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Lower School Essay Competition

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By Dr Tromans

By Dr Tromans

Junior School Essay Competition

Ishan Visvanath (7C) on The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

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The Courage to Be Disliked depicts the dialogue of a young man, who is dissatisfied with life, along with a philosopher who helps him combat these issues through philosophical reasoning. These theories are widely based on the writings of the Austrian psychiatrist, Alfred Adler (1870–1937), and are meant to be interpreted in the reader's own way.

My first takeaway from this book is to stop thinking that our past determines our present and our future. This is somewhat counterintuitive because many of us have bought into the Freudian School of psychology which is based on the model that childhood and upbringing determines to an extent what kind of person you are today. However, one of the key insights from Adlerian Psychology is that we do not need to be defined by our past actions; rather, we are completely free to choose our emotions and goals.

This notion is justified by several terms in Adlerian Psychology, which explain how he wants us to separate our present goals and past causes, in order to be free to make unbiased decisions. This is the basis of several controversial, yet bold claims about how we do not suffer from experiences; instead, we make out of them anything

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that suits our needs. Whilst negative experiences obviously do affect us in some shape or form, he argues that nothing is determined purely by those familiarities; rather, we make our own assumptions from them.

The next idea that I found particularly intriguing was that, contrary to popular belief, emotions do not control us; instead, we create emotions to suit our present goals. For instance, the Philosopher in the book argues that when you chose to shout or argue with someone, it is not the anger causing you to do it; it is you choosing to channel anger into the process of shouting at someone. This is because you are constructing the emotion of anger, as a way of justifying your actions which you would have chosen to do anyway. Similarly, the Stoic philosopher Seneca argued that there was a gap between the stimulus that is happening to us, and the gap between the creation of a feeling in reaction to that stimulus. Essentially, this means that feelings are like choices, so we can choose anger over calm, fear over courage, and misery over joy. This relates to the teachings of Adler, by sharing similar views on the role of emotions in correlation to one’s choices.

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The final lesson that really resonated with me was that freedom is the courage to be disliked. It is an intrinsic part of human nature to have the desire to be liked by other people. However, as Adler claimed, this is a recipe for unhappiness, because we are always basing our lives on the opinions of somebody else. The reason that this is so thought-provoking is that there are so many situations in life where we chain ourselves, because we do not have the courage to be disliked by other people. This is the case for everyone, myself included. So often we want to start, or commit to something new and unique, but we are limited by our fear of being judged by others. In reality, how often have you disliked someone because they put themselves out there? Never. In fact, we are often in awe of people who are able to have the courage to follow their passions and ignore others initial judgement, which is the key message of the book.

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Charlsantony Kaniude (7S) on Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Macbeth, at the beginning of the play, is a valiant and powerful warrior. He strives to serve his kingdom to the fullest and obeys the orders of the King, Duncan. When he is told his prophecy, he is hesitant and scared. Furthermore, the femme fatale Lady Macbeth craves this power upon her urging him to commit the crime. He says in his speech that he wants Duncan to “Hear it not” for it is “a knell” . This shows he feels guilty to be committing a crime. Later on in the play, the taste of power allows him to do anything to fulfil the prophecy. At the beginning, he only kills people directly related to the prophecy like Banquo (his best friend). Soon after he starts killing innocent people. These include the children and wife of Macduff. This clearly shows Macbeth’s descent into evil.

However, is this his own will or fate? Would Macbeth have done such things without the influence of his wife and the witches? I believe that the witches' prophecies allowed Macbeth to awaken his desires, and Lady Macbeth's ideals and manipulation drove him to commit the first murder. Without both of these factors the evil in Macbeth that caused him to commit his other crimes would not have been there otherwise. Ultimately, this is what Macbeth is about. Shakespeare is commenting on the religious

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philosophy present at the time; that all humans are innately evil and how experiences make them become evil.

Macbeth also has many views on life that change during the play. At the start of the play a hopeful Macbeth returns from battle. He has many plans to help his land and sees his prophecy as his means to do so. When Lady Macbeth dies, we see a parallel view. He sees the prophecy as a curse. He has lost everything. His friends have died as well as his wife. Everyone has turned against him. At this point he’s at an all-time low. He says life is “A tale told by an idiot” , that “signifies nothing”. Macbeth now feels that life is meaningless and is hoping to die.

Macbeth does all of this for power, but it disturbs the natural hierarchy of things. In medieval times, it was believed that the health of a country was directly tied

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to its king. If the King was good and just, then the nation would have good harvests and good weather. Macbeth shows this connection between the political and natural world: when he disrupts the order by murdering Duncan and usurping the throne, nature going haywire. Incredible storms rage, the earth tremors, animals go insane and eat each other. This emphasises the horror of Macbeth’s actions.

After committing murder, Macbeth tries to wash blood off his hands, but this does not work. No matter how much he tries, the blood remains there. This illusion symbolises evil. Until this point Macbeth’s hands were clean. He was pure and innocent. Although when he kills Duncan blood is on his once clean hands. This shows Macbeth’s change from good to evil and how one bad act forever stains his hands. This is his tragic flaw that brings his downfall that restores the natural order.

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Moksh Pandya (8H) on Hindu Creation Stories

Long before modern science, practically every religion had its own version of Cosmogenesis, including Hinduism, a notion of the origin of the universe at a definite time. Most of them are based on the idea that an all-powerful God created a world of matter and man. These doctrines cohered with the view of a God or Gods who should be invoked and thanked at another level. They were widely accepted because there was no better hypothesis to explain the existence of the world.

However, from a scientific point of view, these claims are untenable, as the findings of modern science spring from observations, insights, instruments, philosophical outlooks, and knowledge that was absent in the ancient world. However, the defenders of these claims contend that the philosophers and prophets of distant ages had other means of knowing than logic, differential equations, and the spectrometer; that the scientific insights in Scripture are a testament to their divine origin.

Though perhaps well-meaning, such claims essentially belonged to pseudoscience, not least because they are typically based on a narrow outlook and questionable translations of literary texts rather than on scientific papers. There is no solid evidence that ancient prophets or religious thinkers were privy to any revealed knowledge or scientific findings in advance of their peers, although ancient thinkers did articulate many of the broad

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possibilities such as metaphysical, philosophical, and scientific ideas.

A Noble Prize winner, Dr Hauptman said at a conference in New York that “Belief in a supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, but this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race”. Some scientists say simply that science and religion are two separate realms, “nonoverlapping magisterial” as the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould put in his book, Rock of Ages. In Dr Gould’s view, science speaks with authority in the realm of “what the universe is made of and why does it work this way” .

There could be an argument that many scientists believe in God, as per the survey done by The Journal Nature in 1997; 40% of scientists believed in God. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary theorist at Oxford, countered this by claiming that scientists who were believers in God did not claim evidence for their belief. These scientists claimed that there was no evidence to suggest that God does not exist; hence they believe in God. As per Dawkins, this argument is pathetically weak. We know that there is no evidence against all sorts of things, but we don't waste our time believing in them.

In modern times when science has made so much progress, one can disregard Hindu cosmology and treat it as just an interesting story to listen to with no apparent scientific consequence; however, I want to challenge that;

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let's see if Hindu Cosmology is of no scientific consequence in this age of the Big Bang Theory.

Human beings are curious creatures, and we are always interested in understanding our place in this universe. We are very interested in questions such as how this universe was created and what is the future of this universe; all of the great civilizations in the past have had their own theories about how this universe came into existence, and what the future of this universe is going to be. This is called the cosmological theory of these civilizations.

In these modern times, we believe in a universe that is more than 93 billion light-years in diameter and contains billions of galaxies with each galaxy containing billions of stars, and the sun is just one of them. We have The Big Bang Theory to describe the origin of the universe in which we estimate that the universe came into existence 13.77 billion years ago. We believe this theory as it is consistent with our observations of the expanding universe which, when run back in time, will lead us to an infinitesimally small point containing everything present in the universe now. Remember, the Big Bang is a theory that is consistent with our current scientific observation; this does not mean that it is an absolute truth; there are still many open mysteries associated with this theory.

As an example, we know that not only are the galaxies moving further away from each other every day, but also that this movement is accelerating over time, and we

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have no direct explanation for it. Dark energy and dark matter have been included in the theory to deal with these inconsistencies. These are the rational explanations that scientists have put forward to explain things that they do not completely understand.

So, as you can see there are speculations in our current theory as well, and therefore we should respect all the cosmological theories that have come before Big Bang Theory. In the past, we did not have all the scientific equipment that current scientists have to know what is going on in the universe; therefore, our ancestors were just coming up with theories based on the limited knowledge that they had about the universe. Traditionally, these cosmological theories were presented in the form of stories and Hindus were no exception to that. The only exception is that in Hinduism there are multiple theories of the creation of this universe as opposed to other cultures where there is just one; for example, Christianity has just one Genesis story, whereas Hinduism has multiple theories on multiple stories on the creation of this universe, and this is an indication that Hindus are open to changing their theories based on new evidence.

This is the reason why we have absolutely no issue with the theory of evolution, while other religions have not been so receptive to it. In these modern times, as we are all so confident about our theories of how this universe was created, we generally disregard all previous mythical

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stories on the creation of this universe as superstition, and I think that that's a big mistake. The reason why we disregard all these stories is that we do not understand them correctly. If we look at them at their surface value, of course these stories won’t make any sense, but if you go deeper and you try to understand the significance of all the different characters in their stories, then these stories will start to make sense.

The most popular creation story of the Hindus mentions that initially there was nothing; the world was in a nonmanifest form underneath the ocean and Vishnu was sleeping on the ocean on Shesh Naag (a serpent). Vishnu then dreamt of creating this universe and a lotus sprouted out of his navel. After it had blossomed, Brahma came out of it; he then created this universe. If you're thinking that there is a real Vishnu in his human form sleeping on a serpent and a Brahma with four heads, then you have missed the point. In this story, Vishnu signifies the consciousness of this universe, while the ocean signifies the unmanifested universe. Shesh Naag (the serpent) represents that which will be left when there is no space, time, and matter, and in which the universal consciousness will rest when the world is in its unmanifested form. Brahma is the process through which the universe came into existence from its unmanifested form.

If you look at the story this way, then the whole story becomes logical and scientific. Scientists said that before

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the Big Bang there was no space, time, or matter; there was just a singularity where the entire unmanifested universe existed. This is very similar to the Hindu creation myth saying that in the beginning there was nothing and the world was beneath the ocean in an unmanifested form; the only difference is that instead of a singularity we have an ocean. The Big Bang Theory then says that something happened, and the singularity manifested into this universe. Hindu myth describes this something as the universal consciousness desiring to manifest the world. Again, this is not much different from the Big Bang.

In the Hindu myth, Brahma comes out of a Lotus which is sprouting from Vishnu's navel and then creates the world; this is similar to the laws of this universe coming into existence in the Big Bang Theory when the world was created. Also, a lotus signifies birth in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions, and therefore it is mentioned in the story as a metaphor for describing the birth of the universe.

As you can see, the barebones of the story we hear today about the creation of the universe, and what was told by our ancestors remain the same. It is just that in

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modern times, since we have a better understanding of the laws of nature, we have more details on the process itself. The underlying philosophy remains the same.

Considering the openness of Hinduism to easily include new information into their tradition, it is pretty clear that we have absolutely no issue in terms of including the Big Bang Theory into our tradition. It also blends well with our theory. There's only one issue with the Big Bang Theory: it is incomplete. It tells you how the universe came into existence, but it doesn't tell you what was there before the Big Bang, and it also doesn't tell you what is going to happen in the future. No one knows what is going to happen to the universe in the future, as we do not have enough scientific information to conclude anything about what was there before the Big Bang; we are not capable of really knowing what was there before the universe came into existence. Therefore, here we have to mostly use logic. This is where the concept of a cyclical universe and Hindu cosmology becomes quite relevant.

Let me introduce you to the three logical concepts used to arrive at the cyclical universe theory of the Hindus: 1) Whatever has a beginning has an end; 2) Any material thing cannot stay in one form forever; it can only change from one form to the other; and 3) For something to exist forever, it has to go through cyclical changes.

If you agree with me on these key assumptions, then let us consider how it applies to the universe. We believe that

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the universe has a beginning, the Big Bang; therefore, it must have an end. The universe is also changing all the time; it is right now expanding; however, this expansion cannot go on forever as this expansion also has a beginning. This expansion of the universe is just a change of the universe from one form to the other; the creation and expansion of the universe is part of another process that has got to be eternal, as if it was not eternal then, what was before that and what will be there after the process ends? The eternal process can only be done if it’s cyclical; therefore, the creation and destruction of this universe must also be cyclical, as you can see the entire concept of a cyclical universe makes a lot of sense and it is quite logical.

If I were to just use my speculation and logic to think about what to believe in and what is going to happen to the future of this universe, then I would agree with the Hindu concept. If the scientific evidence comes later showing that this is not the case, then there's no problem in Hindus also accepting that into their tradition. I think that it is true to say, that conflict often arises when people with transcendental knowledge attempt to share and explain matters pertaining to this world to scientists and mathematicians. When they do this without having peered through a telescope or a microscope, made sophisticated calculations, or haven’t used any other scientific tool to show scientists proof, they are bound to provoke the practicing scientists. This was evident in the case of Ramanujan the great mathematician whose

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theorem was only proved through traditional mathematical proof years after his death. Likewise, when people who have believed solely in proof and data (for example scientists), blankly deny the existence or possibility of transcendental knowledge without going through vigorous discipline necessary to get a glimpse of such knowledge, they then appear naïve in the eyes of the people seeking transcendental knowledge. I also think that there can be a certain element of peace between both science and Hinduism; however, I think that science has quite a lot to catch up on.

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