February 2018

A Brief Guide to My Books

Over the years as I have written many books, and new readers often want to know where to begin, how to proceed systematically, so that understanding them would become easier. Implicit in this request is the problem that the books are not easy reading, especially if you don’t read them in order. While I try to summarize the relevant ideas at...

The Epistemology of Happiness

How do we know something to be true? This question has preoccupied philosophy for as long as we can remember. Many answers are offered to solve the problem, but each one suffers from a different problem. For example, reason is a useful method of knowing, but reason only compares a claim with the axioms or assumptions; how do you know that...

Divine and Demonic Natures

This post offers some practical advice on how to deal with different kinds of people in this world based on some ideas drawn from Vedic philosophy—namely, divine and demonic natures—which are separated into the upper and lower parts of the universe. In the present world, which lies in between the upper and lower extremes, these natures are mixed. That means some...

The Contradictions of Being

In the previous post, I talked about how choice and responsibility are essential features of human life, and thereby of the soul. In this post, I will discuss how both choice and responsibility often present a paradox when the three aspects of the soul—pleasure, ability, and responsibility—are differentiated and what we enjoy becomes different from what we are capable of, and...