Feeling 'unarrived'
In an interview with Indian film critic Baradwaj Rangan, Indian film maker Anurag Kashyap said something extremely profound: Because of the fact that his first movie took seven years to release, he became a better human and a better filmmaker.
It deeply resonated with me.
What Anurag seems to be saying is this: When you don't feel "arrived", you are constantly pushing your boundaries, and the fire of your tapas to keep learning, to keep discovering is always on.
What is tapas? There is a beautiful Yoga Sutra that explicates Kriya Yoga and its three sides.
Few days back, I received an email from a friend:
I would like to understand Agritech from A to Z. But I am afraid I need to build a foundation. Can you suggest a comprehensive reading list please?
I replied back: "You don't have to worry about building a foundation. Start from where you are. And figure your way along
One of the subtle conditioning we are subjected to in schools is that knowing can happen only through the hierarchy of knowledge dictated by experts. You have to start with basic concepts at ground zero and climb up the hierarchical ladder of knowledge.
It doesn't matter if you find it difficult or boring to go through the fundamentals. In other words, knowing has to proceed bottom-up.
In a dialogue on learning, Elon Musk summed up this approach to learning: It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, i.e. the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.
Now here is the thing. When you haven't formally studied a domain, when you don't feel "arrived", when your hunger for learning is always ON, you can safely ignore this advice from Elon Musk (Blasphemy !!!) and hitchhike your learning journey in whatever route that feels right to you.
So what if you make some silly mistakes and embarrass yourself? Isn’t that the whole point of svādhyāya?
You laugh about your ignorance, pat your back for trying, surrender (īśvarapraṇidhāna) and move on.
The crucial thing is the inner stance of being a flexible sponge, which will keep on absorbing and refining one's understanding of a domain through constant contact with ground reality.
In my experiments with self-organized learning, I have realized that learning takes a circumlocutious route, feeding off my energies organically as I start off with higher-level abstract questions and go down the trail as it shows up, to arrive eventually at the fundamentals. Today, with YouTube democratizing almost every skill learning, what stops us from learning is our inner stance.
When you get that stance right, you can keep on learning continuously.
How do you learn? What do you do to feel "unarrived"?
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