Why "Vichara"?
Vichara/vichāra/विचार (pronounced “vi” as in victory + “cha” is in charge + “ra” as in run without the n-sound) is used ordinarily to refer to thought or thinking in Gujarati, Marathi and probably other Indian languages. It’s used in English in the way one would say that one is thinking about what to order at a restaurant, or when one is being beseeched to think less or more. For Hindi and Urdu speakers, it’s used in the same way that soch/सोच is used.
It also has a more technical usage through Indic philosophy, in which it refers to the intellectual faculty of discernment or discrimination. Vichara is the capacity or practice of distinguishing what is from what is not, real from unreal. The ultimate purpose of vichara is to see the illusion of duality and the folly of attachment or aversion based on it—and thus to see the truth of nonduality between the supposed self and reality as such.
This newsletter is not about Indic philosophy. It is about planetary civilization beyond the liberal internationalist order, and the governance, geopolitics, economics, information networks, systems architectures and values involved therein.
There is, however, a direct parallel between this project, Vichara, and vichara as in Indic philosophy. Liberalism is an ideology and institutional order is founded upon not just believing in the “I” or ego, but manufacturing and optimizing an entire society—and dismantling the whole world—for the sake of that construct. It is the wager of Vichara that a civilization that makes it to the twenty-second century with elan needs vichara to see which structures, functions and experiences are based on ego-existence, and which are based on beauty, vitality, purpose and real joy. Only then will we be able to conduct the ideological, institutional and infrastructural innovation needed to confront the catastrophic risks of this century.
J. Krishnamurti, in a motley lineage of nondualist insight, avers that there is no psychological evolution. There are no gradations of entrapment by illusion. Likewise, in the material world, there is only continuous, dynamic change; included there is society, which cannot go from black to white without gray, however fleeting, in between.
As such, conducting the ideological, institutional and infrastructural innovation needed today will be a matter of impure, intricate evolution. However, vision of what needs innovation, inoculation or eradication, based as such vision must be on the apprehension of reality as it actually is, can only be a matter of cognitive revolution. Hence to act in, upon and as reality to produce an alternative to the liberal order, vichara in the fullest sense is a sine qua non. Only by honing the vital capacity for such discernment, one builds the world without doubt, duality and distress.