Reflection Guide
Reflect on what you are seeking? Is it Love? Is so how True is that Love? Is it Money? If so how Truthfully can you earn it? Is it Fame? If so how do you know you truly deserve it? In all these three situation the question of Truth comes up. Therefore is it Truth that we ultimately seek?
My blog post of last month addressed the notion of purpose of violence in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bomb attacks in Sri Lanka. We saw the involvement of religion and politics in the aftermath of the incident, over the past month. The intention of this blog post is to help us to understand how religion and politics positively and negatively impacted the lives of people.
Since I am not an intelligence, theological or political science expert to make judgements about what happened, and who was responsible for what happened, I request you not to take the assumptions I make in this post as truth. I am far away from the inner circles to know the truth and I am basing this blog post on what I have heard from trusted personalities such as the Cardinal of Sri Lanka, the Commander of the Army, and a retired intelligence experts known to me personally.
It was Easter Sunday (21 April 2019). I was in my flat in Dhaka, attending to some important business matters when I got a message that a bomb had gone off at St Anthony’s Church in Kochchikade, Colombo. Having not heard of bombings and terrorist violence for the past ten years, since the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka, I hoped it was a hand grenade thrown by a business rival involved in unscrupulous business, with no injuries; these were the rare occurrences we heard of over the past ten years. Then the news started pouring in with photos and videos of simultaneous bomb attacks in two other churches and luxury hotels as well. My immediate concern was for my family who would have been at an Easter Mass at the same time. After calling and ensuring they were safe, my thoughts went out to the victims. I started hearing news of people known to me or families of people known to me having lost their lives or being injured, among the 253 souls that departed and 500 plus injured. I had visited St Anthony’s Church many times and I could picture the carnage as if I was there. It is considered a miraculous church and people from all religions visit to reflect on their challenges and ask help from St Anthony to resolve them.
Continue reading “Attacking the Innocent – What is the Purpose? – Purpose of Living – Part 26”
We explored the notion of purpose from the viewpoints of Abrahamic Religions, Eastern Philosophies, Early Sciences, Modern Sciences, Philosophy, Psychology, Ecology and Action Logics (pre-conventional) viewpoints in the past blog posts in this series. Let’s now have a look at this notion from an ‘Action Logics (post-conventional)’ viewpoint.
I started the previous blog post with an attempt to understand the notion of ‘Action Logics’, which tries to explain the ‘logic’ behind the ‘action’ we take. Most unspontaneous actions are based on decisions, which are rational, and therefore they could be based on an intention, reason or purpose. The four pre-conventional action logics; opportunist, diplomat, expert and achiever, explored in the last blog post was based on the degree of mutuality and expertise.
Let’s attempt to explore post-conventional action logics in this blog post based on the proposition by Greuter Cooke (2002). According to a research study in the USA of about 4300 adults, it was found that 18.2% belong to the post-conventional group. While it is difficult to define post-conventional, to me it seems like those who are more mature, wiser, selfless, seeking happiness through harmony, simplicity, generosity and spirituality, would fall into this group. Continue reading “Purpose of Living – Part 10: The Action Logics (Post – Conventional) Viewpoint”
Have you ever thought about how you know what you know? When this question was first asked from me, the answers that came to my mind was; from books, from parents, from teachers, from the learned. But when confronted with the next question, so do you believe that all that you know was true, I felt yes, it must be true, if not these will not be thought to me by those who I respect as learned, honest and well-meaning. But when I thought deeper, I felt that what is true to them, does not have to be true to me, because they come from different backgrounds, eras, conditions, cultures, religion, and would be driven by different purposes etc. Therefore for us to claim that we know what we know requires a kind of self-validation. John Heron provides a theoretical framework that helps make sense of the way we know. He names it extended epistemology, which has four interwoven ways of knowing (Heron 1992, 1999): Continue reading “How do we know what we know?”
Ranjan De Silva 