My First Reflections on Philosophy

Philosophy through religion

I initially started understanding philosophy through religion.

I was born into a family whose traditions followed Hindu philosophy and Hindu religion.

But I started questioning myself:

Why are billions of people following other religions?

Why are so many people following Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and other paths?

That made me curious.

Six months in each religion

I started practicing and understanding different religions and different things.

• I followed each religion for around six months
• Trying to understand why people follow them
• And what they actually believe

Later, I started understanding something.

The way people follow these religions is because they give them answers. Each religion has answers and explanations for many things in life.

Who is making the questions themselves?

But then I started wondering:

Who is making the questions themselves?

That was where my thinking started changing.

There have been many intellectual people born into this world, but we only remember a very few of them. Most of those people had the habit of questioning things. Their questions and their attempts to find answers eventually formed sets of ideas.

• Some of those answers became philosophies
• Some became religions

But people now follow those answers blindly, often without questioning whether they are the final answers.

Hindu philosophy as the final answer

I could also take Hindu philosophy as the final answer to everything because I was tagged as Hindu by my parents, based on their parents' beliefs before them.

But then I realized that we may have forgotten the questioning that came before those answers.

So I started questioning things differently:

• Why do I believe this is the ultimate reality?
• Why do I believe this will happen because of this religion?

Different religions have different beginnings and endings. They have different answers to similar questions.

So I started wondering:

Who actually questioned these things first, and how did they define their answers?

That was how I initially started understanding philosophy.

End of August 2022

This was my first encounter with philosophy, back around the end of August 2022, maybe.

After having a good amount of learning and experiences from the previous years, that was where I felt I started doing things differently.

From there, I started exploring different things to understand different philosophies, different religions, and different isms that people follow.

Not these questions first

I didn't initially start by questioning things like:

• What is real?
• What is fake?
• Who am I?
• What am I?

Because every religion and every philosophy already had its own ways of answering those questions.

What I wanted was to question, and also to know:

What different answers can I get from different philosophies to these questions?

That is my initial reflection on philosophy.