Yours Transcendentally, with Raj: Recent Episodes
Rajdeep Ta
This podcast is the consequence of my pensive soliloquy, an unrelenting barrage of diverse perspectives, all competing for the same mindscape. My own opinions amalgamated with unquoted book excerpts, online articles, newsletters et al.
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2022 New Year's 1st Episode - recorded from Aegina Island, Greece
"It’s natural to think of ourselves as a single person. We have – after all – only one body and answer to only one name. But inside our minds, we are in truth far more like an assemblage of voices or – as we might put it at its starkest – of ‘people.’ We could picture our minds like a theatre, much of it sunk in darkness, with a brightly illuminated lectern and microphone at the center of the stage. At different moments of our days and nights, contrasting characters will seek to step up to speak and interpret the world unfolding before our eyes. What unites these characters is that they are, in their diverse ways, very keen to speak and very very unhelpful.
But we need to keep a surprising idea in mind, that we all also have – though we are not quite aware of the fact and therefore rarely do anything to encourage them to come forward – an adult inside us. The adult may be lingering in the wings, they may be in a seat at the very back of the theatre or in some dark winding corridor backstage. But they are there.
When we can allow them on stage, the adult brings some key virtues to the microphone in our minds. They are, above anything else, resourceful. In the face of trouble, they look for solutions. They know there can be some way through. They don’t despair at the first hurdle. It might be hard right now, but things will work themselves out eventually; they always do. They are practical too: at moments, they will simply but authoritatively tell us to go to bed, not to think about it till morning and to make sure we are eating properly.
The good news is that however unused we are to hearing the adult speak to us on the stage of our minds, they can – with patience – be coaxed into doing so far more regularly than they do right now. We can develop how often, and how loudly, the adult inside delivers its verdicts. And what’s more, encouraging this adult voice requires no particular technical skill or arcane practice.
We can thereby, with a little practice, come to see that we invariably have a choice about who speaks inside us. Of course the Panicker, the Depressive and the Self-Hater will always be offering their services to make lengthy speeches to us about our failings and our dark prospects. But we have an option to call time on them and request someone else to take to the stage.
Now the challenge is regularly to check in and ensure that the adult has as much of our airtime as possible. It’s entirely within our remits to shape the running order of who speaks to us and when. The adult is already inside us, now we need to give them the stage – and ensure we listen to the wisdom they, and therefore we, already well know about how to lead the rest of our lives."
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Recorded live from Berlin, Germany
"Laying down a boundary involves informing those around us – colleagues, parents, children, lovers – of a given set of objectively reasonable things that we are going to require in order to feel respected and happy, while doing so in a way that conveys confidence, self-possession, warmth and a mixture of kindness and strength.
However, because most of us have not been educated in this byway of emotional maturity, the boundaries are either non-existent or else get thrown up in a jerky and destructive manner. As the technical language has it, we are either too compliant or too rigid.
Invariably, those who can’t lay down boundaries have not, in their early lives, had their own boundaries respected. Someone didn’t allow them to say when they were unhappy with a genuinely difficult situation; someone didn’t give much of a damn about their hurt feelings or distinctive hopes. Someone insinuated that being good meant falling in line, always, immediately. No one modelled the skill of winning, graceful objection.
Yet the alternative to lacking all boundaries is not violent defensiveness. We should not let boundary-building be undermined by its most zealous practitioners; there is always a means to make a sound case without reaching for a weapon.
It takes a little self-confidence and courage to be able to notice just how bad we may be at the art of boundary-laying. We may have spent a large chunk of our lives already in an essentially passive relationship to everyday infringements by people close to us. But we aren’t a piece of helpless flotsam on the river of others’ wishes; we have agency, direction and – as it were – a rudder. The price to pay for affection isn’t compliance."
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Recorded live from Rome, Italy
"One of the most beautiful and evocative of all words is ‘home’. Folded within it are suggestions of safety, understanding, sympathy, warmth and belonging.
But, at points, to our dawning horror, we may be forced to take on board a hugely disorienting conclusion: despite our intense hopes, home may not – in fact – be home. We may have a building and a circle of people to which we are committed and where nominally we belong, but our particular ‘home’ may not for that matter live up to our yearning for respite and nurture, security and growth.
Confusingly, even very imperfect homes can feel better than the wilderness and desolation beyond, which is why we often stay around far longer than we should. But it is, in the long term, impossible to still the insistent voice inside us.
Maybe we’re an adolescent and we realise that the family we were born into cannot respect who we’ve grown up to be. Or we’re in a group of friends that have ceased to see the world as we do. Or perhaps we are in a relationship and have slowly despaired that our partner will ever appreciate certain ideas that matter profoundly to us.
It shouldn’t surprise us that so many of us don’t fit our homes; we never consciously chose them. We inherited them or stumbled into them, we fell into them by accident when we were too young to understand ourselves and others
There are moments when we may need to keep moving until the place we live in is – at last – able actively to honour what home should always have been."
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"We ask, typically and acutely, when we’re in a relationship with someone who is inflicting a great deal of pain on us: someone who is refusing to open their hearts or can never stop lying, someone who is aggressive or detached, someone who is harming themselves or managing to devastate us. We ask too because the one immediately obvious response to frustration isn’t in this case open to us: we’re not able to simply get up and go, we are too emotionally or practically invested to give up, something roots us to the spot...
One thing is likely already to be evident to us: even if people can change, they certainly don’t change easily. Maybe they flare up every time we raise an issue and accuse us of being cruel or dogmatic; maybe they break down late at night and admit they have a problem but by morning..
We might ask a prior question: is it even OK to want someone to change? The implication from those who generate trouble for us is, most often, an indignant ‘no’. ‘Love me for who I am’ is their mantra. But considered more imaginatively, only a perfect human would ever deny that they might need to grow a little in order more richly to deserve the love of another...
Why might change be so hard? In other words, the unchanging person doesn’t only lack knowledge, they are vigorously committed to not acquiring it. And they resist it because they are fleeing from something extraordinarily painful in their past that they were originally too weak or helpless to face...
very importantly, we might not stick around as long as we often do. We should at this juncture perhaps ask ourselves a question that may feel at once unfair and rather tough: given how clear the evidence is of a lack of change in a certain person, and hence of a lack of realistic hope that our needs are going to be met any time soon, why are we still here? What broken part of us can’t leave a lack of fulfilment alone?
We may need to rebuild our minds in order – with time – to change into people who don’t wonder for too long if, and when, people might change."
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"The temptation, when we are worried, is to direct our determined intelligence to trying fully to anticipate whatever may be coming for us down the line. We try to strip the unknown of its surprises; we seek, quite understandably, to nothing less than control the future.
Our minds, however impressive, cannot peer into the future and wrestle it of every last ambiguity. We are subject too many variables. Our mental telescopes only permit us to see so far. We must learn to sleep on the pillow of doubt.
We don’t need to believe in a divine creator or indeed relinquish every sensible attempt to forward-plan our diets to see the wisdom of the point. For all the astonishing powers of our minds, there is a critical role for knowing how to switch them off in the face of uncertainty.
We hear no end of reminders as to the benefits of intellectual work. We need also, along the way, to rediscover the occasional art of knowing when and how to stop thinking."
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"For most of our lives, we’re hard at work: we’re up till midnight in the library studying for a degree, we’re learning a trade, building a business, writing a book. We have hardly a moment to ourselves. We don’t even ask whether we are fulfilled, it’s simply obvious that this is the bit that has to hurt. We fall asleep counting the weeks until the end...
The mind works in deceptive ways. In order to generate the momentum required to induce us to finish any task, this mind pretends that once the work is done, it will finally be content, it will accept reality as it is. It will cease its restless, persecutory questions, it won’t throw up random unease or guilty suppositions. It will be on our side...
Once hard work ends, there is nothing to stop our melancholy minds from leading us to the edge of an abyss we had been able to resist so long as our heads were down. We start to feel that no achievement will ever in fact be enough, that nothing we do can last or make a difference, that little is as good as it should be...
We should be kinder on ourselves. Rather than putting ourselves through the infinitely demanding process of idling, we should be self-compassionate enough to keep setting ourselves one slightly irrelevant but well camouflaged challenge after another...
Our work exists to protect us from a brutal sense of despair and angst. We should make sure we never stop having tasks to do – and never make that most reckless of all moves, ‘retire’ or embark on that next most reckless step, taking a long holiday."
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EASTER Special
"As we grow up, we get better at the superficial mechanics of kindness – but not necessarily better at understanding why kindness should matter as it does. The subject remains under some of the strict or sentimental cloud beneath which it was first introduced to us as small children. We simply succumb to its dictates more readily and are a little swifter with the cards...
We need kindness so desperately – even its tiniest increments (a door held open, a compliment on a biscuit, a birthday remembered) – because we are, first and foremost, permanently teetering over a precipice of despair and self-loathing. The impression of grown-up self-assurance is a sham; inside, just beneath a layer of competence, we are terrified and lost, unsure and un-reassured – and ready to cling avidly on to any sign, however small, that we deserve to continue...
We become properly invested in being kind when we realize the power we possess in most situations to rescue another human from self-contempt. We start to be kind too when we realize how much we need others to be kind to us. It isn’t an obvious thought. A degree of machismo can feel more acceptable at the outset. We may stoically imagine that we don’t mind at all how others behave, that we aren’t going to allow ourselves to be wounded so easily – with some of the same pseudo bravery of a child who leaves the house on a wintry day without its overcoat. But gradually, we may come to know our own hearts slightly better, and feel our own pains more sincerely – and therefore realize that we are very much at the mercy of all those we interact with...
We don’t ultimately grow kind by thinking about manners. We grow kind by thinking about fear and self-hatred. A kinder world would be one that wasn’t more decorous, but more alive to the presence of despair, to our susceptibility to shame and to our craving for any sign (however small) of our right to exist"
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"Some of the reason why we are far more fearful, inhibited and sad than we should be is that we are – unbeknownst to ourselves – wandering through our lives with a huge burden of unresolved and unobserved trauma...
A trauma is not merely a terrible event, though it is very much that too. It is a terrible event that has not been adequately processed, understood and unpicked and that has – through neglect – been able to cast a very long and unwarranted shadow over huge areas of experience. Many of our greatest fears have nothing at all to do with actual dangers in the here and now; they are the legacy of traumas that we have lacked the wherewithal to be able to trace back to their origins, localize and neutralize...
The solution, in all such cases, is to get a better sense of the specific incidents in the past that have generated difficulties in order to unhook the mind from its expectations. The clue that we are dealing with a trauma – rather than any sort of justified fear – lies in the scale and intensity of feelings that descend in conditions when there is no objective rationale for them. We know then that we are dealing not with ‘silliness’ or madness or indeed genuine danger, but with an unprocessed incident from the past casting a debilitating shadow on a more innocent present...
As traumatized people, the memory of the founding incident is within us, but our conscious minds swerve away from the possibility of engaging with it and neutralizing it through rational examination. Unable to mourn or decipher the event, much of life becomes mournful and not worth living. At the same time, the trauma breeds symptoms and neuroses which we cannot trace back to their founding moment; we forget why we are so scared, we just know that there are risks everywhere. A trauma is an agony that the conscious mind has lacked the support and resources to process – at the cost of our ability to love, to be free and to think creatively...
Our challenge is to make sense of a specific agonizing hitherto obscure problem or event so as to strip it of its all-embracing impact. Countless situations will be problematic and frightening so long as individual incidents have not been understood and thought through with kindness and inventiveness. By properly gripping an original event in the claws of a rational adult mind, and stripping it of its mystery, we will be able to repatriate fearful emotions – and render the world less unnerving than it presently seems. Life as a whole won’t have to be so terrifying once we understand the bits of it that truly once were."
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Happy International Women's Day
"Modernity is surely a lonelier place than the world that preceded it. It isn’t ultimately technology (cities, cars or screens) that have made us lonely; it’s an identifiable set of ideas. Being on one’s own doesn’t have to be problematic, demeaning or say anything sinister about one’s character. Yet we have in a variety of ways made this the firm equation. Loneliness does not arise simply because one happens to be physically isolated; it’s caused when our culture encourages to feel a sense of shame at being so. We have rendered ourselves lonely first and foremost because of certain stories we have started to tell ourselves about what loneliness means...
Most eras before our own knew that solitude did not – per se – have to be a sign of wretchedness or deficiency. There were ways of being one one’s own that could be filled with honor and an impression of communion with what is noble and sincere; physical isolation could be accompanied by a strong sense of connection with a god, a person in a book, a piece of music or a quieter part of one’s own mind. One could be alone and at the same time not feel isolated or damned – just as one might be surrounded by family and yet feel painfully unseen and unheard...
Romanticism didn’t just make single people feel freakish; it massively increased the pressure on anyone already in a couple who couldn’t lay claim to extreme contentment with their partner; it made those who were merely quietly muddling along and politely putting up with some less than ideal habits and routines feel lonelier and more cursed than they had ever done. For most of history, no one had expected couples to be very content; forbearance and compromise had been praised as the true achievements. One was doing very well indeed if one managed not actively to despite one’s partner after a few decades. But under the new influence of Romanticism, anything but perpetual ecstatic transport appeared to be a violation of the ground rules of existence...
Romanticism trapped the human race in a double bind: by framing singlehood as psychologically impossible, it encouraged us to panic and accept marriage proposals that it would have been wiser to resist. But at the same time, by suggesting that ongoing fascination and bliss were the norm within every decent relationship, it made the vast majority of couples feel as if they had somewhere along the line gone very badly wrong...
The way to make people feel less alone isn’t to pull them out of their musings in the forest or in the diner, in the library or the desert – and force them to go bowling. It’s to reassure them that being alone is no sign of failure. To lessen modernity’s crisis of loneliness, we need for solitude to be rehabilitated and for singlehood to regain its dignity. There is nothing catastrophic about eating dinner, many dinners, on our own."
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*BREAK UP DAY Special***
"When people try to account for why couples break up, the emphasis typically falls on the idea of difference: a disorganized creative type was up against a highly managerial ordered one; one of them liked hill walking, the other hated the outdoors. Someone was gregarious, someone else loathed parties. No wonder – it seems – they had to split...
This method of explanation is underpinned by an implicit and hugely dominant theory of love which goes as follows: the reason why couples function is similarity; what tears them apart is difference. We get an inkling of just how widespread this theory might be when we consider the operations of modern dating sites. In their wish to help us find what they term the ‘right’ person, they scour their databases in order to try to match us with a creature who will most exactly share the greatest number of our tastes, interests and attitudes...
However plausible this might sound, it skirts a fundamental truth about love which we ignore at enormous cost: no couple ever breaks up because of the differences between them. They break up because one of them is fed up of not being heard. What ultimately counts for the success of love is not whether or not there are differences, but how whatever differences there happen to be are handled...
We know that compatibility can’t be the basis of lasting love because, by its logic, it invariably ends up escalating absurdly. Pre-existing compatibility can only ever get us so far. At some point, inevitably, even the best matched partner will in some way emerge as unlike us in some way. What then matters is how the mismatch is handled...
This is what we need to hear above all when a conflicting perspective rears its head: I hear you; I understand what you’re saying, I am going to think about that, perhaps I will need to change. In other words, we need to feel that our point of difference has been witnessed and, to a degree, respected. On the other hand, what gradually destroys love in the long-term, even in the case of the most apparently well-matched couples, is the opposite of the above: It’s not the frustration that kills, it’s how it’s heard – or not...
The single greatest explanation for all divorces is, in the end, defensiveness, the inability to listen with grace to what another person is telling us without resorting to stubborn pride and denial. There are no sexual problems too grave that they ever make it too hard to stay. The lover we desperately need isn’t the person who shares our every taste and interest; it’s the kindly soul who has learnt to negotiate differences in taste without defensiveness or impatience."
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"So efficient and hushed are our brains in their day to day operations, we are apt to miss what an extraordinary and complicated achievement it is to feel mentally well. A mind in a healthy state is, in the background, continually performing a near-miraculous set of manoeuvres that underpin our moods of clear-sightedness and purpose...
To appreciate what mental health might be (and therefore what its opposite involves), we might take a moment to consider some of what will be going on in the folds of an optimally-functioning mind:
– First and foremost, a healthy mind is an editing a mind, an organ that manages to sieve, from thousands of stray, dramatic, disconcerting or horrifying thoughts, those particular ideas and sensations that actively need to be entertained in order for us to direct our lives effectively...
– Along the way, a healthy mind keeps a judicious grip on the faucet of fear. It knows that, in theory, there is an endless number of things that we could worry about: a healthy mind keeps a judicious grip on the faucet of fear. A healthy mind avoids catastrophic imaginings: it knows that that there are broad and stable stone steps, not a steep and slippery incline, between itself and disaster...
– A healthy mind can quieten its own buzzing preoccupations in order, at times, to focus on the world beyond itself. It can be present and engaged with what and who is immediately around. Not everything it could feel has to be felt at every moment. It can be a good listener...
Outlining some of the features of a healthy mind helps us to identify what can go awry when we fall ill. We should acknowledge the extent to which mental illness is ultimately as common, and as essentially un-shameful, as its bodily counterpart. True mental health involves a frank acceptance of how much ill health there will have to be in even the most ostensibly competent and meaningful life."
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Valentine's Day special
"One of the paradoxes of the dating game is that we know that by coming across as enthusiastic at an early stage – if we ring them the next day, if we are open about how attractive we find them, if we suggest meeting them again very soon – we are putting ourselves at a high risk of disgusting the very person we would so like to get to know better...
But we can find a way out of the conundrum by drilling deeper into the philosophy that underpins the well-flagged danger of being overly eager. Why is detachment so often recommended? Why are we in essence not meant to call too soon?..
Yet, there should logically be an option to disentangle the two strands: that is, to be able to reveal high enthusiasm and, at the same time, not thereby to imply manic dependence. There should be an option to appear at once very keen and very sane...
The ability to do so depends on a little known emotional art to which we seldom have recourse or introduction: strong vulnerability...
What is off-putting is never in fact that someone likes us; what is frightening is that they seem in danger of having no options other than us, of not being able to survive without us. Manic dependence, not enthusiasm has only ever been the problem..."
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Valentine's Day special
"At any point, millions of love stories are quietly being spun by one person while the object of their adoration goes about their business blithely unconcerned. Someone watches someone else on a train, casts surreptitious glances at a delegate at a conference; carefully notes a fellow shopper’s manner in a grocery store – and the earth spins on undisturbed...
Unrequited lovers are easy to dismiss as not far from pathetic. If we were better designed and a little saner, we would of course never develop feelings for people who were not prepared to develop them for us – nor squander our days on desires without logical or practical outcome...
It is hard to share with most acquaintances quite what we are going through. But those who do understand become the targets of particular gratitude. A true friend will indulge our folly and be generous to our melodramas. They will avoid the easy task of censoring and upbraiding us. They will have enough of an impression of our basic mental health to shepherd us only gently back to melancholic sanity...
Episodes of unrequited love force us to develop a sense of humor about ourselves. It is impossible to think too well of who we are in their aftermath. Unrequited love edges us inevitably towards a basic humility. We are at last confirmed as truly ridiculous. With any luck, no one gets hurt, it is just that, for a time, the world seems a bit more wondrous, more exciting and more blessed than usual..."
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Valentine's Day special
"Crushes: they happen to some people often and to almost everyone sometimes. Airports, trains, streets, conferences – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from amongst whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but more powerfully, the solution to our lives. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, essentially comic and occasionally farcical. It may look like a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the romantic revolve...
A crush represents in pure and perfect form the dynamics of romantic philosophy: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery – and boundless hope...
The primary error of the crush lies in overlooking a central fact about people in general, not merely this or that example, but the species as a whole: that everyone has something very substantially wrong with them once their characters are fully known, something so wrong as to make an eventual mockery of the unlimited rapture unleashed by the crush. We can’t yet know what the problems will be, but we can and should be certain that they are there, lurking somewhere behind the façade, waiting for time to unfurl them...
A mature person thinks, not, ‘There’s nothing good here’, but rather ‘The genuinely good things will – inevitably – come mixed up with really terrible things’
To crush well is to realize that the lovely person we sketch in our heads is our creation: a creation that says more about us, than about them. But what it says about us is important. The crush gives us access to our own ideals. We may not really be getting to know another person properly, but we are growing our insight into who we really are..."
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Valentine's Day special
One of the most important principles for choosing a lover sensibly is not to feel in any hurry to make a choice. Being satisfied with being single is a precondition of satisfactory coupledom. We cannot choose wisely when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be utterly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to have any chance of forming a good relationship. Or we’ll love no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us being so.
Unfortunately, after a certain age, society makes singlehood feel dangerously unpleasant. Communal life starts to wither. People in couples are too threatened by the independence of the single to invite them around very often – in case they are reminded of something they might have missed. Friendship and sex are, despite all the gadgets, remarkably hard to come by. No wonder if when someone slightly decent, but not quite so, comes along, we cling to them, to our eventual enormous cost.
When sex was only available within marriage, people recognized that this led people to marry for the wrong reasons: to obtain something that was artificially restricted in society as a whole. Sexual liberation was intended to allow people to have a clearer head when choosing who they really wanted to be with. But the process remains only half-finished. Only when we make sure that being single can be potentially as secure, warm and fulfilling as being in a couple will we know that people are choosing to pair up for the right reasons. It’s time to liberate ‘companionship’ from the shackles of coupledom, and make it as widely and as easily available as sexual liberators wanted sex to be.
In the meantime, we should strive to make ourselves as much at peace as we can with the idea of being alone for a very long time. Only then do we stand a chance of deciding to be with someone on the basis of their own and true merits."
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Valentine's Day special
"The common-sense explanation for long-term singlehood directs the blame firmly outwards, it isolates the problem to one of mechanics: one is still single because one hasn’t, perhaps on account of having moved to a vast and anonymous new city, been invited to enough parties, or because the constant requirement to fly to the Paris office leaves no time for the right sort of socializing, or because one is holed up in a remote village high in the mountains connected to the more densely populated lowlands only by an irregular bus service...
These may be solid enough reasons, but when the problems persist over an extended period, their power to explain our situation weakens. Without anything remotely persecutory or unkind being intended by this, one is forced to cast around for psychological rather than procedural explanations. The problem must lie in our minds rather than in the world...
And in the recesses of these minds, two issues – diametrical yet complimentary – can often be identified: one is suffering from an excess of self-hatred. Or from an excess of self-love...
There will always be practical reasons why it proves hard to find a partner. But if we have worked on our levels of self-love and attenuated the ravages of self-hatred, an absence of parties or a difficult bus ride to the next town need never condemn us long-term to a life devoid of tenderness and connection."
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Valentine's Day special
"One way to get a sense of why love should matter so much, why it might be considered close to the meaning of life, is to look at the challenges of loneliness. Too often, we leave the topic of loneliness unmentioned: those without anyone to hold feel shame; those with someone (a background degree of) guilt. But the pains of loneliness are an un-embarrassing and universal possibility. We shouldn’t – on top of it all – feel lonely about being lonely. Unwittingly, loneliness gives us the most eloquent insights into why love should matter so much. There are few greater experts on the importance of love than those who are bereft of anyone to love. It is hard to know quite what all the fuss around love might be about until and unless one has, somewhere along the way, spent some bitter unwanted passages in one’s own company...
We will start to feel like we exist. Our identity will be safe; we won’t be the only guardians of our story. When the world’s disinterest chills and erodes us, we will be able to return to the lover to be put back together again, reflected back to ourselves in terms that reassure and console us. Surrounded on all sides by lesser or greater varieties of coldness, we will at last know that, in the arms of one extraordinary, patient and kindly being worthy of infinite gratitude, we truly matter...
We love at least in part in the hope of being helped and redeemed by our lovers. There is an underlying desire for education and growth. We hope to change a little in their presence, becoming – through their help – better versions of ourselves. Love contains just below the surface a hope for personal redemption: a solution to certain blocks and confusions. We shouldn’t expect to get there all by ourselves. We can, in certain areas, be the pupils and they the teachers. We usually think of education as something harsh imposed upon us against our will. Love promises to educate us in a very different way. Through our lovers, our development can start in a far more welcoming and energising way: with deep excitement and desire...
The person who loves us sexually does something properly redemptive: they stop making a distinction between the different sides of who we are. They can see that we are the same person all the time; that our gentleness or dignity in some situations isn’t fake because of how we are in bed and vice versa. Through sexual love, we have the chance to solve one of the deepest, loneliest problems of human nature: how to be accepted for who we really are."
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You may contact Raj @:
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"The modern world treats education with unique seriousness. Never in the history of humanity have so much thought and so many resources been devoted to the development of the minds of the next generation. In all advanced nations, until a human is 21 or so, there is little else to do other than study. In sensible households, homework has the power of a sacrament. An army of teachers and educators, colleges and pedagogical bureaucrats is set up to feed industrial quantities of the young through complex staging posts of scholastic achievement. Politicians on every side of the spectrum outstrip each other to prove their devotion to the educational cause. The central government-mandated examinations claim a power to determine the course of our whole lives; the dread they provoke can be felt in dawn terrors decades after the event. It may, in rare, tragic but telling instances, feel like there is simply nothing left to live for if the grades go wrong...
It is in this context that Yours Transcendentally with Raj attempts to set itself up, both in its name and its practical activities, as a provocation; a reminder that the task of a school must stretch far beyond the current agreed curriculum to encompass everything with the power to wreck an adult’s life. The emphasis on the word ‘forget’ in the title is not coincidental, it draws attention to the essentially haphazard ways in which we have let important topics fall outside the standard educational remit. There is no conspiracy, that would almost be easier, it is just a form of oversight and happenstance. There is no good or interesting reason why we have to wait for quite so long to discover lessons that might have made such a difference – nor is there a need for every one of us to stumble around in such darkness when brightly illuminated accounts and theories already exist."
If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, rate the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible. You may contact Raj @:
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Yoda, much ?
Welcome to my first -and as of now only-podcast, “Yours Transcendentally” by the one and not only- drumroll noises- RAJ !
A bit of irrelevant background info- My name is Rajdeep and I am a native of India, but currently residing in Budapest, Hungary.
I’d like to call myself a connoisseur or an aficionado of topics and issues pertaining to the subtle nuances of psychology, mental health and social dilemmas that we all deal with & ponder upon- sometimes too belligerently. For better or for worse, I believe that the drudgeries and vicissitudes of our modern or urban lifestyle has done wonders to our longevity and convenience- but, at the expense of- you guessed it right – our sanity and mental health.
Most of us, including me, are plagued by the inauthenticity of our lives. When the show has ended and all is said and done, are we truly content and at peace with ourselves?
Disclaimer: I am NOT a Mental Health professional nor I claim to be one. Please consume my content at your own discretion, and with a grain of salt.
I sincerely hope you find my fledgling content relatable and helpful. Even if I can somehow make one person feel 1% less shitty and miserable about their own existence, I’ll have turned a new leaf in my logbook of Karma. I humbly request you to Please SHARE the podcast to as many people as possible, because we are all mired in our quagmires, and you never know who needs to hear this the most. Additionally, I am open and looking forward to constructive feedback on your behalf so do rate the podcast, leave behind a voice message and if you’d like to contact me concerning the topics/issues that you would want me to speak on or anything under the sun.
You may contact Raj at;
Instagram: yours_platonically
Facebook: Rajdeep Ta
Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/rajdeep-ta/message