Understanding

the Crisis of the

Western Paradigm

How the Western paradigm inverted life: knowledge before knowing, the known over the unknown, mind over body, reason over intuition, left brain over right—until the slave became the master.

The second offering is a more reflective engagement—a cautious intellectual enquiry intended not to generate knowledge, but to understand the fundamental flaws of the Western worldview. This is not an invitation to accumulate ideas, but to recognize the structural failure of a paradigm that cannot offer solutions to the very crises it has produced.

Research on children:
Critically learning from educators like Maria Montessori and John Dewey, who emphasized experience and child-centred learning.
What prevents us from understanding children:
Investigating how and why modernity has misunderstood children and how they got alienated from life, as well as examining the default anti-life stance of modern humans.
Engagement with Decolonization Activists and Researchers:
Collaborating with individuals and groups focused on decolonization to enrich understanding, especially if there has been any study on children.
Insights from Indian Knowledge Systems: (also other Eastern cultures)
Exploring lessons from Indian traditions and their holistic understanding of cognition, culture, and life.
Western Paradigm Critiques:
Engaging with critiques from thinkers like Ivan Illich, Iain McGilchrist, and Marshall McLuhan to examine the limitations of modernity.
Advances in Cognitive Science and Related Fields:
Drawing on cognitive science, and humanistic psychology, with a focus on rediscovering the body and its role in cognition.
Anthropology/ sociology:
Anthropologists who have been transformed by the indigenous cultures.
Philosophy:
Phenomenology, Process Philosophy, Existentialism etc.
Lessons from Literature and Poetry:
Drawing inspiration from poets, writers, such as Rainer Maria Rilke.
Wisdom from Mystics and Spiritual Traditions:
Engaging with traditions that prioritize understanding life and the self, providing a deeper perspective on existence and cognition.

Some minimal reading may be involved—but not to arrive at conclusions. The intention is to hold thoughts without finality, to stay with the questions. Reading here is not for certainty, but for loosening the grip of certainty. It is an exercise in distrust—especially of the latest conceptual tools promoted as liberating.

Take, for instance, the currently celebrated idea of “critical thinking.” Far from offering clarity, it is often just another trap—another illusion of freedom. What passes as critical thinking today is largely the act of using one book against another, one idea to dismantle another—still confined entirely within the conceptual. It is important to ask: on what basis is this critique occurring? The educated mind, after all, operates almost entirely on external inputs—books, theories, and expert opinion.

Even when the modern paradigm speaks of the body, it does so in disembodied terms. Even when it addresses experience, it abstracts it. Phenomenology, which began as a sincere attempt to challenge mainstream Western thought, eventually lost its grounding. Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty had initiated a genuine, deeply spiritual inquiry into Being—but today’s practitioners merely read about phenomenology. They do not live it.

This is the recurring problem: the fragmented mind of the West, which separates science from spirituality, art from life, thought from experience. But all true inquiry is spiritual—because it is existential. The very distinction between spiritual and non-spiritual is itself a symptom of the Western mind’s division and disconnection.

Modernity cannot function without prior theories, predefined methods, and readymade tools. This reliance on external structures fosters a false sense of order and objectivity. Theories mechanize our being. Imposed methods mechanize the mind. Tools mechanize the body. The result is a total estrangement from life’s fluidity, ambiguity, and process.

Modernity by default, is hierarchical and missionary. It assumes superiority. It seeks to save others—always others—without realizing the rot within. But this journey is not about saving others. It is about stopping. Listening. Undoing. It is about reclaiming the self—not as a detached, knowing machine, but as a living, sensing, participating being.

The aim is to bring the enquiring mind to a threshold—where it begins to perceive the failure of abstraction and the necessity of embodied, lived understanding. The crisis of modernity can only be approached like a Zen koan: using thought to reveal the limits of thought, refraining from further reasoning; using reading only to reach the point where reading is no longer of use.

The invitation is to remain in the realm of not-knowing—not as ignorance, but as openness.

This is the essence of the Centre: to situate oneself in the realm of the unknown, to reawaken the senses, to cultivate humility, and to initiate a process in which life itself becomes the teacher—and cognition returns to its rightful ground: in the body, in beauty, in being.