Yours Transcendentally, with Raj

**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"

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

"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."

***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."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

***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."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

"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."

If you like what you listen, please do leave behind a voice message feedback, FOLLOW the podcast and SHARE it with as many peeps as possible.

You may contact Raj @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

**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..."

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 @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

**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..."

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 @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

**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..."

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 @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

**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."

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 @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!

**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."

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 @:

Instagram: yours_platonically

Facebook: Rajdeep Ta

Thank you, hear you on the next episode!