I was the Vedic circle and square, Desi and dharmically fluid until an Indic druid with a decolonial spray gun painted me polytheist-pagan (a polygon?) and now I'm an Indo-European doctrinaire
- dedicated to useful Hindoo idiots who provide a back-door entry to the fictitious Aryan Invasion Theory.
A corollary to the saying “Avoid being over opinionated and under informed”
is "Avoid being the over-informed non-practitioner".
Remembering this corollary helps avoid the pitfall of turning into a top-down thinker, i.e., a person who theorizes others practices through every form of second-hand learning: reading business articles, media reports, video demos, academic dissertations, management reviews, investment hype, book parsing. sound-bites from other top-down thinkers, and soon convinces himself that he's a "strategic" expert who sees what mere mortals cannot, and projects a sophisticated image. The end result is a delusion of grandeur where one's ego and false pride in 'knowing' defeats common sense.
The "spend ten thousand hours to master a subject" statement is valid only if you
are actually immersed in learning by doing, first hand, else it is an
exercise in futility and a whole lot of wasted time. In-the-trenches work is always preferable to head-in-the-cloud intellectualism for the former is much more aligned with reality and Satya. The latter is fragile as it is anchored not in reality but an imagined reality. Success belongs to those who work twice as hard behind the scenes.
This phenomenon of the over-informed non-practitioner can be termed the Sheldon Pollock Syndrome, after the western Indologist Sheldon Pollock who "studied" Hinduism, the quintessential system of lived traditions from every external angle for 30 years without actually practicing any of it. As a result of this intellectual text parsing, every bit of wisdom and sensible thought in the Ramayana or Sanskrit kavya completely bypassed him, leading him to bizarre conclusions and comical "findings" that find favor among idiots and conspiracy theorists.
Whether one wants to get into AI or Hinduism/Dharma or Martial Arts, the best way is to start with actually practicing, first-hand, through Prayoga. Doing is both knowing and learning:
