Post Author
In the fast-paced times of today, practices like spirituality have taken a backseat. The Internet has become an endless bowl of opinions, arguments, information, and many other things, which results in us often forgetting to untangle our mental wires and unlearn.
This is precisely what Chetan Narang helps us do. Starting every episode with a welcoming “Hello, Good people of the internet!”, Chetan Narang’s podcast – The Unlearning Playground, talks a lot along the lines of spirituality, philosophy, and most importantly – Unlearning. Along with his podcast, his website gives a lot of insight on the same.
Today, on Icy Tales, we feature Chetan Narang, bringing a clean, cheerful, and spiritual vibe via an exclusive interview with us. He talks about his childhood, his transformation from an atheist to someone who “understands” (his own words), his favorite books, and much more!
Q) What was your childhood like? How did spirituality become a field of interest?
Chetan Narang – I don’t think my childhood was related to spirituality. I was always a very academic, top-of-the-class student, especially in my school. Even the books that I read were all those academic books, syllabi, and out of syllabus; I just used to read all that. That was my childhood.
It might come across as a surprise, but I was an atheist, especially in my teenage years. So that changing to what I am now, how I see things now, was a drastic change for me. But yes, childhood was pretty simple. I think I was more focused on my studies than anything else. Studies and cricket, of course; growing up in India, you can’t ignore cricket (laughs).
So cricket and studies were two things in my childhood. I was good at both, so that was one positive thing, and in the future, what happened was that yes, I was a staunch atheist, and my family was religious. My mom is especially very religious, but my childhood conditions didn’t seem conducive for me to believe in anything. So my instinct was to become an atheist, and that’s what I was back then.
Q) How did this change, from being an atheist to a believer, happen?
Chetan Narang – I’ve been asked that a lot of times. A lot of friends, and people who have met me online, whenever I tell them that I used to be an atheist, this is one of the first questions that come up. And my answer always starts with – the human mind is a sucker for good stories – so I can build you a good story, but the honest answer is – it just happened.
How it happened for me was when I started reading books. I was a lost person in my early 20s; dissatisfaction was one of the critical elements of my life. I was just dissatisfied with my life in general and it was coming out majorly via dissatisfaction in my career, relationships, and general life overall.
A friend recommended a book to me, and he said, along with a few other books, that this book changed his life. And that book was ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman. It was not a spiritual book or anything. I started reading that book, and after having read only a part of it, I could realise that I was making decisions from a very incomplete standpoint.
That book is basically about how humans think and how our minds work. And that was my first such book. I had never really thought about how I think. And that is something that now I feel is so obvious. Everyone should do that (thinking about how one thinks) at some point in their life.
If you see my podcasts, there’s a section dedicated to cognitive biases, basically how our thinking sometimes betrays us. And it betrays the best we could be at times. And that book introduced me to that fact.
When I realized there are many places where my thoughts are not based on truth, are not based on facts even. It’s just, for the lack of a better word, it’s just garbage. Sometimes thoughts in our minds are just garbage, and if you’re not turned inwards, if you’re not thinking about what you are thinking, you might end up believing them to be true.
So when that paradigm shift happened for me, for the first time thinking about how I think, I started to question everything. And by everything, I mean everything. So at that time, it was as if I could see that in this thing, I was bringing in my bias, and that’s why I was looking at it this way.
I’ll give you an example – there was this guy called Osho, a spiritual guru. So when I was younger, if I saw a grey-bearded man wearing a robe and talking about God, I would’ve just turned off my video, that no, this is not something I’m going to watch, this guy is one of those people who’s going to just screw around with my mind and play some linguistic game. I won’t watch this. But, when I was in this phase of questioning my thoughts, questioning my own cemented truths, even Osho when he occurred on my YouTube feed, I wanted to listen to him.
Previously, all I had in my mind about Osho was that this guy is a sex guru. And again, there was a bias on my part to believe that. He had talked a lot about sex, but he was so much more than that. He also used to talk about a lot of books he had read. And when I heard him talk about the books he had read, it was such an eye-opener.
So what I did after that was I downloaded a PDF where Osho had told about all the books that he had read, and then I started reading them. And did I come across gems! The guy had read Russian authors like Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and read the Bhagwat Gita, Bible, Quran, and many other books too. I started reading all of them one by one, which changed me.
Q) How would you explain a vast topic like spirituality to the young (around teenage) audience?
Chetan Narang – I think, first of all, I would recommend listening to my podcasts because my idea behind the podcasts was that I want to get that message across to people that this is not just about believing. A lot of times, how we see spirituality and philosophy also is that this is going to be a lot of beliefs, this is going to be a lot about believing without even understanding.
This is something many of our older generations have done, believe in, and have faith in. This is a good thing, it does have its pros as well as cons, but for us youngsters, a lot of us who’ve grown with this idea of being more intellectual, being more in the understanding of things rather than just listening to things, my podcast is also around that.
Spirituality is just a polluted word. I’m not a fan of it. I use it because it is more of an SEO kind of thing. People who want to understand spirituality, who want to understand life, this is one of the things that people are going to be searching about. But spirituality – the word – has become very polluted right now. I talk about it with my clients and my students because it’s just about how you can expand your horizons. And that is something everyone is interested in.
Learning and understanding life better. Learning and understanding people better. Learning and understanding yourself better. That is spirituality. That was always the essence of spirituality. What it has become now is just a game. It’s just become faith, and it’s become prayers. Those things have their place in spirituality, but just those things aren’t spirituality. So to teenagers, to very young people who are getting interested in spirituality, I would say go with it. Try and research, try and read more.
We live in the information age dude. It’s downright stupid if we say I’m not finding a good resource. There’re tons of resources. Hit me up, and I’ll give you many books to read and podcasts to listen to. There’re many excellent resources out there.
If you’re someone who’s not interested in spirituality, it’s okay. All you have to do is at least be honest that you do not understand it. This is one thing that gets missed out. When I was an atheist, I realized this very late. I was an atheist from an incomplete standpoint.
I hadn’t even read a single religious text. I hadn’t even ever meditated. And I was an atheist. That was very stupid of me. Even now, I won’t say I side with the religious people; of course not. If I pick any side, that’s the side of understanding, not believing.
Q) Unlearning, as a process, seems complicated. How does one start to get into it?
Chetan Narang – The whole thing would start with acknowledging that you could be wrong. Acknowledge that your thoughts could be limited. There’s this quote that I love, which says, ‘We see the world as we are, not as the world is.’
Whatever comes to us, whatever we consume, everything goes in our mind via the lenses, the filters installed into our eyes, into our minds. Everything gets filtered by that. Once you realize that, you understand that you cannot see the world as it is. We are all always going to see it the way we are. So once you realize that, you will want to unlearn what is false.
If your mental models are based on what is false, you will never see the truth. So when I talk about unlearning, I don’t mean forgetting something purposefully. That’s quite impossible. For me, unlearning is more about letting go of the attachments to those sticky ideas we have. Like I told you about Osho. If I would say that Osho is a sex guru, and I limit myself there, all the other good things, all the other expansive talks that he did, I limited myself from them. No one else is responsible for it.
So unlearning starts when you realize that you could be wrong. It starts when you realize that your thoughts are not always your best servants. And we let them become our masters. That’s stupid. Once you realize these things, you would want to unlearn what’s false.
Q) What is your message for youngsters who might see spirituality as an ‘old-fashioned’ subject?
Chetan Narang – This is actually from a friend of mine from Australia, and he talks about pretty much the same things that I talk about. And he says that almost all atheists arrive at their conclusions because they’ve only seen bad examples, and not because they know these things to be wrong.
So even for teenagers, even for people who think this is old-fashioned and just for older people, I think they’ve only seen bad examples. They’ve only seen examples of it being practiced poorly by older generations. If even our older generations had practiced spirituality and philosophy in their everyday lives in the manner, it is supposed to be, teenagers would not say these things. So my message is that you say all this because you don’t understand what it is. And if you let yourself, you can explore a lot more.
Henry David Thoreau, an author from the late 1800s. One of his most moving pieces from his book titles Walden was- ‘Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows its own religiously.’ And this is true. So even if someone thinks spirituality is old-fashioned, to hell with old-fashioned spirituality, we’re not talking about old-fashioned spirituality anyway. Understand that in the present situation, you can be biased. You could be following things that are not entirely based on truth. That is the beginning of spirituality.
Q) What are your top 3 book recommendations?
Chetan Narang – I talked about ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ by Daniel Kahneman. I would recommend that as one of the top 3 books. Everyone should read that book. I would recommend reading it not really as scientific literature but as a manual for understanding yourself and understanding the people around you.
Second on the list would be ‘Jnana Yoga’ by Swami Vivekanand. As a kid, I had heard about how Swami Vivekanand was an excellent orator and how he’d given beautiful speeches. But I never read the content of those speeches. He points out things I’d want both believers and non-believers to read. It is very moving.
The third recommendation would be Bhagwat Gita. There’re thousands of different translations of the Bhagwat Gita available, and almost all of them are very biased. They’re written by people who prefer believing more than understanding, and that’s not my game, so I don’t recommend their books. What I would recommend would be reading a transliteration of Shrimad Bhagwat Gita. It will have verses in Sanskrit translated into English. So all the bias that you have to overcome is your own, not the author’s. There’s a beautiful transliteration by Ramesh Menon and also by Shri Aurobindo.
And for any other book recommendations, I used to talk about many books on my Instagram, so I have a specific guide talking about just books. There’re a lot of books that I would recommend other than these 3, so you’d find them there.
Chetan Narang, via his daily podcast – The Unlearning Playground, aims to bring people towards spirituality and has chosen the path of digital content creation. Chetan Narang feels that coming out of one’s pre-defined biases and having a curious, questioning eye towards everything is the basis of spirituality.
Check the conversation with Chetan Narang on our YouTube channel.
Last Updated on by ritukhare