Over the years, I have found myself explaining philosophy in a way that would probably look strange on a syllabus. I describe it through three simple sounds: Wow! Mmm . . . Ahhh! I have come to think of them not as a joke about philosophy but as a surprisingly accurate description of how philosophy moves within me.

Wow! comes first. The late Fr. Vicente Cajilig OP used to speak of a “sense of awe and wonder,” and I remember that phrase because it names something that happens before argument. Something arrests us and makes us look again: a mountain, the sea, a child, death, beauty, injustice, the night sky, a forest, an act of courage, or a cruelty we cannot explain away.

Even something familiar can suddenly appear differently. A thing we have passed every day may, for one reason or another, finally become visible. Wonder is not childish ignorance; it is attention, and attention matters because what no longer surprises us often escapes moral scrutiny.

A forest becomes timber. A mountain becomes ore. A river becomes a water resource. A fisher becomes a project beneficiary, and a farmer becomes an affected household. Language becomes efficient, but something disappears, and wonder can bring part of it back.

To wonder at another person is already to resist reducing that person to a category. To wonder at a mountain is to recognize that it exceeds its economic valuation. To wonder at the sea is to know that no amount of accounting captures everything the sea is. Yet wonder alone is not philosophy, because after Wow! comes Mmm . . .

Mmm is doubt, but not the loud doubt that wants to prove everybody wrong. It is the quieter kind that asks whether things are really so, who says so, how we know, what is missing, whose voice is absent, and what assumption has already entered the question before discussion begins.

Wonder becomes investigation when attention begins to ask questions. Philosophy also becomes dangerous to comfort at this point, because doubt turns outward but eventually has to turn inward. It is easy to question somebody else’s ideology; it is harder to question the beliefs that give us identity, belonging, or moral certainty.

Can the tradition I love also carry injustice? Can the movement I belong to become unfair? Can the community I defend also exclude? Can an action be legal and still wrong? Can “development” make some people richer while making a place poorer? Can I become so certain that I am fighting injustice that I stop noticing the injustices I reproduce?

These questions come closer to the loob. In Filipino usage, loob can refer to an interior dimension of the person, but its meanings are richer than the English word “interiority.” My late professor Fr. Leonardo Mercado SVD’s philosophical work on the Filipino mind is helpful precisely because it takes terms such as loob seriously as windows into a less compartmentalized view of the person (Mercado, 1994). I do not treat loob as a mystical space protected from history or criticism. It is where conscience, desire, memory, fear, conviction, and relationship become interiorly lived.

For a long time, I liked the familiar dictum “think outside the box.” I still understand why the phrase became popular because it tells us not to be imprisoned by inherited assumptions. Eventually, however, I found it insufficient. Sometimes we do not simply have to think outside the box; we have to get out of it.

Thinking outside while remaining safely inside can become another intellectual game. Getting out means entering a space where our own assumptions are no longer protected, and that means stepping outside a comfort zone. It may require listening to someone we have already classified as wrong, going into a community as a learner rather than as the one who already knows, or admitting that a position we defended for years needs revision.

It may even mean allowing someone we consider an opponent to reveal something true that our own side has failed to see. None of that means every opinion becomes equally valid. There are lies, propaganda, forms of thinking that dehumanize, and positions built on domination. Leaving one’s box is not surrendering judgment; it is making judgment more honest.

Once we get out, another discovery follows: ours was never the only box. Other people have boxes too. Some are open, some closed, some have windows, and some have very thick walls. Many boxes also contain smaller boxes because we carry our language, beliefs, identities, memories, loyalties, wounds, faith, fears, assumptions, intellectual habits, and experiences.

Some of these smaller boxes we can bring out easily, while others require trust. I have come to believe that getting out of our boxes does not mean emptying everything we carry onto the floor. Some small boxes are sensitive. They belong to the loob and may contain wounds, vulnerabilities, convictions, or experiences that are not owed to everyone simply because dialogue has begun.

Growth requires discomfort, but dignity also requires boundaries. Those two things are not enemies. This matters especially when dealing with communities whose stories have repeatedly been extracted by researchers, advocates, government agencies, journalists, politicians, and institutions.

If I demand that another person open every box while I keep mine carefully locked, that is not dialogue; it is interrogation. Dialogue requires some mutual movement. If communities are expected to understand government, government must also leave the comfort of bureaucratic categories. If citizens are asked to listen to science, scientific institutions must still learn to listen to lived experience. If movements want outsiders to question their assumptions, movements must question their own.

Coming out of the box cannot be demanded only of the other side. We step out carrying what we can share. Perhaps one person brings science. Another brings ancestral memory. Another brings law. Another brings faith. Another carries the experience of poverty or displacement. Someone else knows the forest by species names, while another knows the same forest because a grandmother walked there with her as a child.

No one box contains the whole. If we remain inside our boxes, we shout through walls. If we step outside but insist on carrying our entire box and rebuilding it around everybody else, nothing has changed. Encounter begins when there is enough humility to create common space.

Then, sometimes, comes Ahhh! Something connects. An idea learned twenty years ago suddenly makes sense because of a conversation today. A scientific finding gives language to something a community had observed for generations. A word in Filipino reveals something its English translation had flattened. A position we thought was contradictory becomes understandable because we finally see the experience behind it.

The joy of discovery is not always finding an answer. Sometimes Ahhh means discovering a better question, and that sends us back to Wow. We look again, but not from the same place.

A circle no longer seemed adequate to describe this movement. A spiral returns while changing level; it rises, widens, and carries the previous turn within it. Freedom was one thing when I encountered it in high school. Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre complicated it, my late professor Fr. Enrico Gonzales OP, gave it direction, kapwa made it relational, and ecological struggle widened it beyond immediate human relationships.

The word remained freedom, but the question did not remain at the same level. That is the spiral, and the spiral, for me, moves from loob to labas. Something enters the loob: wonder, doubt, discomfort, insight. But philosophy cannot remain there.

A question about myself leads toward another person. The Other becomes kapwa. Kapwa leads to community. Community leads to institutions and society. Society leads to place, and place eventually opens toward the larger living world.

The spiral widens, but the movement also returns. The labas enters the loob. A farmer’s story changes the way I understand development. A damaged river changes the meaning of responsibility. A community conflict exposes my assumptions about participation. An encounter with a different culture changes categories I thought were universal.

The outside world enters and rearranges the inside, and the next turn begins. At the center of this spiral, however, I imagine something else: stillness, a vacuum of calmness that is not emptiness, detachment, or indifference, but peace inside movement.

Around that center there can be conflict, anger, advocacy, uncertainty, criticism, urgency, and chaos. Public life supplies enough of all of them. If the loob simply reproduces all the turbulence of the labas, something is eventually lost. Discernment becomes reaction. Conviction becomes anger, and anger can become identity.

We may begin to think that because the cause is right, everything we do in its name must also be right. The quiet center interrupts that and asks why I am doing this, whether the anger is still serving justice, whether I am actually listening, whether I have already decided what the other person will say before that person speaks, and whether I can still be corrected without feeling that correction means defeat.

The comfort zone and the quiet center are not the same. A comfort zone prevents movement; the quiet center makes movement possible without losing oneself. The wider the spiral becomes, the more important that center becomes.

The simplest account I can give of my own philosophy is this: Wow! keeps me open, Mmm . . . keeps me questioning, and Ahhh! allows discovery. The spiral moves from loob to labas and back again, while the boxes remind me that I carry a perspective but not the only perspective. The center reminds me that entering the world more deeply also requires returning inward more honestly.

The Spiral and the Center

The sequence Wow–Mmm–Ahhh became more convincing to me as I noticed how often an apparent conclusion reopened the question. The first Ahhh can be dangerous if it becomes intoxication with one’s own insight. Discovery feels like arrival, especially in advocacy where there is pressure to translate an insight quickly into a position. The spiral reminds me that an answer belongs to a turn, not necessarily to the whole journey.

The movement between loob and labas cannot be reduced to private reflection followed by public action. The two constantly interrupt each other. The loob is already formed by language, family, institutions, memories, and place, while the labas is never simply external because our actions alter it and return to us as consequence. The distinction helps me think without pretending there is a sealed interior self standing opposite a separate world.

The quiet center is necessary precisely because the spiral is not quiet. A widening life brings more voices, responsibilities, griefs, loyalties, and contradictions. Without interior space, advocacy can become a sequence of reflexes. One reacts to the latest provocation, adopts the tempo of the conflict, and gradually loses the ability to distinguish urgency from importance. The center is where a person asks whether the work still serves the good that first gave it meaning.

This differs from withdrawal. I have no interest in a spirituality that uses interior peace to avoid responsibility. The center matters because it returns a person to action with a more examined freedom. In my own language, the movement is not from the world toward permanent retreat. It is from labas to loob and back again, with each passage changing the next.

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REFERENCE

Mercado, L. N. (1994). The Filipino mind: Philippine philosophical studies II. Council for Research in Values and Philosophy.