Philosophy
What I personally like about Hindu philosophy is that it has no one authoritative source or “bible”. The only authoritative source if any, is delegated to one’s own critical thinking, with plenty of sources to act as guidance to tap into your Self. I also detest the word “spiritualism” (let alone “religion” or even “eastern mysticism”) and its association to Hindu thought. The following are my two cents:
- Yoga: the art of unconditioning
- Identity
- Moving beyond intellect
- Karm! / Engage! / Act!
- Independent Thinking
- Multivalency
- Multivalent Pluralism
- Impermanence / Transience
Yoga: the art of unconditioning
The science of yoga is one of the six darsanas (schools of thought). It is about exploring the nature of ourselves at the sensorial, emotional, intellectual, existential, and spiritual level (that’s a rough translation of: indriya, manas, buddhi, karm, and atman).
Its product, yoga, is about unconditioning the mind. Hindu thinkers understood that any attempt in science or any inquiry is not easy when the mind is tainted, biased, or conditioned. One must first uncondition the mind, and that is the aim of yoga. Else science, reflection, and spiritual growth will become a drudgery of trial and error, ups and downs, instead of a more steady progress or spiritual unfolding.
Shiva - The Absolute Yogi
Without yoga, this unconditioning of the mind is a constant grinding process, through lessons in life. {That word always reminds me of Shani (God in the form of “maintainer of karma”), the way he straps you on to his sesame grinding mill (எள்ளுச் செக்கு) and grinds you, slowly, in the wheel of time… until you’ve learned your lesson or decide to pro-actively reflect and evolve yourself. If you propitiate Shani as your guru make sure you’re ready to put in a lot of mental stamina; he’s one guy you don’t want to mess with; not to mention he is very stern and stoic-like, having absolutely no sense of humor. I switched to Murugan (God, whose form is more in-line with my cultural sensibilities) after about eight years Shani :)}
Unconditioning is a constant peeling away of layers and layers of conditioning and dispensing with the intellectual “thicket of thorns”. There is always a “new you”, and the “old you” becomes almost a total stranger that you can hardly recognize, abandoned back in the junk yard of time.
Conditioning is the big parasite that chains you down, misleads you, and stifles your level of growth towards love, compassion, understanding, and acceptance. Aghoris see “conditioning” as graha-bhutanis — leech-like parasites from a different dimension, that suck away at your life-energy, that need to be painfully stripped away.
{For the benefit of others, there are several systems of yoga. Often everyone follows a combination of these, with or without their knowing. The major being: bhakti (via devotion, divine love, metaphysical inspiration), jnana (via wisdom, higher knowledge), karma (via action), raja (via meditation), hatha (via activating astral junctions or chakras in the body through asanas). Yoga as it is popularized today is just the last one, hatha yoga.}
Identity
All this means, one has to be prepared to let go of any sense of identity (which is much more than just giving yourself a new name and donning a saffron robe).
I’ll take a more personal illustration here. I can say I’ve always held my own ground/identity, reinforced mainly from the day I landed in India as a teenager, when I held to my individual freedom of being what I am, over that expected by peer pressure. This was the 80’s in India — when craze about anything foreign was at its peak (especially so in a school of affluent kids — the kind who got chauffeured to school; I was one of the few exceptions). I just fully disengaged from any peer/pop-cultural influences, and followed my heart (back then, it was a fascination with the “invisible forces”: electricity, radio waves, electromagnetism, electronics, conscious, life)
Something I found particularly among Indians in India, is that when they find they can’t fit you into any of their cultural frames of references, they become obsessed to try to fix you or make you fit in through some form of peer pressure. Maybe that’s what culture is about? If they allowed too many deviants, it wouldn’t be a culture any more right? Probably that’s how India keeps her culture so intact.
It is just another irony — while India is far ahead of most countries in terms of sheer diversity and pluralism, on the personal level there is very little freedom for deviation in India (such freedom was reserved only for sadhus, siddhars, aghoris, and other legitimized aberrations from the society). While the USA lags behind in cultural expression, it excels in encouraging individual expression: people are respected for what they are. At the same time, individual expression in the USA is not too rosy either, without the cultural collective people do feel isolated — and try to fill in the void by keeping their minds busy (constantly hijacked) by the entertainment or consumerism industry. There are way too many artists, poets, philosophers, who have gone depressed or even committed suicide because they didn’t find a culture that nurtures such deep expressions of Truth. The same if in India would have become say bhakti expressionists, or into classical literature/dance/music, or some sort of yogis (or even “gurus”).
If at all anything I’d say I’m a Hindu in the similar tradition as the critical thinkers in the yoga school of thought, and an American in the sense of materializing them and applying it to life. It is interesting to see this happening in a broader sense today. India had yoga for years, but it is only the USA that has taken it and materialized it for the betterment of life. Who knows, how this tandavam (cosmic dance) between Shiva and Shakti plays out? Like the dance of millions of particles attracting, repulsing, fusing, differentiating, exploding, imploding… so also cultures come into being, collide, merge, fuse, mutate, disappear, create new ones. In India this had happened at an accelerated pace where scores of faiths and darshanas mixed and fused to create what is known as Hindu culture today. All this has happened before, and will happen again, and again.
Moving Beyond Intellect
यदा ते मोहकलिलं बुद्धिर् व्यतितरिष्यति ।
तदा गन्तासि निर्वेदं श्रोतव्यस्य श्रुतस्य च ।।
- Bhagavad Gita, 2.52When your intellect crosses the thicket of delusion, then you shall become disgusted,
with that which is yet to be heard and that which has been heard (i.e. referring to the sacred texts, the Vedas).
The intellect (buddhi), is important, as it is necessary for survival. The “sword of knowledge/intellect” (as the Bhagavad Gita also refers to it as) acts as a guardian preventing us from going down dark alleys, the wrong path. But when you’re using it for reflection and as a tool for inquiry, at some point or the other you’ll reach a stage where you feel a dissatisfaction (or even a total aversion sometimes) for any sort of intellectual thought, and look towards higher grounds (such as jnana, bhakti, raja,…), as you begin to realize the intellect does nothing to nourish your soul. When not restrained, instead of bringing you towards experiencing the Whole, it draws you away from it, and drains you.
Karm! / Engage! / Act!
Yoga by itself will not get us anywhere, unless it is applied to life, as in karm (to act) or to engage in life with the sword of yoga (as Krishna calls it, as Kali wields it, as Shiva embodies it). Karm when undertaken with yoga leads to outward expansion which bootstraps your inner growth (and automatically dispenses with the need for too much reflection). In fact I’d say it accelerates your inner growth far more than doing yoga without karm.
On a personal note: it took me a bunch of wake up calls before I realized that most of my inner growth had never really come from yoga, meditation, intellectual reasoning, nor reflection, but from life experiences. And that the most stagnant part of my life (inner growth and outward expansion) was ironically when I fell into the trap of spirituality. In fact the realization got me to a point were I was saying something to the effect of “screw spirituality! who ever invented the word anyway?” In fact there was no such word like “spirituality” back then.
Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, so also nothing can substitute for life experience. This is also one of the essential messages of the Gita as well: to act (as in to engage it in action, in life) armed with yoga.
I believe that in the Kali yuga, we’ve become so tightly bound by maya, that very few people can extricate themselves to the degree necessary take the pure path of yoga (like the sadhus, rishis, bhakti saints, etc.). It takes a tremendous amount of mental stamina and/or a total disillusionment with life to pursue that route.
So that’s why the most practical path to us today is to engage in life, with yoga. I guess this is what was meant by karma yoga (and not just the stereotyped “selfless service” alone, but simply to engage, to act).
This is why even the Bhagavad Gita does not emphasize becoming a sadhu, but moderation, and in applying yoga in life, i.e. to act.
कर्मेन्द्रियाणि संयम्य य आस्ते मनसा स्मरन् ।
इन्द्रियार्थान्विमूढात्मा मिथ्याचारः स उच्यते ।।
- Bhagavad Gita 3.6He who sits restraining his action-senses while brooding over the objects of the senses, with deluded mind, is said to be a hypocrite.
I consider “brooding” to include intellectual preoccupation, and “objects of the sense” to include the self.
यस्त्विन्द्रियाणि मनसा नियम्यारभतेऽर्जुन ।
कर्मेन्द्रियैः कर्मयोगमसक्तः स विशिष्यते ।।
- Bhagavad Gita 3.7He who controls his senses with his mind, Arjuna, and without attachment engages the sense-actions in the yoga of action, is superior.
It is about inner growth and outward expansion. It’s about change, that makes you change less, as in “to be firmly situated in [the Self]” (as in what comes with स्थितप्रज्ञ).
Independent Thinking
Independent thinking is about evolving, by churning your soul for answers, and not to get distracted by intellectual debates, nor cheating (by burying your head in books – as that wouldn’t be churning your soul, but just filling your head). Critical thinking and independent thinking is a core part of the Hindu thought. It is what prevents it from becoming a religion or from being hijacked by religious zealots.
I believe that critical thinking (and to be an independent thinker) has two purposes. First it is needed to take yoga and put into action, to engage it, in all walks of life with effort. Secondly it serves as the critical feedback loop for you to refine your yoga / path further. For how else would you know, without testing it? which comes from engaging in life.
Also, like that of the yogis, independent thinking is a very personal experience. In that regard, you might say the yogis took the word “independent” in independent thinking to an all new level, allowing multiple and sometimes even contradictory theories to coexist and yet all be still valid.
I feel all the siddhars and aghoris were independent thinkers. They did not follow any “religion” or even a “spiritual path” (these words didn’t even exist back then!), but approached it from first principles, from acute experimentation and observation (not reflection or brooding) at the level of yoga + karm + critical thinking + bhakti.
Multivalency
I believe the core Hindu philosophy that permeates almost all walks of life in India is the concept of multivalency. That is, a world where the boolean expression A • A’ (that is, A and not A) is not a contradiction or an indeterminate state, but perfectly valid. It is a philosophy of life that allows for multiple and parallel realities to coexist.
If you refer to ten different spiritual traditions across cultures and continents, you’ll find that one says there are 6 states of consciousness, and another says there are 10, and another 42. Which is right? All. These sages couldn’t care less about petty questions of that nature. They saw. They wrote. The end goal is to elevate your mind to that level experienced by the sages. This is why numerous spiritual traditions coexisted in India, each flourishing in it’s own right, without fighting over who’s right or wrong. I’m not talking about the intellectual debate halls of ancient India – they were not yogis or siddhars, but end-users of the insights of yogis.
Another example. For example there maybe more than dozen “birth-places” of Krishna (or Rama) in different parts of India. Each believing without a doubt in their heart, that so and so place is the birth place of Krishna or Rama. On top of that, when they travel from one region to the another (say from South to North), they’ll accept folks who say a spot in that region is the birth place of Krishna, and will worship it with full reverence (i.e. not just as a “possible alternative”). When they return back to the South, they return to accepting that birth place in total.
How is it possible? The same way that Hindus go to a Vishnu temple and accept that Vishnu is God in total, and then right after that go to a Shiva temple and accept Shiva is God in total, and can go to a Durga, Murugan, Ganesha, or Shani temple and accept each of these as God in total. That is, not as another God, but each as the “one God” in totality.
If that boggles your mind, then read S. Radhakrishan’s Indian Philosophy Volume 2. The six darshanas (systems of Indian philosophical thought) will amaze you: the phenomenal depth with which Hindus had brainstormed the nature of knowledge and the means of acquiring knowledge – steeped in epistemology, psychology, logic, and metaphysics.
All this is not so confusing if you look at it this way: the pursuit of spirituality is a very personal and serious undertaking — of removing layers of conditioning (usually through some form of yoga or the other). For every bit of progress that one makes moving closer to the Atman, the universe constantly restructures itself, splitting itself at every instant into one of many multi-verses, giving each individual his own cosmic view, within that multi-verse. It’s this built-in multiverse understanding of the universe (i.e. multiple realities functioning and flowing in parallel) that I believe is what gives rise to the multivalent fabric of Indian society, which in turn lends to its unparalleled plurality.
Multivalent Pluralism
Contrast this to secularism where people of multiple cultures learn to live together either by “tolerance” (a somewhat pretentious kind of acceptance) or stripping each other down to a common denominator culture — as opposed to having lots of rich vibrant sub-cultures. Secularism is always on its tippy toes, watching out so as not to risk offending anybody. It takes the color out of culture. An African colleague once told me the irony of how Americans portray Africa as being uncivilized/backwards, and yet tourists come to Africa to experience culture (in particular in areas that are untouched by conflicts introduced by greed, struggle for power, resources, religion, etc)!
Multivalent pluralism (yeah, I’m inventing words left and right :)), is about genuine acceptance of people exactly as they are without having to water down their culture. In India you can walk down any street and you’ll see people of cultures and faiths so dramatically different from each other — and they wear it on themselves with pride (this can be seen emerging slowly in highly multi-cultural cities in the USA — but still far from competing with what you’d see even in an average town in India). Not to mention the latest addition into the churning mill: that of American/Western culture (”jeans, shorts, night life, public displays of affection,…”), which is being assimilated at such a rapid rate compared with just a decade ago.
In short, multivalency allows you to have your cake and eat it to :).
Having said all that, where would India be without her harsh ironies. While India has pluralism that encourages cultural expression, one thing the USA excels at is individual self-expression. You’re allowed to be what you want, without the other person puzzling over why he/she is so different or why he/she is not “normal”. Individual self-expression in India seems to be reserved only for monks, ascetics, and sadhus :).
As an end note: multivalency occurs in quantum physics, as in the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the Schroedinger Wave Function, which allow for an electron or photon to exist in multiple states simultaneously as well as exhibit dual nature of particle and wave simultaneously.
Impermanence/Transience
This is another core philosophy that permeates Hindu culture. It might even be that it is this which gives rise to multivalency. It is about impermanence, transience, fleetingness of time, of seasons, of cosmic cycles, and of life. I believe the whole idea of microcosm and macrocosm reflecting each other arises from this deeper understanding/acceptance of transience or cycles, that like multivalency, is almost hard-wired into the Hindu culture.
“All this has happened before, and will happen again, and again, and again….”
– [paraphrased] gibberish spoken by a Cylon while hooked up to its collective conscious, in the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica.
When I first heard the above quote, I thought it was just pertaining to the wars and conflicts that were going on… only later in the series I realized it pertained to something on a much grander scale, of cosmic proportions, closer at home to Hindu philosophy. So it didn’t come across a surprise, that the Battlestar Galactica theme/opening song had the Gayathri Mantra embedded in it.
I used to think that we had two options out of this: engage (as in, कर्म्, act, and “embrace the moment”) or disengage (as in Lord Murugan’s advice, “சொல் அற, ‘சும்மா இரு’” – Just Be. Simply Be. Be Still.). But I realize the best way to hande it, is both. Wholesome engagement, tempered with yoga.