World Affairs

Vol. 6, Number 1 (January-March 2002)

Eternal India: Resounding Voices of Silence—Emerging Images of the Future
J C Kapur

The loss of depth in thought and discourse and the trivialisation of the sacred are some of the most regressive consequences of the consumer society and the market as the determinant of value. This has initiated the process of moronisation of the consumer and is aborting the evolution to the next stage of human development.

The pressures of unipolarity continue to undermine the emergence of a multipolar world and plurality of thoughts. The social, physical and psychic pressures and constraints keep us at present levels barring all the pathways to higher levels of understanding and consciousness where solutions can be sought for our dilemmas. When our circumscribed logical minds are confronted with problems that become too big to approach, our minds lose their depth, and seek easy solutions through super-violence or the visible, without examining the deep underlying causes of our maladies. We continue to talk of peace yet keep starting wars. Thus the bare and arid desert of materialism, unshielded by spiritual constraints, has begun to spiral into ugly consequences. The power structures continue to clamour about the vast horizons, opening before science but in fact all these unlimited possibilities are limited by five senses and capacity to reason beyond which a human cannot attain. Even these capacities are being constrained through aggressively pursued media blitz which destroys the cognitive capacity to comprehend the aggregating levels of disasters —social, political, economic, technical and ecological. Often, even creative processes when misused in the course of time become destructive. The process of creating a unipolar world on the ashes of the Soviet Union has resulted in the world inheriting a Bin Laden, the Taliban, Ground Zero, and an international network of terrorism.

We must therefore first shed the illusion that we are going through the birth pangs of a great civilisation. The link between the four great paths to that unknown future — religion, philosophy, science and the arts — has been broken, thus dividing and contradicting each other. As they are moving farther from one another, they are also moving farther from truth. Thus the main human trend is launched on the path of untruth. The intellectual way of science and philosophy and the emotional way of religion and aesthetic, is an imperfect way. And when mysteries disappeared from the life of the people, the link, which existed between the cosmos and the hidden knowledge was broken. Our planet has been launched on the path of losing the cosmic connection and its orderliness. And its reflections are visible in the world in turmoil.

The capacity for emotional discrimination in the understanding of the essence of symbolism and the manifestation of mystical feeling, can make exalted religion of what may externally seem to be a primitive cult of so called backward people. The difference is not in the idea but in the men who receive it. Moronisation continues reducing all levels of acceptance of truth in the form of lie. Thus truth is being brought down to the level of the market in a completely unrecognisable form.

Indian culture went through many cycles rising to the highest point then becoming dormant under external pressures or internal decay. But not everything gained is lost. It has been preserved in many of her religious texts, archeological monuments, temples, her aesthetics, music and dance, her flowing sacred rivers, the influence of the Himalaya, her esoteric centres and her psyche.

We are witnessing the pressures for the evolution of a consumerist and technological civilisation while simultaneously seeing the evolution of high technology barbarism. Thus creating within India the seeds of its own regression; through a networked unipolar system and the emerging network of terror.

So the present human state is becoming both dangerous and elusive at the same time and has very little chance for transformation because more and more of civilised life is coming under the spell of this new barbarism in diverse ways. The processes for the preservation of the status quo, by power systems on one side and the compulsions for change on the other, are giving a commercial veneer to religion, philosophy, science and the aesthetics, leading to a struggle with nature and a ransacking of civilisations. True civilisation is another process that is the search for higher levels of consciousness and the meaning and purpose of life.

People whatever their state, whether of high consumption or starvation cannot be altered if they do not understand their condition. To bring about the transformation it is necessary to understand the laws of nature and to reconnect the humans to cosmic orderliness, in a balanced state of life and death, of the creative and the destructive. To achieve this, we have to understand the underlying complexity of the principles at the base of large phenomenon, and for this we have to turn to nature. We cannot build a temple of heaven on earth by building a tower of stones touching the sky. We cannot escape from the universal laws of nature — that what is born must die. It applies as much to nations as to all physical and biological creations. No nation can escape this fate without reaching out for newer levels of understanding and consciousness to a higher plane of being.

And this cannot be achieved through intellectual methods and technical means. The market is only an expression of a few controllers functioning at the level of the market, subjugating everything to market forces for their own interests. Thus everything becomes the expression of horizontal aggregation on the same level. The computer cannot withstand individual intelligence because it begins to disrupt its own ordered intelligence.

Every living being represents the expression of cosmic laws; a complex symbol or complex hieroglyph. It can lead to higher or different intelligence, mysticism, esotericism or levels of consciousness. These were first expunged from the socialist idea and are now being banished from the market place. The scientific method has repeatedly established that there is no reason to believe that the discovered truths of yesteryears will always remain truths. Similarly time-frozen revelations from another age, another moment in time and state of the environment, cannot intervene in these dilemmas. Thus the need for alternative paradigms is being considered as a threat to the system — both materialist and metaphysical — in approaching the aggregating crisis of our times. We have to go beyond temporal and transient facts and approach these intuitive or psychic elements within the orderliness of the cosmic system. Through the elevation of man (Aham Brahmasmi) in the invisible world.

The invisible forces of nature — thunder, sun, fire, spirit of the mountain, woods, lakes, water, spirits — guide the lives of paganism and tribalism. The invisible world is small quantities, micro-organisms, cells microscopes and the ultramicroscopic world of molecules, atoms, electrons and energy particles. Microscope expands our vision in one direction, telescope in the other, a computer in the third, and still the most remains invisible. Visible differs from the invisible properties which most often we can neither define nor understand. This mysterious world is invisible through ordinary means of cognition. It contains the causes of the phenomenon of visible world, which are hidden and inaccessible.

Historically, as cultures get destroyed by various forms of barbaric acts, it becomes necessary that those innate principles which promote barbarism must first be destroyed. Sometimes barbaric acts are performed to protect civilisation, but the arrogance of power or wealth, commercialisation of religion, the emergence of pseudo religion and even hereditary caste, outgrow civilisation.

This creates the need for new sages or supermen to create new kinds of thinking and the abandoning of old forms without which new thinking cannot emerge. And these supermen are the bridges for the cosmic connection.

But these men can only evolve out of the dominant pursuits of a society and become the role model for the rest. In a materialist society in the last stages of consumerism such evolution leads to the creation of a "Rambo" who, by the exhibition of super physical characteristic and highly developed sense of mechanised aggression, and a deep protective instinct, single handedly takes on an army of highly equipped and armed enemies and his skills with destructive instruments overpowers them. The other supermen that such a system throws up are for the vast aggregations of wealth in the service of the paradigm of "Armament Protected Consumerism". These supermen through various technical and not so technical means create an infrastructure of money power to dominate worldwide pathways for the uni-directional flow of wealth and resources in service of the market; en-route rewarding the heroes of the media, the academia, and entertainers for their services. Such presumed superhuman acts with supertech instruments are eulogised and their exploits become the subject matter for psychology and mythology of superpower. In fact it is a moronised version of a few over-sensitised senses, harmonised with the psyche of the environment. Such supermen make little contribution to our future other than the symbolic glorification of violence and wealth.

The sage does not wish to reconcile himself either to the limitation of body and matter or to the limitation of time and space. Thus, the primitive concept of superman as a giant of herculean strength with large material wealth, capable of conquering and destroying chosen enemies still continues. But the use of gigantic machines does not make them supermen. And against the fury of nature and increasingly destructive power of technology these supermen lose their value.

During the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries the long suppressed soul of India began to reawaken. In this awakening from Kashmir to Kanya Kumari, there arose on the Indian horizon supermen who infused a new life into the nation. They were all sages who through their penance, thought, action and aesthetics reached out to the soul of India through many of the resounding voices of silence from her past and thus stirred the slumbering mass into motion — the body, the intellect, the soul and the wounded psyche. Through a mysterious process their message was reaching out in decipherable images and words throughout the vast expanse of the subcontinent.

The spiritual and philosophical foundations of the Indian culture were provided and sustained by the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Vedantas and other religious texts, and the later interaction with many religious and cultural streams, both external and of Indic origin.

There were many movements of Indian resurgence between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. All such movements of renaissance had a spiritual background and brought to the fore many supermen who transcended limitations of colonial servitude and connected themselves with India that was India. Many of these voices of silence from our recent past are echoing and re-echoing in post-independent India, lighting pathways to higher levels of consciousness in approaching increasingly complex problems of human future. And at every turn of our recent history voices like those of Swami Vivekananda, Poet Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi and Sri Aurobindo, resound and remind us of the widening gap between our ideals and the betrayal of our promises to those on whose behalf and in whose name we act. And all these supermen in one manner or the other expressed the Indian Ideal. And each one of them in his own sphere of work endeavoured to translate the antiquity and the continuity of the Indian thought including the recent history, into their work, creativity, search for excellence and to attain higher levels of consciousness. They connected the Indian heritage with the India of their time and their visions of the future.

India is the inheritor of a highly endowed civilisation going back many millennia. The continued recovery and renovation of traditional knowledge systems, literature, aesthetic and philosophical traditions, myths and legends is the responsibility of all civilised people. The pluralistic psyche of India should encourage, search and accept every segment of its history including the most recent Islamic and the British centuries. It is the sacred task of the archeologist of knowledge to repair the tears and reconnect India to its deepest frontiers of history and knowledge. The farther we connect with our past continuity, the stronger the foundation on which the structure of our future can be constructed. The lessons of history are that all high rise civilisational structures built on shallow foundations of violence, greed and lust for power invariably collapse.

We have to reject the colonial system of recognition, which is as transitory as the civilisation that it represents, and connect it to a timeless system of eternal values. The Eurocentric culture-determining group, which was imposed to secure the colonies, has become irrelevant in a dynamic new nation re-establishing its continuity and remaking its civilisation. This will be the first step to the decolonising of the Indian psyche.

Therefore the issue today is, where does India draw the lines of its culture and development to break away from the paradigm which is causing worldwide cultural and economic devastation.

In order to connect to the voices of silence of the Indian antiquity that have frequently begun to resound, challenging the images of the past, we requested a number of eminent scholars from many countries to express their views on a broad spectrum of issues, which collectively unveil the Indian ethos and provide a pattern of continuity to establish sustainable images of the future. In this task we are not intimidated by cultural and politico-economic oligarchies which, while using the hardware of democracy and human rights, employ authoritarian software and through frequent use of mega force, project their cultural interests.

Sri Aurobindo was a political and social rebel and in the process of his transformation to a sage delineated highly inspiring supramental pathways to the future. In his contribution of "Message of Sri Aurobindo" Dr Karan Singh provides some glimpses of his contribution to Indian resurgence. While Aster Patel seeks clarity of perception of the present human state. And the thoughts of Sri Aurobindo pursued in full awareness of the goal is one of the resounding voices of silent Indian contribution to the human future. William Netter relates to the inspired contributions in "Human Cycle" and of course "Savitri" which contains all of Sri Aurobindo's evolutionary vision from the big bang to the descent of supramental stage of evolution.

Swami Vivekananda had a strong message for India to awaken from the depressed colonised and dehumanised state and fearlessly seek the depths of the Indian thought for a new vision of India. He transmitted a loud and a clear message and the cosmic linkages of the Indian thought to the Western world. And also presented images of the West beyond colonialism, for the amelioration of the grinding poverty. In his travels around India and the world, he acquired the global connectivity of his message.

Poet Tagore provided glimpses of the Indian thought in his aesthetic expressions — poetry, painting, and essays. All these expressed his sensitivity to the true spirit of India. A reproduction of one of his lecture at Harvard University in 1913 expressed the depth of Indian spirituality, which becomes visible in Tagore's human concerns.

For over thirty years Gandhi like a colossus stalked the Indian scene integrating within himself his life's message of sanity, spirituality and the eradication of poverty. His contributions to the ethos in pre-independence India from the upliftment of the poor and non-violent struggle against the colonial empire is one of the most glittering chapters of recent Indian history. The global reach of his ideas long before the media, became the message, and thought of India as India will always be associated with the name of Gandhi. Scholar B R Nanda discusses the genesis of the Gandhian movement for the freedom of India based on Satyagraha (holding on to truth). And out of this not only came the freedom of India, but also emerged a personality, a point of hope for the human future in a strife torn world.

Religious and cultural diversity is as compulsive for human survival as biodiversity for sustaining the plant life. Indian search for an eternal and universal tradition of truth and not particular historical revelation is the theme of David Frawley, a Vedic scholar in his presentation on "Religious Diversity and Biodiversity".

In "The Asymmetric Dialogue of Civilisation", Rajiv Malhotra through an analysis of the serious work by many mainstream scholars has established the mutual dependency between the asymmetry of power and institutionalised prejudices in research and education. It has evolved through time into a very finely sculpted model, a last hold out of colonialism in trivialising Indian thought, culture and scholarship. He details the Gandhian response to this. We are publishing Rajiv Malhotra's highly enlightening study. This will help the readers to disabuse themselves from the overload of information as knowledge on India and to hear the resounding voices of India crying out to be heard, not for itself, but for the entire human future. Professor Subhash Kak, a scientist of artificial intelligence provides considerable understanding of the processes through which Indian thought, culture and knowledge were systematically trivialised by the colonialist thus creating a considerable disconnect with the reality of life and eternal insights that have begun to emerge and often resound.

Professor Raimon Panikkar in expounding "The Dharma of India" suggest that the multi-millennial Indic cultures impose on India the burden and responsibility of following her own dharma even if difficult and against modern winds not for her alone but for the whole world. While Patrizia Norelli-Bachlet, a well-known scholar on Indian cosmology in "Caste, Culture and Cosmos" reflects on the ways in which the Dharma can be "eternal" and on the cosmic linkages of the caste system. She also explains the root of the much maligned jyotish vidya or the astrological knowledge as the hallowed Time-Axis that integrated and harmonised Vedic civilisation.

If India can be India, it can be the harbinger of "Eternal Peace", but it is getting lost in the enforced, peccadilloes of acquisitiveness. Anindita Balslev through her philosophical reflections explores, the supramental spiritual and social journeys of great sages dreamers and rebels to connect India to her sacred roots and eternal values. While Lokesh Chandra through a series of interactions between the cultures of the East and West expresses the plurality, eternality and validity of the Indian thought in search of pathways to higher levels of consciousness and search for the meaning and purpose of life. The Indian pluralistic thought does not accept Huntington's formulations on the Clash of Civilisation. The fault lines of civilisations lie at the heart of monotheism, unipolarism, unipowerism and attempted disconnect of all human attributes in service of the market.

In the cosmic silence there arose a primal sound — this was the sound of "Om". Through meditation on and recitation of this sound arose the mantras which gave birth to the sacred scriptures, the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Brahmanas, and the mathematically precise Sanskrit language and through the language, the great sages showed the pathways to the divine source.

Audrey Kitagawa, a lawyer by profession, received this inspiration through divine mother and was chosen by her to head her vast spiritual family and carry forward the message of "Sri Ramakrishna", a saint of "Eternal India". Through the meditation on "OM" Kitagawa transformed and rebuilt many disconnected and alienated lives on to the path of inner peace and harmony. Kitagawa writes about how "OM" through her own inner transformation provided new insights into the human and social environment.

Late Raghava R Menon, the musicologist, a few days before his unfortunate demise sent his contribution on the 'Hindu predicament and Indian Music'. In the Indian context the man that was in mankind, did not care what any one believed. Similarly Indian Music is not just an art but a process of inner transformation which goes beyond religious belief.

Sarasvati the great river which carried perennial glacier waters to all parts of India is no longer a myth or a legend but ground truth. Scholars have not only traced its Rig Vedic linkages but overwhelming historical, archeological and satellite surveys tracing its points of origin, flow and entire journey to the Rann of Kutch and the Arabian Sea. Tectonic shifts around 1800 BC led to a change in its course and the ultimate drying is now a part of geologic survey records. Dr. S Kalyanaraman's magnum opus of over 1100 pages traces the story of Sarasvati with over 1500 settlements that records the creative development of the Indian thought and the contribution of rivers. This article by the author presents some new insights into the flow of Indian history and culture and contribution of river Sarasvati to this process.

Myths and rituals are not just symbolic in nature but are also interdependent, to be seen in a total pattern of meaning, a reality and a lived human experience, a celebration of the inner nature, as well as of human life. They also focus on the place of man in nature, in terms of human familistic, tribal, social, national and international. But the most important question is of man to himself 'Who Am I? Thus Usha Choudhuri provides that Vedic Sacrifices as, the instrumentality of relating to the cosmic terrestrial and individual.

In the Epilogue Kapila Vatsayan, through a scholarly panoramic view has connected the diverse search routes by different authors to the inner core of Eternal India. In this process she weaves the different presentations into a richly textured flowing, narrative which makes the implicit eternal, explicit; and relevant for the here and now of our "self". Thus to find anew the inner centre, and aspire to be in touch with higher consciousness, to hold the balance between the vertical and the horizontal, the deeply reflective and responsibly active, the physical, emotive, intellectual, and spiritual.

The deeper instincts of the Indic thought are that of selfless action, the abhorrence of violence and suffering and search for righteous action or dharma. These were the guiding force in Buddhism and most religious traditions of Asia which in their depth dimension expressed similar instincts. These instincts are the negation, of the psyche manipulative techniques, and the accompanying violence, which have now become the holy-mace for the promotion of the consumerist paradigm of the market place.

The international politico-socio-techno-economic environment has arrived at a point of high vulnerability, with a simultaneous loss in the credibility of most power structures. This has enhanced the uncertainty of the human condition manifold. There is thus an urgent need to transcend these self-imposed human limitation and approach our dilemmas from higher levels of understanding of our present state. And also in search for the meaning and purpose of life. Some silent whispers from the "Indian Eternity" may help make the cosmic connection with the realities of a new human destiny. To this faith in the human future, this issue of "Eternal India" is dedicated.

New Delhi
March 2002