In the first part of this essay, we shall challenge the
prevailing paradigm in which globalization has been equated with
Westernization. Even though nowadays the expansion of the West is framed in a post-colonialist
setting in which theoretically all humans are equal, the notion of civilization
still remains Western. In other words, everyone is being offered the equal
opportunity to become Western. The challenge to this paradigm is presented in
this essay on multiple fronts: the moral issues; the lack of practical
feasibility; the illegitimacy of the underlying assumptions about the superior
West; the deconstruction of the very idea of “West” and the “Western model” as
distinct and coherent entities, and the role of the inner sciences that would
remain subverted under the Western model. Among these challenges, the last two
are the main focus of in this essay, as the first two seem to be well known
arguments already.
We are proposing post-Westernism and not mere
post-colonialism. The second part of the essay then posits a new paradigm of
globalization that would not be the expansion of any particular civilization,
be it Western or another, but would be a genuine renaissance embracing all
humanity in all of its diverse cultural manifestations. In the context of this
global renaissance, Indic civilization’s potential and essential role is
explained as one example of a non-Western civilization with a lot to
contribute. This becomes the basis for introducing the notion of the inner
sciences and how they are crucial to this renaissance.
I. Ethical And
Practical Limits To Today’s Globalization:
“Globalization” has gained currency as a term denoting an
undeniable trend. Economies are increasingly interdependent, and there is a
growing sense that national identity and even national governments are less
relevant as transnational forces shape our lives. In many ways, this trend
seems quite positive and appears to have great potential to enrich the lives of
peoples throughout the world.
Yet there has also been strident and vocal resistance, not
to globalization per se, but rather to a particular way in which it has been
implemented. This implementation has at times appeared to continue, if not
exasperate, the colonialist divide between the haves and the have-nots.
Economically advanced countries continue to consume an inordinate percentage of
the world’s resources. Poorer countries continue to be exploited both for their
natural and human resources, with workers being paid far less than their
Western counterparts, and often subjected to far more hazardous working
conditions. Globalization, undertaken in this sense, is not far removed from
past colonization.
Central to the colonial ideology was the notion that the colonized
people were backward and savage, and needed a more advanced civilization to
manage their cultural evolution, a process usually understood to involve the
abandonment of their tradition and an assumption of the colonizer’s culture.
This, of course, was a rather flimsy justification for exploitation. Current
resistance to globalization may in fact be a resistance to the assumption still
held by many in the West that globalization is essentially the same as
Westernization. This manifests in the arrogance that the West has all the
answers, and that economically disadvantaged nations must follow the Western
model if they wish to better themselves. So strong has been this myth of the
superior West that the extinction of other civilizations has often not been
taken as seriously as the extinction of species of animals. For the replacement
of other civilizations by Western civilization is often held as the route to
their progress, and this process is even viewed as the ‘burden’ of the West.
But before eradicating other civilizations, one must do an
honest comparative assessment of Western civilization, for once eradicated, if
that were possible and ethically allowable, we might never get other
civilizations back.
1.
One fundamental
question is whether Western civilization, with its huge dependence on the
consumption of natural resources and inequality among people, would be
expandable to a global scale since natural resource consumption would need to
expand by a factor between five and ten.
2.
Despite it advantages,
there are many ways in which Westernization has failed, and caused more harm
than good. The economic benefit to the privileged few is often outweighed by
the heightening of poverty of the underprivileged majority, the pernicious use
of technology to magnify warfare’s destructiveness, and the widespread
ecological devastation, all this particularly in poorer, more vulnerable
regions. Is there any basis for claiming that these are avoidable within the
Western model of globalization?
During the colonial era, the naïve assumption of Western
superiority was given authority by thinkers such as Hegel, who developed a
“universal” theory of history, which was, in essence, a theory of European
history in which the rest of the World was taken to be objects rather than
subjects. For Hegel, as Said has pointed out, Asia and Africa were “static,
despotic, and irrelevant to world history.”[1]
Since Hegel, Ethnocentrism has often blinded the West to the
parochialism of its supposed “universals”. But many people of other cultures,
seeing things from their perspective, notice this chauvinism, which is
naturally the source of non-Western peoples’ resistance to globalization qua
Westernization. Samuel Huntington recently made this point:
The West, and especially the United States, which has always
been a missionary nation, believes that the non-Western peoples should commit
themselves to the Western values of democracy, free markets, limited
government, human rights, individualism, the rule of law, and should embody
these values in their institutions. Minorities in other civilizations embrace
and promote these values, but the dominant attitudes toward them in non-Western
cultures range from widespread skepticism to intense opposition. What is
universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest. The West is attempting and
will continue to attempt to sustain its preeminent position and defend its
interests by defining those interests as the interests of the “world community.[2]
We agree with Dr. Huntington here, but would like to go a
step further. Even within the Western world, there is no consensus regarding
exactly what “Western” universal values such as democracy, free markets, etc.
mean. Moreover, it is not established that these values are absent from the
“Western” world, hence their status as “Western”, rather than “human” values
remains to be proven. It can be shown, for example, that “democracy” or ideals
and institutions closely approaching those developed in Greece existed
elsewhere in the world, such as in India. Many of the so-called “Western”
values are universal in the real sense of the term, and are not universal
simply because they are Western, as some might assume.
However much any one group of people imagines a privileged
status for itself, human communities exist in an interdependent fashion. This
was true in the ancient and medieval times as well. Ethnocentrism merely
functions to obscure these interdependencies, or tries to cast them into a
hierarchical relationship. Under the influence of ethnocentrism, interaction
among civilizations has tended to be competitive rather than cooperative.
Repeatedly, militaristic societies have dominated other, more peaceful
societies, and in the process adopted and appropriated many elements from the
subverted societies. The ethics of this are in serious doubt.
II. Challenging The Presuppositions Of Western Superiority:
Traditional accounts of the development of Western thought
tend to stress its continuity. Modern philosophy and science, we are told, go
back in an unbroken lineage to the ancient Greeks. Some of the more
historically accurate versions of this cultural narrative acknowledge that this
lineage was not exactly unbroken, and that not everything has its origins in Greece.
This narrative, like all myths, is remarkably resilient. It also has what we
might call a dark subtext; as a product of cultural chauvinism, it has been
used as an excuse to downplay or gloss over the very real contributions of
non-European civilizations to European thought and technology.
For an example, we might turn to the Renaissance, that
glorious period of awakening and cultural rediscovery as Europe emerged from
the somnolence of the Dark Ages. The Renaissance is often portrayed as a
rediscovery by Europe of her cultural heritage, the science, art and literature
of classical Greece and Rome. It was, of course, that, but not only that.
Fortunately, the European Dark Ages did not affect the rest of the world.
Islamic, Indian, Chinese and Meso-American civilizations had previously
undergone their own “Renaissances”, periods of intense creative and scientific
discovery. The Europeans, interwoven as they were in the global web even in the
thirteenth century, were the beneficiaries of a great deal of science, art and
technology developed elsewhere.
Civilizations do not exist in a vacuum. Humans are social
animals who learn from the imitation of others. An isolated discovery is
probably a dead-end. Advances in human civilization come when people are interrelated,
such that one discovery is rapidly disseminated to others, who may in turn come
up with novel uses or improvements. The fate of people such as the Chatham
Islanders, a small community located in the South Pacific, is a case in point.
Isolated and cut off from their neighbors, they not only failed to develop
further cultural or technological advances, but they in fact lost most of the
technologies of their Polynesian forebears and reverted to a stone age
lifestyle, because their tiny, isolated community was unable to maintain the
sophisticated culture which was the product of a more cosmopolitan society.[3]
It is well known, for example, that Europe’s cultural
heritage, the classical knowledge of Greece and Rome, was largely lost to
Christian Western Europe, but was preserved by the Islamic world, which itself
experienced a Renaissance based, in part, upon that very classical knowledge.
What is not as well known is that both the Islamic and European renaissances
were in turn indebted to India. India was the origin not only of the “Arabic”
numerals, so-called because they were transmitted by the Arabs to Europe, but
was also the origin of place value system of enumeration. It was this decimal
system of enumeration that made possible the development of abstract
mathematics and thus the scientific revolution that transformed Europe
following the dissemination of this knowledge to Europe from India in the
thirteenth century.
This is not commonly known, perhaps because every
civilization imagines itself to be of central importance, and thus tends to
downplay the contributions of other civilizations. We hail Gutenberg, for
example, as the “inventor” of the printing press, yet fail to acknowledge that
both moveable-type printing and papermaking technologies were invented in
China. Of course, it is not desirable to downplay Gutenberg’s innovation, but
we should acknowledge that many innovations took place standing on the
shoulders of giants, including many non-Europeans. The tendency to imagine that
Europe’s global dominance arose from Europe sui
generis, due to Europe’s intrinsic cultural superiority, is a legacy of the
colonial period, during which Europe ignored its cultural debt to the rest of
the world to justify violent appropriation of the world’s resources.
One could argue that the promise of the “first” European
renaissance was unfulfilled largely because its global nature was not
recognized. It is thus instructive to point out that, given the increasing
interconnection of the globe, we appear to be on the verge of another
renaissance, one that has the potential of being truly global. This potential
will only be fulfilled, however, if we relax the façade of the “superior
Western paradigm” by both acknowledging the past contributions of non-Western civilizations
and well as by exploring the wisdom of these civilizations that has not yet
been recognized by the West.
Before this can be achieved, however, it is
necessary that we examine the still quite prevalent belief in the superiority
of the West. Without doubt, the West has contributed much to human
civilization. What we argue against is the notion that any one civilization has
a monopoly on any human feature or virtue such as reason, goodness, and so
forth, and that any society represents the apex of human evolution with other
societies understood to exist further down the evolutionary ladder, and somehow
bereft of or deficient in the same virtues.
Particularly egregious are the attempts by thinkers such as
Hegel to define as universal features that are, in fact, quite culturally
specific. This includes, of course, his “universal history” which saw Europe
and America as the pinnacles of human evolution. Hegel wrote, for example, that
“universal history goes from East to West. Europe is absolutely the end of universal history. Asia is the
beginning.”[4] This idea
was clearly a justification of Western colonial exploitation. But Hegel took
the idea even further. Since his “history” is solely defined in Eurocentric
terms, any act committed by the Europeans, no matter how reprehensible, is
justifiable as a necessary step in human evolution. Hegel wrote that:
Because history is the configuration of the Spirit in the
form of event, the people which receives the Spirit as its natural principle…is
the one that dominates in that epoch of world history…Against the absolute
right of that people who actually are the carriers of the world Spirit, the
spirit of other peoples has no other right.[5]
Hegel saw the evolution of human history as a unified totality,
proceeding via the evolution of the “world spirit”. The “world spirit”, for
Hegel, was Western, with other cultures subsumed to the dustbin of history,
forced either to adapt to the West or be trampled underfoot by this “world
spirit”, which in Hegel’s writing appears as a complex metaphor for the reality
of Western aggression.
Such extreme cultural chauvinism is in fact a meta-narrative
that we shall refer to as the myth of the
West. This myth is absurd not only because it ignores the past and present
interdependency of “the West” with the rest of the world, but it also is based
upon a contrived notion of Western culture unity, glossing over the remarkable
diversity found within Western nations, past and present. The very notion of a
distinct West is relatively recent in history, as the English, Irish, Germans,
Italians, Greek, Spaniards, etc. each saw themselves as very distinct cultures
often in conflict with each other, and not in terms of a cohesive ‘Western’
civilization. It is probably essential that we distinguish the ‘West’ as
conceived in “Westernism” or the myth of the West, i.e., as homogeneously
dominant, culturally, historically and ideationally triumphalist, from the geographically
and culturally porous reality of the ‘West’. We would like dispel the former
and shed light on the latter.
This meta-narrative underlies the way in which history is
taught in the West. Most modern world history narratives start from roughly 1500,
the period when Europe ascended from her dark ages. Educated Westerner fail to
appreciate that prior to that time, there pre-existed sophisticated
civilizations in Asia that had a high degree of economic and materialistic
development. This is particularly well illustrated through the interaction of
India and the British. When the British first approached India in the
eighteenth century, India actually had a much greater share of the global GNP
than did Europe. Europeans raved about India, much like today the world raves
about America as the land of opportunity. Until 1750, India’s share of the
world’s manufacturing output was 24.5%, while the entire share of the West,
including America as well as Europe, was only 18.2%. By 1913, however, the
West’s share was over 80%, while India’s was under 2%. As Samuel Huntington
points out, “the industrialization of the West led to the de-industrialization
of the rest of the world.”[6]
It has been said that most Europeans do not know their own
history since so much of it happened in Asia. The British and other Western
powers, while benefiting from the resources and the labor of other peoples,
rarely took this debt into account when claiming superiority for their own
civilizations over those on whom their greatness so heavily depended. Given the
continuation both of this pattern of global interdependency, as well as a
general reluctance on the part of many Westerners to acknowledge this debt, one
could argue that the current globalization is more akin to British imperial model
than different. In many ways, the “post-colonial” world has been replicating
the patterns of the colonial world, suggesting perhaps that the world is
“post-colonial” in name only.
Hegel, followed by many others, developed a linear theory of
history, in which humanity is seen as going from bad to good, from backward to
progressive. In the Judeo-Christian variation of this narrative, there is also
the God sanctioned and God demanded special status of the Western people to
spread the truth to the rest of humanity. Abrahamic religions have posed a view
of history as a progress from ‘evil to good’. Hegelian and other extrapolations
such as Marxism and Nazism fit neatly into this linear model. The underlying
narrative of all these ideologies has been of ‘us’ against ‘them’ on some basis
of superiority. The ‘us’ gets redefined periodically as more people get
included by subjugation, merger or otherwise, but the fundamental linear
trajectory is maintained.
Scholars have enhanced and reinforced this myth, avoiding
the facts that do not fit it. For instance, it does not fit this meta-narrative
that India had advanced well ahead of the West in medicine, mathematics,
psychology and yogic sciences[7]
(as opposed to mere ‘mysticism’), and in education and economic prosperity.
These facts would negate the fundamental premises of this narrative. Not only
are such facts of history negated, but also demonizing Indic civilization has
served to marginalize its credibility – it is portrayed through a series of
stereotypes, including being viewed as ‘world negating’, socially abusive, even
immoral, backward, and irrational, as compared to the West. Being the biggest
surviving anomaly to this Western superiority narrative, India is therefore
often seen as the greatest potential threat to the present Western model.
This narrative begs several questions, such as: Was India
chronically poor and hence its civilization may be dismissed as backward, or
was it in fact extremely wealthy for most of its history until recent times?
Did the West achieve modern scientific progress by itself or was it facilitated
by considerable appropriation from others, such as India and China?
Just as commercial brands are ‘created’ by advertising,
beliefs in the humanities often get manufactured. Eventually, these new
'truths' become part of popular culture and are tough to uproot. These brands
in turn influence identity and the myth gets perpetuated. The mythmaking of the
superior West has involved demonizing others, while at the same time appropriating
their good things and calling them Western. The subverted people have been made
to develop a sense of pride in seeing their heritage being appropriated and
‘legitimized’ by the ruling West.
The mythmaking of the West has often been the result of four
stages in the West’s encounter with other civilizations, often in a different
sequence or with some stages skipped: (1) Study the newly discovered culture
with respect, including discipleship and acknowledgement of its merits. (2)
Neutralize the vernacular to remove the source tradition’s identity (such as is
now being done by popular new age and by modern psychology’s appropriation from
India), often justified as helping simplify and modernize the knowledge. (3)
Repackage the knowledge into Judeo-Christian language or into Western science.
(4) Denigrate or demonize the source tradition to cover the tracks, hide the
evidence of appropriation, and claim one’s “originality”. This keeps the myth
alive.
Variations of the above pattern of appropriation can be seen,
for example, in the Christian appropriations of Judaism and Paganism followed
by their demonizing, once the appropriation was completed. Many Christian
symbols, ideas and practices are in fact appropriations from Paganism. Even
when Greek thought was appropriated to create the myth of the modern West, the
Greek’s Pagan religion remained demonized. In the case of the Incas and Aztecs,
they were demonized as practitioners of human/animal sacrifices and other
primitive practices, so as to legitimize the appropriation of their material
wealth and the commitment of genocide upon them.
In the past century, Steiner learnt much from the study of
Indic traditions through the Theosophy movement, but then he made the U-Turn by
distancing from it, then re-labeled it as his own brand of Christianity, and
finally demonized the Indic sources. Jung studied yoga, Kundalini and many
other Indic sciences, and taught them at first with great respect. But then he
declared them as dangerous for Westerners to practice, on the false assumption
that Indian thought was world negating and hence not progressive like the West.
Contrary to his hypothesis, over ten million Americans now practice various
forms of yoga and meditation, and these include many over-achievers from
various walks of life who are not backward or world negating. These Indic
sources are subverted even when repackaging the ideas into a Christian
framework. In this and many other cases, the meta-narrative of the superior
West subverted the truths about the non-Western source tradition, as these
riches were appropriated and repackaged as Western, while the source tradition
was demonized as inferior.
III. Our New Paradigm For Globalization:
In contrast to the current trends, our proposal is that the
various cultures and cultural traditions are all intrinsically valuable, as
they are all components of a larger humanity. Enmity between cultures, as well
the eradication, conversion or subversion of any one by another, are the
products of collective stupidity. The way out of this morass is to see beyond
the narrow confines of personal or collective ethnic self-interest, and to see
instead the collective self-interest of all humanity, via an awareness of our
intrinsic and unavoidable interdependency. What the world needs is not the
imposition of any ideology, be it Western, Communism, Christianity, etc., upon
the globe. Mutual understanding will not be achieved through cultural
imposition of ideological and cultural uniformity. Rather, the world needs a
respectful interaction of the world’s cultures, one that respects difference,
and seeks to appreciate rather than eradicate it. Cultural exchange can and
should occur, but with a spirit of generosity and mutual respect.
There is a unity of consciousness, which links all that
exists. It manifests variously in the constantly evolving sentient beings and
material entities. In this context the previous historical attempts at
globalization may be seen as certain parts of this unity consciousness trying
to subvert others. When such subversion happens within one individual’s mind,
it results in the shadow side, and the repression of the subverted shadow
eventually plays out in harmful ways. On the collective consciousness scale, an
appropriation into Western civilization and its expansion to subvert all others
will result in similar repression and the development of many shadow sides.
Therefore, there has to be an explicit and conscious recognition and
celebration of the non-Western civilizations as equally valuable aspects of the
same consciousness in this collective evolution.
IV. Why India:
While the web of interrelations between the world’s cultures
is complex and beyond facile reduction, in this essay we shall focus on India, due
to both space restraints as well as the centrality of India in Eurasia. India
has long occupied an important place in the global imagination, as befits its
status as one of the most ancient of human civilizations. The positive
contributions of Indian civilization to the world are legion, and enumerating
them here will definitely not be possible. What is possible, however, is to
look into some of the many ways that Indian thought has deepened and enriched
Western thought, to a far greater degree than is commonly known.
In order to clear the ground of received prejudices
regarding what might be India’s
contributions (actual past influences or potential present and future
contributions), this conference will begin by analyzing the genesis and effect
of various distortions of “the East” (especially India). In this context we
will address the strong distorting influence which writers such as Max Weber
(in, for example, The Protestant Ethic
and the Spirit of Capitalism) have had on the West’s perception of India
and “the East.” Such perceptions include enduring stereotypes that India is
“socially apathetic,” “other worldly,” “mystical,” and “world-rejecting.”
Counter to what Weberian stereotypes would suggest, all of
the great nations of Asia have historically turned to India for its material,
cultural, and knowledge resources. These included Islamic nations, whose rich
scientific traditions owed as least as much to India as to the Greeks. This
legacy was passed to the Europeans, on the basis of which they were able to
forge their own renaissance and scientific revolution, with little awareness of
the sources of the knowledge they were appropriating and misattributing to the
Greeks.
The influence of India on her neighbors, specifically those
in Central, East and South East Asia, have long been recognized, largely
because peoples of these other nations went to great lengths to accurately
translate and disseminate Indic knowledge and know-how into their own languages
and cultural idioms. This resulted in an accurate transmission that maintained
respect for the cultural source.
In the West, however, this transmission occurred largely
indirectly at first, resulting in ignorance about the ultimate source of the
knowledge, as well as in an incomplete and often inaccurate transmission. It is
rather unfortunate that when Europe and India directly encountered each other
it was under coercive conditions, resulting, ultimately, in the colonization of
the latter by the former. Such a grossly inequitable relationship is not conducive
to mutual understanding and respect. As a result European portrayals of India
were riddled with self-justifying depictions of Indians as irrational savages.
Such false portrayals it impossible for them to explore the potential
contributions of Indian civilization, and when Europeans did borrow useful
facets of Indian thought, it also put pressure on them to deny the source of
these findings, since to openly acknowledge that the West had something to
learn from India was to implicitly undermine the myth of cultural superiority
which was the flimsy justification for colonial exploitation.
We need not resort to the distant past to find examples of
Indian influence on Western thought. In fact, some of the most interesting
examples are modern, given the fact that it wasn’t until the past two hundred
years that the Indian classics have been translated in European languages. Once
the masterpieces of Indian literature and philosophy were translated, however,
they rapidly received a great deal of attention. The great German poet Goethe,
for example, was greatly affected by reading Georg Foster's 1791 translation of
the Sanskrit play Shakuntala, written
by the great fourth century poet Kalidasa. Regarding the play, he wrote “Shakuntala: here the Poet appears in his
highest function. As a representative of the most natural condition, the finest
way of life, the purest moral endeavor, the most dignified majesty, and the
most solemn reverence of God, he ventures into base and ridiculous
contradictions.”[8]
We do not need to be literary critics to discern the
influence of Kalidasa on Goethe; we need only compare the first few pages of
the former’s Shakuntala with the
latter’s Faust to see that Kalidasa
was the source of Goethe idea to begin Faust
with the “Prelude in the Theatre,” which represents a conversation between
the play’s director and author. It is thus clear that there was pronounced
Indian influence on one of the greatest works of modern Western literature.
India’s influence on Western literature increased during the
nineteenth and twentieth century as Europeans and Americans became increasingly
aware of Indian thought and literature. Emerson and Thoreau, for example, were
quite explicit in their admiration for the Hindu classics, namely the Upanishads and the Bhagvad Gita. The “oversoul” of the Transcendentalists is clearly a
rephrasing of the Upanishad doctrine of the impersonal absolute, Brahman. These ideas also provided an
intellectual foundation for the poets Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. The latter
was as familiar with Indian thought as he was with neo-Platonic thought,
although his philosophy is usually identified with the latter.
The influence became stronger still during the early
twentieth century, as modernist authors looked to non-Western cultures for
inspiration in the development of new literary models in an effort to free
themselves from the constraints of tired Western genres. While authors such as
Ezra Pound turned to Chinese and Japanese poetry, T. S. Eliot turned to Indian
sources, particularly the Upanishads,
Buddhist Sutras, and Patañjali’s Yogasutras,
the influence of which is most pronounced in his seminal poem, The Waste Land.
There is probably no need to do more than mention here the
Beat authors, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg and Gary Snyder. The
influence of Buddhism on their writing is both obvious and profound. This was
the product of the transmission of Zen and Tibetan schools of Buddhism to the
United States, which achieved a cultural “critical mass” during the 1960s, when
interest in these traditions broke out of the counter-culture and into the
mainstream.
The translations of a few Indian texts drew the attention of
scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, and had a significant
influence on Enlightenment era thinkers such as Voltaire,[9]
as well as on the Romantic era philosophers who shaped Continental Philosophy
in particular. One of the most striking examples is that of Arthur
Schopenhauer, whose subtle, psychologically oriented philosophy played a
significant role in the development of psychoanalysis and existentialism in the
early twentieth century, and post-modern thought at the end of that century.
Schopenhauer unabashedly admired the wisdom of Hindu and Buddhist scriptures,
and adopted ideas from these sources into his own thought. Most notably, he
went against the dominant colonial attitude, which saw the European and Asian
cultural exchange as being a one-way street, with European ideas and
technologies and Christianity inevitably destined to supplant Asian cultural
traditions. Schopenhauer, however, predicted that the reverse would be true,
arguing that “In India our religions will never take root; the ancient wisdom
of the human race will not be supplanted by the events in Galilee. On the
contrary, Indian wisdom flows back to Europe, and will produce fundamental
changes in our knowledge and thought.”[10]
Indic thought also played a major role in the life of Erwin
Schrödinger, who developed the theory of quantum mechanics, which in turn has
ushered in a new era in modern electronics. A curious feature of quantum
mechanics is its deconstruction of the naïve conception of individual,
independent existence, at least on the atomic and subatomic levels. Rather,
such “particles” can only be understood as existing not in any definite and
identifiable way, but as a superposition of possibilities; the ultimate status
of entities, when taken individually, is indeterminate; their existence is only
ultimately characterized in terms of a spectrum of quantum states.
Schrödinger had studied with some interest the Upanishads and Vedanta teachings, and
explicitly connected the doctrines of these scriptures with the insights behind
his quantum mechanics. In his book What
is Life? he wrote that
From the early great Upanishads
the recognition ATHMAN=BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent,
all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from
being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the
happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after
having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds
this grandest of all thoughts.[11]
It is curious that one of the most profound developments of
twentieth-century science owes a debt to one of the oldest of the world’s
spiritual traditions. This should not be a surprise, however, when we consider
the interdependency of humanity, and the fact that all innovations, however
profound, are based upon earlier discoveries.
Carl Jung, one of the fathers of modern psychology, was also
deeply influenced by Indic traditions of thought and meditative technology.
India had long been particularly preoccupied with what might be called the
“inner sciences”, the speculative and empirical exploration of the self and
consciousness, a field that was almost entirely neglected in the West until the
beginning of the last century. Jung was particularly innovative here, but again
his innovation was based upon the intensive study of the world’s spiritual
traditions. Jung found Indian traditions, particularly the traditions of yoga, most helpful in this regard. Jung
made a careful study of Patañjali’s Yogasutra
and employed many of the concepts therein in the composition of his seminal
work Psychological Types. His concept
of the “collective unconscious” also bears great similarity to ideas found in
Hinduism and Buddhism, such as the buddhitattva
or “Universal Mind” of Sankhya philosophy or the alayavijnana or “store-house consciousness” of the Yogacara school
of Buddhist philosophy. Jung was aware of quite sophisticated psychological
theories of these schools of thought, and made explicit mention of them in his
text.
Jung was open about his utilization of Indic sources,
although he went to pains to distinguish himself from the traditional
practitioner of Indic arts such as yoga, in
part because he was being criticized for doing exactly that. Jung did argue
that Eastern contemplative traditions such as yoga were inappropriate for Westerners. Clearly, his facile
bifurcation of “East” and “West” as culturally incompatible regions is absurd,
but given the time period in which he lived and worked it is understandable
that he would such a view. Indeed, it is remarkable that he took Asian
speculative and contemplative traditions as seriously as he did. In this day
and age, however, there is no excuse for us to fail to go far beyond Jung and
explore in depth the insight and applicability of Indic traditions.
India has also long served as a source of spiritual
inspiration for many people throughout the world, and not surprisingly gave
birth to several of the world’s major religions. Indian monks and mystics
inspired peoples as far flung as the Greeks in the West and the Chinese in the
East, beginning well before the time of Christ. This influence continues to
this day, and not only in obvious ways. For example, it is not commonly known
that an important Vedanta scholar Ramanuja, who lived in South India during the
eleventh century CE, influenced the theology of Teilhard de Chardin, which was
quite innovative in the Christian context. A recent book by Anne Hunt Overzee, The Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in
the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanuja, details the similarities
between their theologies.[12]
These similarities may not be due to mere chance, to “great
minds thinking alike”. Great minds may often think alike, but very often due to
direct or indirect influence. In the case of de Chardin, in appears to be
rather direct.[13] In 1935, de
Chardin traveled extensively throughout India. He also studied a scholarly
monograph on Ramanuja’s theology, at which time he wrote in his notebook that
Ramanuja’s view on the relationship between God and the world was “identical to
his own view of things except that it is ‘static’ and without
‘center-complexity’.”[14]
The genius of de Chardin nurtured in the West and expanded
during his long years in Asia, lies in his recognition that the “evolution” of
humankind would never and could never involve the global spread and adoption of
the supposedly “advanced” Western culture. Rather, this evolution could only be
achieved through a process of what he called convergence, in which difference is not eradicated but preserved
and celebrated. He wrote, in his The
Coming Convergence of World Religions, that
As with general cultural
convergence, religious convergence is unitive yet diversified. It excludes
reduction and substitution as emerging from the unitive process, expecting,
rather, some form of unitive pluralism. Religious convergence is not syncretism
… [nor does it] consist in the emergence of one tradition as simply dominant
and absorbing the others…
…the religious traditions have developed separately and now
will continue their development together. They have a further meaning together which we had not even suspected. It is not
that we will discover that all along they really were all the same. On the
contrary, we must expect to find that their differences … are actually
meaningful together, contribute to each other and constitute the new unity out
of their diversity.[15]
It is this spirit of humble celebration of diversity, rather
than Hegel’s triumphalist tone of the subsuming of all other cultures within the
totalizing embrace of the West, that must be the dominant spirit of the
emerging worldview, if we are to escape the mistakes of the past and forge a
truly lasting basis for peace and wisdom within the world.
These thinkers are not anomalous, but in fact represent a
trend that appears to be culminating now in the development of what might be
termed the “emerging worldview”, a worldview that must be truly global to live
up to such a lofty title. This worldview is particularly well represented in
thinkers who are conversant with more than one cultural tradition. Examples of
this phenomenon would include Nishitani Keiji and other members of the Kyoto
school of philosophy, which have integrated Buddhist and Continental
philosophies. Nishitani, in his book Religion
and Nothingness,[16]
integrated the perspectives of Buddhist philosophy with the thought of Western
mystics and scholars such as Meister Eckhard and Martin Heidegger. This
integration is not casual or based upon a superficial understanding of another system,
or the desire to subsume one tradition within the totalizing embraces of
another. Rather, it is based on the intensive study of both cultural
traditions, and is thus nuanced and respectful with regard to both.
Also among Western thinkers who have studied Asian
philosophies in depth and who have incorporated aspects of the latter into
their own thought, a notable modern example is Ken Wilber, whose “Integral
Psychology” openly draws upon the work of the Indian thinker Sri Aurobindo. In
his early book, The Spectrum of
Consciousness (1977),[17] Wilber pointed out the similarities
between Asian traditions and various schools of psychology current at the time.
He drew attention to the real and valuable contributions to be made by
non-Western schools of thought, and in particular those of India.
In this book, as well as in later works such as Transformations of Consciousness,[18]
Wilber expanded the scope of modern Western psychology by also including within
his schema the supra normal or “transpersonal” states of consciousness
described and cultivated by practitioners of India’s meditators and yogis. He
showed that Western psychology couldn’t afford to ignore the thousands of years
of empirical experimentation in the field of consciousness studies and psychology
that has been conducted by these practitioners, albeit under different names.
Wilber’s debt to these traditions is particular notable with regard to Sri
Aurobindo, who created a schema of states of consciousness. Not fearing to
acknowledge his debt to Sri Aurobindo and the Indic traditions, Wilber has
generally been quite up front with regard to his use and remodeling of the
insights of the Indic traditions. Hopefully, Wilber and many others like him
will continue to explore the very fruitful potential for East-West dialogue and
exchange, in a respectful and intellectually honest fashion.
To challenge the Western view of globalization, one needs a
strong and compelling argument that there exists value outside of the West. It is
critical to bring to light and evaluate the cultural traditions hitherto
unknown or unappreciated in the West. For this, Indian civilization offers an
especially interesting opportunity. Essentially, there are at least five
different ways in which India defies the meta-narrative of linear history:
1.
Many advances
happened in India long before the West, and these seem to confound many
Westerners’ assumptions of their place in history, so they seek to deny or
downplay these.
2.
Archeologists
continue to find older civilizations with more sophistication than is
permissible in the linear narrative of history, as such findings challenge the
logical sequence in which advances are supposed to have occurred.
3.
India is rich in
worldviews built on non-locality and non-reductive ontologies, and this is
threatening to the prevailing paradigms of science and philosophy.
4.
India poses a serious
theological challenge by insisting that Abrahamic religions do not have a
monopoly on legitimate paths to the ultimate truth, and that its own tapestry
of dharmas is rich and most sophisticated.
5.
The assumption that
Western social norms are universal is challenged by Indian culture. For
instance, Hindu women have challenged Western Feminism’s claim to be the sole
ideal for all womanhood, and have provoked controversy by questioning this
hegemony very openly.
We can show that many so-called Western ideas were
appropriated from India. We can also show that much more exists in India that
has not yet been appreciated. For example, only a small percentage of Sanskrit
texts have been studied and translated by Westerners, and there is a wealth of
remaining written and oral texts dealing with profound philosophical and
psychological subjects. But mere “translation” is not enough, especially if they
are done in a spirit of contempt, or treated as exotic. Rather, their
translation must be done with a spirit of respect, and this must be conjoined
with the development and nurturing of a discourse in which these materials are
taken seriously.
We know that many of the modern appropriations by the West
have been superficial and sometimes inaccurate, sometimes in the interest of
commercial or egotistic pursuits. Thus the wealth of Indic learning is far
greater than is commonly understood in the West. To bring this material to
light is a task that can no longer wait. There is also great urgency because
the roots of Indic traditions are suffering neglect, atrophy, and are exposed
to attack both by those who seek to supplant them with Western, materialistic models
and those who seek to replace them with Abrahamic religions. Furthermore, given
the great contributions Indic traditions have already made to the rest of the
world, it would be unethical to fail to acknowledge the Indic traditions. We
should help restore and nurture a revival of Indic heritage within India itself
to facilitate the global renaissance.
The accomplishments and past and potential contributions of
all world civilizations, major and minor, should be studied in depth and
brought to the attention of the world community. Since our interest and
specialization is in India, we propose to undertake such research with regard
to India, but it is our hope and expectation that others will follow suit with
regard to the other civilizations of the world.
V. Overview Of The Inner Sciences:
The inner sciences are empirical sciences involving the mind
and all mental, sensory and cognitive powers as well as consciousness in all of
its states. They are scientific in the sense that they are based on empirical observation
and experimentation with these inner phenomena. From a certain perspective,
they are actually more rigorous scientifically for the simple reason that the
“outer” sciences, which explore external “objective” realities, are based upon
the naïve assumption that the perceptual data, as captured by the sense organs
and organized in the brain, accurately correspond to the “reality” they
allegedly represent.
The Indic empiricists, at a very early date, did in fact
problematize this assumption, and sought to address it by developing
increasingly sophisticated models of the cognitive, consciousness and sensory
powers. Some might criticize this first-person methodology, and argue that
inner phenomena can be analyzed via the same reductionistic methodology as are
external phenomena, but it is not at all clear that first-person, subjective
experience is reducible to third-person description. The physicist Piet Hut has
written that he anticipates that “first-person felt experience and third-person
description will both become part of an extended form of scientific method, in
a framework that will transcend the current dichotomy.”[19]
The Indic Inner sciences did not, generally, proceed via
blind speculation, but rather proceeded by experimentation. These experiments
included, among other things, sophisticated analyses of the mind and mental
states, thought experiments designed to remove negative emotions and negative
thought and/or behavioral patterns, as well as yogic techniques that employ the
interconnectivity of body and mind to achieve mental and physical
transformations, as well as states of deep relaxation, deep concentration, and
heightened cognitive powers. Many insights resulted from these explorations, as
well as practical techniques such as the use of breath control, visualization
and other yogic techniques to accelerate healing and overcome infections,
including infectious agents that are not susceptible to modern medical
treatments. The Inner Sciences have often been dismissed as “magic” or “mysticism”,
allowing their startling efficacy to be safely ignored. Such dismissals,
however, are the product of close-minded ignorance. As Robert Thurman wrote,
The enlightenment tradition discovered the micro and macro
dimensions more than two thousand years ago by using sophisticated
contemplative practices to augment the sixth mental sense of inner vision. They
discovered the infinite divisibility of the atom. They discovered bacteria and
microbes. And, most important to the pursuit of enlightenment, they discovered
their own neurons and even the sub-atomic level of their own awareness. This
realm is supernatural only in relation to a constricted definition of natural.
It is mystical only when its analytic investigation is not completed. It is
magic only when the technique involved is not understood.[20]
Inner science traditions, generally speaking, performed
their analysis to an extremely subtle level. The analyses of consciousness, for
example, undertaken in the Samkhya-Yoga, Advaita Vedanta and
Buddhist traditions, found what we simply call consciousness to be a complex
and multifaceted phenomenon, actually consisting of multiple levels of
consciousness. These, ranging from coarse to subtle and very subtle levels,
serve as the basis both of our sensory experience, our cognition, our sense of
self-consciousness, and, ultimately, the sub-conscious substratum that serves
as a unifying force in our own sense of continuous experience, and that is also
the basis for the common or collective consciousness that appears to link all
living beings. The Inner Sciences also envisioned a subtle body that unifies
mind and body, avoiding the bifurcation between the two that continues to
plague modern Western thought.
The Indic Inner Sciences, however, do not simply offer an alternative
way of conceptualizing reality to Western ones. Within the Indic Inner sciences
there is a tremendous diversity of views, such that many of the debates present
and emerging in the West will all be enriched, on different sides, by
consideration of Indic material. To take the example of consciousness studies
again, the recent move by some analytic philosophers of consciousness to remove
it from objective analysis and engage in phenomenological contemplation, of
course would be helped by looking at the views and contemplative practices
present in Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist traditions. On the other hand,
the strategies to treat the mind as a mental instrument, so prevalent in
cognitive science, is hardly a Western invention, being found in the Nyaya
tradition as well. Indic material can only be ignored on the basis of its
'alterneity' at our peril, for in so doing we risk exposing our ignorance of
the richness of Indic discourse on “Inner Science” subjects such as
consciousness studies.
The knowledge and technical know-how of the traditions of
Indic Inner Sciences are not mere cultural curiosities, to be studied as
anthropological curios. They are, rather, valuable repositories of
understanding into the nature of humanity and reality, and can potentially
deepen the self-understanding of us all. This fact was long recognized by
peoples all over Asia, who frequently sent their best, brightest and boldest to
India to study the inner sciences of meditation and yoga. Unfortunately, while
Muslims were to a certain extent interested in the Indic inner sciences, these
were not transferred to Europe along with the vast amount of mathematical and
outer scientific knowledge and technology transferred during the late medieval
and renaissance eras. This, perhaps, was due to a certain degree of resistance
on the part of the Europeans, whose religious intolerance made it difficult for
them to accept the inner sciences, which were often clothed in the garb of
religious practices. Nonetheless, Indic meditative and yogic practices did to a
certain degree penetrate the Judeo-Christian traditions, in the guise of
Kabbalah and Christian mysticism, which were influenced by Sufism, which in
turn was highly influenced by the Indic Inner Science traditions.
The failure of Europeans to appreciate the Inner Sciences
has been gradually remedied over the century, as increasingly large numbers of
Westerns have come to appreciate their benefits. Included herein are not only
serious and casual practitioners of meditation and yoga, but also serious and
highly influential scientists. Included among the latter were psychologists
such as Jung, whose school of psychology was highly influenced by his study of
Asian traditions of meditation, and in particular Patañjali’s Yoga tradition.
The impact of the Indic Inner Sciences has already been great on the Western
“Inner” cognitive sciences, but as the latter are still in many respects still
in their infancy, it would behoove us to seriously explore the Indic Inner
Sciences, with our eyes and minds wide open.
India has
been at the cutting edge of these fields for the past three millennia at least,
and there is still a great deal India can potentially share with the West. It
is important that we act quickly however, before more of the riches of this
intellectual legacy are lost due to neglect and a loss of self-esteem on the
part of their caretakers, some of whom are inexorably drawn to the outer
material success of Western culture.
What is needed is not a rejection of either the inner or outer perspective, but rather their integration. Such an integration has the potential to effect a transformation, a transformation which sees a shift from the perspective of an alienated individuality to a spiritual sense of individuality in which we have a sense of being unique and precious beings inextricably connected to all other beings, who are equally unique and precious. Such a perspective might give rise to a global renaissance, or, in other words, to what Robert Thurman calls an “alternative modernity”, which he describes as an inner, spiritual, individual modernity that requires neither unrelenting materialistic industrial destruction of the planet nor a retreat into an imagined primitivistic utopia, a modernity that calls us to move forward in transforming ourselves and our world to gain a quality of life higher than any we have ever known…The task before us now is to deepen our interconnectedness and free ourselves thoroughly from alienation. Then our unified consciousness can only improve each individual’s sense of inextricable interconnectedness with all others, and we will never be caught in the destructive rampage inevitably unleashed by any form of alienation.[21]
The global renaissance is perhaps inevitable, and may
already be happening. For it to be successful, and for the human race to avoid
descending into a new dark age of possibly catastrophic consequences, it is
necessary that we get past the idea that any one people is intrinsically
superior to any other, and recognize that we are all deeply and profoundly
interconnected, such that the apparent wealth of any one group is deeply
related to the poverty of another. This new era will need an ethic of global
responsibility, which will not be possible with out a development of the inner
sciences, based not on any one cultural tradition, but on the collective wisdom
of all of humanity.
[1] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), p. 168. Hegel’s view of history was highly influential, on both Marxist and humanist historiography. His rather extreme ethnocentrism should thus not be swept under the rug, but analyzed as a central aspect of his thought.
[2] Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Touchstone, 1996), pp. 183-4.
[3] For more on both the interdependence of human cultures in general and the Chatam Islanders in particular see Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1999).
[4] Hegel, Samtliche Werke. J. Hoffmeister and F. Meiner, eds. (Hamburg, 1955), appendix 2, p. 243; op cit. Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas (New York: Continuum, 1995), p. 20.
[5] Cited in Dussel 1995, p. 24.
[6] Huntington 1996, pp. 86-7. Huntington drew this data from the following source: Paul Bairoch, “Internationalional Industrialization Levels from 1750 to 1980,” Journal of European Economic History, vol. 11 (Fall 1982), pp. 269-334.
[7] By this we mean the Indic sciences of introspection and contemplation which we elsewhere term the “Inner Sciences”. See section V below for more information concerning these.
[8] From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Literarische Werke vol. 42 sec. 2, p. 247 (from the 1st Sophien-Ausgabe ed., published in 1887-1919 by Verlag Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger Weimar.
[9] Concerning Voltaire’s study and favorable impression of Indian philosophy see Wilhelm Halbfass’ India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).
[10] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 1, p. 357.
[11] Erwin Schrödinger, What is Life? with Mind and Matter & Autobiographical Sketches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 87.
[12] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
[13] de Chardin’s study of Indian thinkers, especially of Ramanuja, is not widely known, but it is the subject of an interesting book by Ursula King entitled Towards a New Mysticism: Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions (London: Collins, 1980)
[14] King 1980, p. 244.
[15] King 1980, op. cit., pp. 158-9.
[16] Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
[17] A second edition of this book, published in 1993 by Quest Books (Wheaton, Illinois), is still in print.
[18] Written in conjunction with Jack Engler and Daniel P. Brown (Boston: Shambhala, 1986).
[19] See Piet Hut’s essay “As in a Dream”, located online at: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/ECITdreamframeset.htm
[20] Robert Thurman, Inner Revolution: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Real Happiness (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), pp. 213-14.
[21] Inner Revolution, pp. 270-1.
© Rajiv
Malhotra
Foundation:
http://www.infinityfoundation.com
Mandala: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/indic_mandala_frameset.htm