-- Writing from India (essay about holidays and truth)

Truth is my mind is strangely blank since arriving here. This might be because there was quite a lot to do concerning finding an apartment and things of that sort. That is over with now, but I don't feel any anticipation of things to happen yet.

The flat is pretty good by local standards, but there is no place to walk out to. Hardly any nature left where one could find some freeing from the griminess of life.

Holidaying in India is so different from coming to live here. This is better in a way because one brings one's entire circumstances, and if you have been diligent and not pushed anything under the carpet, your life carries with it a kind of weight, and the situation you create in your new conditions, speaks of this.

Something worth remarking upon is the old relationships, one wonders how much of these will come alive again. I met some of them, but I also hesitate to be like earlier times, expressing affection without bounds, because things are different now, for them and for me.

Anyway, more significant to me than these is the notion of India itself, coming as we have after a long time in the West. I find myself in a state of mind I have not been able to clarify. Unlike when we were only passing through on a vacation, I find myself looking for something deeper this time. And with it, not only a better understanding of 'the Indian things about people here', but an evolving of myself. I've been talking so much of the Indian way of looking at things as an alternate or even the more correct outlook to life, that now I must find this deeper and sounder connection.

It's not that I have doubts about these things, but imagine it this way, that you sign up for a class, say nuclear physics. Then as you enter the new college and classroom, you begin to sense the matter already in the surroundings, in the conversations the others are having, the reading materials lying around; and all of it creates an atmosphere which leads upto the more focused knowledge that the lecture eventually imparts to you.

You might ask whether it is correct to think of coming to India for me as going to some school, and the answer is, 'yes', it is. The strange disconnectedness that I feel, is that the knowledge I had been expecting, the gathering of one's mind, is yet to happen. I know this is not an easily learned subject, and my mind too is honed up a bit with questions from the 'other side'. I do not think I will abandon any ideas I carried from here in the first instance, but unlike an actual school there isn't a lecturer here for me either. Instead, I am more like a student who must carry through his hypothesis in the situation itself that he is studying.

Rajiv! I feel glad to see something from you again. I hope you will write more of your meditative essays on the experiences you have in India. This is very vivid, giving me a very good sense of the feeling of dislocation and disorientation, despite familiarity, you may be feeling.

Love it! My writing can be so technical while yours is so imaginative. I love see what you do.

Thank you Simone and Noto you're very kind!
I'll put it down, as I can..

This is good -- you still discuss fairly abstract concepts, but here they are grounded in your concrete experience of having moved to India, which makes your thoughts much easier to follow.

I hope I managed to convey a sort of a purpose earlier. Come to think of it, hasn't this always been the purpose in India. For me, the difference this time is that I have completed a circle and find myself back again. Did I voluntarily give up my power to move, or was it taken from me? Makes me think of what happened when India lost its independence. Some rulers just allowed that, without resisting at all, believing that was how it had to be !

Most of what I am seeing here leaves me feeling disappointed. Though it is nice when the staff behaves so obsequisely, but I think I'd have felt better if they had instead an attitude of only doing their jobs, not looking up to us. One can see how it's their status forcing this attitude on them. Everyone seems to have this look, and it gets under the skin.

Half the people in India seem to be in that condition where life is hard on the account that they are wondering where their next meal is coming from. I see most of these staff as recently moved up from that situation, and perhaps driven from a fear of falling back again. We are so freshly arrived from Palo Alto, a relatively prosperous community even in US, that the memory of things there is still alive in my mind. I compare development here with communities like those and feel the urban growth fast catching up. But this oppresive sense of poverty in these people, more than actual poverty itself, puts a weight on one's mind.

I have no intentions of pushing myself in a particular direction, and in fact, unlike what I said earlier... I have to allow my own thinking to evolve. It seems starkly insufficient to look past the obvious.

I have discovered I have a strong memory, and am often able to extract details from the picture in my mind, of things, which happened quite a while ago.

Early one time we were in US, newly arrived in Washington and were waiting in a hospital for some reason, I cannot remember what that was. But as we waited, a cartoon was playing on the TV fixed on the ceiling there. It was a pedatrics ward, and I remember a few other families and children, all watching this program.

The story was about a bunch of stick-like figures in some town, and they were talking amongst themselves about a demon who visited them regularly and was expected again soon. So all were distraught and in a state of intense fear. They got down on their knees and bending to the ground, started to pray in a kind of moaning voice " ...mmmmm".

The picture pulled us away a bit, and we saw a character, human like, who was actually looking over the entire scene below. He then opened the top of this huge bottle-like container that all these figurines were in, and using a tweezer contraption reached into it. We are pulled back in with the figures again. They are all bowed and suppliant; the boy reaches in and grabs one of them. The figures look up then towards this unfortunate, who had been clamped and begin chanting " oh, the lucky one... the chosen one."

The boy withdraws the figure and trussing him, carries him away. He drives home where, as he opens the door, his dog is waiting, wagging its tail. The boy places the figure, alive and human like as we now feel it to be - on the dog's muzzle; who shaking it vigorously like a rat or a squirrel, chomps down on it .

There were other details, which together conveyed that these stick figures were the weak in the world. Like the people, I thought, where I had come from. The cartoon mocked them, and I remember feeling stunned with the intrusiveness of it.

I accompanied my daughter recently to the American Embassy school here in Delhi, where she will be studying. As we waited for the teacher we had come to meet, a caucasian mother and her daughter came along and sat down with us in the waiting area. It was a little small, so after a while the silence was becoming a bit awkward. My daughter was called to meet with her teacher, and there was little to turn my attention to. I was more at ease than I normally am in such situations, but the woman sitting next to me wasn't. She and her daughter sat there just bearing the strained silence.

".. quite a melting pot this school is " I ventured after a bit . She nodded in quick agreement, but offered no more to ease the silence.

"You've been here long?" I asked with the faintest of trepidation expecting a rebuff, as in my more recent memory.

But she was forthcoming and replied, " Only this 7th of July ".

"Oh! " I couldn't help exclaiming, perhaps out loud " that explains the shell shocked look on your face."

"What do you think of the culture here?" I asked. "There's so much to see, so much to learn " she said, half convincingly.

I don't think I really broke the ice with them, because the conversation did not flow. To be fair, part of that reason may be that unlike my own children, I am not good at talking with native english speakers. My sense is this particular lady will look to avoid me in future.

I tried talking about how my experience with Americans in India, had been so much of one kind before leaving for the US, but had discovered them as thinking quite differently while we were there.

She said lamely, " Yes, the lack of education ". As though illitracy was very high in the United States.

It wasn't the lesser educated that had bothered me, I told her, but those who were in good positions, in society, in schools.

We were rescued when my daughter joined us. The mother introduced herself and her daughter, telling us they were from Canada. Maybe it was her vulnerability, accentuated in this situation, that made her appear quite attractive.

Rajiv, Thank you for sharing this recollection. I find that it is through such narratives, rather than in pure philosophical speculation, that one can best explore thoughts and ideas in writing. The story draws the reader in. Then, either in the interstices of the story or at the end, one can introduce questions or insights. I'd encourage you to reflect more deeply on what that story signifies for you, why it stands out so strongly in your mind.

Also, please do write down as many of such recollections as you can. While your memory is very clear now, neurobiology tells us that memories disappear over time if the pathways to them are not periodically activated.

Here's a sense of the philosophy which I feel may be close to what the 'sages' have preached in India.

An underlying difference I found in the way that people in the West think and how people in India have thought in past is in the following. I will talk of only the Indian thinking of life and reality, the other we all know well.

This isn't exactly how people here think now though, having become influenced by Western thought. What is going on instead in our minds now is a confluence of the two, and we interpret life in both modes.

It is a facinating idea, this Indian way of thinking, and while I lived so long in US and Europe and had the force of their ideas washing over my mind so long, I can still reach within and pull out this native thinking that I took in so many years ago.

If I were to meet you now, I'd tell you how we simply decided to move to this city on the outskirts of Delhi, without fixing up ahead, the place we would be living in. The accomodations we found as a stop-gap are expensive, and our houseold things will shortly be arriving from US. And inspite of our efforts we havn't found the right apartment until now.

In a somewhat similar situation years ago, we were living off a university campus in the US, where my wife studied and had a small job. Our children were quite young and funds were depleting more quickly than we had anticipated. As I would drift into sleep each night, I could see the situation, not as I wished nor feared it would become, but instead, as though I was walking along a narrow ledge, but had little fear that it will fall away from under me.

This confidence is of the nature of faith; faith like the naive, the innocent and vulnerable have. Those who come to our help at such times too, perhaps do so understanding our situation and others depending upon us. But we can look upon it in quite another way -- where we see not ourselves and others who helped us, responsible for matters turning out right... but of our appeal evoking a response from an underlying 'layer of reality' of these things... whose forms are objects we see in the world, and events, our experience of them.

This is another outlook of the nature of the world and the movements within it.

We may wonder how do we connect and communicate with this more fundamental existence. It seems natural that it should be from the highest level we recognize in ourselves, for otherwise, which part of our nature would we want to keep to ourselves, and not trust to such an intrinsic force and conciousness?

Sean /Simone, I am quite interested in knowing what you yourself think about these things that I have been talking on at great length. Not on my point of view but independently yours. Are you comfortable speaking out on such matters?

I guess I would really like to know what an adult who doesn't have this prestructured system of philosophy like we in India do, think about life, and on the nature of existence. I expect every time one visits these questions, one may discover his or her ideas too have moved, maybe as consequence of some churning they've had in that time.

I have another personal question. I can see the purpose of the essayforum as a gateway for students, and improving their admisssion applications; but I would like to understand a moderator's purpose for himself or herself in doing this volunteer work, which obviously can be quite numbing at times! Why did you get into it, and when do you think would be all right for you to move on?

Every culture has its own way of making sense of the matters covered by Indian philosophy. There is great variance, it's true, in the degree and form in which philosophies are codified, but virtually every human group has grappled with the same questions and formulated some answers.


Individuals vary considerably in the degree to which they ever question the philosophical or spiritual answers provided by their parents or their faith of origin. Some seem to accept what was taught to them unquestioningly, without ever noticing that only the happenstance of birth to a particular led them to believe one thing rather than another.

I, myself, was raised Roman Catholic, which is a very codified way of looking at the world. Luckily, I was an independent-minded child and met children of other faiths. It seemed odd to me that a child across the street believed one thing and I another only because our parents took us to different churches. My friend's mother was just as trustworthy -- perhaps more so -- than mine. "Why believe one thing rather than the other?" I wondered. This skepticism did not endear me to the nuns who taught Sunday school classes!

And so, at age 12 I opted out of my faith of origin and commenced to read widely in the religious texts of other faiths, ultimately opting to believe none of them. As I believe I wrote in an answer to one of your other essays, my fundamentally existential orientation has not shifted since I was 17. In the decades since, however, it has been inflected by increasing awareness of the ecological circumstances that permit and limit all of human experience (however much we might like to pretend that's not true).

Having made a serious study of both the origins and consequences of various belief systems, I have become convinced that what people believe matters -- not for spiritual reasons but because faith so profoundly affects how people treat each other and the earth. So, while I have some sympathy with Indian philosophy (for example) I am also very much aware of its history and of the ways that it has been used to dispossess and depress the original peoples of the Subcontinent in the same way that Christianity later was used to dispossess and depress the original inhabitants of the Americas.

Dear Simone, how exquisite your writing is, and I am again awed by your willingness to share your thinking here... and why not !

Your last paragraph, on Indian philosophy being used to disposses and depress the original inhabitants of the sub-continent is intriguing. I wonder who those original inhabitants were. I am happy to concede that you may know the history of our part of the world better than most of us do, but somehow this particular idea you mention does not sit well with my sense of the background of our peoples.

Our really ancient past, and I am speaking here of the past, as one understands from our epics Mahabharat and Ramayan, is that the learning, the Indian philosophy, was really brought down by the Rishis - the sages, who imbibed it through their practices in the Himalayas. The second of these, the Ramayan belongs to almost another aeon in time, supposedly some 200,000 years ago. You may be aware of its story and a central event where a bridge of stones was laid across the ocean between the mainland and Sri Lanka, a historical artifact, known as Adams bridge in the West clearly discernible in satellite images.

This epic is extant in the present day India and its many portrayals of personalities, serve as the constitution almost, for as many Indians as for others, the modern concepts in state governance have replaced. And of course these latter are none other than Western democracy -- of Plato's Republic, am I right?

Let me take you in another direction now. You may smile to yourself that I am quoting from Sophie's World -- a high school text introducing philosophy, but that's where my rough reading comparing Aristotle and Plato's thinking, and perhaps one essay on this forum too, is making me wonder what to make of this.

To exaggerate even more, we could say that Plato turned his back on the sensory world and shut his eyes to everything we see around us. ( He wanted to escape from the cave and look out over the eternal world of ideas!) Aristotle did the opposite: he got down on all fours and studied frogs and fish, anemones and poppies.

While Plato used his reason, Aristotle used his senses as well.
We find decisive differences between the two, not least in their writing. Plato was a poet and a mythologist; Aristotle's writings were as dry and precise as an encyclopedia. On the other hand, much of what he wrote was based on up-to-the-minute field studies. --- Sophie's World by Josten Gaarde.

It appears Western civilization accepted Plato's ideas on state governance but chose to go Aristotle's way in understanding nature. I am actually quite struck by the correspondence of Plato's philosophical thinking and Indian thought. Almost as though the very same ideas he might have wished the people to follow, another nation, and geographically for those times another world, were already doing. I notice this though, and understandably, as he lacked a following in this aspect of his teachings, that his conceptualizations are similar but say very little on any practice to reach tangebility within those ideas -- something which Indian teachings are eloquent about.

Yes, this is a disturbing (and rarely recognized) element of Indian history. In brief, desertification drove the patriarchal and pastoral proto-Indo-European people out of the steppes of Eastern Europe at about (my dates may be off here) 3,500 b.c.e. Some went West, conquering many of the peoples of what some scholars call Old Europe; others went South and then East, conquering the original Indus Valley civilization. The original, darker, peoples were enslaved (their descendants are the Dalit or "untouchables" of today) or displaced (their descendants are the "tribals" of today). The caste system and other elements of codified Hindu thought provide spiritual justification for social stratification rooted in this history.

A good book about this is Dalit: The Black Untouchables of India by V.T. Rajshekar. A good book about the suppression of women in this process is Sakhiyani by Giti Thadani.

I have always 'felt' for those working the forum here, and that is why my questions in the post before the last one. I am sorry if they appeared as offensive.. I had meant them in quite another way.

In the nearer past of India, these things you point out, about those "enslaved" and the "untouchables" very likely carry truth. But in the interest of informing ourselves correctly, should we also not consider the fact that these "aberrations" are undesired but inevitable devolutions over time, given the coarsness of general human living and thought. Can we correctly judge what social conditions of those times the "varna" ( the four categories) system took care of ? Or that those assigned their particular social status were unhappy in their category, not knowing what distress this system defended them from, or provided for them ? Indian civilization has a long history-- earlier than 3500 bc -- and we live it every day! So it is not by words alone, but the lives of 800 million, including I am certain these two authors, that we willingly live our culture down to its spiritual roots. The few Indians who side with this version of our history, do so more in the promise of some opportunity they imagine dangling there, than from any intellectual and spiritual integrity.

Why refute this above version, instead of simply letting it be? Because, it lays a negative attitude in our minds, where we cannot explore the philosophy for its more significant meanings. Would that not be in itself proof of its intrinsic worth and tell us too its own true history. For its promise itself is to sharpen our very mental focus where we can judge without doubt almost on any matter.

They were not offensive at all. I was just more interested in your other questions. And Sean has been away for the past few days.


I personally am interested in understanding the causes of violence and injustice in order to work towards greater peace and freedom for everybody. In my view, considering violence and inequality "inevitable" (as so many people, East and West, do) creates a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Um, in spite of the name of Plato's most famous text being The Republic, Plato absolutely did not believe in democracy in the sense in which it is practiced in the West today. Nor would he have been a great fan of Western capitalism.


This is interesting, and something that seems to be a very common belief among those who have adopted a more or less atheistic worldview -- the notion that religious and spiritual thought are generally oppressive in nature and intent. It seems to me, though, that religions have been developed by virtually every society because they serve very important social functions. Indeed, we would not expect to see so much convergence in the evolution of a cultural phenomenon, any more than we would in the evolution of an organic one, unless the features that evolved were highly adaptive and beneficial. And in fact we see new religions emerging even now to replace the old ones, as our need, individually and collectively, for the functions religions provide presumably continues to persist. Environmentalism, for instance, is essentially a religion centered on nature worship. The version of nature being worshiped is an idealized one that has nothing to do with nature as it actually is -- disease, aging, disaster, and a brutal, blind competition for survival. Rather, it is some fairy tale version of nature that will provide for all of us if we only "preserve" it, as if it existed as a fixed thing in the first place, which of course it doesn't. Environmentalism also has its irrational rituals, as religions always do. Buying organic, for instance, is a staple of the movement, although organic food is far more environmentally damaging and far less healthy than conventionally produced crops. And, of course, environmentalism has the standard apocalypse scenario, one that is always expected to occur soon, but that never seems to actually arrive. The failure of the world to end on schedule, though, never convinces its adherents that the apocalypse isn't actually imminent. Finally, like many religions, its exercise of temporal power is often detrimental to the world's least fortunate. Malaria, for instance, kills millions each year thanks to the environmental movement, which successfully lobbied for a worldwide ban on DDT -- after DDT had been successfully used to eliminate malaria in the West, of course, so successfully that most people don't even realize that malaria used to exist in North America and Western Europe as an indigenous disease anymore.

Let me quote a text on spiritual practice:

By the practice of the threefold inner discipline on the form and the substantiality of the body, one can comprehend directly the energy that makes it possible to "grasp" it with the eyes and so forth (for the flow of light waves is the form): and when this energy-function is suspended, the dynamics of perception is made inoperative, the link between the perceiving eye and light is severed as it were and invisibility occurs. (21) of Chapter III of Yoga Sutras

The above is an 'interpretative translation' of the original text by a scholar. Of interest is 'the threefold inner discipline' which leads its practioners to this and other extraordinary abilities -- relative to common human experience. You and I understand what college courses demand, therefore I think you will appreciate the very real nature of the effort in this other practice.

Here he explains this inner discipline:

(1) When the attention of the mind-stuff is directed in a single stream to a chosen field, without being dissipated and thus distracted that is concentration. (2) When the cognition is entirely concentrated in that field thus becoming its own field of observation - that is, when the observer is observed - it is meditation. (3) When the field of observation and the observing intelligence merge as if their own form is abolished and the total intelligence shines as the sole substance or reality, there is pure choiceless awareness without the divided identity of the observer and the observed - that is illumination. (4) When these three happen together there is perfect inner discipline . This can happen during what is commonly known as the practice of meditation, and during any other form of physical or mental activity.

We are working with the idea, that individually we are situated at some infinitismal point. But to see ourselves as that is difficult due to the visualizations in our minds. One, of imagined things, and also of concepts.

We think of intelligence as a light within ourselves, something shining through; first some griminess in our own minds, then 'illuminating' the matter before us. Do we 'understand' by processing inputs of our senses or do we mentally 'see' ? And if that, into where?

Choosing that we 'see' by this capacity of intelligence, into a space - of thought, we illumine a world, which is the basis of the 'visible' one. And that world, by a process of its own of constant change, is the 'image' in our vision; but simultaneously too, is of a matter more real, we 'see' as our thinking. For anything -- everyone who understands it, it is a common concept; any differences then are due to the griminess in individual minds.

So obviously the importance, when holding our attention onto something, of recognizing its appearance as its momentary manifestation.

Here is something that might interest you, Rajiv. Science has pretty conclusively determined that we see with our brains, not our eyes. Our eyes are only the gateway through which the raw data for the image passes. The information doesn't have to come through the eyes, though. The brain will process the same information if it comes through the skin of our legs, or the tips of our fingers, or even our tongue. Even when the information comes through our eyes, the information is very limited. If we saw with our eyes, we would see a flat world with few colors and great gaps between fragments of pictures. Our brain fills in all of the rest, making a guess as to what the world looks like. Oh, and it updates it, so that we see what our brains thinks the world will look like 1/10 of second after we have seen it, since it takes that long for our brain to process the info that reaches our eyes. It's why optical illusions work. The lines give the impression of movement, so our brain shows us what we should be seeing if the lines really were moving. But, because the lines are in fact static, our perception of them gets distorted.

References:

scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=device-lets-blind-see- with-tongues
livescience.com/strangenews/080602-foresee-future.html

Lakoff and Johnson's Philosophy in the Flesh explores the philosophical implications of these and other recent findings in neurology.

It sounds like an interesting book. However, I am always skeptical of attempts to tie philosophy and neurology together. Too often it ends up seeming like an attempt to explain the nature of a house by reference to atomic theory. It's the wrong level to look for explanations for the thing in need of an explanation.

I hear you, but Lakoff and Johnson are on a different project altogether. Have a look. It's on Google books.

Ah, God bless Google Books. I'll be sure to take a look at it later in the week, when I'm a bit less busy.

The basis of any instrument of measurement is a configuration within it of a null state. It is the variations to this state which are calibrated, and become a measure of the force, color, electrical impulse.. whatever we wish to quantify. The method of yoga is similar, and the mind is brought into a kindred state of tranquility.

In a mind wherein all volition is absent, howsoever achieved -- not to be confused as a numb mind -- a person becomes the quintessential observer. And accompanying this acuter observation other mental faculties are likewise augmented: rational, reflective, incisive, as we know from experience. Is there a basis for these and if yes, we should in theory be able to increase them without bounds.

These are not absolute and distinct in fact; instead, depend upon the structure of the language we talk of them in. Another culture could well express these differently, though, together they add up to the same. And in this continous spectrum can we then move in the positive direction --- endlessly?

This is the thesis .. the essence of everything is within the mind, diffuse, out of focus.

How does a student bring himself to work upon a difficult comprehension passage or solve a tough problem? There is the inevitable effort at focus, of grasping his subject. Gradually then, follows an attentiveness to ideas which may spring to mind triggered as if from this pressure. As though holding the subject under a magnifying glass, probing not only into its details but allowing them to come together in various ways, simplifying and explanatory. The problem dissolves into its essence, linking with parts perhaps already in his mind.

Hard as it is to realize this, the effort transforms literally into focus, and subsequently into the essence, be it the solution of a math problem or the comprehension of a passage.

You may ask, how can an intangible like effort transform into something material... ? Can we act directly to grasp it?

you made some small mistakes,liked honed, what is meaning of this word.
the topic is not given so it is not clear what you want to explain

I am trying to write about and explain yoga philosophy.

There are some questions here which come up only when viewed from the Western side. For most people in India they 'just are so'. I have therefore to put things logically, where nothing is assumed. This critical point of view I learnt about while I lived in America. That's what I meant by 'honed'.

Here is an interesting challenge for you: why not try and write an explanation aimed at, say, a group of intelligent twelve-year-olds? It'd be a great way to learn to express yourself more clearly, as it would force you to make your writing more concrete, and to limit yourself to simpler sentence structures. Some of the best books out there are ostensibly for young adults, yet can be read with great interest by adults too, because they combine both clarity and depth in the writing.

Sean, love to hear your thoughts on this...in light of your challenge above.