Being Different

It is fashionable in interfaith discussions to advocate “tolerance” for other faiths. But we would find it patronizing, even downright insulting, to be “tolerated” at someone’s dinner table. No spouse would appreciate being told that his or her presence at home was being “tolerated.” No self-respecting worker accepts mere tolerance from colleagues. We tolerate those we consider inferior. In religious circles, tolerance, at best, is what the pious extend toward people they regard as heathens, idol worshippers or infidels. It is time we did away with tolerance and replaced it with “mutual respect.”

Religious tolerance was advocated in Europe after centuries of wars between opposing denominations of Christianity, each claiming to be “the one true church” and persecuting followers of “false religions.” Tolerance was a political “deal” arranged between enemies to quell the violence (a kind of cease-fire) without yielding any ground. Since it was not based on genuine respect for difference, it inevitably broke down.

My campaign against mere tolerance started in the late 1990s when I was invited to speak at a major interfaith initiative at Claremont Graduate University. Leaders of major faiths had gathered to propose a proclamation of “religious tolerance.” I argued that the word “tolerance” should be replaced with “mutual respect” in the resolution. The following day, Professor Karen Jo Torjesen, the organizer and head of religious studies at Claremont, told me I had caused a “sensation.” Not everyone present could easily accept such a radical idea, she said, but added that she herself was in agreement. Clearly, I had hit a raw nerve.

I then decided to experiment with “mutual respect” as a replacement for the oft-touted “tolerance” in my forthcoming talks and lectures. I found that while most practitioners of dharma religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) readily espouse mutual respect, there is considerable resistance from the Abrahamic faiths.

Soon afterwards, at the United Nation’s Millennium Religion Summit in 2000, the Hindu delegation led by Swami Dayananda Saraswati insisted that in the official draft the term “tolerance” be replaced with “mutual respect.” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), who led the Vatican delegation, strongly objected to this. After all, if religions deemed “heathen” were to be officially respected, there would be no justification for converting their adherents to Christianity.

The matter reached a critical stage and some serious fighting erupted. The Hindu side held firm that the time had come for the non-Abrahamic religions to be formally respected as equals at the table and not just tolerated by the Abrahamic religions. At the very last minute, the Vatican blinked and the final resolution did call for “mutual respect.” However, within a month, the Vatican issued a new policy stating that while “followers of other religions can receive divine grace, it is also certain that objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.” Many liberal Christians condemned this policy, yet it remains the Vatican’s official position.

My experiments in proposing mutual respect have also involved liberal Muslims. Soon after Sept. 11, 2001, in a radio interview in Dallas, I explained why mutual respect among religions is better than tolerance. One caller, identified as a local Pakistani community leader, congratulated me and expressed complete agreement. For her benefit, I elaborated that in Hinduism we frequently worship images of the divine, may view the divine as feminine, and that we believe in reincarnation. I felt glad that she had agreed to respect all this, and I clarified that “mutual respect” merely means that I am respected for my faith, with no requirement for others to adopt or practice it. I wanted to make sure she knew what she had agreed to respect and wasn’t merely being politically correct. The woman hung up.

In 2007, I was invited to an event in Delhi where a visiting delegation from Emory University was promoting their newly formed Inter-Religious Council as a vehicle to achieve religious harmony. In attendance was Emory’s Dean of the Chapel and Religious Life, who happens to be an ordained Lutheran minister. I asked her if her work on the Inter-Religious Council was consistent and compatible with her preaching as a Lutheran minister, and she confidently replied that it was. I then asked: “Is it Lutheran doctrine merely to ‘tolerate’ other religions or also to respect them, and by respect I mean acknowledging them as legitimate religions and equally valid paths to God”? She replied that this was “an important question,” one that she had been “thinking about,” but that there are “no easy answers.”

It is disingenuous for any faith leader to preach one thing to her flock while representing something contradictory to naive outsiders. The idea of “mutual respect” poses a real challenge to Christianity, which insists that salvation is only possible by grace transmitted exclusively through Jesus. Indeed, Lutheran teaching stresses this exclusivity! These formal teachings of the church would make it impossible for the Dean to respect Hinduism, as opposed to tolerating it.

Unwilling to settle for ambiguity, I continued with my questions: “As a Lutheran minister, how do you perceive Hindu murtis (sacred images)? Are there not official injunctions in your teachings against such images?” “Do you consider Krishna and Shiva to be valid manifestations of God or are they among the ‘false gods’?” “How do you see the Hindu Goddess in light of the church’s claim that God is masculine?” The Dean deftly evaded every one of these questions.

Only a minority of Christians agree with the idea of mutual respect while fully understanding what it entails. One such person is Janet Haag, editor of Sacred Journey, a Princeton-based multi-faith journal. In 2008, when I asked her my favorite question — “What is your policy on pluralism?” — she gave the predictable response: “We tolerate other religions.” This prompted me to explain mutual respect in Hinduism wherein each individual has the freedom to select his own personal deity (ishta-devata, not to be confused with polytheism) and pursue a highly individualized spiritual path (sva-dharma). Rather than becoming defensive or evasive, she explored this theme in her editorial in the next issue:

“In the course of our conversation about effective interfaith dialog, [Rajiv Malhotra] pointed out that we fall short in our efforts to promote true peace and understanding in this world when we settle for tolerance instead of making the paradigm shift to mutual respect. His remarks made me think a little more deeply about the distinctiveness between the words ‘tolerance’ and ‘respect,’ and the values they represent.”
Haag explained that the Latin origin of “tolerance” refers to enduring and does not convey mutual affirmation or support: “[The term] also implicitly suggests an imbalance of power in the relationship, with one of the parties in the position of giving or withholding permission for the other to be.” The Latin word for respect, by contrast, “presupposes we are equally worthy of honor. There is no room for arrogance and exclusivity in mutual respect.”

Published: December 9, 2010

 

While yoga is not a “religion” in the sense that the Abrahamic religions are, it is a well-established spiritual path. Its physical postures are only the tip of an iceberg, beneath which is a distinct metaphysics with profound depth and breadth. Its spiritual benefits are undoubtedly available to anyone regardless of religion. However, the assumptions and consequences of yoga do run counter to much of Christianity as understood today. This is why, as a Hindu yoga practitioner and scholar, I agree with the Southern Baptist Seminary President, Albert Mohler, when he speaks of the incompatibility between Christianity and yoga, arguing that “the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine” is fundamentally at odds with Christian teaching. This incompatibility runs much deeper.

Yoga’s metaphysics center around the quest to attain liberation from one’s conditioning caused by past karma. Karma includes the baggage from prior lives, underscoring the importance of reincarnation. While it is fashionable for many Westerners to say they believe in karma and reincarnation, they have seldom worked out the contradictions with core Biblical doctrines. For instance, according to karma theory, Adam and Eve’s deeds would produce effects only on their individual future lives, but not on all their progeny ad infinitum. Karma is not a sexually transmitted problem flowing from ancestors. This view obviates the doctrine of original sin and eternal damnation. An individual’s karmic debts accrue by personal action alone, in a separate and self-contained account. The view of an individual having multiple births also contradicts Christian ideas of eternal heaven and hell seen as a system of rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Yogic liberation is here and now, in the bodily state referred to and celebrated as jivanmukti, a concept unavailable in Christianity and in an afterlife somewhere else. Ironically, the very same Christians who espouse reincarnation also long to have family reunions in heaven.

Yogic liberation is therefore not contingent upon any unique historical event or intervention. Every individual’s ultimate essence is sat-chit-ananda, originally divine and not originally sinful. All humans come equipped to recover their own innate divinity without recourse to any historical person’s suffering on their behalf. Karma dynamics and the spiritual practices to deal with them, are strictly an individual enterprise, and there is no special “deal” given to any chosen group, either by birth or by accepting a system of dogma franchised by an institution. The Abrahamic religions posit an infinite gap between God and the cosmos, bridged only in the distant past through unique prophetic revelations, making the exclusive lineage of prophets indispensable. (I refer to this doctrine elsewhere in my work as history-centrism.) Yoga, by contrast, has a non-dual cosmology, in which God is everything and permeates everything, and is at the same time also transcendent.

The yogic path of embodied-knowing seeks to dissolve the historical ego, both individual and collective, as false. It sees the Christian fixations on history and the associated guilt, as bondage and illusions to be erased through spiritual practice. Yoga is a do-it-yourself path that eliminates the need for intermediaries such as a priesthood or other institutional authority. Its emphasis on the body runs contrary to Christian beliefs that the body will lead humans astray. For example, the apostle Paul was troubled by the clash between body and spirit, and wrote: “For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:22-24).

Most of the 20 million American yoga practitioners encounter these issues and find them troubling. Some have responded by distorting yogic principles in order to domesticate it into a Christian framework, i.e. the oxymoron, ‘Christian Yoga.’ Others simply avoid the issues or deny the differences. Likewise, many Hindu gurus obscure differences, characterizing Jesus as a great yogi and/or as one of several incarnations of God. These views belie the principles stated in the Nicene Creed, to which members of mainstream Christian denominations must adhere. They don’t address the above underlying contradictions that might undermine their popularity with Judeo-Christian Americans. This is reductionist and unhelpful both to yoga and Christianity.

In my forthcoming book, The Audacity of Difference, I advocate that both sides adopt the dharmic stance called purva-paksha, the practice of gazing directly at an opponent’s viewpoint in an honest manner. This stance involves a mastery of the ego and respect for difference, and the hope is that it would usher in a whole new level of interfaith colaborations.

Published: November 8, 2010

This essay examines the often repeated claim by Hindus and non-Hindus alike that Hinduism is the same as other religions. Some common factors that cause many Hindus to slip into sameness are as follows: Hindus arrogantly assume that other religions want to be the same as Hinduism, and hence they feel that they are doing these other religions a favor. Against this one may point out that the traditional Hindu teachings make a clear distinction between valid and not valid religious claims, by separating them as dharma and adharma, sat (truth) and asat (falsity), devika and asuric, etc.

Myth of Hindu Sameness

Many Hindus misapply teachings about the Unmanifest when dealing with the diversity of the manifest, and the unity of transcendence in dealing with the diversity and conflict found in the worldly. Furthermore, they fail to distinguish between shruti and smriti. The unity of all shruti is assumed to mean that all smritis must be the same. In particular, Hindus fail to understand the critical history-dependence of the Abrahamic religions and the way their core myths and institutions are built around these frozen smritis. Often what Hindus really mean is that all religions are equal in the respect and rights they deserve, but they confuse this with sameness.

At the same time, there are strong arguments that religious differences lead to tensions and violence. Many Hindus have internalized these arguments, over simplifying the Hindu thought about there being one truth and all paths leading to it.

To address these and other issues, this essay presents a new theoretical framework for looking at religions and global religious violence. It classifies religious movements as History-Centric and non History-Centric. The former are contingent on canonical beliefs of their sacred history. Non History-Centric religious movements, on the other hand, do have beliefs about history, but their faith is not contingent on history.

The essay advances the thesis that non History-Centric faiths offer the only viable spiritual alternative to the religious conflicts that are inherent among History-Centric religions.

In analyzing the predominantly non History-Centric Hinduism through this framework, the essay looks at the two main Hindu responses in its interface with the predominantly History-Centric religions of Christianity and Islam. These are: (1) how Hinduism is trying to become History-Centric, and (2) how Hinduism is self-destructing under the Myth of Sameness, by offering itself as a library of shareware for “generic” spirituality.

The essay cautions that Hinduism runs the risk of becoming either (1) History-Centric itself, or (2) losing its identity and becoming digested into Christianity via the Sameness Myth.

Scenario #1 leads to a three-way jihad among three History-Centric religions – Christianity vs. Islam vs. Hinduism – in which Hinduism cannot win. Scenario #2 leads to the dissolution of Hinduism through a combination of hostile and friendly takeovers by Christianity, which, in turn, worsens the two-way jihad between Christianity and Islam. Therefore, both scenarios ultimately feed the clash of Christianity vs. Islam, i.e. between conflicting History-Centric positions.

To construct an alternative framework, the essay debunks the Sameness Myth, which reflects naïve Hindus’ wishful thinking about how other religions ought to berather than how they actually are.

The essay calls for Hindu scholars to develop a rigorous approach to purva-paksha (scholarly critiques of other traditions within the framework of the Indian darshanas); to highlight the Hindu history of constructions through its own smriti traditions; and to refute false presuppositions about Hinduism that have spread into many academic disciplines.

The essay recommends the promotion of equality-with-difference as a core Hindu principle, also referred to within this essay as difference-with-respect. This entails asserting a positive Hindu identity that is neither History-Centric nor dismissive of its distinctiveness.

I: Introduction

There are two current trends in Hinduism that were born of a perceived ‘threat’ to Hinduism. These are as follows:

1. There is a movement to focus Hinduism in terms of God’s interventions in Indian history, most commonly associated with Avatar Ram’s history and the related geography. Such a version of Hinduism is History-Centric. (See my earlier writings.) The term is also explained later in this essay.
2. The second trajectory is less formal and less institutionalized, but is far more pervasive and subversive. This is to unbundle (or break up) Hinduism into a set of separate generic ideas, practices, symbols, etc., that any religion or non religious worldview may appropriate in a modular fashion, assimilating what fits and rejecting (and demonizing) what does not. I call this the Sameness Myth because it is the result of the false premise that Hinduism is the same as any other religion, thereby making its parts individually available for appropriation.

Both these trends feed and are fed by a ‘threatened Hinduism’, i.e., the sense that Hinduism is facing pressures from within and without. However, this essay does not examine such threats or pressures. (I have other essays on geopolitics and Hinduism.)

History-Centrism (#1) provides any religion with an identity fortress, which is both defensive and useful for an offensive. It also tends to collapse internal differences and encourage homogeneity. I shall argue against the merits of this kind of essentializing of Hinduism, and will suggest alternative ways of bringing cohesion and identity that preserve difference.

After a brief overview of History-Centrism, the main purpose of this essay will be to explain the problems that Hinduism is facing because of #2, i.e., the false myth that it is the same as other religions. I shall show that the Sameness Myth suffers from at least three problems:

– Sameness with all other religions is incompatible with authentic Hindu dharma.

– Sameness is making Hinduism irrelevant and redundant. It is sliding Hinduism towards extinction by dilution and assimilation, in the same manner as Christianity’s inculturation strategy made many pagan religions extinct. It positions Hinduism as a takeover target by History-Centric predators, with a friendly takeover of some components and a hostile takeover and/or outright cultural genocide of other components

– In the aftermath of such takeovers the predators become stronger and the world less safe. Hence, sameness can at best be a short-term alternative and antidote to History-Centrism but it leads to unstable states of power that eventually feed more History-Centrism.

The opposite of sameness is difference. Many scholars have considered ‘difference’ to be the source of tensions and violence. Hence, they promote the sameness myth. However, this is a European view based on their experience with Abrahamic religions that are History-Centric. This view does not apply to non-European cultures such as the Indic traditions that have a worldview of difference-with-respect.

Difference-with-respect is an attitude that is practically unachievable through History-Centric religions, except in the form of artificial political correctness commonly referred to as ‘tolerance’.

My thesis of difference-with-respect is at odds with both #1 and #2 poles above. Furthermore, each pole’s frenzy feeds the other:

– Moderate Hindus recoiling against religious violence have tended to gravitate towards sameness in order to dilute their distinct identities, and hence absolve themselves of ‘Hindu shame’.

– Conversely, many Hindus who are concerned about the way the Sameness Myth deconstructs (and eventually destructs) their faiths have jumped on the History-Centrism bandwagon for identity protection, in the form of Hindutva.

The following factors have contributed to the Sameness Myth:

– U-Turns and American Perennialism: Historically, sameness emerged out of 19th century neo-Hindu leaders’ constructions of Hinduism that often mapped Indic categories on to Western ones [1]. For instance, Swami Vivekananda successfully popularized Hinduism in 19th century America. But later, many of his important Western disciples and sympathizers genericized Hinduism. Several of them eventually did U-Turns back into Western identity and Western thought. Perennialism and the New Age movement were by-products of such movements.[2]. Meanwhile, the mainstream History-Centric Christianity did not dissolve itself or melt itself into sameness, but, on the contrary, it strengthened its positioning by appropriating from Hinduism.

– Opportunistic Hindu gurus: The Sameness Myth took a quantum leap in the 1960s when many Hindu gurus arrived in America. They attracted huge followings and piled up vast donations by playing the sameness game to appeal to the pop culture at the expense of authenticity. They lowered the bar for Westerners to enter into pop Hinduism, but this also lowered the bar to their exit once the fad had died and once enough components from Hinduism had been successfully appropriated into Western systems. (See details.[3])

– Postmodernist intellectualism: Postmodernism is the academic equivalent of pop Vedanta as an intellectual framework to deconstruct identity. (While Vedanta deconstructs the individual ego, postmodernism mainly deconstructs the collective cultural identity.) It has intellectually disaggregated Hinduism into a library of random clip art that may be clicked-and-dragged into any belief system under the control and discretion of the new owner. (For instance, postmodernist frameworks allow scholars such as Courtright to misinterpret Hindu symbols arbitrarily, and to sell their works successfully at the highest levels of the academy.)

– Politics of South Asianism: It is a glaring contradiction that the very scholars who attack Indian identity (where Hinduism is the core value system) as being ‘chauvinistic’, are the same scholars that, simultaneously, promote (i) the divisive sub-national/separatist identities of Dalits, Dravidians and minority religions, and (ii) the South Asian identity that pressures India externally. Furthermore, these scholars suffer from various conflicts of interest as their careers are in institutions of education and funding where Western identity and chauvinism rule. Meanwhile, Western supremacy remains unaffected by the fringe activities of its liberal scholars. Besides USA and European states, Russia, China, Japan and Arab states remain highly nationalistic. Therefore, as Ziauddin Sardar and others have pointed out, the criticism of nation-states and related identities has indirectly served to empower the very imperialism, which the intellectuals attack. Many trendy postmodernist theories are being exported to colonize third world intellectuals who use them to impress white liberals. Unfortunately, many Indian intellectuals have facilitated ‘softening the prey’ on behalf of the predator empires – in effect serving as sepoys [4].

– Popular Hinduphobia: Hinduphobia is systematically institutionalized through education systems, media portrayals and popular English literature, thereby pushing many Hindus into sameness as a safe harbor and a place of refuge. Modern Westernized Hindus are being pulled towards sameness as a way to appear less old fashioned. ‘Secular Hindus’ have made it cool to say things like, “Hindus believe in everything,” “All religions are the same,” etc. This is done either out of confusion or simply to project a public identity safely. The greater the Hinduphobia experienced in an environment the greater is the pressure towards sameness as a way to offload the liability of being associated with demonized Hindu symbolism.

The rest of this essay consists of the following three Sections: Section II defines History-Centrism, and explains its centrality in institutionalized Abrahamic religions and also explains why Hinduism has not depended upon History-Centrism. Section III refutes the Myth of Hindu Sameness, and explains the problems it causes. Section IV proposes a Constructive Hinduism project as the way forward in the 21st century, with the objective to build a positive Hinduism while avoiding the two competing pitfalls of History-Centrism and the Sameness Myth. (I am dissatisfied with the term ‘Constructive Hinduism’ for a variety of reasons and this is a tentative term only. See details[5].

It is my claim that non History-Centric faiths offer the only spiritual alternative available to the Darwinian clash among History-Centric religions, i.e., the clash between one religion’s jihad and another religion’s jihad.

Therefore, if the projects of the kind outlined in Section IV fail, one of the following two scenarios shall prevail: (i) Either Hinduism shall be forced to become History-Centric and this will result in a three-way clash of History-Centric religions: Islam vs. Christianity vs. Hinduism, which Hinduism cannot ultimately win. (ii) Or Hinduism shall get digested into Christianity via the Sameness Myth, in which case the two-way clash between History-Centric Christianity and History- Centric Islam shall worsen.

II: History-Centrism

Anecdotal background:

The critical difference between Indic and Abrahamic religions crystallized in my mind a few years ago, when I was giving an informal talk on Hinduism to a room full of attorneys in New Jersey, none of whom knew much about Hinduism.

I started by asking this intellectually sharp audience a set of questions which went roughly as follows: What would happen to your religious lives if, hypothetically, all history were voided or made inaccessible to you or somehow falsified beyond hope? In other words, imagine that due to some strange reasons, the details of which are irrelevant, you have to live your lives without having any knowledge passed down from God through any historical events whatsoever. What would you do? Would it be possible for you to lead religious lives, and if so, by what authority would you do so? In other words, can you discover the spiritual truth for yourselves without dependence on historical sources, or would you be lost if such historical sources were simply unavailable or unreliable?

To my surprise, these very highly educated Jews and Christians were stumped. Many felt that it would be impossible to be religious under such circumstances because man lacks the ability to know God’s will directly without the historical prophets. Others felt that only Jesus’ very specific personal sacrifice (a historical event) had made it possible for man to get redeemed, as man had no inherent capability to achieve salvation on his own. Some found the very discussion troubling and became disturbed by my thought experiment with a loss of history.

I then explained to my audience that as a Hindu, my spiritual advancement through yoga was independent of the history of Patanjali who wrote the Yoga-Sutras and of any knowledge about his life history. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the Vedic mantras was independent of the personal history of the Vedic rishis, and the Vedas were considered a-purusheya (authorless); the practices of Tantra were not contingent upon belief in the history of anyone; the effect of bhajans (devotional songs) was not based on any belief in the history of the bhakti saints or the histories of any deities. Finally, I explained that deities were not historical persons but were ahistorical forces and intelligences just like the gravitation force; also, that many Hindus had personified these forces through the poetic language of their praises, as they acknowledged their inter-dependency in Nature.

Therefore, if all the history of my religion were falsified, it would not make any difference to the effectiveness of my spiritual practice. Every human being comes endowed with what I call the rishi/yogi potential. There have been innumerable realized saints over time and across world cultures that rediscovered the highest knowledge. History was only ‘nice to have’, but not a ‘must have’.

The audience was rather shaken up but also highly impressed by such a stance. Could I have uncovered a serious blind spot, or at least subliminal assumption, among Biblical societies about the necessary role of history in religion?

My audience’s reactions reminded me of the withdrawal symptoms of addicts who are deprived of their substance dependence. I wondered: Had my thought experiment deprived them of their history dependence and triggered a sort of withdrawal syndrome? Why was their religiosity so contingent upon and hence dependent upon specific historical episodes? Are institutionalized Abrahamic religions in bondage to history? Over several days, my thesis of History-Centrismemerged.

This thesis got a further boost when I participated in a major world conference on science and religion in Bangalore. The Templeton Foundation had flown in scientific luminaries committed to various Abrahamic religions, including Nobel Laureates, to discuss how scientific their respective religions were. But these speakers largely used neo-Vedantin thought (without ever acknowledging any Indic influences whatsoever) as belonging to their own religion, no matter how much they had to stretch their canons to make their case. One was left thinking that all religions were scientific, and that they were virtually identical.

But I knew very well that the very same religions also have major conflicts in the real world. It occurred to me that these scholars had suppressed in their talks theHistory-Centric dimension of their religions, and it was this dimension, which made each religion distinct and also caused conflicts with others. My question became: Why do Abrahamic religions evade discussing their History-Centrism in scientific discussions, while this is at the very heart of their evangelical campaigns to claim uniqueness?

Overnight, I revised my talk that was scheduled for the following day. I highlighted that History-Centrism could not be slipped under the rug because (i) it was in violation of the scientific method, and (ii) it was the principle cause of world conflicts.

For taking this stance, I was attacked on the stage by a prominent Indian Christian scholar, who was working for Templeton. The conference was suddenly shaken out of the pretence that ‘all religions are all the same’. Privately, many Indian attendees congratulated me for opening this door. I felt convinced that I was on to something big in the field of comparative religions. My talk is published in the conference proceedings.

Defining History-Centrism:

Most religions and (even non-religious philosophical systems) agree on some sort of upper limit of knowledge of humans in their ordinary state of mind. However, they disagree on man’s potential to transcend this limit.

Hindus and Buddhists regard maya as being responsible for this limit to infinite knowledge, but believe that adept yogis and others can achieve states of self-realization or enlightenment in which ultimate truth is directly experienced.

Abrahamic religions believe that there is an infinite gap of knowledge between God and man, a sort of maya equivalent. But the vast majority of denominations believe that man can have access to the ultimate truth only when God sends a prophet with a message, and that man can never replace the role of the historical prophets. Without history, therefore, man is inherently lost in darkness.

The Indic approach leads to the experimentation and cultivation of human initiated self-realization processes, of which yoga/meditation are prominent examples. The Abrahamic approach leads to intensive studies of historical prophets’ messages, because this knowledge can never be known by any other means.

The spiritual traditions based on self-realization hold that humans are born with infinite potential and their essence is divinity (sat-chit-ananda). Hence, if all historical records and knowledge were to vanish or become corrupted or inaccessible to humans for whatever reason, new self-realized living masters would be able to teach us the highest truths based on their own fresh enlightenment. Even though these masters are very rare, they have existed throughout history in many cultures. The result is that (i) knowledge of history is not necessary to be a religious person, and (ii) no culture has a monopoly on religious truth, although different cultures may have used or misused this knowledge in different ways.

The Abrahamic religions (according to the interpretations of most institutions) deny the existence of any such infinite human potential that, in effect, could make every human a potential prophet. They say, only God sends a few prophets with the message containing such critical spiritual knowledge. To abandon the history through which this prophetic knowledge has been passed down, or to lose the exact account of these historically transmitted canons would be catastrophic.

The latter approach to religion is defined as History-Centrism.

Every major religion has both strains — History-Centrism from God initiated prophets, and also ahistorical human initiated self-realization. But in a given religion, one or the other tends to dominate and this characterizes religion and its society in profound ways.

For the Abrahamic religions, the history of religion is crucial; for Hinduism, the making of religious history via self-realization, etc., is what is important. This point is elaborated later[6].

What History-Centrism does not mean:

Historicity is not the same thing as History-Centrism, and this point deserves to be elaborated.

Newton had a personal history but his specific life events were not necessary for the gravitation laws to be in effect today. However, Jesus’ personal life events are responsible for God granting man the ability to get saved from Eternal Damnation. Hence, there is a radical difference between these two examples of historicity. The first example does not make physics History-Centric, since gravitation would not get falsified if one falsified Newton’s personal historical details or even proved that he never existed as a historical person.

Gautam Buddha emphasized that his enlightenment was merely a discovery about a reality that had always been there. He was not bringing any new covenants from any God. The history of the Buddha is not necessary for Buddhist principles to work. In fact, Buddha stated that he was neither the first nor the last person to have achieved the state of enlightenment. He also asserted that he was not God nor sent by any God as a prophet, and whatever he discovered was available to every human to discover for himself. This makes Buddhism not History-Centric.

A prominent theoretical physicist made the counter argument to me that the Big Bang was a unique event that physicists believe in, thereby making physics also History-Centric. However, this argument is flawed: Physicists believe in the Big Bang Theory not as a premise of physics (in the same sense as Christians believe in Jesus’ historicity as the premise of Salvation). Rather, the Big Gang Theory is a conclusion that is scientifically derived based on physical laws and empirical evidence that is verifiable today. Hence, the Big Bang Theory does not make physics History-Centric: it is a result of physical theory and not a pre-requisite belief or cause of it. Those who regard it as evidence of History-Centrism are mixing causes and effects.

The following significantly characterize History-Centric religions:

1. God himself intervenes in History, and it is not merely the mundane history of humans such as Newton, philosophers, yogis, kings/queens, and other humans.
2. God’s historical intervention in human affairs is unique — i.e. non-reproducible — and hence there cannot ever be a substitute to knowing the history. (On the other hand, if Newton never existed or if we dismissed his historical details, we could today derive the gravitation laws empirically from scratch.)
3. God’s historical intervention resulted in new Laws and Covenants, and the events were not merely a discovery of pre-existing reality.
4. The past must be falsified, eradicated, subjugated or reconstructed to fit the new truth created by such historical events. Hence, the socio-cultural change brought about by the unique historical event is discontinuous. It does not simply add new knowledge to old, but must erase the old for it to be legitimate. It is God vs. God, as he alters and contradicts his own past laws and messages.
5. Because this history is about God, it is not falsifiable. History-Centric religions tend to have draconian laws on blasphemy.

Is Christianity History-Centric? [7]

The core Historical Grand Narrative of Christianity that is the minimum necessary belief required by the vast majority of denominations consists of the following:

– Adam and Eve committed Original Sin and violated God’s orders. This single act brought upon all humans thereafter the condition known as Eternal Damnation. This is the condition into which every one of us is born. It has nothing to do with our individual deeds but is directly the result of the misdeed of Adam and Eve.

– God then felt sorry for us and sent his one and only son, Jesus, to suffer crucifixion on our behalf, so that we may get Redemption from Eternal Damnation. This is called being Saved, and requires that the individual must believe without question or doubt the History-Centric narrative about Jesus. It is not sufficient to live a good life, to do good deeds, to pray to God, etc. Belief in Jesus’ historical sacrifice is necessary to get Saved.

– Evangelists are those who are committed to spread this History-Centric narrative to others around the world. (Presently, 40% to over 50% of all Americans classify themselves as Evangelicals, and this group has been rapidly growing over the past 25 years.)

Different Christian denominations also believe in other supplemental History-Centric and/or Predetermined-Future-Centric narratives in addition to the core beliefs listed above. These constitute beliefs that are non-negotiable in order for someone to be a member of the given denomination. Examples of prominent beliefs of this kind are as follows:

– The End-of-Time is coming, which is a precisely defined and predetermined event: Christ will return to Earth and will take back to Paradise all those who have Saved themselves as per the procedure indicated above. All others will suffer the most unimaginable atrocities from Christ, which are described in gory details in Biblical canons such as Apocalypse.

– Christian Zionists are those who believe that Christ will return only after man fulfills his side of the bargain in the Bible, which is that man must restore the Nation of Israel to its original state. (The borders of this original Israel include many lands now under the Arabs.) Many of the most powerful political leaders of the US believe in this doctrine.

On the other hand, non History-Centric Christianity has been taught by many Christian mystics using Indic adhyatmika techniques. But these mystics were typically persecuted by the mainstream Christian institutions, because they were seen as a threat to authority.

Generic ideals of loving others, doing seva or service to others, living moral lives, and being socially responsible are non History-Centric elements contained in Jesus’ teachings. But contrary to many educated Indians’ naivety, such ideals do not define Christianity, because such generic spirituality is also found in every world religion, and there would be no reason to convert people away from their native faiths into Christianity simply for these reasons. The differences between religions are to be appreciated by examining their theological premises and not by superficially looking at the ethical mandates.

Liberal Christians belong to certain denominations such as Unitarianism. Unfortunately, these denominations add up to much less than 10% of the US population. While the public diplomacy by Christians often emphasizes this face, it is not what is preached and aggressively promoted to ‘Save the Heathens’ in the third world. Indians have to deal with the aggressive proselytizing denominations, which are exported to them. Hence, Indians must understand History-Centric Christianity, and not base their purva-paksha on the views held by relatively few fringe liberal Christians, such as many liberal arts college professors. (See www.adherents.com for statistics.)

Evangelical Christians have reacted to my thesis by confirming that their faith is founded on literal historical events, which I have termed History-Centrism, even though there is a mixed reaction to my use of this term. At the other end of the spectrum, liberal Christian academicians claim that this is not the ‘real’ Christianity: they find the hard facts about the growing institutional Christianity to be an embarrassment to their elitism.

Is Islam History-Centric? [8]

The minimum necessary condition to be called a Muslim is the History-Centric belief without question or doubt that the Koran is the exact and literal word of Allah who is the only God. This belief is not simply desirable, but is absolutely necessary in order to be a Muslim.

Furthermore, another required core belief is the status of the Kaaba, which is located in Mecca: It is a unique artifact that was historically placed in that specific spot by Allah. No replica of it is allowed. Muslims must point only to the Kaaba to pray five times daily.

If, hypothetically, the Kaaba was not History-Centric and hence unique, Muslims could build Kaabas in every mosque in the world and pray pointing locally towards those, and not towards Saudi Arabia. But this would devastate the Saudi royals’ political capital over all Muslims, because the Saudis control the Kaaba.

Furthermore, if replicas of the Kaaba could be installed in Muslims’ homes, they would be able to pray at home just as Hindus pray to a deity. This would decentralize the Muslim sacred geography, thereby decoupling Indian Muslims from Arabs, for example. It is the non-reproducibility of the Kaaba that differentiates it from being an idol, and hence the political emphasis to consider idolatry as blasphemous and punishable by death.

Sufi teachings, on the other hand, are very compatible with Indic traditions and also with the mystics of the Abrahamic faiths. But Sufis have been cruelly persecuted by Islam throughout their history. Furthermore, Islam’s ideals and practices of egalitarianism and social justice are non History-Centric and are generic, but are not considered sufficient to be classified as a Muslim.

History-Centric Clash of Islam vs. Christianity:

To properly understand current geopolitics, the framework of History-Centrism is very helpful.

Muslim and Christian leaders both claim many similarities between their respective faiths: They worship one God, who is male, and both sides accept that he is thesame God. They accept the long lineage of prophets of the Middle East desert, starting with Abraham. Most of all, in terms of moral values, both believe in universal love, brotherhood, prayer, compassion, avoidance of sinful living, and so on…

Then why is there so much conflict? I propose that intellectuals have simply failed to understand the deeply rooted History-Centric conflicts. Here are two examples ofirreconcilable accounts of history, one issue from either side:

– Islam refutes Christianity: Muslims definitely accept Jesus as a prophet of great importance and respect him as such. But Muslims simply cannot accept the Christian claims that Jesus (i) was the Son of God, (ii) had a Virgin Birth, or (iii) was Resurrected. These Christian claims would make Islam irrelevant and contradict Islam’s essential historical purpose. If Jesus made the supreme sacrifice by which humans may get redeemed, then why is there any need for Prophet Mohammed or the Koran? For Islam to be valid, the problem concerning the human condition remained unresolved despite Jesus’ coming to Earth. Therefore, the three Christian claims about Jesus previously outlined must be false. The vast majority of Muslim clergy teach that he was a great prophet, as were many dozens of other Abrahamic prophets, but he was no Son of God, nor had a Virgin Birth and, most of all, he was not Resurrected after being crucified. Yet, these three claims of Christianity are necessary to the legitimacy of Christianity and are non-negotiable. Bottom line: Christianity’s History-Centrism cannot be accommodated within Islam’s History-Centrism.

– Christianity refutes Islam: Islam’s claim that the Koran is the exact words of God, and hence is perfect and final, is simply unsustainable in Christianity. For if this were valid, it would make Christianity obsolete and superseded by Islam. Why would one need an older version of God’s word if he has sent a new version specifically to replace the older one, as is claimed by Islam? Christian theologians do not accept Koran as the perfect record of the final word of God. Furthermore, Islam also demands (without room for negotiations or ambiguity whatsoever) that the Kaaba (located in Mecca) is absolutely unique, cannot be replicated, and is the only direction in which prayer must be offered five times daily. Clearly, this would undermine Christian institutions’ authority to collect donations, interpret the canons, provide the ‘true history’, etc. Bottom line: History-Centric claims that are necessary conditions to be a Muslim are simply impossible for Christianity to accept.

There are many other inherent conflicts besides these, but the above two suffice to make my case. Any History-Centric system must falsify all others in order for it to be valid. Both Islam and Christianity, in their History-Centric forms – which have been the dominant forms of both through most of their respective histories – are inherently conflict-ridden.

Therefore, almost all the interfaith dialogs are mainly about public relations and diplomacy. Each of these religions uses the term ‘tolerance’ to describe its policy towards other religions. Rather than accepting this term as a sign of their greatness, one must probe the underlying problems.

To tolerate means that the other is illegitimate but we shall put up with him. Would you go to someone’s house to dinner if his invitation says, “I shall tolerate you to sit next to me?” We must demand respect, not tolerance. But Muslim and Christian leaders often have great difficulty about openly and formally giving respect to other religions, especially non Abrahamic religions, since this would legitimize these other religions. And, the History-Centrism of Christianity and Islam forbids them from legitimizing any other religions. Respecting other religions would de-legitimize the proselytizing campaigns that are the life-blood of many institutions.

History-Centrism is the best framework I am aware of to understand the origin of religious bondage and the sustenance of religious conflicts.

Is Hinduism History-Centric?

There are many non History-Centric Hindu paths, such as the following:

– Shruti and Vedic mantras are a-purusheya or authorless. The Vedas do not claim to be sent by a Creator or to be about historical creation, but describe reality as rta which means patterns. Neither rta nor the mantras are in any way contingent upon history. In fact, very little is known about the history of the rishis, as this is considered unimportant except to Indologists who are disputing the political ramifications of the origins of Hinduism.

– Upanishads are the source texts for much of Hindu philosophy, and history has no relevance in them.

– The validity of the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali or Samkhya of Kapila is not contingent on the historicity of Patanjali or Kapila, respectively. In fact, very little is known about these historical persons and nor have Indian yogis of the past been bothered by this issue.

– Bhagavad Gita, the most widely read Hindu text, preaches dharma that is not contingent on the historicity of the Mahabharata epic.

– Tantra consists of spiritual-physiological processes whose efficacy has no relationship with any history of anyone whatsoever.

On the other hand, the following aspects of Hinduism introduce History-Centrism. But overall, the historicity in them is positioned as being optional, and not absolutely necessary for the path to succeed:

• Puranas are narratives that are popularly used metaphors to teach morals, ethics, and cultural identities. While these are seen by many Hindus as historically literal, the believers do not consider their messages to be invalidated when someone treats them as ahistorical and purely metaphorical. On the contrary, when aHistory-Centric follower of the Puranas is offered the position that Rama is ahistorical and his domicile of Ayodhya is inside everyone’s heart, most individuals respect the view as being spiritually advanced.
• Deities like Ganesha, various Goddess forms, etc., are not historical persons, although Hindus commonly personify them and relate to them as highly accessible persons.
• Living Gurus are continually bringing renewals in an endless flow, making any specific guru only of relative importance, and not of absolute status. Each guru re-contextualizes the spirituality for the appropriate cultural audience, and these messages are not considered to be History-Centric despite the veneration of the historical guru. Hinduism mandates its leaders to interpret for changing geography, time, and extenuating or particular circumstance.

The relative absence of History-Centrism or its weak status has enabled a vast array of conceptions of the Supreme Reality to emerge, including the following:

• Nirguna: The Supreme Reality may be formless and beyond all human conceptions. This resembles Islamic notions of Allah.
• Saguna: The Supreme may be personified and the individual may have a personal relationship with the Supreme. While many Hindu paths use humanized forms, others avoid forms.
• The Supreme may be conceptualized as feminine. Furthermore, this feminine may be represented in a vast variety of different forms that represent different aspects of the Goddess. There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to represent just as one finds in the arts. None of the representations are considered to be the literal image.
• The Supreme may be conceptualized as masculine. Furthermore, this may be in a variety of Vishnu forms. Or it may be as Shiva with an entirely different conception and epistemology.

History-Centrism vs. Living Spiritual Masters:

History-Centrism also corresponds to Geography-Centrism, which means the uniqueness of the geography where the history allegedly occurred.

Furthermore, the geography privileges the specific culture of the place where these events occurred, and the inhabitants of these cultures tend to build institutions to control the history, geography and cultural norms as assets to preserve and to project their power. The politics of such a religion comes under the control of the institutions that emerge and win.

Living spiritual masters act as a counter balancing force to defuse institutional power. Therefore, History-Centric religions have considered living saints to be a threat. Such saints have the credibility to overrule institutional authority in matters of interpretation and practice, to de-legitimize the institution itself, and to take away its followers.

A religion with a continual supply of living enlightened masters has: (i) regular challenges to any established institutions of power and doctrine, (ii) fresh shruti (first principles) for the current time, place and context, and (iii) geographical (hence cultural) decentralization of the spiritual movements because spiritual masters emerge in unpredictable places and situations.

Therefore, History-Centric institutions only allow dead saints. For example, in the Catholic Church, to be canonized as a saint the person must have been dead for a certain number of years, thereby eliminating any threat from that person. The dead person becomes the property of the church, which controls the history and interpretations of the canonized saint’s teachings, free from any of the risks associated with living saints.

As a result of the prominence given to living spiritual masters, non History-Centric religions evolve towards lineages of adhyatmika (inner science) practices. One may think of this kind of spirituality as embodied knowing as contrasted with discursive knowledge, which is a set of intellectual propositions, of which History-Centrismis one kind. Canons tend to be less powerful in traditions built on embodied knowing because of the emphasis given to living masters and their direct transmissions.

Centurion Archetype vs. Yogi Archetype: [9]

The two pivotal events that profoundly shaped the trajectories for Eastern and Western civilizations were the spiritual encounters of emperors Ashoka and Constantine, respectively. Indian Emperor Ashoka surrendered his entire military (centurion archetype) and became a Buddhist (yogi archetype). But the opposite took place in the case of Roman Emperor Constantine (centurion archetype) who captured and seized control over Jesus (yogi archetype) for his imperialist expansion.

In the former case, the yogi archetype prevailed over the centurion archetype, whereas in the latter case the centurion archetype prevailed over the yogi archetype. These two events characterize the dominant strains in Indic and Abrahamic religions, respectively. While both archetypes have existed worldwide, different ones have dominated in different traditions.

The centurion archetype is violence prone and extroverted. It is constantly uneasy with itself and, hence, with its environment. The peaceful introverted archetype of the yogi is embodied (adhyatmika) and at ease with itself and others.

The centurion archetype thrives on History-Centrism, heroism and control. Its priorities are worldly expansion and accumulation.

The yogi archetype seeks to ultimately transcend nama-rupa (constructs based on limitations). Its priorities are adhyatmika, purifying its gunas from tamas to rajas tosattva, advancing from lower to higher chakras, and evolving from the psychic body to the supra-mental body.

The centurion’s belief system is founded entirely on God’s historical interventions, proven by the prophets’ miracles as reported in anecdotal accounts. The centurion controls this ‘one true account of history’ as his asset and source of personal identity. This account legitimizes his power, whether as the Catholic Pope or as an Evangelical Protestant Church. This canon combines both shruti and smriti into a frozen book. The yogi, on the other hand, is ever expanding his consciousness to discover more, has a massive library of texts that separate shruti and smriti, which is built cumulatively without purging the old.

Frozen canon and History-Centrism turn religion into a Darwinian game in which many strategies get deployed to expand, takeover, monopolize and plunder – all in God’s name.

On the other hand, the creativity of new living spiritual masters is like an R & D lab using an open architecture that encourages fresh startups, and this threatens the orthodoxy in each era.

History-Centric religions advance very rarely, as it takes God’s intervention using miracles as the proof of authenticity, and these advances are violent and kill the past identity, culture and history. On the other hand, open and free adhyatmika explorations are cumulative and do not impose on prior or competing worldviews. Such traditions are not boxed in the way that History-Centric religions invariably are.

The History-Centric approach demands conformity because it is membership oriented: You are either in or out, either one of ‘us’ or ‘them’, and this subliminally equates to ‘we = good’ versus ‘others = evil’. Monotheism is more accurately described as My-Theism.
Buddhism has been called the export variety of Hinduism. Its peaceful spread from India across Asia for over a thousand years was achieved without any subversion of the various host cultures or languages or identities into which it was received. This stands in sharp contrast with the violent imperialism with which both Christianity and Islam have achieved their expansions.

Finally, postmodernists must undertake a serious study of Indic thought free from contemporary politics of the left and right, and from Eurocentric mis-portrayals of the past. They need to appreciate the Indic traditions’ resources for deconstruction; that it seeks a positive state that is free from conflict rather than the nihilism and cynicism that often results from postmodern deconstructions.

III: Myth of Hindu Sameness

To evaluate the popular notion that Hinduism is the same as Christianity, let us consider some specific issues.

Shruti and Smriti:

One of the foundations of Indian thought is the separation between shruti and smriti as two different kinds of knowledge.

Shruti is authorless. It is heard as direct inner experience without any intermediary, not unfiltered through one’s own conditioned mind. It is available only in high states of consciousness achieved by rishis and advanced yogis.

Smriti is constructed by persons in a historical, cultural context, and is conditioned by its authors. Hence, it must change with time and context.

Shruti is eternal truth, while smriti is meant to be changed and is to be applied like case law with great care taken for each context to determine its applicability and the required adaptation.

Shruti is the rishi’s/yogi’s present moment embodied experience of the ultimate reality. Smriti is disembodied knowledge that is objectified and discursive. Shruti is kept alive by living enlightened spiritual masters.

The Bible and Koran combine shruti and smriti into one. Furthermore, smriti prevails over shruti in these canons: Shruti was collapsed into smriti. All Shruti has been reduced to Smriti – unchangeable text rather than present realization. History became the supreme smriti of the institution as that enabled it to collect taxes, impose its police authority and to expand via imperialism. Shruti was sacrificed in the process. Therefore, the finality of canon forces a freezing and imposition of old smritisthat were meant only for a given historical context. The key factor is that they regard History-Centric events as though they were shruti. This drags into the already frozen canons, many incidental historical details about the way Prophet Mohammed or Jesus or their respective followers lived.

Hinduism’s and Buddhism’s itihas (history) are viewed as smriti, and not as shruti. This separation allows changes in smriti as per human society’s needs. But unfortunately, most of the condemnations of Hinduism cite smriti as though it were shruti. These critics mimic the colonial agenda to demonize native traditions and native identity. They use educational institutions and media to manufacture and/or distribute false interpretations. Hindu submission and acceptance leads to Hindus internalizing these falsities, and they often becoming pathological self-haters.

One may classify cultures as shruti centric or smriti centric. The yogi is shruti centric and seeks to ultimately transcend Nama-Rupa. Shruti refreshed by living spiritual masters prevents the fossilization of old smriti. But institutionalized religions drift away from yoga. Jihad (Islamic, Christian or Hindu), is a product of smritithat has taken over shruti.
People have asked me what is wrong with U-Turns. My simple response is that the appropriated shruti gets collapsed into History-Centric smriti.

Postmodernists rightfully deconstruct smriti, but they suffer in two ways: (1) They lack the yoga to be able to receive shruti and are stuck in disembodied intellectualism. (2) They de facto tend to use Western smriti, because their education, mentoring and career advancement are embedded in Western smriti.

Karma:

The Biblical historical narrative is the essence of mainstream Christian denominations. When examined through the Indic lens, the core historical narrative of the Bible is incompatible with karma theory:

• Karma is not transmitted via biological reproduction: Adam and Eve committed Original Sin when they violated God’s commands. As a result of their act, God cursed the entirety of mankind forever, i.e., Adam and Eve’s children, grand children, and so forth, ad infinitum, were forever condemned by God. This is known as Eternal Damnation. However, the karma of Adam and Eve cannot be transmitted to their biological offspring, and Adam and Eve must pay for their karma in their own rebirths. A given person carries his/her own personal karma into his/her own next life, and one’s karma does not get transmitted to one’s biological children. I do not suffer from the karma of my parents and nor do my kids suffer from my karma. I brought my past life’s karma into this world and will take this life’s karma into my next birth. Rebirth is not in the form of one’s biological progeny. A white Christian could have been an Iraqi Muslim in a prior life, General Musharraf could have been a Hindu, Shiv Sena’s head could have been a Muslim, a man could have been a woman and vice versa, and so forth.
• Karma is always finite and its phala (consequence or fruit) cannot be infinite: Regardless of how bad Adam and Eve’s misdeed was it could not cause eternal phala, which is what Eternal Damnation is. Every karma is finite and its phala is finite, even if it lasts a million years.
• Phala cannot precede the karma: Karma theory states that first the karma has to occur and only then can its consequences occur. Effect (phala) never precedes cause (karma). But Jesus is said to have suffered (the phala) 2,000 years in advance of our birth today, and his suffering was to redeem our karma of today. This implies that Jesus suffered in advance of our karma, but phala in advance of the karma is impossible. The claim seems to be that Jesus established a sort of ‘phala bank’ and deposited infinite amount of phala in advance, and all those who accept his offer may neutralize all their karmas by drawing against this ‘phala bank’ account. This is simply impossible in karma theory. [10]

These points do not necessarily falsify Christianity but point out the deep incompatibilities between the two systems. This is merely an example of the kind of engagement that would have to take place before any sameness could be stipulated. During the centuries of darshana debates in India among various schools, the above arguments would have been put forth between Hindu and Christian theologians. It is not un-Indian to engage in such discourse.

The tragedy is that by the time Christianity was taken seriously in India, the support systems and resources needed to do an adequate purva-paksha had vanished. Because of colonialism, Christians started dominating the discourse. Hundreds of Christians institutions exist that study Hinduism seriously, and thousands of Christians study it. Yet, we have few if any Hindus and Hindu institutions that systematically study Christianity. This is a necessity before an adequate purva-pakshacan be done.

Meanwhile, we are left with nonsensical sameness talks by leaders who have failed to do an adequate purva-paksha of Christianity.

Time:

Biblical time is finite, with a specific beginning and an end. It is said to have begun a few thousand years ago only, and the End of Time is coming soon according to many mainstream denominations. [11] This finiteness of time boxes many Christians into haste, and eventually into terror that time is running out.

The peculiar combination of (i) Eternal Damnation (i.e. an infinite problem) and (ii) Finite Time has produced a state of desperation in Christian societies.

Every person is born into the infinite horror of Eternal Damnation, and the finiteness of time does not give enough opportunity to resolve this condition. Therefore, one must always be in a hurry and not waste time. The consequence of not getting saved is Eternity in Hell, and one simply cannot take any chances. This is why horrific images of Hell play a critical role in pressuring people to convert.

Reincarnation doctrine was banned in Christianity so as to raise this pressure, and this is especially effective as one becomes older. This is the one and only life that a person will ever have and Time is running out!

The reward offered to those who become members of this History-Centric belief is also infinite: Eternity in Heaven amidst God, along with one’s family, friends and other ‘good’ people. The price of failure is unimaginable, the reward is too good to miss out, and the effort is trivial as one merely has to admit that the Historical Grand Narrative is true – and one is in!

This turns dangerous when it becomes extroverted and fuels the centurion-like militaristic evangelism.

Western linear progression in history:

After the Enlightenment in Europe, the Biblical linear historical narrative from evil to good became replaced by the linear ‘progress’ narrative from primitive to modern. Here, modern has a specifically European meaning. This is why the teaching of world history and civilization in America is unable to incorporate more than a limited amount about ancient accomplishments, as these refute the linear history, especially when these accomplishments are from non-Western cultures.

The self:

The Biblical notion of the soul gives it an individual essence, which easily gets conflated with one’s Earthly identity in terms of gender, race, religion, and even Americans as having the unique Manifest Destiny. Hence, there are good souls and bad souls, with different places in the chain of being.

On the other hand, rebirth of the jiva-atman gives it experiences in living as different genders, races, cultures, levels of prosperity and so forth. This relativizes any Earthly identity formation as being only relevant for this one birth and not as one’s atman’s essence. [12]

Christ will return to restore all saved dead persons back to life, in their original bodies as of the time of their deaths. This helps the plastic surgery industry and also drives the fixing up of dead bodies prior to their burial: One must look forward to eternal life in this same body, and the specifics of the body’s race, gender, height, weight, age, etc., are therefore critical priorities.

This sense of having one’s physical body in heaven also encourages the youth industry and causes people to be in denial of aging. This is becoming a major factor in causing geriatric mental health problems, especially after the individual is forced to admit that aging has set and that s/he cannot fake youthfulness any longer.

Death and aging:

The ashrama system in Indian culture gives each life stage its own legitimacy and dignity, and its own dharma to follow. One is not measured by the norms of youth throughout one’s life. The aged are respected, and regard their condition as being normal. Being old is not seen as an abnormality that one must cure or fight or be in denial of.

This respectful aging has enabled older people in traditional Indian societies to remain integrated in multigenerational families, until recent mimicry of Western lifestyles led to dislocated aging – ironically, the result of ‘progress’.

The Bible’s trauma of dealing with death and aging causes senility. The obsessive youth culture is the result of this fear of aging. It has been said that the West has a two-ashrama system: juvenile and senile. People invest heavily to remain young for as long as they can, forcing themselves into artificial extremes just to live up to the image. This is juvenile behavior, and it is out of the dread of eventually turning old and senile, and having a fearful death.

Property, privilege and entitlement:

In the Bible, God gives man ownership of all animals and nature, for man’s own pleasure.

To support the plunder of other peoples, this supremacy was extended by Church theologians to argue in favor of the slavery of blacks and the genocide of millions of Native Americans, on the basis that they were heathens, i.e., not Christians. It was argued that the men who were given ownership of the bounty of nature were Biblical men and not the heathens.

Later, when these non-whites were converted into Christianity, this argument was replaced by a different approach to supremacy, namely, that the people of color were ‘unfit to self-govern’. Therefore, it was declared the duty of Anglo-Saxon Christians to rule over others in the best interest of the others. Many criteria for ‘fitness to self-govern’ were established, including ‘moral values’, ‘rationality’, and so forth. Data was gathered to prove that non-whites lacked these qualities.

By the early 1800s America, this had evolved into the well-known doctrine called Manifest Destiny, which was the basis for the conquest of new territory (such as Texas) from Mexico, along with the territorial expansion Westwards by conquering the Native Americans. This doctrine explicitly gave white Americans the right to ‘civilize’ others by whatever means they considered appropriate, and to take over their lands, property and cultures.

In British India, the argument of ‘fitness to self-govern’ was very explicitly used to remove various native rajas and install the East India Company’s governance. A prominent example was the removal of the Queen of Jhansi (who had led the war of independence against the British) on the basis that she was an ‘immoral person’ and that this made her ‘unfit to rule’. The phrase ‘regime change’ that is so common in the media today was used in the 19th century by the British to force their rule upon Indians – argued on the basis that they brought ‘freedom’ and better ‘human rights’ than the local Kshatriya rulers.

Scholars in Whiteness Studies have developed a notion called ‘white privilege’, which refers to institutionalized and deeply rooted cultural privileges that whites enjoy, even when a given white individual is free from racial prejudices. Nowadays, the term has been replaced with ‘American privileges’, and refers to the superior rights and entitlements that Americans must enjoy in the world over and above other peoples.

The Bush Doctrine of spreading freedom and human rights has been called today’s version of Manifest Destiny. It presupposes that America must impose its own social and political principles on others, in the others’ best interests.

Any perceived threat to the status quo of privileges and entitlements that Westerners take for granted is sufficient provocation to trigger the revival of Christian fundamentalism. Post-9/11 is seeing the rise of this fundamentalism from its latent state.

One of the entitlements claimed by the West is in the field of knowledge production and dissemination, and this may be called epistemic privilege. This includes the right to select the topics for inquiry, the way issues are framed, who is qualified and certified as a scholar, the theories that are available to be applied, and so forth.

Individuals like me, who criticize the system, are deemed to be ‘attacking’ the scholars and the scholars are depicted as ‘victims’. This diverts attention away from the real issues of substance that are being contested. Naturally, many Indians have joined such a system of privilege and protection, and have thereby earned the title, ‘sepoys’.

Institutional authority:

The Church’s institutional authority over all men lasted for centuries, and similar theocracies existed in the case of Islam. (In fact, the serious study Islam entails in large part a study of Islamic Law.) This does not have a parallel in Hinduism, where the raja was supposed to protect the diverse dharmas of every person and not impose his own personal dharma upon others.

The Christian and Islamic concept of enforcement of religious laws on people is different from the principle of voluntary dharmic compliance. The Gita is not a book of rules that any authority is supposed to enforce, nor was it ever the ‘law’. It does not even say, “Thou shalt do this and not that...” It explains how the system of karmaoperates and what the consequences of various choices are on the individual choice maker. The individual remains with the freedom of choice and the knowledge of possible karmic consequences governed by the cosmos and not by human authorities/institutions. It is a description of natural rta/dharma, and not man-made laws.[13]

This is why Indian gays/lesbians do not need to have a parade in Delhi to ‘fight for rights’ (like the parades in major US cities), because no authority took away these rights from them in the first place.

Even the much maligned Manusmriti was never enforced as the law of the land, except under the British rule when it was enforced to prove that the colonizers were ruling in accordance with ‘Hindu Law’, a canon they constructed with the help of local pundits hired for the purpose.

A primary difference between Indian and Western approaches to institutional authority is that the living gurus are given a high status by Hindus, whereas institutions occupy the preeminent status in Abrahamic religions. (This is why Hindu gurus have now become a prime target of demonology, because Christian strategists realize that no destruction of physical temples or texts or institutions will erase Hinduism as long as its new gurus continue to appear and enjoy large popular followings.)

The institutionalization in Biblical societies has also brought about a culture of conformity with other members. Canonized knowledge leads to normative thinking and social standard for everyone to emulate.

Conformity is also the seed of social competition. Such a society is more vulnerable to advertisement driven consumerism.

Can sameness be one-sided?

If X is the same as Y, then Y must also be the same as X. [14] This gives us a reliable method to empirically test the sameness hypothesis in the real world.

How many Christian denominations would be willing to hold Vishnu worship ceremonies in their church? Besides a few relatively small denominations such as the Unitarians (who in combination have less than 10% share of the US Christian population), almost all mainstream denominations reject such proposals outright. Try launching a sameness program with leaders of Mormons, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Pentecostals, etc. To be genuinely the same, Hinduism would have to be given equal and explicit treatment inside their congregation, and not in special meetings for PR purposes.

Would the US government print currency in which ‘In God we trust’ is replaced by ‘In Shiva we trust’ or ‘In Allah we trust’?

Only after one tests the hypothesis in the real world (which is different than the academic cocoons and staged ‘interfaith dialogs’) could one begin to understand the sameness hoax that Hindus have been sold.

The role of Hindu leaders:

After India’s independence, the leaders betrayed Gandhi’s vision to re-imagine India in a manner that would respect India’s culture, and which he felt lived in its villages. Instead, they filled the Englishman’s shoes and became the brown sahibs ruling over Indians, using most of the same structures and ideas that the departed British left behind. This is ironic because Gandhi had emphasized that he did not oppose the English people, and merely opposed their English ways. The vacuum left by the British was a tremendous bonanza for Anglicized Indians. They preserved the English ways and replaced the English people.

In this milieu, Hindu gurus had few prospects within India and went to the US to teach. There, a thirsty audience awaited them. But unfortunately, they got trapped by their own instant marketing success. The gurus and/or their Western followers mapped Indic categories to Western categories, so as to gain quick legitimacy. This mimicry appealed to the Western followers, who could have their cake and eat it too, i.e., they could remain embedded in their Biblical identities and/or ‘secular Western’ chauvinist equivalents and yet gain the benefits of Indic traditions. In effect, Hindu gurus facilitated U-Turns.

Hindu leaders also betrayed their own darshana traditions in which they are required to do purva-paksha of other worldviews. This means a genuine, authentic and deep understanding of the prevalent worldviews must be developed in such a profound manner that a scholar from that other tradition would acknowledge it as being a true representation of their position. [15]

While in the past, the purva-paksha opponents were typically Buddhists, Vedantins, Jaina, Mimamsikas, and various others in India, today’s globalized purva-pakshahas to be of Christianity, Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment, as these are the three major strands out of which Western worldviews are built.

False information is more dangerous than acknowledgment of one’s ignorance. Most Hindu leaders naively equate Christianity with Catholicism, US Christianity with European Christianity, and see all Christian denominations as being the ‘same’. They lack any purva-paksha about Christian Liberation Theology, Inculturationstrategies, constructive theologies, Christian Zionism, and so forth. When they gleefully quote that church attendance is down in the US, they fail to consider that home based Christian prayer groups have replaced church going in many communities across America, and such groups now represent a major component of fundamentalist Christianity.

Furthermore, they simply lump all ‘secularists’ and ‘leftists’ as the ‘same’, because they are untrained in Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment theories. Yet individuals (including Indians) who are grounded in these Western theories drive global culture, human rights, law, business codes, property rights, literature and media. This means that Hindu leaders are simply obsolete.

At the same time, one comes across many Hindu scholars who are chasing useless and chauvinistic bandwagons that are disconnected from today’s relevant issues. For instance, they seem to be obsessed with ‘proving’ the age of the Mahabharata or geographically locating the Vedas, as if any Hindus were converting because the Mahabharata is not proven to be old enough! They are like ostriches with their heads stuck inside the temple, ashrama and/or political arena, while the globalized world has already passed them by. [16]

Being so isolated and inbred, these Hindu leaders failed to develop any effective ‘home team’ to represent Hinduism in the important global debates today. They have alienated themselves from large communities of intellectual Indian youth and have lost the enormous cultural capital that once existed amongst the white Americans practicing yoga/meditation, who number 20 million.

Dangers of the Sameness Myth:

The Myth of Hindu Sameness is leading to the dissolution of Hinduism. Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras are being clicked-and dragged into becoming footnotes to the Gospel of John or some other system of Western thought.

The Hindu Goddess became the subject of very serious and intense study by many white women in the 1970s when they revolted against the male centric Abrahamic religions. Today, the Hindu Goddess is often used to enhance the historical narrative of Mother Mary or to reinterpret European Goddesses such as Sophia, Diana, etc. Furthermore, Gloria Steinem, one of the pioneers of the women’s liberation movement in the US, spent two years in India in the 1960s, and after her return to the US she helped to launch the feminist movement. She writes in her autobiography that it was her experiences with women’s empowerment groups in India that inspired her later work in the US.

Yet, Western scholars and their Indian chelas have started to demonize the Hindu Goddess as vulgar, as a symbol of sexual oppression of Hindu women, and as a cause of violence by upper castes.

There is a long list of Hindu items being appropriated as Western ornaments to be preserved, modified, celebrated and used by the new owners. The source traditions are seldom acknowledged, and, instead, are burdened with negative images and liabilities to encourage their demise.

This kind of sameness perpetuates the colonial inferiority complexes, while feeding the cultural and political capital of the dominant culture. The burden to be same is upon the underdog culture in terms of power, i.e., it is Hindus who must prove their sameness to the dominant culture, and not vice versa, because it is the neo-Hindus who uphold sameness and not the other religions. The sameness is therefore on the terms of the dominant West. The West determines how authentic one’s mimicry is and which Indians get legitimized to various extents through awards, certificates and brand value given to them. We are only as legitimate as we are similar to them, and they control the judgment on how well we are accomplishing this goal.

Ironically, one of the most common reasons given by Hindu youths to their parents when they convert to another religion is, “You taught us that all religions are the same, so how does it matter?” It would be okay if the parents and Hindu leaders would simply accept this fine logic and not be concerned. But they are concerned and do get angry. Yet, it has not occurred to the leaders that their own sameness myths have caused the very problems, which they are fighting.

Many Christian institutions and scholars do not practice sameness internally, but deploy it externally with non-Christians as a rhetorical ethics, i.e., as an ethics that is not meant to be implemented but is a public relations projection. Hindus are encouraged towards sameness with the strategic goal to (i) confuse them about identity, (ii) dilute their interest in seriously studying their own traditions, and (ii) bring Christian ideas into their lives in a Hindu-friendly manner, and gradually move them deeper into Christian fundamentalism.

IV: Constructive Hinduism

The foregoing discussion leads to the following question: Can there be a positive Hindu identity and universals that are neither History-Centric nor a library of shareware for ‘generic’ spirituality? This section suggests projects that might help accomplish this. It is merely a preliminary list at this stage.

Develop History-Centrism vs. Ahistoricity as a theoretical framework:

History-Centrism is the cause of religious violence. Religious difference is not the cause of violence if it is difference-with-respect. This is a key entry point for discussing what Hinduism has to offer to the world today.

Religious freedom has become a major geopolitical initiative of the United States, as a sort of Manifest Destiny to intervene in other countries that get listed as being in violation, especially against Christians. The meaning of religious freedom must be debated in my proposed new framework: I posit that true religious freedom is freedom from History-Centrism. Evangelism towards any History-Centric religion reduces the freedom in the world because it boxes people into historical clashes. Therefore, the freedom to convert others into History-Centrism leads to loss of religious freedom from History-Centrism. (Analogy: Freedom to promote slavery would result in the loss of freedom of the slaves; hence this ‘freedom’ in not genuine.)

A sustained dialog must begin between Indic deconstruction theories and Postmodernism, in order to better understand areas of overlap and differences.

Develop antidotes to the Sameness Myth:

Expose the blunder of thinking that the equality of religions’ rights implies their sameness. (Analog: Men and women have equal rights, but men and women are not the same.) Show Hinduism’s principle of equality-with-difference:

• Multiple worldviews, practices, paths, images and cultures, with intellectual engagement to reconcile contradictions. In the end, no narrative is privileged to eradicate others, because these are not History-Centric.
• Spirituality which does not depend upon proselytizing can respect (not just ‘tolerate’) others’ faiths.
• Change without need for discontinuity.

Develop purva-paksha of other worldviews using various Indian siddhantas. European, Western, White, etc., identities were constructed via study and construction of others, and the Constructive Hinduism Project must engage in similar theorizing of others while being true to the Indian darshana tradition of honest debate.

The constant critique of others, including their History-Centrism, immunizes Hinduism from sameness. Point out how the mimicry of Whiteness creates the pressure for sameness among Indians. Whiteness Studies help decenter Whiteness and show Western thought to be relative and not universal. This makes elitist (Whitened) Indians self conscious of their inauthenticity, reducing their rate of multiplication into the next generation of students.

Sanskrit non-translatables must be explained in considerable detail, and the common translations should be problematized. These are the most robust and sustainable long-term anchors to preserve the authenticity and distinctiveness of Indic traditions.

Refute radical difference:

The opposite of sameness is radical difference, which means that Hinduism is so different that it cannot possibly make any sense to the West. A consequence of radical difference (sometimes referred to as radical relativism, as in the case of Richard Rorty), is that the study of Hinduism can only be positioned as a study of the South Asian exotic folks – in the same category as their monsoon and snakes.

Both sameness and radical difference are the result of on-going U-Turns. These distill Hinduism into two kinds of components:

Things that are deemed valuable for appropriation into the dominant culture are processed into generic sameness as an intermediate stage, pending being re-contextualized as ‘Western’. These are eventually removed out of Hinduism, and the traces of appropriation are erased.

The residue consists of things that are considered ‘undesirable’ by the dominant culture’s values at a given time, although these determinations are subject to future revision. These aspects are demonized and otherized. A polite version of this is to exoticize Hinduism as a property of the ‘South Asian’ geography.

The result is that Hinduism’s claims of a universalism that rivals the West are denied. In fact, attempts to position Hinduism as a world religion invite insults from those who see this as Hindutva Nationalism and who dismiss without consideration its merits as a competitor to Western worldviews.

This Myth of Radical Otherness is used to protect American culture from equivalent scrutiny and blame as others are normally subject to:

• It prevents India’s dowry murders from being treated at par with American spousal killings (which are done for collecting insurance policies, the Western form of spousal wealth).
• While Islamic Fundamentalism and Hindutva Fundamentalism are fiercely studied and blamed for any and every crime in those respective societies, Christian Fundamentalism is not explicitly named with equal intensity or frequency, and nor is it used in the mainstream media as the frame to interpret Abu Ghraib, the Oklahoma City bomber, the inner city crime, hate crimes and racism, etc.
• Ethnic cleansing is not something that Western societies could possibly be accused of because the very category applies to less civilized peoples.
• American caste is denied because the category is only applied to South Asia.

However, the massive amounts of appropriations in the past to build ‘Western’ civilization prove that when it suits the West’s self interest it has no difficulty to understand others. For example:

• Mathematics, metallurgy, linguistics, grammar, transcendentalism, and numerous other imports would have been impossible if Indian culture had been so radically different as to be incomprehensible to the West.
• Chinese paper, printing, silk, gunpowder, etc., were understood and made a part of Western society without any difficulty.
• Economic wealth expropriation from colonial India and the importation of manufactured goods from China and India for centuries demonstrate that the West had little difficulty in understanding what those cultures had to offer.
• Native Americans gave Europeans the gift of potatoes without which a huge portion of Europe’s population would have starved in the 18th century. They also gave Europeans tomatoes without which it would have been impossible to evolve Italian cuisine. Europeans had little difficulty in understanding the value of looting their gold and land, without which they would not have gone from rags to riches so suddenly.

This is why the rediscovery and proper documentation and dissemination of the West’s unacknowledged debts to others is an important academic project, because this would demolish the Myth of Radical Otherness.

Some years ago, the huge Cathedral in Mexico City was found to have been built by the European conquerors on top of a Mayan temple (which can now be visited under the basement). This and numerous other examples illustrate how the Myth of Radical Otherness has been a strategy of arson: plunder and destroy the source.

Challenge the resistance to Constructive Hinduism:

Study the history of Constructive Christian Theology to point out its series of reconstructions over many centuries.

Study Hinduism’s history of constructions to show that this is nothing new, nor is it a violation of any canonized or frozen tradition. In fact, constructive theology is truer to the spirit of changing smritis of Hinduism than it is to Christianity’s canonized History-Centrism.

Refute the scholarship that negates Hinduism as a world religion. The typical arguments used against the legitimacy of Hinduism include the following:

• Because the name ‘Hindu’ is of non-Hindu (foreign) origin, therefore the tradition being named is deemed to also be a foreign derivative.
• Constructions during Islamic or British influence are assumed to be inauthentic Hinduism.
• Any and all Constructive Hinduism done today has to be a ‘right wing chauvinistic clean up’ of Hinduism. (One must separate out History-Centric Constructive Hinduism to refute this.)

Refute the ‘frozen in time’ glorification of ‘eternal India’, essentialized as ‘mystical’ contrasted against ‘rationality’ – now internalized by too many Hindus. (In the doctrine of white people’s Manifest Destiny, one of the criteria for declaring others to be ‘unfit to self-govern’ was ‘irrationality’. Furthermore, ‘mysticism’ in Western history has occupied a less honorable place than in India, and is seen as a pre-rational or child-like stage of mental evolution.) This project entails separating shrutifrom socio-political smriti, and refuting the highly exaggerated (mis)use of Manusmriti as being the ‘code’ of Hindu culture.

Explore innovative solutions for today based on Indic traditions:

The Hindu ashrama system of four life stages, each with its own norms for dignity and its own dharma, provides many resources for socioeconomic and mental health applications. This can be developed into theoretical frameworks for managing aging with dignity, and managing the fear of death and ‘running-out-of-time’ anxieties that haunt Westerners.

The world population is expected to reach 9 billion by mid century, and the Western lifestyle has been sold successfully as the global standard of expectation and legitimacy.

• But this is unachievable on the global scale as is now being demanded, because: (i) enough natural resources do not exist, (ii) enough capital does not exist, and (iii) the labor competition from poorer economies will be intolerable in the rich societies especially given their chauvinistic upbringing based on entitlements and privileges as their birthright and ‘destiny’. Hence, there is the serious threat of a cataclysmic systemic collapse.
• The Hindu sadhu paradigm offers an alternate lifestyle that is not dependent on obsessive levels of consumerism. It is an established tradition of dignified and voluntary poverty, which is not seen by the individual as a ‘problem’ waiting to be solved.
• How might the infrastructure and resource demands be alleviated if a certain portion of population (such as many of the aged) were to opt for such alternative lifestyles? How might honoring these alternatives serve as role models to reduce the obsessive consumerism of others?

The effectiveness of Hindu dana and Christian charity must be compared using quantitative methods. The sums spent must be seen in light of the tangible results produced, so that the efficiencies in the use of funds may be compared. Much has been written about Christian charity in India, but these accounts fail to consider the huge funds available to Christian charities. Comparisons must also include the value of real estate owned by the churches and affiliated institutions in India. (The church is said to be the largest non governmental land owner in India.)

• It is my hypothesis that Christian charities spend far more for producing a given level of charitable benefit to society than their Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim counterparts. The wastage is partly due to monies diverted for proselytizing, partly for PR to impress, but also for corruption.
• The Vatican’s refusal to provide accounting for the billions of dollars raised by Mother Teresa’s organization worldwide and allegation about misuse of funds is an example of this point.)
• The value of New York City real estate that is occupied by various cemeteries is estimated to be in the tens of billions of dollars – enough to feed/clothe all the homeless of America’s East Coast in perpetuity! Should burials be contrasted with cremations as issues concerning ecology, poverty alleviation and other human rights factors?
• Such an analysis would enable NGOs and donors to learn from Hindu approaches that may be applicable in other third world countries.

Hinduism’s adhyatmika technologies for embodied knowing could be applied as antidotes against a variety of body alienations and counter productive body fetishes: plastic surgery, anorexia, sexual orientation dogmas, mental health, addictions…

The jati structure (as distinct from caste) must be seen in light of growing multiculturalism in Western societies, a trend which is inevitable with globalization. Jatisprovided identity-with-mutual-respect, giving both a sense of internal coherence and belonging and without the theological imperative to conquer others or make them the ‘same’. (Wars have existed in non-Monotheistic societies, but usually not driven by religious mandates.)

Freedom from History-Centrism is a solution to the clash of civilizations. Denial of this clash by the left is merely an evasion of the deep-rooted problems caused byHistory-Centrism. Hinduism offers spirituality (which Communism admits it cannot eradicate), yet in a manner that is free from History.

Refute common presuppositions in many disciplines:

Hinduism has been disassembled into parts that are taken in isolation and reduced to prepackaged conclusions, which are then blindly applied in various humanities disciplines and mass culture. At each stage of this pipeline of misinformation, the conclusions from prior stages are simply assumed without enough critical examination.

For example, as per Prof. Paranjape (English Department, JNU), it is now the trend in English Departments everywhere to apply a few standard frames in examining Indian texts, movies, art, history, society, etc. These frames are as follows:

• Caste oppression
• Religious minorities’ oppression
• Women’s oppression
• Indian Nationalism as oppression

Meanwhile, positive aspects of Hindu culture are omitted, including: yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, ecological theologies, history of Indian science/technology, history of Indian economy prior to colonial disruption, etc. Because these themes would demolish the negative stereotypes, students are discouraged from pursuing them on the basis that they are not the ‘real’ Hinduism, i.e. they are not Hinduphobic. Those who persist in pursuing these topics are attacked as ‘chauvinistic’, ‘killers of Muslims’, ‘rapists’ and ‘fascists’, and other demonology that has become standard weaponry.

Therefore, literary and critical theories are taught with the specific goal to make students apply a given tool box of theories and derive the predefined negative set of conclusions about Indian culture. This is done in literary analysis, cultural studies, political science, sociology, etc.

One who is able to prove his/her competence at using the ‘theories’ imported from the West to reach one or more of the standard set of established stereotypes is advanced forward as a ‘scholar’. The better the style and more unusual the data the more useful the person is considered to be.

This has turned a whole generation of Indian writers into ‘hunters’ looking for specific demons in Indian culture. It reminds one of the recent US hunt for WMDs in Iraq: The goal is predetermined, and any means may be used to reach that conclusion. Huge rewards await those who assert claims in support of the agenda. The result is to install deep Hinduphobia in young minds in college. Many become coolies or sepoys doing the dirty work of empire building while being led to believe that they are spreading Indians’ “progress.”

In conclusion, the Constructive Hinduism Project should also engage various other disciplines and cannot be isolated to Religious Studies.

[1]Neo-Hinduism is the Western influenced watered down version that is pop Hinduism today.

[2]Perennialism must be differentiated from New Age, but the former led to the latter because of dilution of rigor and under pop demands. F. Schuon, a pioneer of Perennialism, does not speak about equality or identity between traditional forms but about a transcendental unity. Also, Guenon agrees with me that Abrahamic religions necessarily limit their exotericism by their theological and moral views, while Hinduism does not. Perennialists were also severe critics of New Age: Guenon was one of the first scholars to offer a radical critique of theosophy, of Vivekananda’s neo-Hinduism, and of theories by Paul Lecour, a pioneer of New Age. (In ‘Theosophy, History of a pseudo-religion‘ and in his ‘General Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines‘, he highlights the mistakes made by Westerners on Hinduism). Nevertheless, I locate all these on the same spectrum of (mis) appropriation from Hinduism: Some did it more sincerely and authentically than others, but in the long run they fed off of each other and the result has been disastrous for the Hindu psyche. Westerners’ harm was much less than that caused by Hindu leaders’ own internalizing of Western mappings in the spirit of sameness.

[3]Not all gurus slipped into this trap. Prabhupada, Swami Chinmayananda, Swami Dayananda Saraswati, and many others remained authentic. On the other hand, Self Realization Fellowship and Sri Sri Ravi Shankar are examples of those who are promoting genericized spirituality that plays to the new age market. Ramakrishna Mission and Chinmaya Mission are examples where the founders were authentic, but which subsequently diluted their authenticity by resorting to the sameness syndrome for the sake of PR, political correctness, and possibly out of fear of being different than the dominant culture. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi remained true to Vedas as being distinct, despite the fact that he lost the majority of his white followers to U-Turns once it became clear to them that his generic TM program was only an introduction to deeper Vedic teachings. Yogi Amrit Desai, who trained the largest number of white yoga teachers in the US over a period of 30 years, avoided dilution, but he was dismissed by his institution’s trustees over alleged ‘sexual misconduct’, and the new Western owners have drifted away from Hinduism.

[4] Many Western liberals/leftists do detest the classical Western heritage. They have waged a long-term and concerted attack against the Western literary canon. They often portray the West’s great historical thinkers as ‘dead white guys’, ridicule and attack their own Judeo-Christian past (which is then, unfortunately, extended to all other religions, and ‘religion’ itself), etc. Many of the leftist intellectuals who have dominated American academia clearly have an ideologically driven crypto-Marxist agenda. What is ‘good’ in their eyes isn’t necessarily what is explicitly Western, but what represents the ‘oppressed’, the ‘disenfranchised’, the ‘lower’ class, race, religion, gender, ethnic group, language, etc., in any given perceived (on their part) antithetical social-cultural coupling. Yet, their theories often embed deep and invisible Biblical epistemologies, and, furthermore, they have failed in impacting the West’s own mainstream power structure while having colonized India’s empowered intellectuals because of the latter’s vulnerability to mimic. The Manifest Destiny doctrine of 19th century America expressed white supremacy in terms of ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, and ‘fitness to self-govern’. Ironically, today’s leftist activism has inadvertently played into the hands of the reincarnated Manifest Destiny in the form of the Bush Worldview.

[5]‘Constructive Christianity’ has been a project to protect the core idea of a unique historical revelation. Hence, it is a system of Christian apology of finding ways to incorporate new facts (using science and/or U-Turns from other plundered traditions) while pretending that it is all from the single original source (which can be made to say anything). Hinduism does not need that kind of construction because it does not have that kind of History-Centric problem to begin with. What it needs is expressions of the Truth gained from the adhyatmika experience for contemporary times, as well as new sociopolitical smritis for today. This is precisely what people like Aurobindo and others were up to. ‘Constructions’ without adhyatmika experience is what many Hindutva politicians have been doing.

[6] In Hinduism, the importance of (i) tradition (agama-pramana), (ii) lines of succession (sampradaya-parampara), and (iii) the sacredness of places (tirthas) due to sacred occurrences that happened there, are all important in preserving the teachings of Dharma. However, the subtle but critical point is that if all the above were lost one would still have the Truth revealed inwardly via yoga and meditation. Abrahamic religions are history-dependent, whereas Hinduism merely uses the examples of concrete instances of Truth revealed in what we call history as guides and tools for personal self-realization. Thus, Hinduism is not history-dependent.

[7]Evangelical Christians, despite being the dominant American theological and political force, do not speak for the esoteric strands that are not History-Centric. Esoteric interpreters of the Bible map Indic Adhyatma-vidya on to Platonic metaphysics and consider the events of Sacred history and the Prophets as contingent manifestations of eternal Principles such as Logos. The esoteric interpretation of the Bible does not speak of the Original Sin as a sexual act between Adam and Eve. The symbol of the Tree (of knowledge) evokes rather an orientation of the will towards the world and duality, a subversion of the sprit by the soul. The Revelation and eschatological events are events in the Soul that any being on the spiritual path is potentially able to turn into an inner reality. The Perennialists would say that history-centrism is the result of the intellectual limitations of fundamentalist Evangelists. However, the Christianity that is ‘on the ground’ that Hindus must deal with, both in the form of proselytizers playing havoc in India and in the form of the geopolitical projection of Manifest Destiny, is not what Ivy League professors and their followers would like us to imagine.

[8]A Sufi academic scholar wrote to me the following in defense of her tradition (paraphrased by me): “There were numerous debates in ancient Islam about the status of the Koran. It is absolutely necessary to distinguish between the ‘Mother of the Book’ and the physical Koran which cannot seriously be considered eternal or of non-human origin. The Sufi tradition distinguishes between the earthly Kaaba and the celestial one. Islamic History-Centrism is the result of degeneration of its traditional intellectuality and of the development of politicized schools of theology. The present situation only reflects the views that prevailed for political reasons.” My response to her was that Sufis represent around 1% or so of the worldwide Muslim population and that Islam as experienced popularly is best understood based on what is preached in the Mosque on Fridays and not what a few elitist intellectuals would like to project it to be externally.

[9]Antonio deNicolas explains the difference as follows: “The Abrahamic religions base themselves on the discontinuous, while Hinduism bases itself on the continuous. Discontinuous based religions believe in a God that is unique, comes from the outside, and dictates eternal laws. The continuous religions make a God or gods as they practice internally the discipline of will development for decision making as the paradigm of the gods (different brain centers) demand according to the dharma in front of the individual. The discontinuous religions base their practice on the left brain, theoretical, conceptual descriptions of the path they want to follow and as convenient. The continuous religions base their practice on memory, imagination, and experience using the conceptual, theoretical left brain only as an instrument of translation. The discontinuous religions are imperialistic because one brain dominates all others, while the continuous religions base their practice on the ability to modulate all the brains and find a harmony leading to moksha.”

10i] Using the modern language of trusts, one may say that (i) Jesus established the Trust by contributing his suffering; (ii) the Church (long after Jesus’ death) claimed the role of Trustee in perpetuity; (iii) the Beneficiaries are all those who join the History-Centric Grand Narrative; and (iv) the Distributions from the Trust to the Beneficiaries are Redemption from all their Sins. According to the Biblical Apocalypse, all Beneficiaries thus Saved are scheduled to be flown to Heaven and live there in Eternity. All those remaining will be massacred by Jesus personally when he returns at the End of Time which is just around the corner.

[11]It is claimed to have been ‘coming soon’ for 1900 years based on the Book of Revelation in the Bible.

[12]The Christian (especially Thomist) idea is that people have a soul like the property of a person. This soul is a metaphysical appendage of the person similar to the physical appendage of a spleen or a lung. Thus, a soul can be lost, sold or injured. This is a radically different notion from that of atman.

[13]Hindu scripture – both shruti and smriti – is also packed with ethical norms, laws, proscriptions and prescriptions. The Bhagavad Gita is full of descriptions of right and wrong behavior; the Yoga-Sutras of Patanjali outline the yamas and niyamas, etc., etc. While it is true that the Manusmriti was not the ‘law of the land’ in Hindu India previous to the British Raj, the overall genre of the dharma-shastras were, nonetheless, always important guides for Indian/Hindu governance generally. The difference between the Abrahamic versus the Indic view of religiously acceptable behavior is that the former is a morality-based system in an ethnically parochial and sectarian morality sense (thus kosher laws, for example); i.e., a morality that is externally imposed. The latter is more of an ethically based system (internally cultivated) and focuses on the cultivation of inner virtues and excellences, somewhat akin to both Platonic and Aristotelian ethics. This has to do with the absence of yoga in Abrahamic religions, at least as a central feature of spiritual advancement (i.e. lack of adhyatmika) and the over-emphasis placed upon affirmation of faith in History.

[14]Plus for X and Y to be interchangeably equated means that they must necessarily be the same in every respect.

[15] Serious purva-paksha analysis died with the birth of neo-Hinduism. Hindu philosophy declined from serious and systematic critiquing of other systems to then merely serving as a pseudo-intellectual tool.

[16] While these are important issues in their own right, they have caused Hindus to get stuck in the minutia while forgetting the larger, more important, picture.

Published: November 2004

In my recent book, Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism(2011, HarperCollins India), I’ve discussed how a constant striving for balance and equilibrium between the forces of “chaos” and “order” (rather than the complete annihilation of chaos) permeates Indian philosophy, art, cuisine, music and erotica, distinguishes Indian culture from its Western counterpart and avoids the absolutism of Western sacred literature that views the two poles locked in a zero-sum battle in which only order may triumph. This perpetual reordering, fundamental to Indian culture and religion, has privileged dynamism and creativity, and yielded the diversity evident in Indian life and cultural artifacts.

The difference in attitudes toward order and chaos is one of the chief differences discussed at length in the book. It is worth considering why the Indian religious imagination so unequivocally embraced the notion of diversity and multiplicity while others have not to a similar extent. Since all civilizations have tried to answer such existential questions as who we are, why we are here, what the nature of the Divine and the cosmos are etc., why are some Indian answers so markedly different from the Abrahamic ones?

Sri Aurobindo offers us a clue. In Dharmic traditions, unity is grounded in a sense of the Integral One, and there can be immense multiplicity without fear of “collapse into disintegration and chaos”. He suggests that the “forest” with the “richness and luxuriance of its vegetation” is both an inspiration and metaphor for India’s spiritual outlook. A quick look at world cultures and civilizations reveals how profoundly the geography and the human response to it affected those cultures. So it may well be that the physical features and characteristics of the subcontinent, once lush with tropical forests, also contributed to its deepest spiritual values (in contrast to those that were born, as the Abrahamic religions are, in the milieu of the desert).

The forest has always been a symbol of beneficence in India – a refuge from the heat, and abundant enough to support a life of contemplation without the worries of survival when worldly ties had to be severed for the pursuit of spiritual goals. (The penultimate stage of life advocated for individuals in Dharma traditions is called “vanaprastha” or “the forest stage of life”). Forests support thousands of species that survive interdependently and contain complex life and biology that changes and grows organically. Forest creatures are adaptive; they mutate and fuse into new forms easily. The forest loves to play host; newer life forms migrate to it and are rehabilitated as natives. Forests are ever evolving, their dance never final or complete.

Indian thought, analogously, favors plurality, adaptation, interdependence and evolution. Diversity is natural, normal and desirable, an expression in fact of God’s immanence. Just as there are virtually unlimited species and processes in the forest, so there are infinite ways of Dharmic practice including communicating with God. The plethora of scriptures, rituals, deities, festivals and traditions are not seen as “chaos” but harmoniously interwoven, reconfiguring themselves quite organically as time and place dictate.  Life-giving forests and nature are not intended for man’s “dominion” (as they are in the Abrahamic religions) but are part of the same cosmic family as man. Sri Aurobindo emphasizes this natural predisposition to pluralism in the Indian mind where “the Infinite must always present itself in an endless variety of aspects” and contrasts this to the religious mindset of the West which has privileged the “idea of a single religion for all mankind […], one set of dogmas, one cult, one system of  ceremonies, one array of prohibitions and injunctions, one ecclesiastical ordinance”.

In Being Different, I posit that just as forests may have inspired and shaped Dharmic thinking, so too have deserts, the dominant landscape of the Middle-East where the Abrahamic faiths arose, left their imprint on the ethos of those faiths.  Deserts can be hostile places and are not places to easily dwell in permanently, or to marvel at the diversity of life. The vast emptiness and unique beauty of a desert does instill awe and humility, but also fear. Deserts generally connote starkness, a paucity of life, harsh environs and danger. The desert has fewer types of life and less multiplicity in general. Desert dwellers look to overcome their harsh circumstances by turning to a God above. The Abrahamic religious ethos is built on this sense of awe and fear. Nature is not supportive but profoundly threatening  – an enemy to be tamed, civilized and controlled. The divine is less a nurturing mother than an austere and oftentimes angry father.  The desert, like its climate, seems to lend itself to extremes of religious experience. God rescues man by offering strict and immutable do’s and don’ts – the Ten Commandments. For their obedience, He confers grace and mercy on men but expects the deepest repentance and atonement. Those who disobey get punished in draconian ways, and there is only one life in which to prove oneself with no second chance through reincarnation.

Geography however, is only one contributor to the differences between Indian and Western thought. In my next blog, I will discuss how attitudes toward history further differentiate India from the West.

Published: March 7, 2012

My book’s emphasis on difference is mainly about differences in axioms, truth-claims and philosophies. The purpose is to demonstrate that all truth-claims are not the same, and the intent is not to establish the superiority or inferiority of any. Some post-modernists do find all truth-claims to be essentialism, including all scientific claims; however, that is such an extreme view that I shall not bother to address it. My response here is to another kind of charge of essentialism – i.e. the use of terms like West, India, Dharma, Christian.

‍Because I seek to undermine the notion of a coherent “West”, I need to use the categories in which Western discourse has developed since Hegel’s time, especially since these categories became crystallized in academe, public square, law and politics. I may be accused of using broad definitions, generalizations and extreme contrasts, but we are forced to these categories because the prevailing discourse is defined in terms of them.

‍When I speak of “the West” vs. “India,” or the “Judeo-Christian religions” vs. the ”dharma traditions,” I am well aware that I may be indulging in the kind of essentialism that postmodern thinkers have correctly challenged. I am also aware that every one of these large categories includes multiple traditions which are separate and often opposed. I view these terms as family resemblances and guides, not as reified or immutable entities – I am conscious of choosing Abrahamic or Judeo-Christian or Christian or Catholic, for instance. Furthermore, most people do understand such popular categories as pointing to actual entities with distinct spiritual and cosmological orientations, even if they can only be defined only approximately. The terms can thus be used as entry points for debate and as foils to contrast both sides, which may help deepen our understanding. They are alive in the public discourse – a simple search of any of these terms will produce tens of millions of hits, hence it is hardly essentialism to use them.

Approximate definitions

‍“The West” is used in this book to refer to the cultures and civilizations stemming from a rather forced fusion of the biblical traditions of ancient Israel and the classical ones of Greece and Rome. My focus here is on American history and culture, because they are most exemplary of the Western identity today. I investigate European history primarily to uncover the roots of the West’s self-understanding and approach to India, and I give special attention to the role of Germany in shaping the Western approach to dharma. “India” here refers both to the modern nation and to the civilization from which it emerged.

‍As for the term “Judeo-Christian,” it is a hybrid which does make some Jews and Christians uncomfortable, because it lumps together very different and often sharply opposed religions. I try to avoid using this hybrid where a distinction is important. Nevertheless, this term is useful in designating a religious paradigm that is common to both, particularly with regard to the central importance given to historical revelation.

‍“Dharma” is used to indicate a family of spiritual traditions originating in India which today are manifested as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Dharma is not easy to define, and a good deal of this book is devoted to explaining some of its dimensions. The oft-used translations of dharma as “religion,” “path,” “law” and “ethics” all fall short in substantial ways. Suffice it to say that the principles and presuppositions of dharma are available in classical Sanskrit terms which often have no exact translation in English; dharma encompasses a diversity of lifestyles and views which have evolved over many centuries.  I am conscious of the internal diversities among them and do not try to overcome these differences. But I wish to explore how the variety of perspectives and practices of dharma display an underlying integral unity at the metaphysical level which undergirds and supports their openness and relative non-aggressiveness.

‍As I have just noted, Western foundational concepts and values stem not from one source but from two: Judeo-Christian historical revelations expressed through prophets and messiahs, and Greek reason with its reliance on Aristotelian logic and empirical knowledge. Subsequent events in European history led to further “digestions” of civilizations as a result of colonization, conquests, slavery, etc. I argue at length that the resulting cultural construct called “the West” is not an integrally unified entity but a synthetic one. It is dynamic and also inherently unstable, which has had a devastating effect not only on non-Westerners but on Westerners themselves.

‍Prevailing discourse relies upon these categories

‍If the concerns against my alleged essentialism were applied equally to the predominant academic discourse on South Asia, it would become virtually impossible to sustain many fields of study that are popular today – such as Subaltern Studies, Dalit Studies, Minority Studies, Hindu Caste System, to name a few. For, in every one of these instances, the case could be made that the very terms of reference are based on essentialism. The category of Brahmin is not as fossilized as claimed, as there have been numerous flows into and out of Brahmin varna with blurred boundaries, and the same is true of Dalit when it is seen as a fixed entity that endures over time. Nor is the reductionist assumption always true that Brahmins have power while Dalits do not. (Political power in India today rests increasingly with groups identifying as non-Brahmins.) The category of Dalit is further suspect because it is a mishmash of hundreds of independent communities separated by geography, language, ethnicities, traditions, rituals, and so forth. They have had numerous clashes among them, and these have intensified lately. A similar analysis could be made to show that Hindu/Minority are essentialized categories because there are many blends in between. The very notion of “caste” is an essentialized one – in this instance essentialized by Lord Risley first conceptually, and then enforced through the colonial census for several decades under his authority. One would expect that given the concern over essentialism, all such topics of research dissertations, conference panels and grant proposals should be seen as problematic. All courses on specific essentialized categories such as Hinduism, Christianity, Western Religions, Western Civilization, South Asian Religions, etc. should be challenged as promoting essentialism. Yet such categories persist and the academy perpetuates them.

‍Let me say that I am in favor of abolishing all such essentializing categories, if this could be achieved in practice. I further state that I oppose categories of nation-state as well. But to turn this into the ground reality would entail removing the boundaries that fortify them: removing the US-Mexico border fence, removing all immigration and customs organizations worldwide, and removing all laws that prevent the free flow of Third World Labor (wherein Third World is yet another essentialized category).

‍My point is that for anti-essentialism to become the ground reality would entail the dismantling of the world order as it exists today. Until that happens – and there is no sign for it to happen in this century especially with the rise of China as a superpower based on essentializing itself – how are we to discuss the problems caused by such hegemonic formations if we are not supposed to referred to the categories which sustain them.

‍Postmodernism as hypocrisy and preservation of the hegemonic status quo

‍One is left wondering why the residents of these academic fortresses of essentialism get so concerned when an opponent undermines their own categories by referring to them. One answer could be that this anti-essentialism is a defense mechanism to protect the prevailing essentialism in place. The deep structures where Judeo-Christian axioms are rooted remain often hidden, while at the surface the popular discourse tries to go beyond essentialist boundaries. Both Enlightenment and Post-Enlightenment thought preserve the power structures built on Western Universalism. In fact, the effect of post-modern thought has been precisely to protect and perpetuate the very structures it purports to demolish.

‍Postmodernism has made it fashionable to advocate that all identities be dismantled or blurred, and views all positively distinctive cultures as being oppressive to weaker or less assertive ones. This idea might at first seem reasonable, and indeed it has started a huge academic bandwagon. But it opens the door to a pervasive cynicism and narrowness of vision with no workable criteria of value in aesthetics, politics or philosophy.

‍Many popular writers have adopted the postmodern stance and assumed that today’s America exemplifies a society in which hybrid cultures are blurring identities and making all boundaries obsolete. America, according to this view, is on its way to becoming a society free from difference anxiety because American society is becoming freed from its chauvinistic grand narratives.

‍But beneath the veneer of popular culture, the Western foundation of America, especially with respect to its Judeo-Christian roots, remains largely unchanged. In the American institutions where power resides, one finds little evidence of boundaries being erased. For instance:

‍The U.S. government’s foreign policy is designed to retain superiority and protect what is specifically in its interests.

‍Corporate multinationals fight for market share and maximize their shareholder profits and valuations much in the manner of playing to win a competitive game.

‍Churches fight for “soul market share,” not just among denominations but more ferociously in the heathen-filled Third World.

‍Postmodern scholars would do well to go beyond the analysis of pop culture and abstract patterns, and to attempt to deconstruct the oppressive Western institutions of government, business and Christianity, where the power structure really resides. American socio-political unity has been achieved and maintained from the beginning through a frontier mentality which has always wanted to annex and expand. Besides America, one finds that the European Union, Russia, China, Japan and the Arab states remain highly nationalistic.

‍Postmodern Imperialism

‍The postmodern insistence on denying such identities as “Indian” and “Western” leaves non-Western cultures vulnerable to even further exploitation because they are denied the security of possessing a difference which is real and defensible. Postmodernism, then, tends to undermine the particular reality of the non-Western culture that might be in need of being affirmed, protected and developed.

‍The London-based Indian Muslim cultural critic Ziauddin Sardar points out that the postmodern criticism of nation-states and their related identities actually empowers imperialism insofar as it “softens the prey” on behalf of the predator empires by advocating the abandonment of distinctiveness in a one-sided manner. This is so because the West does not practice what it exports. The call to abandon distinctiveness is propagated and promoted through a network of intellectuals in the Third World nurtured and sustained by the First World.

‍Postmodern philosophers have made many attempts to deconstruct the West’s “meta-narratives,” as they are often called, rightly pointing out that such claims of universalism are in fact parochial and arrogant views of what is merely one cultural tradition among many others. It is perhaps a paradox that the West is simultaneously protecting itself by rewriting its story in a new and renewed chauvinistic mode in which deconstruction itself is seen as the culmination and fruit of its long, singular and ineffably superior philosophical trajectory.

‍Without an outside perspective on the Western mentalities, the postmodern critiques assume an unfolding consciousness in which Westerners are the leaders and agents. They tend to project their latest theories back into Western intellectual history, thereby enhancing the Western collective identity rather than dissolving it. Although it decries identity, postmodernism is itself the product of a history that has been shaped by particular attitudes to difference and that cannot be assumed to be the template for world history. Postmodernism is highly critical of imperialism and colonialism, yet it has a grand narrative of its own which remains largely outside the bounds of the deconstruction process. Indian traditions are marginalized by the postmodernists.

‍The power of the U.S.A. and the European Union remains unaffected by the fringe activities of its own liberal postmodern scholars. Ironically, many of the “leftist radicals” of the counterculture in France and the U.S. later became neo-conservatives — because of the temptations of the marketplace and because the sacrifices required by the left proved unsustainable. Only a few years after participating in strikes and anti-war and civil liberties marches, these “radicals” found themselves calling for the defense of “Judeo-Christian civilization” and advocating aggressive but selective “humanitarian” intervention into other countries. The U.S. military has used liberal social scientists to foment conflict in countries such as Chile and, more recently, Iraq. In fact, much of the research into foreign “area studies” is done by liberal scholars and ends up serving the interests of the state and/or church. At the same time, the West is secure in its sense of history and identity, and that’s because postmodernist discourse in the West is limited to academic cocoons and applied mainly to pop culture – it is not allowed to change the education system of policymaking, for instance.

‍India’s postmodernist scholars who brag about their Western training and connections are encouraged to deconstruct Indian civilization, showing it to be a scourge against the oppressed. The deconstruction of India by Indian thinkers has a destabilizing effect which invites a new kind of colonialism. The most fashionable kind of difference being championed by Indian postmodernists is on behalf of the subalterns, i.e. “from below,” seen as the oppressed underclass. But many of these “oppressed minorities” have been taken over by global nexuses (Western churches, Chinese Maoists and Islamists, to name only the major ones) with the result that they are not truly autonomous and independent but satellites serving a new kind of remote-controlled colonialism. Thus the postmodern posture on difference has had the overall effect of causing native cultural identities to become vulnerable to imperialism – which is exactly the opposite of what the postmodernists claim they want to achieve. This is a serious topic of inquiry outside the scope of this book and which I cover in my previous book, Breaking India.

‍Postmodernism and Digestion

‍Postmodern deconstruction facilitates the digestion of dharma into the West by disassembling it into a library of random, unrelated components similar to the way clip art is clicked-and-dragged as useful additions to proprietary frameworks. Some scholars take these components apart so as to de-contextualize them from the rest of the dharma tradition, thereby enabling them to be digested or destroyed selectively. The digestion of Indian civilization by the West is encouraged by arguments that there is no such thing as an “Indian civilization,” the claim being that the “Indian” is a construct given, as it were, by the British.

‍Postmodernism and Dharma

‍Postmodernism resembles dharma philosophies in several ways. Both are frameworks for the deconstruction of identity. Both approaches share the notion that all concepts are mental constructions which are ultimately empty or devoid of self existence. Many of the postmodern thinkers have been influenced by these Indian traditions – this has been discussed in the literature.

‍But there is at least one important difference: The Postmodern movement lacks the esoteric practices of the dharma traditions as a means to achieve a state of consciousness transcending differences experientially. Hence, postmodernism is merely discursive deconstruction as an intellectual exercise, and its end-state can be one of nihilism or indifference. In other words, after deconstructing the meta-narratives of the dominant culture, nothing is left to put in their place, whereas in the dharmic case the experience of higher selfhood would provide the foundation for a positive existence.

‍Dharma also has some anti-essentialism built into it. The notion of sva-dharma (“my personal dharma”) counteracts against essentialist “commandment” style normative dogma. The emphasis upon heuristic self-discovery and enlightenment demolishes history centrism, the pillar of essentialism. The separation of shruti and smriti prevents a fossilized, frozen, final “canon” mindset.

‍Conclusion

The charge of essentialism is a pedantic one. It is inconsistent with prevailing reality, both on the ground and inside the academy at large. To retreat apologetically from my project of reversing the gaze upon the West would only perpetuate the hegemony of the Western gaze even further. We need to be pragmatic in explaining our positions. This includes the usage of approximate categories which have a lot of momentum on behalf of Western paradigms, and which need to be re-examined.

 Published: March 16, 2012

This essay problematizes the way certain cultures have historicized divine intervention and viewed it as the primary mode of knowing about spiritual truth. It compares this mode with ahistorical insight received through esoteric methodologies of transformation of consciousness.

There are two different, and often competing, ways of arriving at spiritual truth: (A) via historical narratives (about “holy” events, for example), and (B) via adhyatma-vidya (inner “science” or esoteric processes) which tends to be direct and ahistorical. While both methods exist within every major tradition, a given tradition tends to emphasize one or the other. The methodology by which truth gets discovered, debated, validated, and accepted, becomes a central part of the core competence of the tradition, and the basis for its continuity. The essay challenges A on scientific and ethical grounds.

On scientific grounds: Can universal truth-claims be considered scientific, if they are contingent upon a particular account of history, especially a historical event that could never be replicated? Specifically, what does a scientist think of claims of God’s unique interventions that are space-time discontinuities, and that either violated or permanently changed the laws of the cosmos? Can science afford to legitimize any Grand Narratives of Human History, including the teleology that God intervened to reveal? It is not this essay’s intention to “blame God” for intervening; but, rather, to problematize the history-centric tendencies in societies.

On the other hand, B is a set of ahistorical methods that includes first-person empiricism. Of special interest is the question: What does science have to say about truth-claims which are based on discoveries brought about by human potential, and not based on God’s interventions in history via prophets? In other words, isadhyatma-vidya (based on inherent human potential) an empirical “science”, and, if so, could it be reconciled with historically unique revelations?

Should the scientific approach to spirituality be to “prove” historical narratives, or should it be an open-ended process that also examines the methods used to arrive at religious canons?[2] Should the thriving new discipline of science and religion apply scientific standards of inquiry to question religious Grand Narratives, and not just serve to legitimize certain religions?[3] Are many scholars invested too heavily in the dominant scientific theoretical models and/or the religious outcomes of their inquiries?

The essay also analyzes the socio-political and ethical contrasts between the two modes.

The academic study of religion, and hence of science and religion, has been rooted in Western categories. These categories define religion based on Grand Narratives of God’s interventions in human history, and have become the lens through which much of this historiography has developed.

At the same time, non-Western truth-claims of adhyatma-vidya are often first (i) harvested for their fruits, by repackaging them into Western categories, and then (ii) become ornaments, either digested into Western science/religion, or worn as exotic museum pieces that are not seriously examined as truth-claims. Because they are no longer nurtured as living traditions, non-Western traditions cease to serve humanity as laboratories of inner science, especially in former colonies where the West is seen as the gold standard to emulate. This has ethical implications, and has sometimes resulted in cultural genocide[4].

In this classification, I interpret Jesus’ original teachings as type B (ahistorical and esoteric), whereas Christianity later became type A (exoteric institutionalized power). The Grand Narratives in Jesus’ name have often not been faithful to his message. The category of “Abrahamic religions,” as used in this essay, denotes the institutions and their history-centric Grand Narratives. Prior to Constantine, Jesus had inspired movements quite similar to Indic traditions.

This paper challenges the trajectory of the field of science and religion, and shows how the use of Abrahamic categories has limited the inquiry. It includes a lively discussion with “liberal Christians” at the end.

Limits to Ordinary Mind

Before comparing different methods that are used to claim transcendental truths, let us first examine the limits to ordinary human knowledge, and the possibility of transcendental knowledge.

Most philosophies, both theistic and non-theistic, Indian and Western, accept some kind of upper limits to human knowledge. For instance:

1. Indian theories of ignorance: A central feature in classical Indian thought is the view that the world as perceived by the ordinary human mind is not the ultimate reality, but that it is constructed by the mind (which includes the senses). This superimposition of the mind’s prior conditioning and context is referred to as nama-rupa (name-form). This nama-rupa context is the result of memory traces (sanskaras), which, in turn, are the by-products of past impressions of willful actions. So the sequence could be depicted as follows:

Intentional choices –> Sanskara traces –> Nama-rupa –> Avidya/Maya.

The maya principle, as the theory of mental distortions and limits, is a common foundation to many Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina traditions, even though the terms used might be different[5].

1. Western secular theories on the limits to mental representation: Modern Western thought has notions of similar limits of mind: (i) Gödel’s theorems demonstrate that all the truths of common mathematical systems cannot be written in any language. Linguistic expression, such as that involved in mathematics, is limited in what it could possibly state[6] .(ii) Wittgenstein’s theory of language as a game is built on problematizing the “meanings” of sentences and the limits of what may be representable. (iii) The quantum uncertainty principle describes the uncertainty built into the state of all physical systems. (iv) Kant considered his transcendental realm and the notion of nuomena to be outside the mind’s capacity. (v) A variety of post-modernist philosophers — from Rorty, to Putnam, to Derrida — each in their own way, refute any mental representation of an objective ultimate reality. I have benefited greatly from the study of Western thought in deepening my understanding of the avidya/maya principles, although Western thinkers have mostly avoided making any reference to Indian systems[7].

III. Abrahamic religions’ approach to bridging the infinite gap between God and man: In contrast with the Indian traditions, the Abrahamic religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — emphasize that the infinite gap of knowledge between man and God can only be bridged when God initiates a dialog with man. This is why God’s interventions in human history are all-important, and become the cornerstone of each Abrahamic religion. Without God’s prophet bringing the ultimate truth to man, it would be impossible for man to transcend his limits[8]. (See the endnote after IV, on why Prophet ¹ Living Guru, and a sub-heading towards the end on why Savior ¹ Avatar.) Hence, Abrahamic religions are largely about history, more specifically, about God’s interventions in history. These miraculous interventions occur very rarely, and therefore, must be documented in canons and doctrines, and studied meticulously, in order to know the ultimate reality. Man has no other recourse available except this. While direct intuitive knowledge of Christ is also available, it is only after the individual has been conditioned by history-centric scriptures[9].

1. Indian theories of transcendence: In Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina systems, maya, or its equivalents, masks (as avidya) an underlying state of all mundane knowing[10]. In other words, every human has the potential to transcend avidya. What distinguishes these systems from the Abrahamic systems is that they do not depend upon a God-initiated intervention via a prophet or son, in order to transcend the ordinary human limitations. Rather, every human has the potential, no matter how rarely achieved, to experience the state claimed by rishis, advanced yogis, jivanmuktis, buddhas, or the equivalent, wherein the ultimate truth is known directly and without mediation by nama-rupa. This is a most extraordinary claim, and one that is central to the Indian traditions[11]. (The adhyatmika process used is itself in nama-rupa, and must, therefore, be transcended eventually.)

The rest of this paper deals only with III and IV, which are shown in the diagram below as A and B, respectively. In other words, my assumption is that the ordinary human limits are possible to transcend via some (extraordinary) processes. The purpose of the paper is to examine the essential differences between III and IV. The processes by which spiritual truth gets established differ greatly between III and IV, resulting in two major kinds of spiritual traditions: The Indic and the Abrahamic traditions are best understood by the different ways by which they arrive at their understandings of ultimate reality.

The Abrahamic means to bridging the gap emphasizes a top-down, God-initiated intervention in human history. This intervention is via a prophet, who is also God’s son in the case of Christianity. In most interpretations, as shown below, unless such an intervention is taken literally and its message is implemented, man is doomed to remain in darkness, for his mind has no other way to escape from its delusions and limits. On the other hand, the Indic traditions claim an endless stream of enlightened living spiritual masters, each said to have realized the ultimate truth while alive on this earth, and hence, able to teach this truth to others. Unlike in the case of Indic traditions, the great teachers of Abrahamic traditions are not living models of embodied enlightenment for the student[12]. Instead, Abrahamic teachers proclaim the truth based on historical texts. The consequences of these divergent systems are enormous, and are at the heart of Indic-Abrahamic distinctions.

The diagram that follows gives an outline of the main points that are discussed in this paper. “A” and “B” correspond to the paths of history-centrism and ahistorical spiritual enlightenment, respectively. The former’s premise is that human limitations are inherently insurmountable without divine intervention. The latter’s premise is that humans have infinite potential. These, in turn, correspond to (A) the view of man being essentially evil, and hence in need of being salvaged by God’s agency, versus (B) the view of man being essentially sat-chit-ananda, the Supreme Being in limited form, with the built-in capability to achieve self-realization[13].

Click here to download the diagrammatic representation of ‘Historicity Versus Ahistoricity’ as described by Rajiv Malhotra..

Historicity Versus Ahistoricity

While the Abrahamic religions have been predominantly A, this does not imply that there have not been mystics in these religions who practiced and taught the methods of B — Meister Eckhart and numerous Sufi mystics were such exemplars[14]. Nor is it true that all Indic traditions are free from history-dependency: the recent Hindutva focus on Ram’s birthplace is an example of history-centrism[15].

Each culture has had both the adhyatmika (esoteric) and the laukika (worldly or exoteric) movements within it. But there have been differences between Indic and Abrahamic cultures, in the manner in which this competition played out.

Mystics in the Abrahamic faiths were mostly on the margins of mainstream religions[16]. They were often persecuted by the religious institutions, and were rarely accepted within their own faith communities during their lives. Hence, they did not create lineages that could further test, develop, enhance, discover, and teach the “B” processes that they had discovered, often accidentally. Therefore, there were no peer debates amongst mystics who made experiential claims[17]. Consequently, these sporadic mystical experiences did not result in the systematization of sophisticated epistemologies, nor into rigorous procedures for reproducing them — unlike in the case of India. In the West, “mysticism” became a pejorative that meant pre-rational and inferior, and was frequently subject to persecution.

On the other hand, Indians who claimed enlightenment using the “B” methods were glorified and honored as spiritual leaders during their lives, and often developed massive followings[18]. Bhakti saints, Ramakrishna’s integral yoga, and Sri Aurobindo’s “purna Vedanta” are each examples of innovations to prior methodologies, based on embodied experience, and not based on a reinterpretation of old scripture. Such living masters have always been the loci of spirituality in India, in contrast to the institutions in the case of Abrahamic religions. Living masters often override and subvert institutional loyalties. It has also been argued that Tantra, in both Hindu and Buddhist traditions, was a reaction against institutionalization and hierarchy. These innovators discover new spiritual technologies, and also re-contextualize the truth for their given culture, time, place and audience[19]. As living laboratories, they subject the classical methodologies and experiential claims to test, improvement and adaptation — generation after generation.

India seems to have enjoyed a very long-term and continuous free-market of adhyatma-vidya ideas, practices, and lineages, where freelancers competed just as modern high-tech start-ups do. There was no attempt to enforce top-down standards, to root out quackery, or to control and license only the “best” or “true” practices. The consumer had free choice in a vibrant spiritual marketplace. There were always dissidents, many of who launched new spin-offs in a big way, just like today’s entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The kshyatriya kings’ non-interference in the spiritual free-market was an important tradition.

By contrast, top-down institutionalized religions became obsessed with history-centrism and canons. They collapsed spirituality into canons, and this could be compared with a Soviet style controlled economy — the mentality of one airline, one kind of toothpaste, one kind of breakfast cereal, and central licensing of movies, music and fashions.

Ironically, just as the Soviets derided the US free-market — as being anarchical and inefficient — so also, some of today’s Indologists and liberal arts scholars look for “canons of Hindu Law” or historical Grand Narratives, and stereotype Hindus as irrational and unethical.

There are, indeed, trade-offs: Religious institutions provide continuity, whereas living spiritual masters disrupt bureaucracy and accumulation of power. Abrahamic traditions have institutional continuity, with historical canons as their center. Indic traditions have a flow of living spiritual masters, often with considerable spiritual creativity. These processes roughly correspond to coherence and power that is diachronic (in the Abrahamic case) versus synchronic (in the Indic case).

It is interesting to note that in Roman Catholicism, saints are always dead persons: As per the church’s rules, only years after death is an exemplar entitled to be considered for sainthood. Why? My understanding is that living saints would threaten the institutions, because their word might overrule the dogma of the hierarchy in control[20]. Carl Jung referred to churches as institutions designed to protect men from the awesome power of the Divine. Also, the vast majority of early Christian saints were glorified as martyrs, who died violently for the cause of Christianity, and not based on esoteric maturation[21]. But martyrdom was never the basis for Indians to consider someone as a saint[22].

History-Centrism in Christianity

While the Christian Grand Narrative of History has its variations, the Apostles’ Creed, first composed in the sixth century, is the official creed in most Protestant churches today, and similar creeds are used in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches:[23]

“I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried. He descended into Hell. The third day, he rose from the dead, he ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From thence he will come to judge the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.”

Yet, some liberal Christians have disagreed with my analysis that Christianity is history-centric. For example, Alex Alexander, a liberal Indian Christian, commenting on Sulekha, explains that there is no single historical Grand Narrative in Christianity:[24]

“There are several Christian communities that are markedly different from the Roman Catholics. First of all, there is little agreement among the eastern churches as to whether the Vatican’s “codex vaticanus” is the only reliable text of the Bible, or whether their own 5th Century Codex Alexandrinus is the more authentic version. What constitutes the contents of the New Testament has always been disputed by many of these sects. The Mormons have their Book of Mormons. The Seventh Day Adventists, the Pentecostals and the Jehovah’s witnesses have different interpretations of the Bible. The Quakers, Amish, Moravians, Chaldaens, Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, the Jacobites and the Marthomites in Kerala etc., etc., have all their doctrinal differences and different religious hierarchies within their conclaves. They all feud and spar with each other! Let us not forget that the first so-called collection of New Testament gospels was put together nearly 200-300 years after Jesus’ death. And, they all relied on Greek and Latin versions of the gospels. We know that Jesus spoke Aramaic and not Greek or Latin. The first King James Version of the English Bible came out only in 1611, followed by its revisions in 1615, 1629, 1638, 1762, 1769, 1881, and 1885. Then the American version followed in 1901, 1946 and 1989. The changes due to revisions and translations are sometimes laughable: for e.g., Luke’s (17:21) The Kingdom of God is within you, is translated as: Kingdom of God is beside you, Kingdom of God is among you, Kingdom of God is in the midst of you… etc, etc… Similarly, the famous saying of Jesus, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” is translated in one version as “Happy are the utterly sincere, for they will see God.” What will be even more hilarious will be to translate the Greek version back into Aramaic (which has no vowels), which has different sentence constructions than Geek or Latin[25]. Yes, the Christians too have their differences and they are free to choose their interpretations. And they do.”

But this inter-denominational conflict described by him does not imply the absence of history-centrism. The above explanation does not refute my point, and in fact supports it: each of the Christian denominations mentioned is based on its own history-centric canons. The fact that they disagree amongst themselves mainly about history only goes to show how much importance is given to these competing historical narratives. The symbols being disputed are also historical. This clash of narratives confirms my thesis that Christianity is contingent upon the validity of some historical narrative or other.

In order to evaluate how widespread history-centrism is amongst American Christians, a good source of data is the book by George Gallup, founder/CEO of the famous Gallup Poll, and a self-identified Christian evangelist. This book is based on decades of systematic polling of Americans about their religious beliefs. Here is a snapshot of Americans’ religious beliefs prior to September 11, which have become even more literalist since this data was collected:[26]

• 39% classify themselves as ‘born-again’ evangelical Christians, defined as: (a) Bible is the Literal Word of God, (b) have experienced a personal conversion, and (c) seek to lead non-Christians to conversion [p.68]. 54% read the Bible several times a month [p.50]. 84% believe that Jesus is God or His Son [p.123].

• 79% believe in miracles [p.26]. 56% believe in Hell [p.30]. 30% believe in ghosts [p.40].

• 79% were taught religion formally as a child [p.61]. 89% want their kids to get formal religious education [p.63]. 75% like Bible Studies in schools. 75% like the Bible to be also taught as part of literature, history and social studies [p.154]. 67% support a Constitutional Amendment to allow spoken prayer in schools. (Clinton already signed a memorandum allowing public school students to pray by themselves, without teacher direction.) [pp.152-3].

• 36% claim having a “particularly powerful, sudden religious insight or awakening” [p.69]. 82% are “very conscious of the presence of God” [p.72].

• Americans have higher confidence in the Church as an institution, than in any other institution, including the Military, US Supreme Court, Banks, Public Schools, Newspapers, US Congress, TV news, Organized Labor, Police, Medical System, Business, and American Presidency. [p.137]

• More teens than adults go to Church today — indicating the future trend [p.147]. Teenagers’ beliefs: Angels — 76%; Astrology — 54%; ESP — 43%; Witchcraft –19%.

The above data should also be studied by neocolonized Indians, who are trying to prove their secularism, rationality, and Westernization, by developing self-hatred for their own adhyatmika traditions[27].

Here is yet another recent example to demonstrate the centrality of historical detail: Twenty eight clergy of the 8.4 million strong United Methodist Church recently filed a charge within the UMC tribunal against a liberal bishop, for doubting “the virgin birth, divinity and bodily resurrection of Jesus.” Indian spiritualists wonder why there is so much fuss about charges that are entirely about historical interpretations. Because the bishop said that Jesus was not the only way to salvation, he was charged with being guilty of “dissemination of doctrines contrary to the established standards of doctrine” of the church — clearly showing the rigidity by which truth-claims are established in mainstream Christianity even today. The charge acknowledged that the accused bishop “is obedient to Christ’s teachings” — showing that Jesus’ teachings are less important than his history. This has generated a major internal fight amongst the Methodists, about the interpretation of Jesus’ history[28].

A recent report on CNN says: [29]“The Kentucky Mountain Bible College has finally dropped the 666 prefix [from the phone numbers] that disturbed Christians who recognized it as the biblical mark of the beast… In the Book of Revelation, 666 is stamped into people’s foreheads or right hands during the last days. Those who receive the mark, according to Scripture, are damned to eternal punishment.” MacGrego, the college vice president, said, “the beast represents Satan.” True Christians, he said, will not accept the mark.

Christian movies, music and books are enjoying very high growth rates. For instance, Hollywood’s Mel Gibson is now a high profile actor, director, financier and spokesman for “Catholic traditionalists,” who reject the Vatican II reform that would give respect to other faiths. His planned movies will center on Catholic literalism. His Oscar-nominated movie Signs, directed by M. Night Shyalam, was about Catholic miracles coming true[30].

America’s Obsession With The “End of Time”

Apocalypse and Americans Today:[31]

In the Abrahamic religions, the future is also frozen by the Grand Narrative of History. TIME magazine recently devoted a cover story on this:

“Notions of a divinely choreographed end to history are almost as old as Western faith. They appear first in the Jewish Bible’s books… Eventually Jewish fascination with a militant restoration of God’s kingdom faded. But it was embraced by Christianity[32].”

A recent TIME/CNN poll showed that a growing number of Americans are taking the Bible’s Book of Revelation literally as the final predictor of events:

“Fully 59% say they believe the events in Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack[33].”

Among the best-selling fiction books in recent years is a series about the End of Time, written by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkens, based on the Book of Revelation. In 1995, they published “Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days.” The recent TIME magazine cover story explains the mass hysteria related to this kind of literature:

“Only about half of Left Behind readers are Evangelicals, which suggests there is a broader audience of people who are having this conversation. … The books offer readers a vivid, violent and utterly detailed description of just what happens to those who are left behind on earth to fight the Antichrist after Jesus raptures, or lifts, the faithful up to heaven… The series has sold some 32 million copies — 50 million if you count the graphic novels and children’s versions — and sales jumped 60% after Sept. 11. Book 9, published in October, was the best-selling novel of 2001. Evangelical pastors promote the books as devotional reading; mainline pastors read them to find out what their congregations are thinking, as do politicians and scholars and people whose job it is to know what fears and hopes are settling in the back of people’s minds in a time of deep uncertainty. Now the 10th book, “The Remnant,” is arriving in stores, a breathtaking 2.75 million hard-cover copies, and its impact may be felt far beyond the book clubs and Bible classes.”

TIME magazine goes on to explain the significance of this in understanding the American psyche:

“To some evangelical readers, the Left Behind books provide more than a spiritual guide: they are a political agenda. When they read in the papers about the growing threats to Israel, they are not only concerned for a fellow democratic ally in the war against terror, they are also worried about God’s chosen people and the fate of the land where events must unfold in a specific way for Jesus to return. That combination helps explain why some Christian leaders have not only bonded with Jews this winter as rarely before but have also pressed their case in the Bush White House as if their salvation depended on it…”

Wyoming state senator Carroll Miller has retired from politics, and speaks at churches and men’s clubs, helping people come to grips with the prospect of the Second Coming of Christ. “It’s very important that we as a Christian nation know what the Scriptures have said about these days,” he says. Many Americans have prepared Bibles highlighting the relevant passages about what will occur during the Tribulation, so that their left-behind friends and relatives “will know to prepare for the earthquakes and locusts and scorpions…”

While liberal Americans acclaim how pluralistic the country is becoming, here is TIME magazine’s analysis of the growing xenophobia and exclusiveness:

“After a while, sightings of the Antichrist come naturally: when U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan tells the World Economic Forum that globalization is the best hope to solve the world’s problems, when the forum floats the idea of a ‘united nations of major religions,’ when privacy is sacrificed to security, the headlines are listed on the prophecy websites as signs that the Antichrist is busy about his business.”

One woman thinks that technology is facilitating the End of Time: “When Christ returns, every eye shall see Him,” she quotes from Revelation. Thanks to CNN and the Internet, she concludes, “we’re getting to a place where every eye could actually behold such an event.”

An employee of Boeing decided not to buy Microsoft’s Windows XP, because it carries a method of tracking e-mail: “If the Antichrist were to come,” she fears, “and you want to contact another Christian, they could see that, trace it.”

However, most true believers do not see the end as a threat, but as a great promise coming true. “If we keep our eyes on Israel, we will know about the return of Christ,” says one man in Ohio. “Everything that is happening — wars, rumors of war — in the Middle East is happening according to Scripture.”

It is interesting to note that Islamic extremism is also driven by history-centrism that is very similar to the Christian history-centrism described above. TIME magazine analyzes:

“At the religious extremes within Islam, that means we see more suicide bombers: if God’s judgment is just around the comer, martyrdom has a special appeal. The more they cast their cause as a fight against the Great Satan, the more they reinforce the belief in some U.S. quarters that the war on terror is not one that can ever end with a treaty or communiqué, only total victory or defeat. Extremists on each side look to contemporary events as validation of their sacred texts; each uses the others to define its view of the divine scheme…”

America’s Historical Identity:

Such thinking is nothing new or atypical in Western civilization. It is deeply rooted in eschatology, the Jewish and Christian doctrine about the end of history, at which time the dead would get resurrected, and there would be The Last Judgment. Encyclopedia Britannica explains: [34]

“In New Testament Christianity, history is viewed throughout in eschatological terms: the future of God has already begun with the appearance of Christ; the end of history is near; the end of time is therefore filled with danger and salvation, faith and unfaith, Christ and Antichrist, will be consummated through the resurrection of the dead, the judgment of the world…”

TIME magazine writes that the United States was always seen by many of its leaders in light of this Grand narrative:

“From as early as the 17th century, many had seen the New World [i.e. USA] as the linchpin of a particularly optimistic End Times scenario. Unlike earlier believers who thought humans were helpless to influence God’s cosmic plan, they thought they could trigger Christ’s Millennium by purifying and perfecting America. Ministers preached America as Revelation’s New Jerusalem. Many colonists saw the Revolution in millennial terms, with George III as the Antichrist. Those most convinced, whom we would now call Evangelicals, helped shape the nation’s culture of civic engagement, founding movements to abolish dueling, drinking, slavery and other sins. By the mid-1800s, some announced confidently that the Millennium might be a mere three years away…”

However, things did not go as planned:[35]

“By 1865, those dreams lay in bloody ruins on Civil War battlefields. Far from a millennial peace, Evangelicals found themselves fighting their brothers in America’s homemade taste of hell. Afterward, they felt helpless to alleviate the misery in fast-growing cities and threatened by the arrival of Catholic immigrants.”

Therefore, a new edition of the End of Time narrative had to be developed. John Nelson Darby, an Anglican priest and traveling evangelist, and Cyrus Scofield, a minister, grabbed this opportunity to come up with a new Grand Narrative on God’s future plans. Their new Grand Narrative was a big hit, and went as follows: [36]

“Far from getting ever better, things on earth would progressively worsen, until the Antichrist, also know as the Beast, arose. A seven-year, hell-like Tribulation would begin, survived by only a small human remnant. Not until then would Christ return, defeat the Antichrist and commence his Millennium. Much of Darby’s scriptural synthesis had been suggested piecemeal by earlier thinkers. His most striking innovation was the timing of a concept called the Rapture, drawn from the Apostle Paul’s prediction that believers would fly up to meet Christ in heaven. Most theologians understood it as part of the Resurrection at time’s very end. Darby repositioned it at the Apocalypse’s very beginning, a small shift with large implications. It spared true believers the Tribulation, leaving the horror to nonbelievers and the doctrinally misled, thus moving Christianity’s us vs. them concept of heaven and hell into a new and exciting theater…”

TIME explains how the same Grand Narrative has also been driving recent political history:

“The election of Ronald Reagan brought “Christian Zionism” deeper into the White House: Lindsey served as a consultant on Middle East affairs to the Pentagon and the Israeli government. Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostalist, in discussing environmental concerns, observed, “I don’t know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns.” Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger affirmed, “I have read the Book of Revelation, and, yes, I believe the world is going to end — by an act of God, I hope — but every day I think time is running out.” It was no accident that Reagan made his “evil empire” speech at a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals…”

Neo-Abrahamic Secular Grand Narratives:

This sub-heading might come as a surprise to many neocolonized Indians, who imagine secularism to be free from the kind of superstition and dogma described above. But Encyclopedia Britannica explains otherwise:

“Western civilization, even in its modern secularized forms, is heir to a long tradition of Christian patterns of thought and sensibility…Both the 18th — and 19th — century Enlightenment and the Romantic versions of the idea of the progress of humanity to an ideal state of peace and harmony betray their descent from messianic-millenarian beliefs…”

Marxism has its roots in the same Abrahamic Grand Narratives as well:[37]

“Marxist Communism, in spite of its explicit atheism and dogmatic materialism, has a markedly messianic structure and message… Some of the analogies between Marxism and traditional Christian eschatology have been described, in a slightly ironical vein, by the English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, who contends that Marx adapted the Jewish messianic pattern of history to socialism in the same way that the philosopher-theologian St. Augustine (AD 354-420) adapted it to Christianity. According to Russell, the materialistic dialectic that governs historical development corresponds — in the Marxist scheme — to the biblical God, the proletariat to the elect, the Communist party to the church, the revolution to the Second Coming, and the Communist Commonwealth to the millennium… The similarities are founded on actual historical contacts… and also on the fact that they are variations of the same social dynamics and of a basic myth…”

Eliade’s deconstruction of modern Marxism as Judeo-Christian myth is also very interesting:

“Marx enriched the venerable myth by a whole Judaeo-Christian messianic ideology: on the one hand, the prophetic role and soteriological function that he attributes to the proletariat; on the other, the final battle between Good and Evil, which is easily comparable to the apocalyptic battle between Christ and Antichrist, followed by the total victory of the former. It is even significant that Marx takes over for his own purpose the Judaeo-Christian eschatological hope of an absolute end to history;…”[38]

Hegel, one of the giants of modern Western thought, propounded the philosophy of the Absolute Spirit. This consists of utmost historicity, since the world is depicted as grand rational thought, God’s thought uncovering itself in time. Hegel’s influence asserted that all non-European cultures were out of history, out of the development of the Spirit. In this context, India belongs to the pre-history of the Spirit. Hegel’s philosophy has become very entrenched, and it was instrumental in justifying colonization, and in proving the superiority of the Western people.

Critics of Westernism:

William Higgins, as one example of many Westerners who are bitterly opposed to Eurocentrism, wrote: [39]

“Religious symbolism and ritual in the West often produces fear of the unconscious by Satanic Spirits as an enforcer of that fear. Abrahamic Religions lead the herd of sheep to the slaughterhouse of the Apocalypse on the stage of the world. This is why the fad of yoga in the sixties soon reduced to diet, hatha yoga, and born-again Christians. They were incapable of handling the occult phenomena, which they necessarily encountered on their road to ‘enlightenment’. This is the result of Abrahamic Religions’ projections into the collective psyche of the religious community. Although there have been many interpretations of Christ, the most influential one is that his mission as a prophet is to aid in the fulfillment of the prophecies of his forefathers. The fulfillment of the prophecies is to bring on the Age of the Apocalypse, which goes hand in hand with world events today. This is clearly written in the Bible. The Inquisition is still quite alive and well, it has simply been disguised. The mind’s eye has been severely blurred by this infliction of collective samskara.”

Two Kinds of Historicity

To justify history-based religious claims, some scholars have pointed out that even science has a history. Of course, science has a fascinating history. But the history of science has not been the basis for resolving scientific disputes, and nor has it been the source of serious conflicts, because it is not a necessary condition for the validity of scientific claims. Science is not contingent upon history.

There is a history of Isaac Newton, for instance. However, Isaac Newton’s history’s relationship to the validity of gravitation laws is entirely different than the centrality of history in the Abrahamic religions. Newton’s life history is neither a necessary condition nor a sufficient condition for the validity of the gravitation laws. It is possible for Newton’s life history to be valid — that he lived at a certain time and place, that an apple fell on his head, and so forth — and yet for his gravitation laws to be found false. Hence, his history is not sufficient for the validity of the laws he propounded. Conversely, it is possible that Newton’s history is false — i.e. he might have been an entirely different kind of person and lived in a different time and place, might have been a woman, and it might have been an orange that fell on his head rather than an apple — and yet the gravitation laws could be found to be true. Therefore, Newton’s history is not a necessary condition for the validity of the laws of gravitation.

While it is true that there is a history of Isaac Newton, it is largely a matter of side interest to scientists, and their belief in gravitation laws is independent of any such history. The history of science, and science itself, are two separate bodies of knowledge. Imagine if there were rival schools of physics fighting over whether it was an apple that fell on Newton’s head or an orange, whether Newton had a brother, whether Newton was a woman, whether s/he existed in one place and time or a different one. Would such a profession be capable of scientific advancement?

Therefore, we must distinguish between two kinds of history. The mundane history of human events is not what I am problematizing. This would include the histories of scientists, rulers, cultures, and so forth. The laws of nature are not contingent upon such histories, and we do not have an obsession to prove any such history in order to live our lives scientifically today. However, the history of God’s interventions has entirely different implications.

The Big Bang and the evolution of life are examples of unique historical events of great scientific importance. But the reason scientists believe in them is because empirical data available today leads to those conclusions, and not because of any historical narratives passed down to us.

Ahistorical Means of Truth

This section discusses several means of attaining spiritual truth, which are not history-centric, but are existentially immediate.

First-Person Empiricism:[40]

Alan Wallace explains the role of mind in any empirical investigation of consciousness: [41] “The primary instrument that all scientists have used to make any type of observation is the human mind…” However, like any scientific laboratory, one has to first clean, fine-tune, and calibrate the mind:[42]

“The untrained mind, which is prone to alternating agitation and dullness, is an unreliable and inadequate instrument for observing anything. To transform it into a suitable instrument for scientific exploration, the stability and vividness of the attention must be developed to a high degree.”

This is the scientific importance of yoga, meditation, kundalini, tantra and other systems of achieving higher states of mind, and more evolved states of body, which may then be used to discover deeper layer of reality:

“Over the past three millennia, the Indic traditions have developed rigorous methods for refining the attention, and then applying that attention to exploring the origins, nature, and role of consciousness in the natural world. The empirical and rational investigations and discoveries by such great Indian contemplatives as Gautama the Buddha profoundly challenge many of the assumptions of the modern West, particularly those of scientific materialism.”

In the pursuit of inner discoveries, the scientist is himself/herself the instrument of observation/experience. Anindita Balslev has called this “second-order empiricism,” and feels that this has been a unique achievement of Indic traditions[43].

To refine and develop the inner scientist’s capabilities (i.e. cleaning the antahkarana), an important process is the cultivation of a lifestyle that minimizes mental perturbations and distractions that would reduce the resolution and clarity of experience. Rishis, yogis, and buddhas were such living human laboratories. Lineages evolved that continued the adhyatmika experimentation across many generations. These states led to the development of many sophisticated conceptual models and epistemologies over time. There were philosophical peer debates among inner scientists, based on these longitudinal experiments.

Sunthar Visuvalingam writes:[44]

“There is no doubt that there was much greater (and, in certain epochs such as around 600 BC, even absolute) freedom in Indian civilization to inquire into, experiment with, and expound upon the nature of (inner) Reality (including its denial, as by the Cârvaka ‘materialists’…) and its mode of attainment. A veritable technology of consciousness proliferated, armed with an arsenal of new tools such as philosophy, aesthetics, practical psychology, etc., that has [almost] no equivalent elsewhere in the world. In fact, the primary focus of the Abrahamic religions has not been esotericism, self-realization, diversification of approaches, whereas even the most ordinary Indian at least acknowledges the latter claims.”

Lack of Western Adhyatma-Vidya:

My U-Turn Theory may be used to model the tension between adhyatmika and history-centrism in many Western individuals and movements: First, there is a period of freedom from historicity, during which there is extensive learning from Indic traditions and expansion of consciousness. Then the Grand Narrative of Western History raises its head out of insecurity; it fights, and eventually conquers whatever adhyatma-vidya had been embodied or conceptually learnt by that time.

Consequently, what Indians consider to be spirituality is not primary to the Abrahamic religions’ self-definition. As Visuvalingam explains:

“Both Judaism and Islam, for example, are preoccupied with social order and cohesion (hence the primacy of Law), which is the main reason why the spiritual quest has been relatively ‘marginalized’ or at least wrapped away into esoteric currents of Kabala and (Sunni) Sufism or subordinated to theological doctrine, as in the figure of the Shia Imam.”

He goes on to state that the messianic impulse, embodied especially by Christianity, is focused on transforming the (external) world (as much as, if not more than, the inner man), even and especially when it breaks free of the (Jewish) Law. The same socio-political tension also exists between Sufis and the Islamic historical Grand Narratives.

Although the institutions that held power over society could be characterized in this manner, I feel that one must not ignore the morality, imitation of Christ-love, and inner salvation through works that were also taught by these traditions.

In each given Abrahamic religion, God gives collective bargains to man: Jews as the chosen tribes; Christians as all those who subscribe to the Grand Narrative of God’s Son’s sacrifice for them; Muslims as all who unquestionably believe in and comply with the final and complete words of God sent via his last Prophet (PBUH). Therefore, the focus of Abrahamic religions has often been extroverted. Many important canons are not about individual spirituality, but about collective salvation, calling for organizing society and politics to defeat non-believers. Individual salvation is experienced only in an afterlife in Heaven. Too often, success on Earth has been measured by collective socio-political mobilizations — and, hence, via organized religions.

Robert Thurman’s book, Inner Revolution, is about the need for a second renaissance, one that would be adhyatmika. He feels that the first European renaissance was only laukika and extroverted, and that the West has not developed serious esoteric technologies of its own.

Alan Wallace goes deeper in order to explain why the West has no systematic science comparable to adhyatma-vidya:

“The first step in developing a science of any kind of phenomena is to develop and refine instruments that allow one to observe and possibly experiment with the phenomena under investigation. The only instrument we have that enables us to observe mental phenomena directly is the mind itself. But since the time of Aristotle, the West has made little, if any, progress in developing means of refining the mind so that it can be used as a reliable instrument for observing mental events. And… there continues to be considerable resistance against developing any such empirical science even today.”

In the Middle Ages, Europeans considered extraordinary mental abilities to come from the Devil. This association of non-ordinary consciousness with the demonic precluded the development of a technology of consciousness. European superstitions literally killed the freedom to pursue any adhyatma-vidya, as witch-hunting became the craze from the late fifteenth century through the mid-seventeenth century. Wallace shows that even Christian mystics imposed serious limitations on human potential, because of:

“the widespread conclusion among Christian mystics that the highest states of contemplation are necessarily fleeting, commonly lasting no longer than about half an hour[45]. This insistence on the fleeting nature of mystical union appears to originate with Augustine, [46]and it is reflected almost a millennium later in the writings of Meister Eckhart, who emphasized that the state of contemplative rapture is invariably transient, with even its residual effects lasting no longer than three days[47].”

Struggles between mystics and dogma-based hierarchy almost always resulted in the defeat of the adhyatmika at the hands of the history-centric. Christianity saw any rishi or buddha type of state as a threat to its historicity. Claims by spiritual adepts were condemned as man-made religions, because the notion of human transcendence during life was inconsistent with the canons. Protestantism, says Wallace, closed the Western mind even further with regard to serious inner investigations:

“With the advent of the Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, the gradual decline of Christian contemplative inquiry into the nature of consciousness rapidly accelerated. Given the Protestant emphasis on the Augustinian theme of the essential iniquity of the human soul, and man’s utter inability to achieve salvation or know God except by faith, there was no longer any theological incentive for such inquiry. Salvation was emphatically presented as an undeserved gift from the Creator.”

European outer science did not bring about any serious inner sciences into Europe, and the towering influence of Descartes made it worse:

“Descartes, whose ideological influence on the Scientific Revolution is hard to overestimate, was deeply committed to the introspective examination of the mind. But like his Greek and Christian predecessors, he did not devise any means to refine the attention so that the mind could reliably be used to observe mental events… Moreover, in a theological move that effectively removed the human mind from the natural world, Descartes decreed that the soul is divinely infused into the body, where it exerts its influence on the body by way of the pineal gland… This philosophical stance probably accounts in large part for the fact that the Western scientific study of the mind did not even begin for more than two centuries after Descartes.”

Even William James, the pioneer of Western psychology, did not have the required empirical tools:

“James was well aware of the importance of developing such sustained, voluntary attention, but he acknowledged that he did not know how to achieve this task[48].”

Wallace sums up the West’s lack of adhyatma-vidya methodology as follows:

“In short, the trajectory of Western science from the time of Copernicus to the modern day seems to have been influenced by medieval Christian cosmology. Just as hell was symbolized as being in the center of the earth, and heaven was in the outermost reaches of space, the inner, the subjective world of man was depicted as being the locus of evil, while the objective world was free of such moral contamination… And it was only in the closing years of the twentieth century that the scientific community began to regard consciousness as a legitimate subject of scientific inquiry. Why did it take psychology — which itself emerged only after many scientists felt that they had already discovered all the principal laws of the universe — a century before it began to address the nature of consciousness?[49]”

Embodied Knowing:

The rishi-state achieved by esoteric psycho-physiological adhyatmika practices is one of several kinds of embodied knowing. Bhakti sants use a different set of processes to achieve transcendence of ordinary human limits: These processes are based on intense devotion and surrender of the ego, combined with a simple lifestyle without anxieties. Natya, which includes dance, music, and performing arts in general, has served as another set of sophisticated processes for transcendence and embodied knowing, and is available to every human. Ramana Maharshi taught a Vedantic process of “inquiry” at all times, that leads to present moment transcendence.

Sri Aurobindo explains that the experience of jnana (“supramental knowledge”) gives human beings the possibility of knowing the relative in light of the absolute: one sees, touches, feels, and knows first the infinite, and then every form is known or seen through that infinity. This extraordinary claim is that a state is possible that goes beyond the relativity and limits of ordinary mind. This transcends the distinction between experience and interpretation of experience, i.e. between ontology and epistemology.

The following summarizes the distinctiveness of Indic traditions, on account of their emphasis on embodied knowing:

1. Every human has this inherent potential of embodied knowing of ultimate truths.
2. The state of embodied knowing is achieved during one’s life on Earth, and does not depend upon death (i.e. it is not after entering “heaven”).
3. Such living enlightened gurus are sometimes seen as divine. They re-verify and re-contextualize the embodied (as contrasted with historical) truth to a given community of followers, at a given time and place. This continually refreshes the knowledge, and prevents history-centrism and ossification.
4. Embodied knowing also has major ethical implications, because (i) ethical conduct is a prerequisite for cultivating a clean mental instrument, and hence rishismust be ethical; and also because (ii) as a byproduct of this inner pursuit one’s external conduct becomes spontaneously ethical. Ethics is inseparable from epistemology. This is important in order to understand the ethical foundation of Indic traditions — they are based on embodied knowing.
5. Sophisticated epistemologies were developed based on embodied knowing. However, theoreticians also had to be experimental scientists, i.e. they had to engage in long-term adhyatmika practices and the prerequisite lifestyles, in order to achieve the states discussed by the epistemologies. Today’s academic scholars simply lack this empirical foundation to be able to understand the epistemologies, much less being able to critique them — regardless of how many diplomas and licenses they might have secured from their institutions.
6. Embodied knowing is forever reproducible, even though difficult to achieve. This is very different from history-centric claims that are even theoretically non-reproducible. Therefore, shruti — the ultimate truth that is “heard” in such states — is ahistorical. It was always there, and is always available to be rediscovered in the appropriate state of consciousness. Hence, shruti is not the same as revealed scripture, because the latter is contingent upon history. Shruti is not only ahistorical, but is regarded as supra human (a-paurusheya) and unchangeable to the letter — similar to any physics formula, such as E = MC2. By contrast, smriti is knowledge that has become contextualized in a given socio-historical context.
7. The achievement of embodied knowing by any individual is not a discontinuity in the natural laws of the cosmos — i.e. it has nothing to do with any new covenants.
8. Miracles are not necessary as a means to validate embodied knowledge, although the practitioner may acquire them as a byproduct along the way. Each practitioner must self-validate the embodied knowing, through the practice of the adhyatma-vidya, during his/her life on Earth.
9. Embodied knowing is best transmitted orally in a direct interpersonal manner, though many yogis have systematically documented their experiences. Once it gets collapsed into conceptual categories, it is already disembodied. Hence, while Indic traditions have developed many highly sophisticated logical and conceptual systems of discourse, embodied knowing is considered a higher state than any intellectualism. Embodied knowing transcends all “propositions.” It transcends all the linguistic boundaries of nama-rupa. This is why rishis and yogis have been placed higher than pandits.
10. Historical prophets are not a necessary condition to embodied knowing. Historical Grand Narratives can also become a major obstacle in the achievement of higher states of embodied knowing. To advance in adhyatma-vidya, one must give up history-centrism.

Is Adhyatma-Vidya a “Science”?[50]

The historicity of Buddha is not a prerequisite for the validity of Buddhism, just as the historical Newton is unnecessary for the validity of gravitation theory. Buddha emphasized that he was not a prophet. No God had sent him, and he was neither the first nor the last person to have discovered the nature of reality and how every human may achieve nirvana just as he had. He made it very clear that each person should verify his teachings for himself/herself. (Tibetan Buddhists use various deities just as Hindus use devas/devis, but they are ahistorical forces or archetypes.)

Likewise, the validity of Vedanta, as expounded by Shankara, is not contingent upon Shankara’s life history. The validity of Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras is not dependent upon the historicity of Patanjali. The sphota theory of Bharthrhari is not based on the personal life events of that genius.

In more recent times, Ramana Maharshi’s and J. Krishnamurti’s teachings are not about with any historical events. The same could be said of the teachings of Sri Aurobindo, Ramakrishna, and so forth. Tantra is entirely about embodied knowing, and there are no historical pre-requisites as necessary beliefs. When one takes a course on The Art of Living, by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar — which is the fastest growing Hindu movement amongst well-educated Indians worldwide — one learns various techniques to achieve higher states of consciousness. The results are experienced here and now. One also learns new ways of experiencing the nature of the self. It is nowhere close to being a lesson in the history of God’s interventions in some remote past.

To spiritual masters from such traditions, a fixation with a historical Grand Narrative is the worst kind of nama-rupa grasping and delusion that there could be. History-centrism is seen as a major obstacle to spiritual progress. (Therefore, to appropriate Indic spiritual methods via the “new age,” into an Abrahamic historical Grand Narrative, is often counter-productive.)

Contemporary Science and Religion[51]

There are largely two types of participants in the science and religion dialogue: (i) those that engage it from the perspective of science, but who are themselves Judeo-Christians; and (ii) those that engage it from the theological side, who are well versed in scientific theory as it applies to theology.

The latter are having a remarkable impact on the re-construction of Judeo-Christianity as a “scientific theology.” They make Judeo-Christianity look very sophisticated indeed, for they deploy philosophical categories, such as Whiteheadian thought, much as the ancient Christian theologians did to undermine Greek philosophy and science. Having lost in its fight against science in Europe a few centuries ago, Judeo-Christian theologians are now busy repackaging their Grand Narratives in science-compliant ways.

However, God’s interventions in history are not easily resolved in scientific ways, even though these interventions are the defining moments of these religions, and the cause of most disputes.

For instance, there has been an ongoing Judeo-Christian discussion about the “mechanics” of God’s activity in the world. While Abrahamic theologians bear the burden to scientifically explain God’s intervention in the world, Indic traditions have no such problem to begin with, because, within Indic theistic traditions, Saguna Brahman acts through his Shakti (the kinetic/intelligent power), which is innate and immanent within the physical universe. No fracture of natural law is necessary for Brahman to act in Indic systems. Hence, there is no need to patch up the contradictions in order to “explain.” This is a radical alternative to the problem of historical intervention.

One of the most important debates in the Judeo-Christian science and religion dialogue has been the issue of proving or disproving “intelligent design.” However, this issue exists because those religions perceive the “Creative Consciousness/Intelligence” to be extra-natural (and indeed, supernatural), while Indic traditions understand it to be pervasive, immanent, and non-local. Thus Prakriti, being penetrated by Chit (Intelligence/Consciousness), can organize itself into life. There are a variety of ways in which Indic traditions deal with the intersection of materiality and consciousness, but nowhere does one find the position that creative consciousness is extra-natural.

Itihas ¹ History

Itihas is not literal history in the Western sense. Itihas is a view of the past that is continually updated, based on the present context. As Shrinivas Tilak explains,[52]

“Hindus see the arrival of Sri Rama as a Grand Narrative (Ramayana) that is made up of symbols woven into dramatized ritual and narrative. But itihas (which traditionally comprises of Ramayana and Mahabharata) is not a question of either myth or history for it includes both. History is a linear mode of experience, relating primarily to the left-brain literal knowledge. Myth, on the other hand, is a creative and aesthetic mode of experience that derives from the right-brain, reflecting a holistic mode of consciousness. Just as the left and the right sides of the brain are bridged to act as one, so in itihas, both myth and history are subsumed.”

Hence, there are many Ramayanas across India, Thailand, Indonesia, and other places, and these have changed several times. Even in Thailand, there are towns named Ayodhya, because the villagers have constructed their itihas to believe that Lord Rama lived in their midst. Bali has a monkey forest, whose monkeys are believed to be descendents of Hanuman’s army. Local inhabitants who are unable to travel to the Ganga treat the Godavri and Narmada rivers as their Ganga for many rituals. Many Hindus in UK treat the river Thames as their local Ganga, without any sense of transgression.

Not being handcuffed to literalist history, itihas is pliable, fluid, and allows many versions, with no compulsion to find “one true canon.” Therefore, Western projects to write “critical editions” of Indian itihas are inherently flawed. Madeleine Biardeau cogently argued this for the Mahâbhârata (against V. Sukthankar)[53]. By a forced mapping onto Western notions of history, such projects would alter Indic traditions, in the same manner as many 19th century colonial interventions re-engineered Indian society, narratives and identities. This is cultural imperialism.

Itihas is more about identity and continuity with one’s ancestors. Itihas is not seen as a necessary condition for spiritual truth-claims, because there have always been many mainstream Indian spiritual movements with no reliance upon itihas. Vaishnavism, as one of many ways of being a Hindu, comes closest to having a Grand Narrative of God’s interventions in human history, i.e. via the avatars of Vishnu. But even Vaishnavism accepts multiple avatars, and the puranas are able to adapt to include Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed as avatars — because of the pliable nature of itihas. itihas is like an ecosystem of narratives, in which new peoples may incorporate their own narratives in a mutually respectful manner.

Finally, Shiva’s dance is completely ahistorical. It is the universe. There is no question of a specific time or place where a “unique” intervention by Shiva occurred, because Shiva’s Shakti is engaged with us at all times and in all places, and is immanent in, and as the universe.

Having said all this, itihas can also include literal historiography in the Western sense, especially in mundane human events[54].

Theology ¹ Adhyatma-Vidya

Theologians of Abrahamic religions study ancient canons, with the same intensity as business attorneys study complex commercial contracts. They examine canonical amendments through various covenants from God, look for annexes to various clauses, try to find escape clauses in specific situations, and so forth. In fact, discussions amongst theologians often remind me of corporate attorneys debating a complex and convoluted contract that allows many divergent interpretations.

To support this kind of theology, historiography is very important. Historiography looks at “evidence” to re-construct the “contracts” between God and man, which theologians can then work with. Hence, legal jurisprudence and historiography have dominated much of the scholarship of Abrahamic religions.

All this seems very strange and irrelevant to most Indian spiritualists, who fail to see what any of this has to do with true spirituality. This points to the core difference between Indic and Abrahamic traditions. Continuity and success, therefore, depend upon two different kinds of core competences.

The Abrahamic religions are built around institutions of jurisprudence and historiography. These institutions maintain the canons, (re) interpret them, protect them from false claims and threats, control their distribution, and leverage them as assets in expansion campaigns.

On the other hand, the core competence that determines the continued success of many Indic traditions has been the ability to produce living spiritual masters across the spectrum of space and time, in order to serve specific communities with customized teachings. This means that the techniques to achieve embodied enlightenment are all important — including various esoteric systems of meditation, tantra, Vedanta, bhakti, etc. These are the tools, and not the history[55].

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of culture as capital, one might say that in Indic traditions, embodied cultural capital is given greater value, whereas in the Abrahamic religions, the disembodied cultural capital of institutions and doctrinal “property” has been valued higher.

History-Centrism and Inter-Faith Relations

What, one wonders, is the reason for so much inter-religious tension and competitiveness, given so many similar conclusions across all religions? After all, there are “liberal” interpretations that show various religions agreeing on physics and cosmology. Furthermore, ethical principles, such as loving all humans, charity, truthfulness, and so forth, are common to religions in general[56].

My answer is that no amount of commonality amongst religions could resolve the conflicts caused by non-negotiable Grand Narratives of History. Even if different religions’ rituals became common, houses of worship became similar or even common, dress codes became the same, and so forth, as long as they have non-negotiable and proprietary Grand Narratives of History, they would continue to clash[57].

Grand Narratives are in competition for market-share. They serve as mechanisms for appropriation from others, including the use of hostile and friendly takeovers. For example, if extrapolating some obscure Christian text legitimizes the claim that “Christian Yoga” was “always a part of Christianity,” then it would enhance the Christian Grand Narrative. Given the popularity of yoga today, it would correspondingly inflate Christianity’s brand value. Likewise, if “dowry murder” can be blamed as a “Hindu problem,” then it devalues Hinduism. These brand wars are the natural consequence of history-centric canons, just as a proprietary computer operating system is the basis for exclusiveness. What Windows is to Microsoft, the proprietary Grand Narrative of History is to an organized religion[58].

Since superiority must be claimed in order to justify aggressive proselytizing, and no intrinsic superiority may be found in the evangelical religions over other faiths, either in scientific aspects or in ethics, the only way to claim superiority is via some unique claim to history. Therefore, the Darwinian expansionism of Grand Narratives overrides any and all other considerations — including commonalities of cosmology and ethics. When interfaith dialogs proclaim commonality of morality and belief in one Supreme Being, etc., they evade the point that history is the real cause of conflicts.

The Historical Grand Narrative of God’s interventions is usually non-negotiable, for it becomes a source of power, and serves as a marketing brand. It leads to exclusiveness: that there is only One True History. Monotheism turns into My-Theism,[59] the belief that only one’s own conception of theism is valid, and that all others must be falsified and demonized. Religious institutions get obsessed to defend, control and enforce their Grand Narrative of History. It becomes one’s religious duty to do this as God’s work. Most religious conflicts have originated with the groups that insist on a historical narrative as central, and many of these aggressions have been visited upon groups for whom such a narrative is secondary or irrelevant. Nowadays, this triggers a chain reaction of responses.

History-centric religions demand bondage to historical dogma and hence deny freedom to discover spirituality for oneself. They also have irreconcilable conflicts with other history-centric religions, such as those between Christianity and Islam. Furthermore, they tend to prey upon non-history based faiths, claiming this to be their civilizing mission.

While history is culture specific, adhyatma-vidya is pluralistic, as has been proven by the many different forms it has taken in Asian cultures that have embraced Buddhism. The great advantage of this, as noted by Rita Sherma, is “that it does not need to destroy whole cultures and undermine entire civilizations to inculcate an acceptance of a history that, by its very nature, is exclusively representative of a specific time and place[60].”

Why This Matters

1. Western categories have dominated the study of world religions. Hence, we find all spiritual traditions classified into monotheism and polytheism, rather than into history-centric and adhyatmika. Furthermore, because Abrahamic religions are self-defined in socio-political terms, Western scholars have used anthropology as a principal means to “study” Indian spirituality, leading to the “caste, cows, and curry” theories of India. But dharma ¹ religion: this calls for a fresh examination, in which Eurocentric categories would be put under the microscope.
2. The West is strong in constructing Grand Narratives for itself, defending and propagating them via institutions, and using them as a source of power, including conquest and expansion. Indians today lack a Grand Narrative in the Western sense, while the traditional itihas style of Indian narrative has been marginalized by “secularism.” Adhyatma-vidya is incomplete by itself, as it leaves Indian society exposed to external forces that assert a God-given socio-political agenda, which is their mission on Earth. On the other hand, India has been very strong in developing a wide range of adhyatma-vidya, whereas the West lacks this dimension. A civilization must have both, but the narratives must not be history-centric or exclusivist. A strong Grand Narrative without adhyatma-vidya can become demonic and a global menace. On the other hand, an adhyatmika society that lacks laukika (worldly) narratives becomes subjugated.
3. Hindutva may be seen as a recent attempt to fill this Grand Narrative void, not as anything to do with adhyatma-vidya, but as an indigenous response to competing foreign Grand Narratives. However, I have many issues with the specific Grand Narrative of Hindutva, given its own kind of exclusivism. I would like to see Indians across all faiths (and non-Indians who choose to adopt Indic traditions) jointly construct a pan-Indic Grand Narrative for themselves. (This is why I have preferred the term “Indic”.) This process should be based on a critical but fair study of Indic traditions, and should not be Eurocentric in the way Nehruvianism, Indian Marxism, and Westernized Indian Feminism have unsuccessfully tried to be. This narrative would strengthen Indian culture, giving it both: (a) individual leveladhyatma-vidya and (b) collective laukika identity.
4. India’s subaltern scholars have ignored the spirituality of the subaltern people, while claiming to champion them. This has to do with Marx’ use of Eurocentric categories in his analysis of “religion.” Unfortunately, he, and subsequently the Indian Marxists, blindly applied the conclusions that were based on Abrahamic religions, as being universal to all faiths worldwide. Consequently, most subaltern scholars neither have the interest nor the training to be able to understand that the true transmitters and preservers of adhyatma-vidya were the rishis, siddhas, natha yogis, tantrikas, sadhus and bhakti sants, many of whom were from non-Brahmin and non-Kshyatriya varnas[61]. The Brahmin priesthood did preserve oral and written textual works of importance, but in terms of adhyatma-vidya, the prize goes to the renunciant/yogic lineages[62]. Unfortunately, since European religions were, indeed, dominated by elitist interests, the same lens was superimposed on the study of Indic traditions, and remains the academic practice even today.
5. The core thesis of this paper is that absolute and literal historical grand narratives are (a) unscientific, and (b) the cause of many conflicts. When these narratives are given up — or reinterpreted as ahistorical, in the manner in which Carl Jung did with Christian myths — they cease to serve fundamentalist evangelism.
6. The West is rapidly appropriating adhyatma-vidya from Indic traditions, because it knows that it lacks this area of knowledge systems. The goal of much Western scholarship is to assimilate Indic adhyatma-vidya into Western Grand Narratives. This is explained in my U-Turn Model[63]. They look for obscure references in their own traditions, that could be stretched and extrapolated, to claim that whatever the scholar studied in Indic traditions for several decades is also found in his/her own Western tradition. This appropriation gets justified in various ways, each of which I have responded to elsewhere. Simultaneously, a parallel team of Western scholars are busy forcing Western categories upon Indic traditions, to depict them as incoherent, pre-rational, deficient in ethics, other-worldly, backward, etc. This two-pronged strategy — appropriate and demonize the source — was previously used to devastate pagan, Native American, and African cultures. Many powerful Indian scholars, journalists, English language award-winning authors, and others, are deeply invested as sepoys in this strategy.

Discussions with Liberal Christians

Since the foregoing treatment of Christianity assumes mainstream Christianity, I sent the draft to several scholars who define themselves as “liberal Christians.” Their criticisms and my responses are summarized below, in a dialog fashion. I have learnt a great deal from this exchange, and feel that we could open “history centrism” as a new category for analysis in religious studies.

History-Centrism:

Liberal Christians: There is no requirement in Christianity to take God’s historical intervention literally, and, indeed, if you do try to take it literally, the result is a complete contradiction.

My Response: But there are so many mandatory official creeds, which focus mainly on the literal interpretation of history. Also, why do 39% of Americans believe the Bible literally, as per Gallup Poll, and 59% after September 11 believe in the literal interpretation of Revelation? Secondly, if historical literalism were to be abandoned by the powers of the church, and Jesus were interpreted metaphorically as one of many equivalent rishis/avatars/gurus, would it not make conversion moot, and would it not usher in a new era of cooperation amongst religions, rather than competition? Your position is not the ground reality today. [64]

Liberal Christians: Don’t fall into the methodological error of comparing popular Christianity with the very highest and best traditions of India. It would be wrong to assume that historicity is absent from the Indic traditions. You compare exoteric Abrahamic religions with esoteric Indic religions. By far the most widely practiced forms of Hinduism are bhakti, and look to the god in a historical context.

My Response: Western scholars readily acknowledge that most Hindus are not people of the book. Have you ever come across a single Hindu who reads the Manu-smriti (other than an academic scholar)? I have never come across such a person in my entire life. When they do read a Hindu text, it is most often the Gita; but Gita is ahistorical, as it makes no demands to believe in any literal account of history. Furthermore, under the sub-heading, “itihas ¹ History,” I explain that the past as seen by common Indians is not the same as the Western notion of literal history. Vedas, Tantras, and several other scriptures do not belong to any author.Devas/devis are ahistorical intelligences. Time and temporality are mithya, and not seen as literally real. Mainstream Christianity depends upon prophets, and prophetic = history-centrism. You are trying to de-prohpetize Christianity, which will not be easy, and it won’t be the same religion anymore. Prophetic encounters between God and man are fundamentally different than the ahistorical experiences in yoga, tantra, bhakti, and other esoteric methods[65].

Liberal Christians: Christianity has had many internal tensions: Mark is the earliest and in some ways the most challenging. Matthew is the account that most deeply connects the life of Jesus with Judaism. Luke is interested in the human-interest stories and in the founding of a new religious order. John is the most mystical. “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, Bless the bed that I lie on,” is an old chant.

My Response: True. But Alex Alexander already made this point, earlier in the essay. My response was that, despite there being different Christian narratives, the overall meta-narrative, as accepted by mainstream churches, is history-centric. Competing history-centrisms do not negate history-centrism.

Liberal Christians: An ahistorical way of knowing might not really exist. Even the body, and certainly the conceptual matrix, are arguably historically conditioned, if not historically determined.

My Response: Any conceptual matrix is nama-rupa, and hence, within maya. The state of consciousness claimed by rishis transcends all nama-rupa. History fixation is the worst kind of nama-rupa.

Emphasis Upon Jurisprudence:

Liberal Christians: Christianity criticizes Judaism for too much focus on jurisprudence. Christian theologians see Jesus as coming to rectify this obsessive interest in the law. That is part of his appeal.

My Response: While Christianity is less focused on jurisprudence (as compared to Judaism), it is still very much focused on “God’s Laws”, and various covenants that come from time to time, that need expert lawyers to interpret.

God’s Immanence, and Embodiment:

Liberal Christians: The presence of God is considered always accessible to every Christian, merely a heartbeat away, as in the psalms, and God is always and constantly active in the world. Christians have experienced Christ in the same way as Shiva’s dance.

My Response: But the experiencing of Shiva is not as a historical man, who came in a specific time and place, and directed certain people to act on his behalf. Therein lies the central difference in the nature of the “experience.” An experience of the historical Jesus brings his whole history as context into the mind. This isnama-rupa. Most Abrahamic people are very reluctant, and some outright afraid, to let go of this nama-rupa grasping. The Abrahamic religions posit an external God who drives history, which, in turn, creates ideology, separation, and imperialism. The ahistorical religions posit embodied adhyatmika processes (devatas) that operate the decision-making to create history. The embodied ahistorical creates unions, communities, continuity, moksha, nirvana.

Furthermore, Indic paths deal not just with spirituality that is attainable by everyone — consciousness as awe, saintly virtues of courage, love of all, and righteousness — but also with deep potentials of the body-spirit to the point of revealing the “anatomy” of the “ensouled body,” — it’s subtle body, chakras, energies, and maps. On the other hand, the worship of historical events/persons could also be correlated with the poor record that the Abrahamic religions have regarding the body in spiritual growth. The milieu of India has nurtured sadhus, rishis, yogis, and tantrikas for millennia, at all tiers of society. The milieu of RISA and others like it is based on hermeneutical training and career advancement. These are entirely different[66].

Adhyatma-Vidya:

Liberal Christians: Christianity may have turned away from adhyatmika, but Jesus taught “The kingdom of God is within you,” and Judas went wrong because he assumed that Jesus was a this-worldly messiah or political leader.

My Response: Agreed. How I wish Jesus’ followers had understood him in the same manner as he would have been understood if he had been born in India![67]

Conflict-Ridden:

Liberal Christians: Hindus and Buddhists are not immune from the us/them disease, or from chauvinism.

My Response: Agreed. Indians had many intense disputes also, and there were centuries of debates. But the criteria on which this bifurcation occurred had nothing to do with competing accounts of history. Rather, the disputes concerned the nature of the self, the pramanas to be allowed, whether certain states of consciousness were ultimate or provisional, and so forth.

Monotheism/Polytheism:

Liberal Christians: I don’t think there is really much of a difference between monotheism and polytheism. Jack Miles writes in his book, “God: A Biography,” that the Abrahamic traditions replaced many gods with a single God having multiple personalities. To this, the Abrahamic traditions added Satan, who functions as a Zoroastrian “other,” and a whole bunch of angels, saints, Mother Mary, the Virgin of Guadalupe, supernatural icons, etc., not to mention the Trinity. Before you know it, the so-called monotheistic religions seem polytheistic in practice.

My Response: I agree with that account. But monotheism is a fundamental “Western” concept taught today in virtually every school, in college courses on comparative religions, and in Western media portrayals. It defines the teachings of Main Street’s church priests. It cannot be imagined away by a few liberal intellectuals. I am glad to be in dialog with the enlightened liberal minority of Christians, but this essay is about Christianity as being promoted worldwide today. I have no complaints against either monotheism or polytheism, but only (i) against “My-Theism”, and (ii) against imposing these categories upon non-Abrahamic religions.

Savior ¹ Avatar:

Finally, in response to these liberal criticisms, Antonio de Nicolas also sent me his own writings on the subject. He has written one of the finest explanations of the key distinction between Abrahamic and Indic traditions. As an eminent scholar of both East and West, his interpretations of Vedas are valuable for contemporary audiences. He contrasts the Savior of Abrahamic religions with the Avatar of Indic traditions to make his point[68].

First, here is his explanation of the Savior as an essence of Abrahamic myths:[69]

“The Savior image [is] the go between God and the sinful race of humans. We know this image also as the scapegoat, and the Substitute King: someone chosen for the occasion to be the victim of the moment for the salvation of the rest of the community. He gains immortal divinity, saves other humans, brings his Father into the scene, his followers name a Church after him and these same followers establish a narrative, a theology, and ethics based on principles of behavior… The room left for individuals to improve their spiritual knowledge in this scheme of Savior/sinner, is not great, we are after all sinners, born in sin, and our individual salvation is only a gift, provided we follow the rules of ethics, and not the result of any superior knowledge of God or deviation from this scheme. Judaism, Islam and Christianity are the followers and founders of the model. God and the rules of ethics come from the outside and their mission in life is to bring all humans to surrender to this model, either through conversion or force. The individual, in this model, is an individual only in name, for after all, individual perfection consists in total surrender to the model, in letting the model become embodied in the subjects in such a way that the model, rather than the individuals, acts through each complying individual… Wherever there is violence the Savior model is at work.”

By contrast, the Avatar is different:

“The Avatar model, on the other hand, is earlier than the Savior’s. It dates from the times of the oral Rig Veda (5,000 to 2,500 B.C.) It has a larger range of human development than the Savior’s, from the Language of possibilities of the Asat (Chaos) where all geometries of possible human forms are waiting to be born as heroes, gods, humans etc., to the Language of Sacrifice and Images, where all forms are to be sacrificed… The gods are this side of creation and they are interior embodiments of a multiplicity of brains at work. Inner acts, rather than names are at work. These acts are so efficient that they may create new “gods”, new centers of action, to guide humans to make wise decisions. There are no a priori norms of ethics to accommodate to…”

He goes on to explain how the Indic process involves an entirely different mechanism of ethics, one that is not dependent upon outside rules, (which, in turn, would be dependent upon historical revelations.):

“Hopefully, the West will realize that both Plato and Pythagoras are footnotes to the earlier cultures of India, such as the Katha Upanishad, Rig Veda etc. Indic texts had already marked the individual training and ethics of social life. Nothing short of excellence will do. The training for excellence is to practice the embodied technologies of decision-making, the right decisions, the wise decisions, when needed by the present dharma, context, one faces. This is the goal, the ethics of the whole program of the Avatar Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: to train Arjuna, that fallen and disturbed warrior, to make decisions, the best ones, as needed by his present dharma (his present situation), a battle field. And this is the program of human acting, from the Rig Veda down, that Indic texts propose: an ethics of decision-making as opposed to an ethics of compliance to rules coming from the outside. There is no outside god able to make these pronouncements in Indic texts; here all the gods are this side of creation, as the Rig Veda proclaims.”

Antonio de Nicolas emphasizes that today’s ethical situations are not sufficiently dealt with by simplistic rules or commandments. Rather, one needs to cultivate embodied states (of sattva) that also include the outer contexts in which decisions are expected:

“Decision-making is a must-ethics in a world that is so ambiguous. Our educational system is biased in favor of veridical decisions, decisions geared to agreements between subject and object, logical platitudes, “finding the truth”… But there are no mechanisms in education to teach anyone decision based on multiple ambiguous situations, self-centered decisions, “what is best from among the possible,” in the concrete situation facing the subject. For these kinds of decisions new technologies need to be embodied by a subject and also by the guide, guru, spiritual director that supervises the spiritual development of the subject. This is the lesson of Indic texts. Arjuna in the Gita collapses in the first chapter unable to make the decision to fight in a very ambiguous — to him — situation. Family, friends, are on both sides of the battlefield. Krishna takes him on a journey of communities and acts (yogas) he was familiar with for ten chapters until his whole organism opens and is able to see (chapter eleven) the geometries on which the passage and dissolution of nama-rupa, names and forms, takes place. This is the embodiment of the Avatara in its full manifestation. A man has been able to embody in one life-time the technologies of the present culture to the point of having it constantly present so that when called upon he may make the best decision, from among the possible, for the benefit of all. It is after the realization that the Gita, in chapter twelve, spells out the meaning of the “battle field” as the human body, and of the technologies of decision-making, as the opening of memory, that opens the heart, and opens finally the frontal lobes so that in the end the subject, Arjuna, by habit from the desires of his heart whatever he wants: yatha icchasi tatha kuru (now that you know do as you wish).”

He concludes: [70]

“It comes down to this. The West has trained its people to perform veridical agreements — this is true, this is false — but all these Western people lack the ability to make decisions in complex situations, where they have multiple choices and need the frontal lobes to view those situations. The only people who did this in the West were interlopers from other cultures — Ignatius, John, Teresa, etc. They founded Orders to be able to practice these skills without the Inquisitions ears around the corner, but in public they talked theology. Moreover, these skills are borrowed from Indic texts and practices, and it is time they came together as “ONE” tradition. You are doing a very good job pointing to the problem and the differences. The opposition you encounter is that of experts (so-called) unable to make complex decisions in need or frontal lobes, but are trained in “veridical” decisions for which you need nothing biological except agreement to a priori rules.”

How “Western” is Liberal Christianity?

Many liberal Christians are now propagating a new ”Scientific Christianity” in the West. But this is largely constructed from the many unacknowledged U-Turns from Indic traditions. These appropriations reached a frenzy in the mid 19th century, when virtually every major European university created a large-scale Sanskrit department, often at the expense of Latin/Greek. A few prominent examples of Indic appropriations into Christianity include:

• Teilhard de Chardin, the prominent 20th century scientific Christian theologian, studied Ramanuja’s Vedanta, and then equated Saguna Brahman with “the body of Christ.” However, he was persecuted by the Church, and lived in Asia in exile, while writing many of his works. While ignoring this background, his ideas have seeped into Judeo-Christianity as part of “scientific theology[71].”
• Carl Jung studied Indic traditions, taught summer institutes on yoga philosophy and kundalini in Zurich for a few years. Then, he repackaged this into his “original Western science,” and later used it to re-interpret the Bible to make the old myths scientific. Meanwhile, he emphasized that Westerners should not practice yoga, because it would lead to dangerous consequences[72]. I wonder what he would have to say about the fact that today 18 million Americans practice yoga, and that it has not made them world negating, irrational, or unscientific. However, many Westerners are following his advice to construct “Western yoga,” but they are attempting this not by original discovery, but simply by repackaging and branding the Indic traditions as theirs.
• T.S. Eliot, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Huxley, Steiner, Assagioli, Montessori, Huxley, Eliade, Campbell, Beats, Wilber and many other modern thinkers were heavily influenced by Indic traditions. Later, they and/or their followers erased this influence, in an effort to preserve the “purity” and integrity of European thought, and, especially, the integrity of Christianity[73].

Contrary to their self-image, many liberal Christians are unable to go beyond Eurocentric worldviews[74] . For instance, Thomas McEvilley explains the suppression of one major appropriation:[75]

“Still, modern western attitudes towards Plotinus have not been shaped by the widespread acknowledgment of the extraordinary similarity of his teachings to doctrines taught in India in his day; but by the role he unwittingly played after his death as a formative influence on Christian theology. Translations of his work may have a churchy kind of ring. The view of Plotinus as a kind of proto-Christian may express, at least in part, a dread of finding possible Indian origins for the texts whose influence was to contribute to shaping the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhardt, and many later western thinkers. So it is not only that “to admit ‘oriental influences’ on [Plotinus] was tantamount to besmirching his good name,” [76]but even more it would also besmirch that whole aspect of the western tradition that flowed from him. If Plotinus had passed massive Asian influence into the western tradition, there would be little point to calling it western anymore.”

Furthermore, the new liberal Christianity is not the variety being exported to third world countries, because history-centrism is required to establish Christian uniqueness for conversion purposes. I am asking liberal Christians to make a choice — between adhyatmika Christianity on the one hand, and evangelism and proselytizing on the other. I hope that this essay triggers the following two healthy tensions within liberal Christians:

1. The liberal Christian ahistorical interpretations at home contradict the conservative export variety of Christianity. This is similar to the way John Stuart Mill, while serving as an officer in the British East India Company for 35 years, was on the one hand responsible for studying dharmashastras to instruct the British on “managing” Indians socio-politically, and simultaneously, was pioneering liberalism at home. It was rationalized that Indians were not ready for liberalism, even though one could explain how Mill’s study of dharmashastras influenced “European liberalism[77].”
2. Eurocentric appropriations are making Indic adhyatma-vidya traditions seem irrelevant, because many scholars reference only the European equivalents to the Indic sources that they have studied, thereby making it unimportant for students to study Indic thought. Consequently, Indic traditions are facing rapid atrophy in Western influenced scholarship. To make matters worse, a large number of highly educated and Westernized Indian intellectuals have recently been appropriated and deployed by liberal Westerners to prosecute Indian traditions, while at the same time, these very traditions are being appropriated into Western society. For example, techniques such as yoga, meditation, mantra, and guided imagery are being demonized in India as superstitious, chauvinistic, communalistic, and even fascist, by Western funded “progressive” Indians, denying a billion people the benefits of their own traditions in terms of reduced stress, violence, and psychological disorders — while the West now enjoys these very traditions. The ethical dimensions of this must not be ignored.

Summary of Major Assertions

1) Adhyatma-vidya is a methodology that many spiritual traditions have used as the basis for arriving at their truth-claims.

2) Historical narratives about God’s interventions have served as a methodology by many traditions to make their truth-claims.

3) Both these methods tend to exist in most major traditions.

4) One or the other method tends to dominate over time, and this has a drastic impact on the nature of the tradition that develops.

5) History-centric traditions tend to be more fixed in their claims, because history cannot be renegotiated easily. Adhyatmika traditions tend to allow new insights because their methodology allows them to do so. Hence, the former tend to gravitate towards “finality” of truth-claims and fixed canons, while the latter end up compiling massive libraries of texts based on large numbers of adhyatmika claims.

6) History-centric movements easily get institutionalized, and this gives continuity. Adhyatmika movements depend on the living masters who claim the “rishi state”, and hence cannot easily become institutionalized.

7) Between these two categories, adhyatmika based traditions tend to have greater flexibility, accommodation of diverse views, and ability to peacefully change over time.

8) Bhakti saints, Vedas, Upanishads, Gita, Buddha’s teachings, Mahavira’s teachings, are some of the many examples where truth-claims are not contingent upon any historical events. In other words, you do not have to accept or prove any history, in order to practice and receive the benefit claimed.

9) Major (but not all) denominations of Christianity and Islam insist on a set of historical events as being necessary to their belief system, making them history centric. Examples include: Sunni, Shiite, Ahmadiyya; Mormon, Baptist; Vatican; Presbyterian; Methodist; etc. (Many Hindutva followers would also fall under this classification, such as those that claim Ram’s birthplace in Ayodhya as a necessary (not just “nice to have”) part of their religion.)

10) Major Christian and Islamic denominations also believe in a fixed set of future events, i.e. the Apocalypse.

11) Surveys by prominent American research firms (Gallup, CNN, TIME) show that history centric religious beliefs are held by a large percentage of Americans, and that this percentage has increased recently. Furthermore, many very important Americans hold these beliefs.

12) For a variety of reasons explained by scholars, such as Alan Wallace, the West has not develop sophisticated systems of adhyatma-vidya, even though they have had “individual” mystics over time.

13) Much of the theological work in the Abrahamic religions has centered on analyzing, arguing, and interpreting historical claims and counter claims.

14) History centric religions find it difficult to consider another conflicting historical grand narrative to also be valid. Therefore, for a given religion to be valid, it must find the others to be false, or at least partially false.

15) Adhyatma-vidya allows that there can be many different kinds of adhyatmika experiences, at many stages, and many levels. Furthermore, there can be many methods to achieve various stages.

16) Since the academic study of religion started in the West, it is based on the use of Western categories, and hence, this privileges the lenses of the Abrahamic religions over others.

17) Many Indian subaltern scholars have ignored or dismissed spirituality as an important part of life, whereas the subaltern people of India have considered spirituality as very important to them. In other words, these scholars do not fully understand the very people they claim to champion.

18) While subaltern scholars have depicted Hinduism as elitist and Brahmin controlled, the sadhus have been subaltern people; the bhakti saints were almost always subaltern people; tantrikas were subalterns and not Brahmins; and the puranas have traditionally been performed by all jatis. Hence, these scholars have thrown the baby out with the bathwater, because they simply assumed Marx’ conclusions about Abrahamic religions as being universally applicable to all cultures – the blind spot from becoming neocolonized.

19) Many Westerners have appropriated Indic adhyatma-vidya into their own Abrahamic religions. Often, the source of the appropriation gets blurred, and eventually erased, in the minds of most Westerners and neocolonized Indians.

20) Monotheism is not a true mark of distinction of the Abrahamic religions, because: (i) many other traditions also believe in one Supreme Being; and (ii) some of the Abrahamic religions have had polytheistic backgrounds and polytheistic present beliefs.

REFERENCES:

[1] I wish to thank the following scholars for their extensive comments, criticisms, and suggestions: Jack Petranker, Sunthar Visuvalingam, Antonio de Nicolas, Rita Sherma, Cleo Kearns, Billie Grassie, Kundun Singh, Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Srinivas Tilak, T. S. Rukmani, Patricia Reynaud, Matthijs Cornelissen and Stuart Sovatsky.

[2] While most Christian theologians today would go for the latter option, in practice, they treat the historical claims in the Bible as boundary conditions in any such “open” thinking.

[3] Some reviewers suggested including the debate between third-person (“it is said that…”) claims and first-person (“I know…”), but that is a major topic of its own, and already much has been written on it.

[4] Unfortunately, genocide is only defined in terms of physical human deaths. Therefore, eradication of entire cultures, languages, ways of life, religions, etc. is not being included as genocide. Endangered species of animals and plants have more rights and ethical oversight than do human cultures. Could it be that the very “liberal” forces that champion “human rights” are, in many instances, endangering cultural diversity by facilitating Westernization in the name of globalization?

[5] For instance, Kashmir Shaivism does not accept maya as defined by Vedanta, but has its own notion of ignorance in ordinary man.

[6] Such as the proofs of all possible theorems.

[7] Schopenhauer in “The World as Will and Representation” linked Kant’s theory of knowledge and Maya.

[8] This explains, perhaps, why the Hellenic philosophy and the sources that Plato and Aristotle used constituted a major issue with the first Christian theologians, who resorted to the ‘theory of borrowings’ ancient knowledge. The Greeks would have been taught these divine truths by fallen angels (Origen, Clement of Alexandria). The Fathers of the Church could not imagine such knowledge imparted without divine intervention.

[9] Any intuition based on history-centric “beliefs” is still in nama-rupa bondage.

[10] In Buddhist and Jaina systems, there is no atman occupying such a state, but the state is claimed.

[11] There are strands in Indic traditions that say that without the presence of the teacher, enlightenment and the transcendence of human limitations are not possible. But Indian living masters are not historically unique, and there is an endless stream of them, with always some in the present moment. Hence, unlike the dependence on historical Prophets, this is not history-centric.

[12] Christian saints are often deemed to be embodied models, but (i) only after they die is it allowed to declare them as saints, and (ii) the notion of embodiment is itself dependent upon the historicity of Jesus. The master-disciple connection is extremely important in certain orders of Islam. All the Tariqas nowadays are centers around living spiritual masters. In some countries such as Syria, they are deemed more important than exoteric hierarchies. But these connections are non-existent neo-Wahhabism.

[13] Note that while “Original Sin” is a specific space-time (i.e. historical) event, avidya is beginningless, and hence ahistorical.

[14] Islam is a dual tradition: apart from sharia, Islam is also haqiqa defined as the divine reality in the human heart. It has a double hierarchy, one of theologians and doctors of the law inscribed in history, and one hidden, composed of holy men around the qutb or pole. These “mystics” have a structured and systematic teaching, transmitted from master to disciple in the Tariqas. Notwithstanding this, the power and control of Islam has been based on the historical canon.

[15] Unfortunately, Hindu nationalism today sometimes seems to be mimicking the worst things about the West, by becoming obsessively history-centric. But this is different than the past of Hinduism, and is atypical amongst Hindus even today. (See the section titled, Itihas ¹ History.) In the case of Christianity, history-driven exclusivism has dominated ever since Constantine took control over it in the 4th century.

[16] In very early Christianity, and in 8th to 13th centuries, Christian mysticism was widespread, although always overshadowed by canon-based institutions.

[17] Even though religious orders did keep alive their mystics, such as Teresa, John, and Ignatius.

[18] It is a fair criticism by a Christian scholar that this was not always good, because it could also be abused, as it lacks institutional oversight.

[19] In Shiite Islam, Saints reinterpret the eternal truth for each historical period. One of the names of Ibn Arabi is “the one who revitalizes religion,” religion being more than sharia and theological dogmas. This is one of the core reasons for the Arab-Iran conflicts — the Iranian Shiites refuse to succumb to Arab controlled Law of Islam, and have kept it fluid and open. Shiite Islam, therefore, comes much closer to Indic traditions.

[20]The invention of apostolic succession was an attempt in Christianity.

[21] The vast majority of them did not do the violence; they were the objects of persecution and execution.

[22] With the exception of Sikhism.

[23] “Religious Traditions of the World,” Edited by H. Byron Earhart. HarperCollins. 1993. p.540.

[24] C. Alex Alexander’s comment on Sankrant Sanu’s Sulekha column, “Need I belong to only one religion?” at: http://www.sulekha.com/column.asp?cid=294339

[25] John Davidson, “The Gospel of Jesus: In search of his original teachings,” Element, Rockport, MA, p.75

[26] “Surveying the religious landscape,” by George Gallup and Michael Lindsay. Critics have complained that statistics cannot define a religion, but then it must also be pointed out that Western anthropology’s data gathering of India’s “caste, cows, and curry” stereotypes would also have to be invalidated.

[27] See “The Axis of Neocolonialism,” at: http://www.sulekha.com/column.asp?cid=218625

[28] “Dismissal of heresy charge called ‘dysfunction‘,” by Larry Witham. The Washington Times. February 20, 2003. http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030220-6816151.htm

[29] “Bible College hangs up on 666 prefix.” Sunday, March 2, 2003: http://edition.cnn.com/2003/US/South/03/01/offbeat.ky.prefix.ap/index.html

[30] “Mel Gibson’s a Catholic now,” The Economic Times. March 13, 2003. Based on Reuters, March 8, 2003:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=39593568

[31] All quotes in this sub-heading are from: “Apocalypse Now,” by Nancy Gibbs. Cover Story in Time Magazine, July 1, 2002, pp. 41-48. Includes sidebar, “The End: How It Got That Way,” by David Van Biema. pp. 46-47.

[32] “The End: How It Got That Way,” by David Van Biema. Time Magazine, July 1, 2002. pp.46-47.

[33] “Apocalypse Now,” by Nancy Gibbs. Time Magazine, Cover Story. July 1, 2002, pp.41-48.

[34] “Eschatology,” in “The New Encyclopedia Britannica,” Vol. 17. pp. 401-408.

[35] TIME Magazine.

[36] TIME Magazine.

[37] “Eschatology,” in “The New Encyclopedia Britannica,” Vol. 17. pp. 401-408.

[38] Mercea Eliage, “The Sacred and the Profane,” pp. 296-207.

[39] In an email forwarded by Holly Gwyn Lavender, in March, 2003.

[40] The validity of any specific first-person claims is not crucial to my thesis: What matters is that the basis for making the claims is ahistorical.

[41] While his writings are about Buddhism, similar principles also apply to other Indic traditions.

[42] Alan Wallace: “Why the West Has No Science of Consciousness: A Buddhist View”. Global Renaissance:
Indic Contributions. July 2002. Menla, NY.
See: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/indic_colloq/persons/person_wallace_alan.htm

[43] Private communication.

[44] Private email of 3/3/03.

[45] Butler, Dom Cuthbert. (1967) “Western Mysticism: The Teaching of Augustine.” Gregory and Bernard on Contemplation and the Contemplative Life. 3rd. ed., with “Afterthoughts,” by Prof. David Knowles. London: Constable & Co. p.26).

[46] Burnaby, John. (1938/1991) Amor Dei: “A Study of the Religion of St. Augustine.” Norwich: The Canterbury Press. (1938: 52 & 67)

[47] M. O. C. (trans.) (1979 & 1987) Meister Eckhart: “Sermons & Treatises,” Vols. I-III, Longmead: Element Books Ltd. (1979: 1:7)

[48] James, William. (1890/1950) “The Principles of Psychology.” New York: Dover Publications. I: 416-424.

[49] Wallace: this was due “in large part to the fifty-year domination of academic psychology by behaviorism.”

[50] I do not accept orthodox “science” as the court of last resort in matters of religion. “Science” is used loosely in this essay to represent reproducible and ahistorical methodologies.

[51] I am indebted to Dr. Rita Sherma for suggesting the ideas in this section.

[52] Private email, 3/10/03.

[53] See 2.1.1 and 2.1.7 at: http://tiger.bun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/letter/003/symposium/basenote/witzel-2.html

[54] For an example of Indian “history” from indigenous Indian sources, see: Ronald Inden, Daud Ali, Jonathan Walters (Editors): “Querying the Medieval: Texts and the History of Practice in South Asia,” Oxford University Press. 2000.

[55] It is interesting to note that Prof. Jack Hawley of Barnard College, NY, has launched a campaign across American campuses to charge that Diaspora Hindus are “constructing a new Hinduism.” But he fails to appreciate that the very nature of adhyatma-vidya is to continually renew itself, in contrast to history-centric canonized belief systems that must wait for the next Prophet (who must first prove his status by doing miracles). Furthermore, Liberation Theology was a successful “construction” by Catholic bishops in Latin America, to counter Marxism. They were able to show that Catholicism had its own internal resources to offer better human rights, without having to adopt Marxism. Catholic theologians would not accept that they invented a new religion. Rather, they would point out the long history of Christian reconstructions as reinterpretations, each true to the Bible. Since Hinduism has been colonized, and is now neocolonized, it has not recently enjoyed the same freedom and rights to be able to re-interpret itself for each situation. But in earlier times, Hinduism did reinterpret itself many times, each time from within, i.e. without Western grants to scholars to document “human rights” violations. So this process is to be seen as: (i) natural organic development in any system that is not fossilized; (ii) the tradition within India for a long time to make changes; and (iii) similar in some ways to what Christianity has been doing to itself. Therefore, could one surmise that Hawley’s problem is that the changes would be brought about by insiders, and not imposed by (neo) colonialists from the outside? Note that Veena Oldenburg’s and also Dirks’ latest books point out that a major part of the colonial agenda was to blame native culture for all sorts of problems, and then to use this excuse to “reform” in ways that suited the colonial interests. Indigenous reform or natural evolution was seen as a threat to colonial control — a moving target makes the job more difficult for the hit men. Might there be a similar threat perception on the part of the Western-controlled academic study of India? This comment points the microscope back at the role of asymmetric power in Indology.

[56] There are major academic campaigns to try to show that Indic traditions lack progress, ethics, etc. and that these are unique gifts brought by Christianity. However, these are distortions, which are sustained only through control over the production and distribution of Religious Studies in the academy.

[57] On the other hand, some agreement of a different kind can be found when one looks at the metaphysical principles underlying these narratives. For example, some masters of the Chisti Tariqas translated the Bhagavad-Gita, and found that the core teachings of Krishna were the same as the doctrine of the Unity of existence, the very metaphysical essence in Islam — they recognize Krishna as a very old prophet.

[58] The adhyatmika traditions could be analogized as being similar to Linux.

[59] I am indebted to Ravi Ravindra for first suggesting the term “My-Theism” to me, in an email comment.

[60] Private email.

[61] For example, see: Pinch, William R. “Peasants and Monks in British India.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft22900465/

[62] Texts are also historical or ahistorical, and have the same implications as any other historical or ahistorical methods. I regard Vedas as ahistorical, Puranas as itihas and not literally historical.

[63] A summary is given in “The Axis of Neocolonialism”: http://www.sulekha.com/column.asp?cid=218625

[64] The Mormons are an interesting example of history centrism. Their Grand Narrative is roughly as follows: From 1827 to 1830, a man named Joseph Smith in New York State (near Ithaca), got a series of dreams, in which God guided him to go to a particular forest, and to find a specific location for which the dreams provided landmarks. Upon finding the exact spot, he was to dig the ground and find a set of gold plated tablets. He did all this, found the tablets, brought them home, and transcribed them onto paper. After the tablets were transcribed, he returned them back to the place where he had found them, and covered the hole in the ground with dirt, hiding all evidence. He was not to disclose the location to anyone. The written transcript he produced was God’s message to humanity. This became the Book of Mormon – their Bible. It contains narratives of ancient peoples in America, which gives the Mormons a very “American” Christianity. They believe that Christians had come to America thousands of years ago, as per the Book of Mormon. The set of historical events concerning Joseph Smith’s activities between 1827 and 1830 is the basis for having complete faith in the Book Of Mormon as God’s truth. While they also believe in the conventional Christian narrative of Jesus, the more recent instructions from God via this latest prophet take precedence. Mormons are not some tiny fringe cult. They are the fastest growing Christian denomination in USA. They are immensely wealthy, and their members include many of the top businessmen, and tend to be well educated. They tend to be very articulate, and go out of their way to help those in need. They make good friends, and live under a strict code of ethics.

[65] I have a speculative side theory that does not impact this paper: India’s Varna system was a classification of job descriptions, before it degenerated, and especially before it got re-engineered in the 19th century into the modern caste system. [See Nicholas Dirks’, “Castes of Mind.” 2002.] It was merit based. Kshyatriya and Brahmin were separate jobs, whose duties were defined as ‘Kshyatriya dharma’ and ‘Brahmin dharma,’ respectively, and never held by the same individual. The king was always a Kshyatriya, never a Brahmin, thereby avoiding the possibility of a theocracy. This separation also corresponds roughly to exoteric and esoteric domains, respectively. Hence, neither of these domains was supposed to subvert the other, and each had its own separate champion. Theocracy doesn’t have much meaning in the Indian context, for the Brahmins never entertained the project of making everyone else embrace their mode of living. The term is more suitable for societies held together by a common uniform theology imposed by a religious elite firmly holding the reins of power. Furthermore, the true transmitters and preservers of adhyaatma vidya were the rishis, siddhas, natha yogis, many of whom were from non-Brahmin and non-Kshyatriya varnas. The Brahmin priesthood did preserve oral and written textual works of importance, but in terms of adhyatma vidya, the prize goes to the renunciant/yogic lineages. However, it could be that the very existence of a Brahmin domain, that the rulers could not meddle in, might have protected the entrepreneurial spirituality of all jatis. Because Varna has not been objectively examined today, and has simply been conflated with the abusive caste system, this feature of classical India deserves further inquiry. Might it explain the long-term respect and empowerment for esoteric movements across all social strata in India?

[66] I am reminded of a conversation with Francisco Varela, one of the top Western practitioner-scholars of Indic adhyatma-vidya, who did a U-Turn into Euro-Phenomenology. I asked him where one could find practitioners of Husserl’s phenomenology, and where the Western adhyatmika adepts were being nurtured. He was silent for a while, and then replied, “One of the problems of Western hermeneutics is that we don’t have a yoga. There is no such place.”

[67] I do believe in the veracity of Jesus’ teachings, when interpreted in an Indic framework, such as the analyses done by Ravi Ravindra.

[68] For his complete collection of essays on the Internet, please visit: http://www.infinityfoundation.com/mandala/i_es/i_es_denicolas_frameset.htm

[69] “The Avatara and The Savior: The Philosophical Foundations of Politics,” Antonio de Nicolas. Presented in Madrid to the Ministers of the European Community, and later published in “The World & I,” under the title, “The Philosophical Foundations of Neo-Conservatism,” September 1986.

[70] Private email.

[71]See: (a) Ursula King, “Towards a New Mysticism: Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Traditions.” London: Collins, 1980; (b) B. Bruteau, “Evolution toward Divinity: Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu Traditions,” Wheaton: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1974; and (c) Ann Hunt Overzee, “The Body Divine: The Symbol of the Body in the Works of Teilhard de Chardin and Ramanuja,” Cambridge University Press, 1992.

[72]Harold Coward, “Jung and Eastern Traditions,” SUNY Press, 1985. Also, Harold Coward, “Yoga and Psychology,” SUNY Press, 2002.

[73] See: J.J. Clarke, “Oriental Enlightenment,” Routledge, 1997. Carl Olson, “Indian Philosophers and Postmodern Thinkers,” OUP India. 2002. Thomas McEvilley, “The Shape of Ancient Thought,” Allworth Press, 2002. Silvia Federici (Editor), “Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and is ‘Others,’” Praeger, 1995. Cleo Kearns, “T.S. Eliot and Indic Traditions,” Cambridge University Press. P.S. Pai, “T.S. Eliot, Vedanta and Buddhism,” University of British Columbia Press, 1985. Alan D. Hodder, “Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness,” Yale University Press, 2001. Sumita Roy, Annie Pothen, K.S. Sunita, (Editors), “Aldus Huxley and Indian Thought,” Sterling Publishers, 2003. Graham Parkes (Editor), “Heidegger and Asian Thought,”University of Hawaii Press, 1987. T.R. Rajasekharaiah, “The Roots of Whitman’s Grass,” Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970.

[74] Eurocentrism is a sort of collective superego, sometimes unknown to the person and unconsciously applied. It becomes more extroverted under stress – for instance, after September 11, there is sudden prejudice against brown-skinned Americans, contradicting all sociological trends. The Eurocentric grand narrative, that was always there, got activated under perceived threat.

[75] Thomas McEvilley, “The Shape of Ancient Thought,” Allworth Press. 2002. P.550.

[76] Albert M. Wolters, “A Survey of Modern Scholarly Opinion on Plotinus and Indian Thought,” in “Neoplatonism and Indian Thought,” ed. Baine R. Harris, Norfolk, Virginia: International Center for Neoplatonic Studies, 1982. P.295.

[77] See “Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought,” by Uday Singh Mehta. The University of Chicago Press. 1999.

Published: 2003