I am an
American doctor, a psychiatrist by profession, and have long been an admirer of
India and of things Indian. I was recently discussing the relevance of Indian
spiritual thought to Western psychology with some doctors at Harvard, where I
work, and was not surprised to find that there are still a one or two who
believe there could be nothing more irrelevant to our field than a “bunch of
superstitions.” A century ago such comments might have been cause for a diatribe,
but today all I could do was chuckle. Alas, the poor chap who said that has no
idea that the tide of history flows against him, and that sooner or later--and
probably sooner rather than later--he will be inundated in a flood of Indian
thought and culture that will change the entire landscape of Western culture.
The portents
of the coming rapprochement between East and West are all around us. In
America, Indian spirituality has been permeating the popular culture ever since
Henry David Thoreau read the first translations of the Bhagavad Gita and
shared them with his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. That seminal event lead to
the genesis of transcendentalism, the first genuinely American philosophical
movement, and ever since then America has been slowly, and now rapidly,
imbibing the spirit of India. She opened first to India's great ideas via
Vivekananda and the string of gurus high and low who have followed him to these
shores, and then in the 1960s to India's music via the influence of the Beatles
and George Harrison's association with Ravi Shankar. Today, America is
importing India’s mathematical and engineering talent via the information
technology industry, and tomorrow she will open to India’s film industry. And
of course America is fascinated with Indian cuisine, and is absorbing an
ever-swelling number of Indian immigrants into her cultural melting pot.
Today, when
one looks from the West towards India, one sees a tremendous nation on the
rise. Put aside for now the Pakistan-India conflict and Bush’s designs on Iraq;
these are conflicts of the moment (alas, perhaps a very long moment) that must
with time right themselves. The big picture is that India is the oldest and
most complex continuous culture on earth, and she is but a scant 55 years into
her current reincarnation as a modem democratic state, and that after nearly a
millennium of foreign invasion, exploitation, and domination. Naturally India
will have a sea of internal and external problems to surmount in order to gain
the position of influence and power in the world she rightly deserves, and
shall have. If we take the example of America as a rough model, it may well
take a century or more for modern India to find her way. Certainly the
evolution could happen more quickly, and one hopes it does, but as we say in
the medical business, experience teaches us to hope for the best but prepare
for the worst. By the very virtue of her vastness and complexity, India has a
deeper task to accomplish than other nations, and so the forces of darkness
that dog human progress at every step may well put up their stiffest resistance
in India, precisely because she has such a wealth of spiritual and cultural
power to share with humanity.
Sri
Aurobindo, one of India’s great modern rishis, says that every nation is not
just a physical mass of people with certain political and socio-cultural bonds,
but is more importantly a soul, a living being, a force of the Divine that has
come to advance the evolution of consciousness by bringing its gifts to earth.
Every culture has a purpose and mission, be it explicit or as yet veiled, and
in the case of India and America these are clear. Each of our countries has a
well-articulated mantra, a summary statement that captures the essence of our
people’s aspiration and sets a purpose for our tenure on earth. The American
mantra is stated in the rhapsodic opening lines of her Declaration of
Independence:
“We hold these truths to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
This is,
admittedly, a high task and Americans, being human, have often done it quite
poorly. We had a civil war--one of the bloodiest and most vicious conflicts in
the entire cruel history of warfare--to establish that “men” means men of any
race or color. It then took us another full century after the abolition of
slavery to create legislation to ensure equal rights to all Americans, and to
begin to acknowledge that “men” means really “human beings,” including women.
We are still not a society of equal opportunity, though perhaps we are doing a
little better in this regards than prior civilizations, and we have yet to
clarify for ourselves what exactly “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness”
mean. So far, we have tried to achieve these freedoms of the individual in a
rather simplistic, external, and materialistic fashion; the widespread sense of
alienation in American culture today is proof that this experiment is failing,
and eventually the pain will become acute enough to make us try another route.
My hope is
that we shall try next a more spiritual path to liberty and happiness, shift
our considerable energies from expressing the mental and vital ego, to freely
expressing the soul, which is the true basis of individuality. If America does
this, she will renew her mission on earth and again offer something new and
beautiful to humanity; if not, we will go the way of Rome and sink under the
weight of our own decadence. This is, I believe, the secret meaning for America
behind the terrorist attacks of last September 11, and the ongoing scandals in
the Catholic Church and the business sector (Enron, WorldCom). America speaks
of leadership in the world, but if all she has to offer is an amoral capitalism
and liberty to indulge the lower impulses, she will fade and fail, because she
will have betrayed her own mantra by ignoring the rights of the poor and the
weak.
India also
has a mantra, indeed, she has many. Yet of all her many illumined statements,
perhaps none voices the essence of her aspiration more succinctly than the
famous lines from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.3.28):
“From the
non-being [lead us] to true being,
From the
darkness to the Light,
From death to
Immortality.
Om, shanti,
shanti, shanti.”
This ancient
dictum of the rishis is an even higher goal than that voiced in the American
mantra. Indeed, it is the highest goal that human beings have ever
conceived--to know and be one with Divine in all worlds and on all planes of
existence. Accordingly, therefore, the great soul of India has been patiently
laboring away at her cosmic task since the dawn of history, and still but a few
recognize the true and vast aim of the ancient mother. Her obstacles are
plethora, her setbacks endless, her fruits seemingly the very opposite of that
to which she aspires. It is only too easy for the foreigner to set foot in
India today and be impressed--or rather overwhelmed--by a spectacle of poverty,
overpopulation, squalor, disorder, religious conflict, and epidemic political
corruption, the magnitude and lethargy of which are stunning.
However, to
mistake this mass of outer problems for the inner soul of India would be akin
to reducing America to slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, smog,
handguns, pornography, Yankee imperialism, colossal bad taste in art and
thought--and then package all that in a McDonald’s value meal and, oh yes,
supersize it with a gallon of Coke and drive it home in an SUV. America is no more
her failings than is India hers. Rather, each nation-soul has set before her a
labor to do in the world, and the problems of each are simultaneously
resistances against the transformation of consciousness proposed, and
challenges necessary to point out defects in the work and lead eventually to a
perfect perfection. To the degree that America has succeeded in resolving some
of her most egregious problems internally, she has been able to radiate the
gains of her sadhana externally and offered, at least in moments and to
some, a ray of hope and the promise of a better life. Likewise, in the
proportion and measure to which India looks inward and puts her own mantra into
daily practice in all her affairs, she will be able to radiate that wisdom,
grace, beauty and power in the world around her,
In the last century, Sri
Aurobindo came to tell India and the world that this monumental spiritual work
can be done, and that the key to accomplishing it lies in the ancient method of
Indian yoga, Only, this yoga must not be taken up along the old lines and outer
methods, but cast along new lines suited to the evolving spirit in humanity.
Like all yogas, it must be based upon a turning inward and an aspiration to
know, feel, and be one with the Divine, but it must proceed from there to
embrace all life. It must pour the splendors of the Spirit into the world, or
as Aurobindo says so handsomely, “to make of earthly life the life Divine.”
This is the extraordinary goal that the soul of India sets for herself and, by
example, for the world. It is a goal of which most Indians are likely not
conscious, no more than the average American grasps inwardly what is the
purpose of the United States’ existence, but that is the goal nevertheless.
When I was in
Calcutta last year, I was looking at a map of India and it struck me that the
general shape of India resembles that of a giant cardiac silhouette, as one
sees when looking at a chest X -ray. This is a rather unpoetic medical image, I
know--and here my training as a doctor betrays itself--but to me it seemed apt
and suggestive. For India is indeed the spiritual heart of the world, the great
bellows of God that tirelessly pumps the lifeblood of the human aspiration. I
suppose, to extend the metaphor, one would have to say that India has had a few
myocardial infractions in her long life, and has suffered centuries of heart
failure, but, you know, the wonders of science are great, and the wonders of
God even greater. India can be reborn. If the last two centuries have been, in
a general sense, the story of America’s rise to world-prominence as a leader of
freedom and democracy, the next few centuries will be the story of India’s
renaissance. I shall not be a hypocrite and begrudge India her claims to
material wealth and military power--she has as much right to those as America
or anyone else--but I do pray that she remember her mantra and her mission. For
the soul of India alone can give these supreme spiritual boons to humanity, and
we shall all be the lesser if she does not.
In closing, I
wish India a very happy birthday at the dawn of this new millennium. I think
that if India is true to her mantra, she will show America how to be truer to
hers, and India will then find in America a faithful companion, a younger
sister full of enthusiasm, hope, creative dreams, and enormous vitality. The
French have a tired old saying that runs like this: “if only age were able, if
only youth knew how.” Well, like a good American, I’ll better that one with a
proposition to India. Let’s make a deal: lend me your knowledge and I’ll lend
you my energy, and together we ain’t just gonna pursue immortal
happiness, why, I reckon we can actually catch the darn thing.