The Indian genius

The Indian genius

I am struggling with a fundamental problem of the theme before us to present a sweep of ‘The Indian genius’ within 45 minutes.  I made a rough note of the various areas that I would have like to cover and broadly these would include philosophy, mathematics, engineering, physics, medicine, industry, trade, economy, polity, administration, society, warfare, arts (64 arts), music, dance, literature, occult sciences and religion; and all of these presented in an integral, deeply interconnected vision and practice. Essentially epitomized in the science and technology of what we call Yoga.  This would be the broad sweep that I would like to present of ‘The Genius of India’. Because, India unlike other civilizations, is the world’s most ancient and the only surviving ancient civilization, which internally in our own history and in our own records goes back to at least ten thousand years of continuity. Yes, there has been much that has been destroyed in those records. But even in what survives, we have continuity going back at least ten thousand years. Sequences, lineages of knowledge, of leadership, of Kings and so on, still surviving. Texts gathered and organized ten thousand years ago – still surviving as a living tradition not merely things placed in museums; there is no other such civilization in the world. And in the little glimpse that we have of this we find this is the only civilization which has dared to explore every single field of human endeavor without exception. And in each field that it has entered it has excelled. It has achieved way beyond anything else seen in the best of history and in certain areas gone far ahead even of what we have in the best of modern society today.

Unfortunately, we are dealing with here a span of time so great that things do not survive and I do not mean merely buildings, even the forms of language, vocabulary, changes with time.  The meaning we give to a word 200 years ago has changed today.  What about a word that goes back to 2000 years, or 10,000 years? And this is really the great problem we face, when we read the Veda for example. If we use the way a word is understood today in colloquial terms we find often we are confused; we do not find consistency or continuity of meaning; and yet we have the tradition still surviving that teaches us how to understand those words, because in the field of linguistics again India excelled as no one else has.  We have a whole science of linguistics, a science of language in which we go down to the very root sounds and those root sounds are not arbitrary conventions as all the modern languages today are.

Every word in the English language or any other modern language has meaning which is a convention – if you don’t look up the dictionary you don’t know what the word means. But in Sanskrit, the starting point was different, or let us says, in Indian culture, in the Indian tradition, the starting point was different.  It was not what can you create, it was what is real, what is true, what is permanent, what is lasting. Can we capture that glimpse and articulate it? Perhaps, articulate in terms which are changing, in forms which are not lasting and yet capture something that is eternal, expressed in time, expressed in space, expressed in changing circumstances. Indian linguistics began thus. What are the fundamental essential concepts and experiences of a Fundamental a Reality? What are the natural corresponding sounds in which those experiences can be expressed? How can we naturally combine those sounds to articulate more complex structures of ideas and thoughts? It is in this way that the Sanskrit language unfolds; and therefore we can say that it is the only natural language.

Interestingly the characteristic of the language [Sanskrit] is – if you have something to say, you can express it, even create a new vocabulary to express and it will still be communicated. On the other hand if you hear something which you do not know, you can go back into the root sounds and recover the essential meaning that is being communicated. Not only this is the case in the word formation, this is also the case of the structure, the grammatical structure of interconnections of these words in which the semantic (relating to meaning in language or logic) net — that is the interconnection of meanings between the words and the key ideas — is actually held so tightly and so completely, you can rearrange the sequence of words without losing the semantic communication and content of it.  It is for this reason that one of the researchers at NASA, we are told, explained that this [Sanskrit] is the best language for artificial intelligence.  But it is not that Sanskrit was created for artificial intelligence, it was created as a natural expression to articulate what is true and permanent, in terms which are changing; and this being the case even what was expressed and articulated 10,000 years ago can be decoded, it takes effort though.

When we do make that effort we find extraordinary things.  We find for example in the Vedas, and later in the Upanishads more obviously understood, the most profound philosophical concepts have been dealt with. That is so profound that the best of modern philosophy comes nowhere near. In fact, if you look back at the history of Europe and philosophy in Europe, you find philosophy got a boost in Europe when they began to study the Upanishads.  It was link point to India which was the cause of the renaissance in Europe, and with that philosophical awakening, began a series of other explorations including mathematics, medicine, physics, chemistry and so on, linking back to India for inspiration which became the basis for the renaissance and subsequent what we call   Western modern civilization.

Some of these things are so extraordinary and astounding, you would be surprised to know that for 500 years there was a struggle in Europe to accept the Indian system of numbers. Why there was a struggle? The Mathematician said that this is the way to go and this is the natural way to do it. The Church said if you allow the Hindu numerical system and the Hindu way of calculation, the mathematics will become so simple, we will lose controls over people’s minds.  For 500 years, this struggle went on, until eventually of course what is true, real, natural comes forward, and then there is this huge renaissance.

Chemistry for example, even in Europe, traces back to experiments and production methods observed from India and then imported in Europe. I recently visited an Ayurvedic surgical lab in India where they perform surgery in the old Ayurvedic method, even today. They showed me a picture of the instruments they use and then they showed the pictures of the instruments used in modern surgery in a surgical theatre; there is an exact correlation, one to one match. Why is that? Because the origin of European surgery was from a replication of Indian surgical procedure observed by a Britisher and replicated there, who then claimed to be the father of the modern surgery. Such are the deep links and correspondences with Europe that you will be surprised at how dependent the whole European awakening was on India.

I was witness to an interesting display in the British Museum of Indian Jewelry, and a note there said, it was about 300 years ago, that ‘this was the jewelry displayed from India in Paris in that period’ and it astounded Europe, they couldn’t imagine that such complex intricate and beautiful work could be done by human hands! And it lead to renaissance in the jewelry making, where they attempted to replicate the Indian Jewelry, Indian patterns and then they attempted to mechanize them. Unfortunately, very quickly India had come under colonial rule and we missed the Industrial revolution that was beginning then all over the world. But the principles of that industry were already present in India and as you know, India, it has been observed, had this enormous manufacturing base. It had the only sustained economy going back at least 5000 years, entirely dependent on its own production, not based on theft of others.

If you look back at the great empires of the last 2000 years, each one of them built their greatness on conquest of others, on taking the resources from others, turning others into slaves and raw materials for their richness. The moment they lost their colonies they become poor again. India was the only civilization which sustained economic development without taking from others but giving more than it took. What was the basis and principles on which they developed such a sustainable life style?  In fact there are extraordinary examples of how influential this was, purely at the level of trade and production. You have in the Roman history, during the Roman Empire, an emergency has been meeting recorded in the senate, in which they discussed the problem of trade with India; and the problem was that Indian goods are so competitive and so good that the whole Roman Empire is importing from India and there is a massive loss to the exchequer; they are about to lose their reserves and they passed a ban order preventing the Roman Empire from importing too many goods from India. Similarly, when the trade route – land route – was blocked from India to Europe, the French King passed the ban order saying Indian textile can only be purchased from the French royalty because there is a major lack at present. You look back at the culture of the British and the times and the mindset, and you see the Shakespeare and his book – you have seen the ‘Merchant of Venice’ – why was Venice [the city] so important? Why was a merchant of Venice? It’s just a tiny trading island. Why was it so great? Because it [Venice] was the link point for all the ships from India coming into Europe and the Merchant of Venice suddenly becomes rich at the end of story because the three ships arrived from India. It is like today, if you say, ‘oh I got this export order from USA, and you made it’.  It was the kind of thinking that existed in Europe, ‘oh you got link from India, your ship has come back from India, and you have made it’; because India was the focal point for wealth. I am pointing to this aspect of wealth because today that’s the value which we have.

If a country is strong and rich, we respect it. But it is a falsehood to say that India, because she was spiritual, was not strong or rich.  I am emphasizing some of these examples to point out India was the only sustainable economy which impacted the whole world. And in terms of strength we had the world’s largest ship building industry producing ships which could go across the ocean for six months carrying all the food supplies and people in it; for 6 months without stopping at a port! And this involves very advanced navigation skills. When, Vasco da Gama was heading for India, he was hugging the coast, he was afraid to go into the ocean and at some point on the African coast, he bumped into a ship which was 3 times the size of his ship. It was a trader from Gujarat and Vasco do Gama said, ‘I want to go to India, I don’t know how to go and I am scared’. The trader said, ‘follow me’. He followed the rest of the journey behind these big ships from the Indian traders.  That’s how he came to India.  He was the man who was afraid. But these were people who had extensive shipping links widely spread. This is the reason why to this day, it is called The Indian Ocean and not the African Ocean.  Africa has the bigger coast line but India dominated the trade, and in strength, in warfare, even on the sea, we had naval tradition of protection. You will be surprised to know perhaps that Shivaji had a massive battle out there in the sea with the Portuguese, because he was protecting the sea coast line with 200 ships. And there was massive gun battle across ships in the waters, in which Shivaji won.  This is recorded and is in fact displayed by the Indian Navy as one of the early traditions of warfare in the sea.

I give these examples because most of us are not aware of these things, because unfortunately, as you know, history was written by the conquerors. And especially when the British realised that their entire empire depended on wealth from India, they realized it was not enough to control India militarily, they have to conquer the minds of people.And it was for this conquest of mind they changed the content of what is thought, and you know the subsequent results.  I am pointing to that period before where the mindset of the Indian civilization was not that of slaves, it was that of leaders, it was of people with great courage, strength and tremendous vitality, a tremendous power of intellect and very practical organizational sense.

There are three characteristics that Sri Aurobindo points to which are at the heart of the achievements of the Indian civilization. First, a brilliant intellect which did not stop at the superficial appearances but penetrated through to the core issues.  Second, a tremendous vitality and courage to explore everything without fear. Third, a very practical application by which all of this exploration and knowledge was brought down to an applied level in the form of ‘Shastra’ (or Śāstra, pronounced as ‘Shaasthra’) — manual of application, and we have Shastras for everything, everything without exception.

Those Shastras may perhaps not be relevant today, because when you go to practical application, things change, circumstances change. But the principles behind them are still applicable today. Among those shastras we found certain applications, certain technologies, certain sciences, of which we have no equivalent today, which are far ahead of anything we have.  And one example that I will refer to, because I have spent particular energy and time to explore it, is the Vimana Shastra. Some of you may have heard about it, Vimana as you know means Aeroplane (or airplane). There is a shastra of aeroplane, which not only teaches how to construct an aeroplane, which not only gives you the specific alloys necessary to make the aeroplane, it also teaches you the kinds of dresses that the pilot should wear to protect himself against different kinds of radiation. And it categorizes different kinds of radiations at different heights from the earth. It makes a distinction between flight in the atmosphere, flight in outer space and flight across in the solar system and different kinds of radiations and dangers at each of these levels. It specifies the kinds of food that pilot should eat. It specifies the kinds of machines – 32 machines which make the aircraft complete. Among the machines are things which we cannot even imagine, things which we also have developed.  I will give two or three examples. One is,

“apasmāra dhūma prasārana yantra”

apasmāra – forgetfulness, dhūma – smoke, prasārana – spreading, yantra – machine – that is, machine that spreads the smoke of forgetfulness. When the vimana operates during war, it can spread the smoke which knocks out people and makes them unconscious. This is something we have done today. But imagine a description like this existing then. And then there is,

“thamo garbha yantra”

– which has no equivalent today.  Thamo means darkness, garbha means womb, yantra means machine; machine that produces darkness from its womb, and the description goes – when you switch on this machine it can create darkness in the middle of day time! We do not have the necessary scientific understanding even to speculate how such a machine would work. Because in fact we don’t understand light. We call it as electromagnetic waves; waves in what, how? How does empty space carry electromagnetism as magnetic and electrical field at right angles? Why does the changing magnetic field produce electric field and vice versa? We do not know these things. Our physics is a description and not an explanation. We have formulas which describe behaviors, which do not explain why they are, what they are. But they [Vedic Indians] did go to that level. They did go to that depth, and thereby developed technologies which even to this day we find difficult to understand.

There is an interesting description of glass and the whole process of manufacturing it, in which you can see the other vimanas flying all around like ‘dots’, like stars in the sky. It’s a very interesting description similar to what we have ‘display in a radar’ where you see each plane in a point. These descriptions were all documented in this book ‘Vimana Shastra’ and actual metallic formulas given there. Unfortunately the formulas are difficult to decode because they involve technical terms we don’t fully understand.

And recently, Dr. C.S.R. Prabhu in Hyderabad replicated 3 or 4 of them (he has decoded about 16 formulas so far). Among them was a material which belongs to the ‘thamo garbha yantra’.  He developed from that formula a ferrite material which was absorbing something like 94% of light shown on it.  He developed from those formulas a copper alloy material which was harder than steel and which doesn’t corrode in the sea water.  And as evidence that these things actually existed then he got a piece of copper alloy from Dwaraka which has been sitting under water for the last 5000 years, it has not corroded.  And it shows you that these things did exist.

But why is it we do not have a continuity of these traditions to this day. We must understand, the civilization is far more ancient than any sense of time that any of the Western cultures give us. We are going back remember 10,000 years. And the civilization documents a period of breakdown and decline at the end of the Mahabharata, the beginning of the Kali Yuga. And at that point, there is a deliberate decision made by those who knew and who had these advanced technologies, knowledge and science to withdraw it from public. Already many of these things, because of they were so powerful in their potential for misuse, they were kept secret.  But then the knowledge was withdrawn during that period in the beginning of the Age of Darkness (Kali Yuga). This is recorded. And so we must understand when we refer to achievements of this civilization it is not enough to go back to 2000 years, we have to go back way before to see the true peaks.  I have given a long list of so many things which are areas of achievements. But I want to go back to the ‘essence’ of the motivating drive of this culture. What made it so great and so capable, that even to this day when all other cultures have declined, collapsed and have to rebuild if at all or have ceased to be what they were, this culture is still surviving in spite of the period and the passage of extreme destruction under colonial rule?  What is it that drives this?  And I want to go back to this because it is the question of greatest relevance for today.

The technology of the Vimana shastra surviving is not important. The inspiration which made the Indian genius realize those things then, that is important, because with thatinspiration we can recreate everything and perhaps far better than anything which was achieved in the past. In one of the inspiring lines Sri Aurobindo says,

“We do not belong to the past ‘dawn’s but to the ‘noon’s of the future” – whatever was achieved then, however great was, only a beginning and there is so much more to be done. And it was only Swami Vivekananda, who first exclaimed,

“India is destined to be the Guru of the World”.

And as guru, she is not merely somebody who will come and preach to you the spirituality; that would be meaningless, empty and hollow; it has to be a monastery of all life on the foundations of the spirit, then only you can say this is worthwhile to follow.  If it says, you will be weak, you will be poor but you will be in God, it is not good enough. And there is a distinction between a ‘guru’ and as I pointed out earlier ‘acharya’, and there is another word also we use ‘Shikshak’.  The English word ‘Teacher’ actually translates as ‘shikshak’—one who teaches. But acharya is different; acharya is greater than a teacher.  Acharya is one who shows by example, his āchāra [practicing in one’s own life] leads you and he not only teaches and tells you what is right but he shows you by example.

A guru is even greater. A guru gives you an experience, he gives you the realization, whatever field it is. It could be spiritual, it could be music, or it could be dance. This is why in the Indian tradition, where music and dance are survived in the original lineages, they still call them ‘guru’ because they give you the experience of that realization of music or dance. And what is that experience? It goes to the very core of things, to realize the essence, the deepest permanent lasting truth in that field of expression of music or dance. We had an interesting interview with one of the very famous musician of today, I think it was Ustad Vilayat Khan, we asked this question to him – what is your experience when you sing? Where are you? What do you see? What do you feel? He said, ‘within me is God, before me is God and everywhere it is only God’.  This is an experience which can lead to realization through the passage gateway of music.  It is this which makes Indian music great.

I will give this example because this gives us a clue to the very essential motivation and inspiration of the Indian culture.  If you look at all the cultures of the world, you will find they have been inspired by some Ideal. As long as they followed that Ideal, they became great, when they turned away from that Ideal, they fell. If you look at Greece, the Ideal was elegance of thought, beauty of form. So you had the Greek philosophers who sat and discussed in the market place beautiful ideas. They didn’t care if it is true or false, it is a beautiful idea, it’s a fun experience in itself. And that has been the characteristic of the Greek civilization. When they turned away from that Ideal, the civilization itself fell. Rome as a culture and civilization was defined by the Ideal of law, order and discipline. It is that which made it great. When it turned away from that, it fell. And it is in fact these two mixtures of the Greek and Roman Ideals which spread in Europe which have defined the characteristics of the European civilization today. Discipline, order, structures with elegance of ideas, thought and forms. And it stops with that. You can see the hollowness of it also – beautiful form but it is hollow, the core is missing.

Look at the Hebrew civilization, the ideal there is ethics and morality, do’s and don’ts, rights and wrongs; and their whole book is about that, the Ten Commandments. The commandments, ‘this is good and the rest is bad’. If you look at Japan, the motivating Ideal of the civilization is love of art.  Anything they do must be artistically done. Whether the manner in which you wear your dress, in your room alone, or whether you sit down to make a cup of tea sitting alone or to a guest, or a little kitchen garden, whatever it is , you make it artistic and beautiful.  When you go to Japan you will find everything spontaneously artistic, and even in the common man there is a feel of beauty. When the cherry blossoms bloom you will find Japanese going out and sitting in nature and admiring the beauty of flowers.  It has gone deep into the very grain of their personality and character.

What is it that motivated India? And the keyword of Indian civilization has been Spirituality. As deeply as the sense of beauty has gone into the Japanese civilization and its people, so deeply spirituality has gone into the Indian people, Indian cultures, values and forms of life, we are not conscious of it, that’s all. It was the late General B C Joshi, Chief of Indian army, who once observed in an interview – ‘it is my experience that in the very genes of every Indian is spirituality’. And this man, we should know, was dealing with three million people who were willing to give up their lives to defend you and I; and spirituality is the motivating factor even there. We do not fight because we hate the other; we fight because we love an ideal, because we love our motherland.  It is very different motivation from the soldier on the other side [of the border] who fights because he hates or because he has been brain washed.  And this is at the heart of the Indian people – the spirituality.  But how does spirituality work to give us physics, mathematics and engineering, music or dance.  What is the connection?  Spirituality is something out there, isn’t? When we go back to the very core and beginning of the foundation of our culture, what do we go back to? The Veda.

Every tradition in India to this day declares itself authentic by reconnecting to the Veda and says we draw inspiration from the Veda.  What was so great about the Veda?  It was an extraordinary revelation and articulation, although not fully understood today, we still feel that it is something so great and true.  In the Vedic period, the Rishis set the type of the Indian civilization by their experiences, by their profound realizations which they articulated in the Veda. It is for this reason that even when it is not fully understood, we still preserve the Veda with such accuracy that even after at least 7000 years we still have no errors. And you know how the system of coding was used for storing the text of the Veda, although by memory; we had the systems of what they call ‘redundancy’ and the system in the computer what we call the redundant byte – the ‘checksum’. We had a system of checksums in the transmission of the Vedic verses to ensure that there is no corruption.  This is the kind of information that has been preserved there. But what was it really holding?

When we go back to the essential experience of the Vedic Rishis – they went all the way through to the origin. They looked at the world and said ‘the appearance is not the reality’ and they peeled off layer by layer of the appearances. And this process is not different from modern science. Modern science also concludes, ‘the appearance is not the reality’. This [table] is molecules , that [bench] is molecules, etc; remove that layer, there atoms, elements; and you remove that layer, behind that are electrons, protons and neutrons; behind that is another layer which is subatomic particles interweaving and in constant flux and unstable; and peel off that layer, we find an ocean of an energy. What is modern science doing? It is pursuing the quest for reality by peeling off the layers of appearance. What did the Vedic Rishis do?  Exactly the same thing. They used different means. They used an internal subjective means, while modern science uses external objective means. But they came to similar conclusions. What does modern science say? All ‘this’, ultimately is an ocean of energy. And it concludes and measures that energy by ‘zero point energy’ — it is a pure mathematical conclusion from the quantum physics, thatin a tiny cubic millimeter of space, of empty vacuum, is enough energy to evaporate all the oceans of the earth!  Where is that energy coming from? In fact all of this form which we see is nothing but the foam structures on that underlining energy; that is what modern science teaches us.  But where did that energy come from? How does it move in these rhythms which you call laws of physics? Why e=mc2 and not mc3? Well, we don’t know. And that is where [modern] science stops and says ‘beyond this it goes into a domain which I can only speculate, I cannot observe’; the moment you cross the quantum levels you cannot directly observe anymore. The reality escapes your grasp of the sensory observation and you enter domain of speculation.

The Rishis approached differently, by pursuing a subjective quest, they came to the same conclusion – they said all matter is ultimately is energy, ‘Shakthi’. But they went further and said, ‘that energy is not ‘mechanical energy’ it is ‘Chit-Shakthi’, conscious energy; and this was the key, the breakthrough. It is conscious energy, which ‘consciously’ chooses certain rhythms, freely chooses rhythms of its own articulation. And that is what makes for the laws of physics. Recognizing this and subjectively pursuing that quest, identifying with that consciousness, they found they could choose freely from that domain, from that level, to modify the existing rhythms. And from there was born their knowledge of sciences and their technologies, and therefore they could gain extraordinary insights into material processes which to this day we can’t replicate.

An example, standing before us all over India, is the non-rusting iron, the iron pillar in Delhi is the famous example; but there are at least 200 sites in India where iron is exposed to rain, sun and wind but doesn’t rust.  How did they make it? All of our spectroscopic analysis doesn’t reveal the secret. How did they do it? Well, they used means, they used methods which we do not fully understand. There are materials which they developed which even to this day we cannot replicate. As I mentioned in the Vimana shastra, there are actually materials which have characteristics of what we call today ‘meta materials’ or ‘quasi meta material’.  This is a domain which we are just beginning to explore and still from a very superficial approach. They went from ‘within out’ and they could shape materials. They could overrule, override or modify even what we call laws of physics. Of course, it can appear as a simple miracle but the goal was not a miraculous intervention but mastery of life and of matter.

They went still further, Chit-Shakthi – where did that come from? And they went deeper and deeper, all the way to the Ultimate Essence, which they described and articulated in words in philosophies, while still building sciences out of it. And then the most interesting part was this, they answered the question ‘from where did the Big Bang come?’ It is a question science cannot answer.  Do you know why? Because when you go back to the point of Big Bang you find all of your equations collapse. As you approach, this is pure General Relativity, as you approach the point of Big Bang in time, you find there is a huge ‘big crunch’ – the whole of mass of space is condensed into a tiny bit, the gravitational field folds space upon itself, time slows down, until at the point of the Big Bang space collapses into a singularity and time stops. And therefore the question ‘what came before the Big Bang’ or ‘what caused the Big Bang’ has no meaning for science because space and time do not exist for that; science stops; because science has started with form and is stuck with form. But the internal subjective pursuit of the Rishi went back to that ‘point’ and the ‘thing’ behind it. And they came to this conclusion, ‘That from which the universe came is space-less, timeless, indivisibly One and yet holding all potential, and it is Pure Awareness, formless essential Awareness’. And That Awareness has in it intrinsic Power of Awareness to articulate Itself, in form, in limitation. And this is the Power with which the whole universe is born and so on.  The whole sequence from that stage up to here [pointing to the finger] down to the molecule and the atom has been articulated in sequence.

How does That which is indivisible and formless express Itself in divided forms?  This is important philosophical or metaphysical question; it is a physics question ultimately. They answered it.  It goes through 5 layers of self-modification – “Pancha maha boothas”. Once you understand that principle, you get the key of manipulation of form itself.  You find the key of how to evoke any quality out of any object [material]. And if you observe what modern technology is doing, not yet science but technology, I make a distinction, what modern technology is doing is precisely that, drawing out qualities out of objects which didn’t have those qualities. A silicon wafer, a piece of sand, which is nothing but transparent crystalline structure, out of that we have done so much. All of our electronics is based on that – we make it conductive and semi-conductive. Latest discovery is how we can make it give up light and make it transmit light, create wave guides for light and so on. These are the qualities which are not inherent to the sand and yet we draw out those qualities – that is the essence of technology. But they developed a science which explains how any quality can be drawn out from any other [material], and the whole of terminology for this science exists to this day. All of these keywords which we use – tamas, rajas and satva, these three this ‘triple principle’ is at heart of that; the pancha maha bhoothas are at the heart of that. And with those fundamental principles they have articulated the whole unfoldment. And interesting part is, because they saw everything is coming out from the same Oneness, they saw the interconnection of everything and therefore you will find no field of exploration is in isolation in the Indian tradition.

If you take simply Ayurveda, you would say oh its health; it is actually science of life – Ayuh. In Ayurveda not only do you have the means for cure of diseases but you also have a whole development of food and the effect of food, and the food itself made the medicine. This is the only civilization in which food is your medicine. Interesting isn’t! Because they understood the qualities and properties of each food, and then they made it tasty. The result today is when modern science explores the characteristics of key ingredients of Indian food, they came out with – this is anti-cancer, this is ‘anti-this’, this is ‘anti-that’, and so on.  If you just eat healthy Indian cooking, you will get all the ayurvedic benefits. But they went further. They saw the prakrithi – the various ‘psychological types’ and ‘natures’ of human beings.  They went from the physical-biological basis of illness to the psychological basis of illness. They found means to intervene on all these levels. Your thoughts, your emotions have a physical effect on the biology. Can we create a medicine which taken at the biological level can affect your thoughts and emotions, and heal illnesses on those levels?  Yes we can. Can you create a science which describes this whole process? Yes they did.  This is just one example, one glimpse, when we look at Ayurveda alone. And all of it traces back to the knowledge of the Oneness out of which the whole multiplicity comes; and so it was for all the fields.

Even if you take a simple system or simple science of making a city and we had Shastras [manuals] for that.  They started with fundamentals; every complete unit, they said, must represent the only thing which is ‘complete’ – which is That [Indivisible One, the Ultimate Reality or Brahman].  So the design of the city itself must replicate That and the completeness of That. Interesting idea isn’t. The macro world and micro world are interconnected, the microcosm and the macrocosm are related.

yathā pinde thathā brahmānde,

‘As in the unit so in the whole’; and the unit is complete when it replicates the whole, and so on. In each field, they went to fundamentals, to the origin, and then developed the full science and mastery of the most detailed processes. This is the fundamental inspiration of the Indian civilization, the Spiritual. You can see how the ‘spiritual’ here is not cut off from the world rather it is the foundation of life, it is the fulfillment of life, it is the perfection of life, and it is the mastery of life.

It is from this basis, from this inspiration that they had this tremendous intellectual power developed. An intellectual power so great that examples of it today are very few.  Swami Vivekananda is one of the great giants of the modern history who had that kind of intellect; but we do not find too many today.  Yet they developed a science by which we can develop that kind of power of mind. There was means, whole training system and the knowledge of that still survives, though in fragments. Unfortunately it is not compatible with our modern educational system. The modern educational system starts from the other end, its starts by stuffing facts into you. Our original system of education began by training the mind and the power of thought. Once, Swami Vivekananda exclaimed,

‘If I had to do my education all over again, I would not waste time learning subjects, I would develop to perfection the power of concentration and the power of equality [detachment?] and having mastered both, I could master any subject at will’.

Think about it! I am leaving here this only as a clue for their approach to development of thought power. With that kind of thought power, we had geniuses galore in Indian history. And in each field we have these geniuses. Just in the field of literature, the genius of Kalidasa is so great – he has so many different styles, so many approaches; he weaves into his dramas not only the thrill of the narration and the beauty of the literature, but also the profound philosophical insights into human nature, into life in the world; he weaves it altogether. That is what makes Kalidasa so great. He had so many styles, he switches from one style to another as if a different person. The result is when modern European analysts look at his writings, they say, ‘Kalidasa cannot have been one man, one man cannot write with so much diversity, he must have been four different people!’ But for the Indian tradition, this is the sign of genius. In the west, genius is the specialization in a narrow track; in the Indian tradition genius was the multi-faceted mastery of multiple fields, interwoven and interconnected.

Only today gradually we are coming to the realization that we made an error by cutting up knowledge into subjects and the real breakthroughs today are beginning in what we call the interdisciplinary fields.  But that concept was always inherent in the Indian tradition; we always saw knowledge as one. There is a famous incident in the Upanishad where a young boy who has been sent for training, comes back to his father who is a great Rishi himself.  The father asks, ‘what are you learnt my son?’ The young boy says, ‘I have learnt this, mastered that’, and he lists a whole range of things. Then the father asks, ‘Have you learnt That by knowing which all is known?’ And the boy says, is there such a thing? If so, please teach me. Then the father begins to reveal to him the knowledge of That by which all is known. These are the profound traditions. And they are not merely the speculative traditions, they are the realizations and that is why they are great gurus. These traditions they have transmitted and in a way that we can gain those realizations even today.

When India turned away from the spiritual approach to mastery of life, the civilization went into decline. It was a necessary phase; let us look at it that way. Sri Aurobindo observes, ‘from the larger perspective God always keeps for himself one country in which through all the ravages of time the highest knowledge is preserved’. And then he writes, ‘at least for this chatur yuga [four Ages as per Hindus] that country is India’.  He explains, ‘when God wants to enjoy his poverty and his weakness he withdraws the knowledge and the strength, and India falls. When God once again when wants to play at the full revelation of his glory then once again he fills that light and strength into India and there is the blooming of civilization. We can look at it from that higher perspective.

But from the historical perspective, we say when the civilization turned away from the spiritual foundations, it began to decline. And the decline ended with weakening of the civilization which allowed invasions to take place. Let us be clear about this, the invasions were always attempted. Barbarians always surround a civilization; they always try to break in. And we have even a record of invasion attempted by Alexander, quote ‘the great’. He was called great by his own people not by the Indian people. He had a series of battles on the border line of India. Why did he come to India?  He set out by declaring that he will conquer the world. To conquer the world, he doesn’t conquer 20 villages around him; he must conquer the most powerful country. Isn’t it? That’s India; the wealthiest country, that’s India. So he first makes a beeline to India, because he was to conquer the world and India was the center of the world. On the border of India he breaks down and he cannot get through. In fact, he could reach India because the bulk of his soldiers who fought, the bravest of them, were Indian mercenaries. As they came to the border of India, the Indian mercenaries said, ‘we won’t fight our own people, we want to go back’. Alexander said, fine, you can go back but without your weapons.  Entire families of these mercenaries, fighters with their families and children all were released without weapons. As soon as they left, Alexander turned to his soldiers, his generals and said, ‘if those people fight me, I will never conquer India; go out immediately and slaughter all of them’. They were all butchered. This is the man who was called the Great, of course by his own people not by the Indians.

When he came to the border of India, he faced repeated defeats until his soldiers became tired and they wanted to go back; and at that point when he turned back he couldn’t give the message that ‘I have lost’ and so he made the story, ‘I have won but I gave back the kingdom that I won’. Would you believe that?  The man who kills butchers his own mercenaries who had given him all the victories, would he give back a kingdom that he has won? Interestingly among the Greek historians, there are historians who say that he lost badly and he came away. Who says that he won? Unfortunately that is one of the little stories, that one historian in the Greece records, which is Alexander’s personal historian. It is the same story we find when Cleopatra lost to the Roman Empire, she came back and announced, ‘I have won, let’s celebrate; I have made peace with the Roman because I won’. It is similar story. I give this example because the battling power of the Kshatriya in India was so great that nobody could make a dent into this protected space. It is only when we turned away from the roots of our civilization, everything weakened; thought power weakened, vitality weakened and the invasions became possible.

At that point comes a gradual reversal. Through the invasions there is the battling, the shock and the awakening, to find our roots again. This is the transition point we are at [presently]. Why have we have fallen? Why have we become so weak?  And whole introspection that begins. In the last phase there was also the suppression of the Indian mind, wherein alien system of education was imposed upon us, alien values were brought in and the Indian mind itself suffered an onslaught to fragment it. And I am making this very clear conscious observation with this vocabulary. Sri Aurobindo makes a distinction between the characteristics of the Indian mind and the characteristics of the European mind. The European mind by temperament looks at pieces, looks at forms and remains with forms. The Indian mind by temperament looks at ‘whole’s, ‘complete’s, the full picture and tries to go to the essence. It is not something you and I have done; it is something our forefathers have done. We only benefit from the momentum or the gift of their realizations. And it is there as a tendency within us, it doesn’t mean we have it, it is a tendency. While upon this tendency you put a contrary tendency and impose it as the right way to do things, you are not good at it, you are a poor slave and you try harder to be a better slave, well, you will fail.  You are poor at looking at superficialities and looking at pieces; if you try harder to do it, well, it won’t be very successful. But if you return to your own native way of being, native way of thinking and native way of relating to life, then you will be full and you will be successful.

Following your own innate svadharma [one’s own way of life] of the civilization is the way by which you will grow. And what is that svadharma of the civilization? Go back to the fundamentals. And the fundamentals can be seen subjectively or objectively.  Objectively, look at the fundamentals of everything, why do you do this, why do you do that. Keep questioning, and you will come to some insight. Subjectively, who am I?  I am not this person merely thinking and feeling. Where does the thought come from? Where does this ability to stand back from my thoughts come? And I introspect subjectively. And I ask, ‘why I am here?’  Am I merely a product of chance, as modern science teaches us, some molecule fell into place we happens to be here? If that be the case, then the only meaning to life is make the most of every moment, enjoy yourself and let the future go to blazes. That is what the Western civilization is doing. It has been the single most destructive civilization in human history. All of the mess we see – all the forests being cut, rivers being polluted, human life being destroyed, human babies being poisoned – deliberately with full awareness. That is the outcome of a civilization that looks only at the present and ignores the future.

In our tradition, as in many other indigenous traditions, the teaching was to look at the next seven generations. Every decision you take today, think of its consequences for seven generations.  Ayurveda tells you, the food you eat, the habits you inculcate in your body today will transmit for seven generations in your lineage. ‘Choose carefully, be conscious and be aware of the whole and the implications in a long span of the timeless eternity’ – is native to the Indian mind; infinity native to the Indian mind. These are precious values, precious sensitivities.

Do not make the error of imitating and being a poor imitation of West. Because the future of the world is not in that short term thinking. It is in this foundation on which the Indian civilization was built. But we are passing through a ‘passage’, it is a ‘yuga sandi’ – the breakdown of an Age and the beginning of a new Age, in which the very things which made the old Age great are breaking down, the forms of the past are breaking apart. You cannot go back to those forms. But remember our civilization was not founded on forms; it was founded on the fundamentals. If we go back to the fundamentals we will recreate the forms.  Or perhaps we will take the old forms and enliven them with inspirations; or as we create a new form we discover that this is the same form they did, but we will be expressing them as our spontaneous truth of today. And for that we must go back to our deepest foundations, individually and collectively.

Stop imitating the West. I am going to give a very practical example of how that imitation has destroyed our national life. Simply look at the structure of modern politics in India, when we won our freedom the very first step we took was to copy the British constitution, to continue the same governance structures that the British left us. And they didn’t design the government for governance, they designed it for exploitation; remember they were colonizers. The most powerful man at the ground level was the man who took the taxes, the Collector.  To this day the Collector remains the most powerful man. Why? And the government still designed for sucking out your life blood, not for serving the people. We continue to fear the government as we used to fear the colonizers. That’s not a healthy relationship for a healthy country. The government should fear the people; that’s how it should be if at all fear should be there; rather it should be a partnership of trust, mutually helping each other. None of that is possible in a lopsided system designed for exploitation; you read the top, you have no accountability, at the bottom, you have no flexibility, it doesn’t work, it has destroyed the country. Worst still, we copied a constitution; and constitution itself was a patch work by committee of 300 people, not a single mind, not from fundamentals.  What are we here for? What does our nation mean to us? None of these questions were taken up. And the result was we have a parliamentary model of democracy which doesn’t work for India.

Sri Aurobindo observed 100 years ago in 1910, ‘India will pass through the experiment of parliamentary democracy simply to realize that it is not suited for us’.  100 years have passed, and we still have the mess. And he explained why, ‘the Indian mind wants to choose its King and therefore the presidential model is more appropriate for that, because we want to choose the man that we trust’. Let’s see what happens when we have a parliamentary model, you have a party representative standing locally. Do you trust him? Do you know him? No. Does he act for himself? Does he act for truth? No, he represents a party; do you know the party? No way. I will give an example. In 1984 when Sri Rajiv Gandhi stood for elections overwhelmingly the country voted for him. Why? We trusted him. He was fresh, he was new and he was unpolluted. What you have to do to vote him to power, you can’t vote for him in the parliamentary model. You vote for his party’s representative, the same old crook who has been there for last 20 years. You know he is a crook but you have to vote for him because you want this honest man to come in. All the crooks get to parliament and still you have no guarantee that they will choose the man you want for Prime Minister. That’s how the corruption starts because of the indirect election system of the parliamentary model.

Let’s take a practical example, if it was governance based on the need of ‘Indian type’, for the Indian mind, the presidential model.  Suppose Abdul Kalam stood, with no parties, he stands alone; he will win hands down, because we trust him. And a man whom we trust he will be free to build his own team. And because we trust him, we know that his team will also live up. And then imagine the kind of governance we might have – as efficient, as effective as the defense program that he oversaw. Yes, this is possible. But for that we must say enough of the false imitations; we need to question ourselves, go back to our fundamentals and recast, rebuild our life. Swami Vivekananda said, ‘India is destined to be guru of the world’; that is the destiny waiting, pressing upon us, but we are still chasing illusions and false hopes. And when the destiny presses while we ignore it, there is a crushing, break up; that is what we are seeing today in our national life; and the break-up of the forms which are false. The transition will have to be revolution. I often put it in this way, the freedom movement was left incomplete; we won our political freedom but we didn’t recast the whole system, in terms of governance we replaced the British by the same mindset.

The first Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was not elected by people.  You are aware of that?  At the very first step of democracy, democracy was crashed. It was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who was elected by the party; and at that time Mahatma Gandhi stepped in and asked him to step down because he had promised Nehru’s father that he will make Nehru the Prime Minister. He was selected by passing the will of the electoral process. The same principle continues to this day where the Prime Minister is not chosen by you and I, he is selected by an extra constitutional authority. Worst still, in that very first step many more things happened – ‘the mindset which came in’. Jawaharlal Nehru shared with the then American ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, ‘you know I am the last Englishman to rule India’. You see there are two perversions here: he didn’t see himself as Indian he saw himself as an Englishman – you see the same mindset continuing! And second, he saw his role as Prime Minister not to serve India but to rule India! You have the same mindset continuing; everybody who gets elected to parliament starts ruling people rather than serving people. What we need today is the completion of the freedom movement where the entire governance structure needs to be recast; the economic development model needs to be recast. And the cultural framework, we are still strapped by alien influences dominating in the name of freedom of the press or freedom of society or freedom of television, whatever forms it takes.

We don’t have a chance to express freely what is innate to us. And most important, the need for the freedom of the Indian mind. The educational system today drives into you the falsehood starting with informational rote learning, doesn’t promote creativity, doesn’t promote individuality, and doesn’t promote your own innate svabhava [innermost nature]. All of these need to undergo a massive change. It is only as a result of these that India will move closer to her destined place as ‘the guru of the world’.  But at the foundation of all these changes is the fundamental shift in consciousness in our sense of identity, purpose and inspiration; to realign ourselves with the spiritual inspiration at the foundation of our civilization. You cannot make the social, economic, educational and governance changes if you do not make this internal change. That is why the revolution will start within us by internal awakening within, which will energize the mind, energize our energies, energize our actions, inspire for the new creation. And let’s not avoid facing this fact. The entire national life needs to be rebuilt. We cannot say anymore ‘things are fine as they are’, nothing is fine as it is. But to build that we must have the inner foundations. I won’t [say we should focus on the] first, I will say we have to work both simultaneously. You can’t wait and say when in next 50 years I will attain self-realization then I will have the true knowledge and then I will make the effort, but my body won’t support it.  It has to be simultaneous. At each step we make an effort and action align it to your deepest accessible awareness and aspiration. There is the famous phrase in Sanskrit,

‘Chitte vāchi kriyāyām cha sādhūnām ekarūpata’

In thought, in speech, in action, there is a continuity of alignment in a good person.

That alignment then points to your deepest aspiration. And let’s face it. As I said earlier the deep foundations of Indian spirituality are in our genes. If we become quiet for a moment we will feel deep in our heart the thing which inspires us.

An interesting philosopher of philosophy in the Ashram [Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry, India] once told us, when he visited UK for the first time, they asked him, ‘what is special about Indian civilization or Indian culture?’ The professor told them, ‘can you sit quiet for a minute without thinking and moving?’ And that person said, ‘no, I can’t’. Professor said, ‘any Indian can do that!’ It is an interesting observation, because that foundation of equality, or silence, or the capacity to become quiet, to turn inward and become aware of something deep within us; that is as if innate. It is rusty, because we haven’t consciously developed it; or if we have consciously attempted to develop it, we can rapidly make the contact, easily. Again not because of anything we have done or achieved. It is the gift of our forefathers in the underlying cultural values in which we grow up, in the atmosphere of this sacred space that is Bharat [India]. And we are fortunate to be born here in this culture. But the opportunity is wasted if we are not conscious of it and do not make the most by conscious effort. This is the most critical next step. I will articulate it in this way, very simple, very practical, superficial perhaps, but as a starting point it is very good: spend 5 minutes every day, alone, cut off from the whole world and becoming very quiet in your mind and in your heart, become conscious of your deepest and highest aspiration. You may not be able to describe it in words or in thoughts but you will feel it deep within you. Center your whole being around that and then from that center turn to face the whole world, and in every thought, speech and action, to the extent possible, try to align to that center during the rest of the day. If this much all of us can do then the revolution would already have started and all the rest will follow and India will take truly the destined place as the “guru of the world”.

Namaste.