How do we go about approaching what we know and what we believe?

Someone once told me that before you can move forward with what you believe, you have to hold what you believe to be true.  To be honest, I somewhat disagree with this point of view. This goes back to the idea that one religion is “right” while others aren’t.  For example, should faith be guided by historical accuracy? Should we try to prove which religious texts are accurate, and in effect, follow them? Should we try to prove a monotheistic or pantheistic view of the world? Should we question whether the mythology of Krishna and Arjuna and Shiva and Parvati really occurred, and should the answer influence our belief in God?

I think back to the story of Narada, a devotee who asks Vishnu to show him the truth of Vishnu’s maya.  Vishnu instructs Narada to jump into a pond, from which Narada emerges as a princess named Sushila.  Sushila is married and bears children, but when her father and husband break out in a bloody feud, resulting in her son’s death, she throws herself upon the funeral pyre from her grief.  Narada wakes up in his previous form, but when Vishnu asks him what was the name of the child who died, Narada cannot answer.

This story tells us that the world surrounding us is maya, an illusion that we construct to perhaps assign false meaning to our lives.  Hinduism teaches that it is through the goodness of our deeds and actions that we are liberated from our maya, so our current lives are certainly not useless or completely insignificant. However, using the “truths” we extract from the world (maya) around us to guide our beliefs in a higher power can be a faulty method.  For all we know, we could very well be like Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy in Narnia, or like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot… or like Sushila, currently stuck in a pond of ignorance, with Vishnu, symbolizing the reality of the supreme, divine, and infinite, waiting to pull us out.

Related posts:

1. Reason and Faith at Harvard At Harvard, there is a clear emphasis on the importance...
2. Question of the Week: What defines truth? In honor of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday, I thought it would...
3. What are we waiting for? We Hindus are not waiting for anything. Abrahamic traditions have...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Their questions are designed to make us think critically about our experience as Hindus in America (which, coincidentally, is one of the purposes of Swadharma!), so I thought I’d share them now, so we can ponder this food for thought:

I. What is your current relationship to Hinduism and current religious practice?
II.     To what extent has your relationship to Hinduism changed or stayed the same since coming to college/grad school?
III.    How does your practice and conception of Hinduism differ from your parents’?
IV.     How do you or do you not present yourself as a Hindu to your friends, colleagues, professors and the university community?

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on Self-Development and Change The other day, I was reminiscing with friends of mine...
2. Graduating? I’m home right now for my sister’s college graduation, and...
3. Why Pray?: Part II The ever-burning question about prayer in college. Why should we...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What I find really interesting about this is that, in a certain sense, it doesn’t matter at all. It is entirely possible to take the categories we are presented with unquestioningly, and use them to structure our appreciation of Carnatic music — indeed, that is precisely what pretty much everybody in the audience had done until today. Of what use, then, is such historical investigation?

This question is of immense importance, not just for the relatively obscure field of South Indian classical melodic structures, but for the entirety of the South Asian (and hence South Asian American) effort to make sense of our heritage. For a variety of reasons (largely attributable, in my opinion, to the epistemic rupture caused by colonialism), we have been cut off from older ways of thinking and living, and are hence struggling to make sense of our past as we march towards the future. The question we need to ask ourselves, as TMK has done in this field, is very simple: does history matter? Do our past customs and traditions mean something to us? Are they worth preserving and investigating?

I should clarify that there are two things that can be meant by “disregarding” history.

1. The first is to actually believe that all the categories we use to understand the world, all the texts we have, everything we call “culture” or “tradition”, are eternal and unchanging. This view is deeply problematic and leads to severe, crippling misunderstandings of our past and therefore our present. This is not what I’m talking about here.
2. I’m more interested in the second possibility: that we acknowledge our past, accept that things were different and things have changed and things will change, but then consciously decide that there is no present relevance to studying the past. This is more like saying, “sure, R.D. Burman’s music came before A.R. Rahman’s and may have influenced it, but I’d much rather listen just to ARR, or for that matter, to that new DJ in that new up-and-coming club down the street.”

The second choice is a historically conscious choice to choose to disregard the effects of our past on our present and our future. And it will have moral, ethical, political, even aesthetic consequences. (Well, most things do, but you’d need history to tell you that!) What are those consequences, and are we okay with them?

I’m curious to know what y’all think about this matter. I’ve been thinking about other formulations of this question off and on for a while now, and those of you who know me probably know where I stand on the matter I’d love to hear from you all.

Related posts:

1. The Three Gunas in Music In Chapter Fourteen of the Bhagavad-Gita, Krishna talks to Arjuna...
2. Music and spirituality For Soundscapes, a music anthropology class I am taking, I...
3. Authentic or Apocryphal? Does it even matter? In one of the discussions with Swami Tyagananda during the...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Can selfless love really exist?

Love is a huge topic of discussion in our lives — whether describing the beauty of a mother’s love, discussing romantic love, enjoying the love between friends, love for humanity, or love for God. In his lectures, Swami Vivekananda mentions:

“When you have succeeded in loving your husband, your wife, your children, the whole world, the universe, in such a manner that there is no reaction of pain or jealousy, no selfish feeling, then you are in a fit state to be unattached.”

But, in the context of the aforementioned types of love, is it really possible to achieve love without pain or jealous, love without selfish feeling?

In our daily lives, this conflict can be seen most clearly in forms of romantic love — jealousy (or even just pretending to be jealous!) seems normal between lovers, even a sign of how much they care for each other! Swamiji is suggesting that perhaps this is not true love…But what would distinguish love for a specific person from general love of humanity, other than a feeling of attachment to that specific person? If it is not correct to love with a selfish feeling, is falling in love with one person (as many of us hope to do eventually…) wrong? It seems to me that all types of love are inherently selfish, because they single out specific individuals whom we choose to shower our love upon — whether those individuals are our children, lovers, friends, or even God. Is it possible to love unselfishly?

Related posts:

1. Jealousy I was reading Think on These Things, by the independent...
2. Question of the Week: Hinduism and Relationships We may all need food, water, and shelter to survive,...
3. Ammachi: Pure unconditional love, serving humanity Last week, I returned from a four-day spiritual retreat in...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

“This life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive”

Tonight, I decided to find the context of the quote, so that it might provide some sort of background into what he meant.

The quote comes from a letter to the Maharaja of Mysore, in 1984, about his duty to the masses. Here is the text of the letter, as found in the Prose Writings section of Volume 4 of the Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. I have bolded portions that sparked my interest — I’m really interested in knowing what you all think of the passage!

Shri Narayana bless you and yours. Through your Highness’ kind help it has been possible for me to come to this country. Since then, I have become well known here, and the hospitable people of this country have supplied all my wants. It is a wonderful country and this is a wonderful nation in many respects …

Nowhere on earth have women so many privileges as in America. They are slowly taking everything into their hands; and, strange to say, the number of cultured women is much greater than that of cultured men … they require more spiritual civilization, and we, more material.

The one thing that is at the root of all evils in India is the condition of the poor. The poor in the West are devils; compared to them ours are angels, and it is therefore so much easier to raise our poor. The only service to be done for our lower classes is to give them education to develop their lost individuality. That is the great task between our people and princes. Up to now, nothing has been done in that direction. Priest-power and foreign conquest have trodden them down for centuries, and at last, the poor of India have forgotten that they are human beings. They are to be given ideas; their eyes are to be opened to what is going on in the world around them; and then they will work out their own salvation.

Every nation, every man, and every woman must work out their own salvation. Give them ideas – that is the only help they require, and then the rest must follow as the effect. Ours is to put the chemicals together, the crystallization comes in the law of nature. Our duty is to put ideas into their heads, they will do the rest. That is what is to be done in India. I could not accomplish it in India, and that was the reason of my coming to this country.

The great difficulty in the way of educating the poor is this. Supposing even your highness opens a free school in every village, still it would do no good, for the poverty in India is such, that the poor boys would rather go to help their fathers in the fields, or otherwise try to make a living, than come to the school. If the poor boy cannot come to education, education must go to him. There are thousands of single-minded, self-sacrificing Sanyasins in our country, going from village to village, teaching religion. If some of them can be organized as teachers of secular things also, they will go from place to place, from door to door, not only preaching, but teaching also.

Suppose two of these men go to a village in the evening with a camera, a globe, some maps, etc. By telling stories about different nations, they can give the poor a hundred times more information through the ear than they can get in a lifetime through books. This requires an organization, which again means money. Men enough there are in India to work out this plan, but alas! they have no money. lt is very difficult to set a wheel in motion; but when once set, it goes on with increasing velocity. After seeking help in my own country & failing to get any sympathy from the rich, I came over to this country through your Highness’ aid.

The Americans do not care a bit whether the poor of India die or live. And why should they, when our own people never think of anything but their own selfish ends? My noble Prince, this life is short, the vanities of the world are transient, but they alone live who live for others, the rest are more dead than alive. One such high, noble-minded and royal son of India as your Highness can do much more towards raising India on her feet again and thus leave a name to posterity which shall be worshiped. That the Lord may make your noble heart feel intensely for the suffering millions of India, sunk in ignorance, is the prayer of — Vivekananda.

What do you think of the passage as a whole? I tend to agree with Swamiji’s ideas of education — however, the quote that I for so long idealized seems to lose its power in the context of the passage. It seems like Swamiji only uses it to implore the Maharaja for support, which, for me, someone adds a different perspective to the quote itself.

At the same time, the words of Swami Vivekananda (for me, at least) are so powerful that even though in this scenario, they seem to have a specific purpose, they are still applicable even when pulled out of this context — the idea of selfless service as a duty, as the very nature of life is very morally appealing to me; and that makes me more comfortable with incorporating the idea into my life, even though the quote is a bit out of context.

What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Britain’s first state-sponsored Hindu school In a country like America, where secular public education is...
2. Question of the Week: What is my duty? Chapter 3, Verse 35 of the Bhagavad Gita reads: श्रेयान् स्वधर्मो...
3. Today’s bombings in Mumbai The bombings and gunfire in Mumbai today (reuters, cnn) make...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.