Tribes•Manuals

Charvaka, The "Ship of Theseus" and The Compassionate Atheist

2013-08-02T16:00:00.000+01:00

"Whether an object which has had all its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object? Whether a ship which was restored by replacing all and every of its wooden parts, remained the same ship?"

Somewhere in the 1st Century CE Greece, the great philosopher Plutarch is compiling an argument that deals with the constant change and the state of flux of the world, ans which is also known as "Theseus's Paradox", "grandfather's axe", and "Trigger's Broom". Plutarch, in his seminal "Life of Theseus" elaborates:

"The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same."

Plutarch's argument is apparently based on his predecessors, mainly Heraclitus, who has extensively contemplated on the idea of change, and whose writing have striking similarities with those of the Charvaka, Sankhya and then Buddhist cannons of his era.

When treated strictly as a philosophical thought experiment, the strongest supporting argument for "Theseus's paradox" can be found within the premises of Shunyta - dependent origination, eternal change, ans non-self.

* * * *

In this 2013 film by the same name - "Ship of Theseus" - debutant Bollywood director Anand Gandhi renders the following Prakrit verse with some very powerful imagery to portray this millennia old theology of agnosticism, atheism, compassion, impermanence and the so-called the philosophy of change, which captures the essence of many eastern "religions" being practiced by no less than a billion people today.

The original verse of this now extinct Charvaka tradition survives in the oral traditions in Gujarati language. For this adaptation, the director translated them back first from Gujarati into Prakrit, and then into English. From the song "nAham jAnAmi kampI dEvam na daIvam", the first line below captures the Prakrit verse from the video using devnagari script, followed by its English translation as it appears on screen.

Naham Janami (song)

नाहं जाणामि कंपि देवं न दईवं, णत्थि इसरो णियन्ता ।
There are no celestial beings I know of, there is no god

णत्थि सग्गभूमि ण णिरयं ।
Neither heaven nor hell

णो जगकत्ता णो विकत्ताय ण य जगईसरो कोवि ।
Neither a preserver, nor an owner of this universe

ण रक्खओ ण भक्खओ ।
Neither a creator nor a destroyer

ण य कालाईओ आदित्ठो दन्दनाईओ ।
No eternal judge

कम्मुणो चेव दण्डं । (2)
There is only the law of causality

हं सयमेव सट्ठा भोत्ता य मे सुहदुह - पियाप्पिअसंजोगाण ।
I take responsibilities for my actions and their consequences

अप्पसरियो जीवो सव्वाण सुहुमतिसुहुमेसु ।
The smallest of creatures have a life-force just like mine

नत्थु कोवि कयापि दुहिओ मया ।
May I never cause any harm to anybody

सया मे इइ संवेअणा ।
May I always have such compassion

सच्चस्स मग्गा बहवे, सच्चो य एगरुबो णवरं ।
The truth is multifaceted, and there are many ways to reach it

समया मे मणो दुव्विहअवस्थासु ।
May I find balance in this duality

मम पत्थणा - निज्जरउ अन्नाणकंमं ।
I pray, may my karma of ignorance be shed

शुद्धसासयरुवो हं इइ अत्थु मे सद्दंसणंअन्ते - ण य भवउ चवियं,
May my true self be liberated from the cycle of life and death

मे पयं मोक्खमग्गओ ।
And attain moksha (by walking the path to nirvana/liberation)

The Buddha Purnima 2013 Vesak Message by Thich Nhat Hanh

2013-05-25T10:21:00.000+01:00

Today we celebrate the appearance of Siddhartha on this planet. However, the majority of us only worship Siddhartha as a supreme sacred power with the ability to bless and to protect us from danger. Not many are able to walk the path he has walked, to handle suffering, generate happiness, reestablish communication and touch Nirvana in the present moment. Our Buddhism of today mostly is a Buddhism of devotion. What the Buddha advised us—to let go of such things as fame and sensual pleasures—we now ask him to grant us.

Practicing mindfulness, concentration and insight, walking the Noble Eightfold Path as the path of happiness in the present moment, has become only a very small part of Buddhism as it is practiced today. We did not inherit the most precious parts of the spiritual heritage that Siddhartha left. Our Buddhism has become corrupted, unable to play its original role. We need to put all our heart into renewing Buddhism, so that it can continue to play its role in generating peace for individuals, families, countries and societies. By only practicing devotional Buddhism, bowing our heads amidst incense all day long, we will not able to do that—and not be worthy to be called descendents of the Buddha—the Great Conqueror of Afflictions.

Go here for the complete press release.

"Invictus"

2012-12-23T17:00:00.000+00:00

"Invictus", the 1888 Victorian poem by William Ernest Henley, has inspired many a peoples of nations, including Nelson Mandela, and Clint Eastwood who made a Hollywood movie by the same name on the same subject in South Africa.

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul."

Invictus (2009) - Morgan Freeman, Matt Damon, Dir: Clint Eastwood

Richard Dawkins - on Sex, Death, and The Meaning of Life [More4]

2012-11-11T08:40:00.000+00:00

IN A THREE-PART SERIES starting in Oct '12, Richard Dawkins tracks the three nouns of the title from the perspective of how life (might) looks like without religion.

Every episode repeatedly reminds the viewer that "More and more of us realise that there is no God. And yet...".

The first episode talks about Sex and the (religious) notion of sin. Try here. ("Sin" is, by definition, a religious notion.)

The second episode discusses death from a factual, pragmatic perspective as a reality, and the inherent denial that all religions propose as an alternative. Try here.

The third and final instalment takes the examples of the struggles that Leo Tolstoy, Henry Graham Greene, and Albert Camus have put forth in finding the "meaning of life" (through the entanglement of religiosity). Try here.

Heraclitus of Ephesus ― Impermanence, Flows, Logos

2012-03-13T03:30:00.000+00:00

Nothing endures but change; Change is the only constant. ―Heraclitus

Heraclitus of Ephesus (535–475 BCE), more commonly known as the obscure, the riddler, or the weeping philosopher, has been one of the earliest line of Naturalist greek philosophers. It may very well be that Nietzsche took direct inspiration from Heraclitus' nature-dwelling wanderer's lifestyle in developing the character of Zarathustra for Thus spake Zarathustra. In a pre-Socratic greek thinker's world, philosophers such as Anaximander posited that "the origin or the ultimate reality was an 'indefinite' and eternal divinity called Apeiron –a formless, boundless, ageless, infinite with abundant supply of matter which gives rise to all natural phenomena". The material world was composed by this boundless apeiron from which arose the elements (earth, water, fire, air), and pairs of opposites (hot and cold, wet and dry), which, as it were, akin to properties of these elements. Anaximander further believed, through his teacher Thales of Miletus and the prevailing belief system of the time, that these elements –according to their pairs of opposites– continue to be in a constant state of war with each other.

Anaximenes of Miletus, a student and successor of Anaximander, and a proper, though senior, contemporary of Heraclitus, removed the concept of apeiron, proposing in stead that there was not so much a war of opposites that Anaximander posited, as a continuum of change. His new proposition now rested on his concept of Material monism –a one, single, "root" element as an originator for all the rest. Anaximenes chose Air as his fundamental or "root" element.

Heraclitus improvised the theory by further removing dependance on material monism, and proposed that everything in the universe rests on an abstract, subtle, principal rather than gross, tangible, matter. He called this Logos, and along ith Anaximander's precepts, the theory came to be known as The Unity of Opposites. Heraclitus coined the word Logos from the root legō, suggesting through his rather obscure style of narration that it is the fundamental principle, where "all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos". Plato, Aristotle and others, under influence of Heraclitus' work, subsequently developed Logos to mean Logical Discourse. (Aristotle's initiative of establishing Logic as a proper independent branch of philosophy –what we now call Aristotelian Logic– traces its origins to Pythagoras, which seems a separate, parallel, descending line from Anaximander.)

The following are two surviving fragments from Heraclitus's writings on his concept of Logos around 500 BCE:

1) "This Logos holds always, but humans always prove unable to understand it, both before hearing it and when they have first heard it. For though all things come to be in accordance with this Logos, humans are like the inexperienced when they experience such words and deeds as I set out, distinguishing each in accordance with its nature and saying how it is. But other people fail to notice what they do when awake, just as they forget what they do while asleep."
2) "For this reason it is necessary to follow what is common. But although the Logos is common, most people live as if they had their own private understanding."

Among the more recent studies, Carl Jung in his analytical psychology contrasted a rational, critical, decisive logos with an emotional, non-reason oriented and mythical elements of mythos. In Jung's approach logos vs mythos can be represented as "science vs mysticism", or "reason vs imagination" or "conscious activity vs the unconscious".

Notice the inescapable resemblance of i) Anaximander's line of thought with that of Vedic cosmological world-view of Hirnyagarbha (void) as the origin; ii) his position that the divinity of Apeiron informs each and every thing and bing in the universe, comparable with the Indian tradition of seeing God everywhere; iii) and Heraclitus' proposition of "continuum of change" with Samkya philosophy, and later, Buddha's idea of impermanence. The ideas are contemporary of the era 550–500 BCE. At the same time, iv) also notice the similarities between the idea of Logos and the Chinese concept of Tao; as well as v) the pairs of opposites with the unity of Chinese ying–yang. The point shines even brighter when we look into some of the surviving writings of Heraclitus.

Πάντα ῥεῖ (panta rhei) – Impermanence –"Everything Flows"–"Everything is in a state of flux"

ἐδιζησάμην ἐμεωυτόν...
Self-examination is the hardest thing to do

Seyn und Nichts sey dasselbe
Being and non-being are the same

τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν
All beings going and remaining not at all

Ποταμοῖς τοῖς αὐτοῖς ἐμβαίνομέν τε καὶ οὐκ ἐμβαίνομεν, εἶμέν τε καὶ οὐκ εἶμεν.
We both step and do not step in the same rivers. We are and are not

ἐκ τῶν διαφερόντων καλλίστην ἁρμονίαν
Out of discord comes the fairest harmony

Alan Watts - The Silent Mind (Awareness Meditation)

2012-03-09T03:30:00.000+00:00

In this early 1960 recording of his TV episode by the same name, Alan Watts gradually walks the talk of a silent mind through meditation. Using calligraphy and the abstraction models, Watts argues why meditation is considered essential for sanity by the traditions, highlighting why no-thought is required for [better] thoughts. Man's conditioning, especially in the West, of putting strain on the human senses impedes the clarity of them, he argues, since it is unnatural. Further, the constant thinking about the experiences in terms of coding them into words, this abstraction of thought, increasingly divorces us from the reality. Watts proposes that this is the reason why this attitude of having a quiet observation, without thoughts, at least some of the time during the day, has been developed in the East.

Portraying a meditating buddha.

He clarifies that this is not to say that thinking is a disturbance, that it is something that the human being shouldn't do; on the contrary, it is a highly important acquisition of man. But thinking isn't of any real value to us, he argues, unless we can also practice non-thinking; unless we can have our minds silent and make immediate contact with the real world as distinct from the world of pure abstraction of thoughts. The logic Watts proposes is the saying, "talking to oneself all the time is a sign of madness", while arguing that one's thoughts are in effect a self-talk. He then postulates that this non-thinking is what is called meditation.

A side-note: Other scholars, especially of the 19th century such as T. W. Rhys Davids, seem to share the exact same view but who might be using a different, sometimes even opposite, terminology. For instance, while noting the categories, as found in Dittha Dhammika Nibbāna Vāda (Nirvana through the dharma of Drashti, i.e. seeing/ Awareness), of attaining the perfect bliss in the present world, Rhys Davids records the properties of the First Dhyāna as, "By an enquiring mental abstraction." Apparently, this is the author's scholarly interpretation, which seems to stem from the western empirical view that essentially "thoughts are reality," and hence to get rid of thoughts is to attain a level of abstraction. Alan Watts, on the other hand, is providing an as-is narration in this video as found in these philosophies where, "thought is an abstraction".

While it is not explicitly mentioned, the technique described by Watts here, including the analogy of vibrations, closely resembles the Awareness Meditation practice where, the ascent of the practice is simply to observe objectively, and not necessarily to cut out from the sense organs, but to let their experiences come forth without any obstructions, until the experiencer and the experience are united. As the knower and the known become one, it produces the experience of one's unity with the universe - which, as Alan Watts underscores, is the function of meditation.

[Part: 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsFHokJzLrA]

[Part: 2 - http://www.youtube.com/embed/bz4TBKZZKjk]

The concluding quote of Lafcadio Hearn from the video above, describing the attitude potraid by the expressions on the face of a meditating buddha:

Each idol shaped by human faith
remains the shell of truth eternally divine,
and even the shell itself may hold a ghostly power.
The soft serenity,
the passionless tenderness
of those Buddha faces
might yet give peace of soul
to a West weary of creeds,
transformed into conventions,
eager for the coming of another teacher to proclaim,
'I have the same feeling for the High as the Low,
for the moral as the immoral,
for the depraved as for the virtuous,
for those holding sectarian views and false opinions
as for those whose beliefs are good and true.'

BBC Series: Darwin's Dangerous Idea [video links]

2012-03-07T11:01:00.000+00:00

Episode 01 - Body & Soul:

Episode 02 - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Born Equal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yAlwdkbuCw

Episode 03 - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Life & Death: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zVIQbGa86I

Tossing of a Coin (Vēdanā — Awareness Meditation)

2012-03-04T03:35:00.000+00:00

बुद्धं शरणं गच्छामि | Buddham Sharanam Gachchami - meaning: i) One is on the continuous journey initiated with, and gradually persevered by, one's own will (गच्छामि); ii) Towards the gem of the purest being within myself (बुद्धं) which is the essence of Buddha consciousness (note: not Gautama, or even Gautama the Buddha); iii) With complete submission, as my refuge (शरणं);

As one progresses on the internal journey of the self and psyche with बुद्धं शरणं गच्छामि, the duality of an internal nature of the self is most likely to be the first realization for a new practitioner of Awareness Meditation.

The treachery (प्रपंच) of the five senses, in conjunction with the mind as the sixth, enclosed within the three-and-a-half hand-fold of mind-body (नामरुप) thrives on the delusional proponents of ignorance (अविद्या), keeping the man rooted amongst the struggles of the world (संसार).

At the very gross level, the mind (स्थूल मन), as it were, "commands" through its rational faculties such that the body is pampered, and remain in it's comfort zone; and in return the mind uses the body as a transport to go places and make the body do things that "pleases" it's desires.

Indo-Greek King Menander I (165-155 BCE),
also known as Milinda in Sanskrit/Pali. He is
revered for his canonical dialogues with the
buddhist brahmin monk Nagasena, recorded
as "Milinda-panha". Arguably, Menander I
was the first western nobility to have
adopted Buddhism.

The practitioner, having come in touch with the subtle mind (शूक्ष्म मन), also realizes that such treachery without continues her 'within' as well. As every vēdanā (वेदना, i.e. pleasant as well as unpleasant sensations) originated by the senses, and interpreted by samskar (संस्कार) is like tossing up a coin. The result would be either of the two sides of the coin - pleasant or unpleasant.

And just as the want for winning the toss, one craves for those pleasant sensations, rejecting the unpleasant, wanting the coin to fall on the preferred side all the time -- praying, or perhaps, craving.

Or better still, she would be driven to work relentlessly on the coin per say, to convert it into having the same engravings on both the sides, getting her preferred sensation now and forever. She probably will not realize that it would be a flawed coin, bearing no currency and merit, against nature, and something that the processes of the real world would keep rejecting. Thus, suffering (दुख:) continues.

As the hollywood movie Batman And the Dark Knight illustrates, finally, the hero of the beginning with the same-sided coin, ends up being a con in the end.

Five Zen Koans (March '12)

2012-03-02T04:00:00.000+00:00

A compilation of five beautiful Zen koans and parables.

❦

1. Teaching the Ultimate: In early times in Japan, bamboo-and-paper lanterns were used with candles inside. A blind man, visiting a friend one night, was offered a lantern to carry home with him.

"I do not need a lantern," he said, "Darkness or light is all the same to me."
"I know you do not need a lantern to find your way," his friend replied, "but if you don’t have one, someone else may run into you. So you must take it."
The blind man started off with the lantern and before he had walked very far someone ran squarely into him. "Look out where you are going!" he exclaimed to the stranger. "Can’t you see this lantern?"
"Your candle has burned out," replied the stranger.

❦

2. Cliffhanger: One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff.

Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine.

Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry.

He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!

❦

3. Maybe: Once upon the time there was an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit.

“Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically.
“Maybe,” the farmer replied.

The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses.

“How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed.
“Maybe,” replied the old man.

The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune.

“Maybe,” answered the farmer.

The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

“Maybe,” said the farmer.

❦

4. If Nothing Exists: Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young samurai student of Zen, visited one master after another.

He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku. Desiring to show his attainment, he said:

"The mind, Buddha, and sentient beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness. There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no giving and nothing to be received."

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing.
Suddenly, he whacked Yamaoka with his bamboo pipe.
This made the youth quite angry.

"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?"

❦

5. Right and Wrong: When Bankei held his seclusion-weeks of meditation, pupils from many parts of Japan came to attend.

During one of these gatherings a pupil was caught stealing. The matter was reported to Bankei with the request that the culprit be expelled.

Bankei ignored the case. Later the pupil was caught in a similar act, and again Bankei disregarded the matter. This angered the other pupils, who drew up a petition asking for the dismissal of the thief, stating that otherwise they would leave in a body.

When Bankei had read the petition he called everyone before him.

"You are wise brothers," he told them. "You know what is right and what is not right. You may go somewhere else to study if you wish, but this poor pupil does not even know right from wrong. Who will teach him if I do not? I am going to keep him here even if all the rest of you leave."

A torrent of tears cleansed the face of the pupil who had stolen. All desire to steal had vanished.

❦

Did Neanderthal Man Do Meditation?

2012-02-24T05:16:00.000+00:00

Perhaps the question that should precede the title is "Why meditation?". While the answer is rather complicated, this blog shall attempt to make relevant posts around the topic. To begin with, let's sample the opening paragraph from the first chapter of The Power of Myth, the book capturing a conversation on world of myths and religions:

Bill: Why myths? Why should we care about them? What do they have to do with my life?

Joe: My first response would be, "Go on, live your life; it's a good life -- you don't need this." I don't believe in being interested in a subject just because it is said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other. But you may find that, with a proper introduction, this subject will catch you [...]

Perhaps the same is also applicable to meditation and likeminded practices. As with Myths.

To begin with, the notion seems erroneous that makes meditation an exclusively religious forte. Concentration is not termed as religious. Contemplation can be termed semi-religious. But meditation has become common to be associated with a religious practice. Why?

(For instance, Nassim Taleb would like to argue -as in Fooled by Randomness- that his is the meditation of Mathematics, and it is the best that there is.) As we moved into the "21st century" the human race had been metaphysically controlled (for a want of a better word) on a continuous basis by a certain group of people claiming to have answers to certain blindspots within the human cognitive processes. One of the tantamount evidences is right there in the number - 21st century. Why not year 35,100 which is roughly considered the behavioral origin of Cro-Magnon Homo Sapience species? Or say year 200,100 when the anatomical homo sapience first emerged in Africa?
The simple answer would be that these numbers were largely unknown until very recently. And hence, most of the unknown and unknowable has been attributed by the wise-men of mankind to a "power" seemingly much larger then themselves; namely God. In its purest sense, the notion is true perhaps. To quote Joe again, quoting Indian Chief Seattle's famous speech, "Man didn't weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it." In its purest sense, perhaps those wise-men didn't mean to initiate religion as we know it today. Sampling some of the earliest Greek, Indian and Chinese wisdom talk provides no reference or need for "religion" as such.

Uncertainty and randomness, and the dangers they propose, must be the common and prevalent forces active in a hunter-gatherer aboriginal man's struggle. Millennia pass. Man continue to fight for survival in a rather hostile environment, with a rather fragile physic. Her erect posture compromises the pelvic bone structure. For a mammal it means the child bearing and delivering system ends up making a series of adjustments and compromises. Evolution mandates that to make this system work, the fetus development within the womb would focus on "manufacturing" mainly the cerebral tissues, and would now create an offspring that would not be capable of doing much more than breathing and suckling when it would first see the light of the day. That too after a few desperate prompting attempts immediately after birth, when the lungs need to be expanded by crying out loud, as a water breathing creature suddenly becomes an air breathing one. For about an average twelve long years from that point, this protection by the parent guardian would be required, while the brain development would continue for about 20 years of her life. (Time permitting, this blog shall attempt to contribute more on the subject from Nobel laureate Gerald Edelman's work "Neural Darwinism – The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection")

The other mammal cousines of homo sapience do not face a challenge of similar severity, or oddity. The largest animal of the mammal kingdom, the blue whale, after about eight to 12 months of gestation period gives birth to a 2.5 metric ton calf, which is up and running for a thousand miles journey. And while at it, they socialize, they sing, and they play games. These arrangements of these species have been stabilized through evolution for at least 10 million years. Relatively, humans are a fairly new species, still at a continuous struggle against a rather steep evolution curve.

Multiple theories have been attempted at explaining the evolution and development of "brain" per say within the animal kingdom in general and for humans in particular. One such source claims:

"What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle." – Marvin Minsky [The Society of Mind, p. 308]

Yes, what Magic? About 15,000 years ago the uncultured, wild, hunter-gatherer evolves to realize that, among others, he had two choices: to accept those uncertain and random forces as a part and parcel of survival; or to somehow find a way to control it, or better still, to turn it into his favor. Enter the wizards. They claim to harness these natural forces and command them to serve man. Later developments bring about the earliest breed of priests, sarmans, magicians. Birth of cult; birth of religion. A system that pacifies his fears, and magnifies assurances. A trading system where a desire is traded for a certain rite; a fear is traded against another. Promoting hope, promising to minimize uncertainty and randomness, give-and-take a few self-delusions.

Apes and humans share nearly 98% of the gene-pool. Experts claim that primates do not have the ability to 'think'. They may demonstrate intelligence such as, using a stone to crack a hard nut, or use a straw to lure termites out, or even certain (rare) analytical abilities like "if two bears go into a cave, and only one emerges, it may still be unsafe to enter the cave since the other may still be inside." Even metacognition or self-awareness may be true, for chimps and the dolphins, to some extent: there is more than 50% chance that a chimp looking itself up into a mirror may recognize an ink spot on its face, and try to rub it off. However, their faculties do not extent to the sophistication of what we know as human thinking ability. The 2% genetic mutation or evolution provides man with this uncanny evolutionary advantage that supersedes even the seemingly major survival disadvantages such as: a fragile physical structure, lack of weaponry such as canines and claws, and an overall weak gross sensory organs of smell, sight and hearing. The genetic mutation favored development of brain and its faculties as against to these animal traits.

The Neanderthal Man (Male). [Image via Neanderthal museum, Germany]

The results are in front of us: humans become the top animal. This 2% genetical "advancement" also includes at least four sub-branches within Archaic Homo sapiens; one of which is called the Neanderthal Man. These early species sometimes inter-bread with ancestors of modern humans, and their genetic traces are still found in people from Eurasia. They performed fire-based "rituals", cooked food, produced charcoal cave-paintings, built dwellings, used advanced tools, and had a language-based communication. They lived in complex social groups, and were smaller yet much stronger in terms of physical strength and structure in comparison to modern humans. Perhaps, a summation of all the traits that should put them ahead of the rest in terms of evolutionary selection. National Geography further reports:

"Studies have shown that Neanderthal and modern human brains were the same size at birth, but by adulthood, the Neanderthal brain was larger than the modern human brain."

And then, by as late as 24,000 years before present, this whole branch of archaic homo sapience called Neanderthalensis goes extinct. Why? No one conclusively knows as yet. Competing hypothesis include species specific desease, climate-change, volcano eruption, and even an economic theory suggesting that Neanderthals were poor at trade and hence became extinction. Most anthropologists however tend to favor the notion (with an apparent influence by the history of colonization in recent centuries) that homo sapience, though seemingly inferier in physical strength than Neanderthals, but superior in cognition and tool building, initially did a "soft invasion" to their territory, leading to inter-breading and then absorption of Neanderthals into homo sapience main-stream, at which point Neanderthals loose their independent existence as a species.

So, did Neanderthal Man, or even early Cro-Magnons, indulge into something like meditation? The most likely explanation is that the need, the concept and thus the word 'meditation' didn't have to exist for their era.

The limited point here being that a larger brain size and brain-to-body mass ration does not always automatically translate into a successful evolutionary selection. Evolution is also a journey riddled with a series of unpredictable accidents. One such likely accident on its way could be the human brain matter, and the faculty enabling 'thinking' like humans, which has been undergoing transformation over the last few thousand years. Within the last 35,000 years since Cro-Magnon varient of modern humans, the cranial capacity (brain size) has been decreasing from average 1600cc to 1200cc for an average modern human. The change isn't without its effects.

The gray area highlighted by the flaw(s) in this cognitive process that is undergoing evolutionary changes, magnified by brains's imaginative powers and emotional response system, seems to have come into existence just about 15,000 to 10,000 years before present, when, as per the available archeological evidence, the first lunar calendar is thought to have been created. Thus far, the experimentation via various 'religious' organizations have indicated that these flaws and blindspots of the brain could be addressed, and controlled, (first by terming it God, or at least a lul of the divine, and then) by systematic individual and group therapies such as, what we generally call, a meditation.

Evolution is taking place even at this moment as we speak. And while the processes optimise this primary resource called human brain that has directly contributed towards the survival and superiority of the species, those blindspots of cognition that the priests, magicians, alchemists and sarmans seem to exclusively have access to in recent millennia, are also in the processes of being ironed out.

The word God is filling this blank for modern humans, and it is safe to bet that evolution is aware of it.

Mind, In and Of Itself (Five Aggregates — Awareness Meditation)

2012-02-20T07:49:00.000+00:00

Mind, In and Of Itself is a mahāmantra; a concept central to the Awareness meditation—samādhi aspect of Buddhism, so powerful and potent, that it is said that it could even separate water with a blow of a stick.

In conclusion of Satipatthana Sutta discourse on the awareness meditation, the Buddha is supposed to have said,

"'This is the direct path for the purification of beings,
for the overcoming of sorrow and lamentation,
for the disappearance of pain and distress,
for the attainment of the right method, and
for the realization of Unbinding
— in other words, the four frames of reference.'
Thus was it said, and in reference to this was it said."

As the commentators have observed, the primary focus area of the teaching during the Buddha's lifetime have been around vijnān p: vinnan (and not on dhammā per say). One way of understanding vijnān is as formulations through the consumption of an object (rupa) by the mind via it's five sense-doors (each door having it's own perception, objects for perception, with the respective vijnān). The mind, in this respect, consumes all five sense-doors, in addition to having vijnān for itself. Further, to consume is to create new samskāra, which leads to dukkha (follow the example below).

Briefly, this is Buddha Consciousness of a being. As per Buddha's teachings during his lifetime,
a) Consciousness cannot 'exist' independent of its subject or object;
b) Consciousness is always an attribute, to be attributed to;
c) or, to look from the other direction, consciousness is formulated, through a process by vijñāna, in the mind-body;
d) there is no consciousness "out there", akin to some spirit body; or "in here" akin to some spirit;
This is the fundamental precept proposed by the Buddha leading towards cardinal doctrines of Dependent Origination - Pratītyasamutpāda, and Impermanence - anicca.

A samādhi with complete awareness (sati) of vijnān makes it a samyak-samādhi; the only samādhi which can destroy new and old samskāra, and which is qualified for prajyā (destruction of ignorance), which then leads to nirvāna.

What is Mind, In and Of Itself? Simply put, 'mind, in and of itself' is to observe objectively and equanimously rather than in a consumate manner.

Panc' upadanakkhanda: Rupupadanakkhando, Vedanupadanakkhando, Sannupadanakkhando, Sankharupadanakkhando, Vinnanupadanakkhando. - Abhidhammattha Sangaha / Acariya Anuruddha Chap VII-35

The classical way of beautifully illustrating the precept of Panc upadanakkhanda (five aggregates) employes an analysis of the faculty of hearing. Let's try a similar example:

When we hear a sound
The sound-wave is generated by an object (e.g. a howling dog; a guitar)
This is rūpa. (Rupupadanakkhando)

The vibrations or sound waves travel through a medium
The vibrations hit our earlobes, and are channeled inside
The vibrations are transfered to the mechanism of 'hearing' within the ear
This is sparśa.

This produces neurological gross sensations
The sensations are the signals that the brain can perceive
The sensations travel through the nerves up to the brain
This is vedanā. (Vedanupadanakkhando)

The sensations are perceived by the hearing faculty of the brain
The perception is put through recognition ("this is the sound of a dog"; "this is a guitar chord")
The perception is interpreted ("this is a noisy dog"; "this are guitar chords by The Beatles")
This is samjñā or saññā. (Sannupadanakkhando)

The perception is judged
The perception is categorized as either pleasant (the howling dog), or
The perception is categorized as unpleasant (the guitar chord), or neutral
This is saṃskāra. (Sankharupadanakkhando)

The mind formulates craving if the sensation is pleasant (your favorite guitar chord)
The mind formulates aversion if the sensation is unpleasant (the howling dog disturbing your meditation)
This is vijñāna. (Vinnanupadanakkhando)

Not understanding that cravings or aversions are delusions
This is avidyā.
Avidyā leads to suffering-dukkha.

Hearing, In and Of Itself, is to discern that a sound is a sound.
To discern, that it is a vibration that reached our brain-samjñā.
The vibration is neither pleasant, not unpleasant.
Suffering does not 'happen' out there, in the sound wave, but happens in our mind-body (nāmarūpa).
The pleasantness or unpleasantness is not in the sound per say, but in the interpretation and classification of the sound - saṃskāra. (For instance, it could very well be the sound of our pet dog sensing our proximity and eagerly showing affection by howling; while the sound of guitar chords could be a heavy-metal disturbance by a neighbor while we are trying to meditate.)

Hearing, in and of itself, is to observe objectively, the process within our mind-body, associated with this sound vibration; While remaining mindful, alert, and equanimous, and to avoid creating a saṃskāra.

As in this case of hearing faculty, the same mindfulness is applicable to all the other four sense-doors, namely, sight, smell, taste and touch.

Mind, itself as a sense-organ: Then, finally, after the five sense-doors, when the faculty of mind discerns that it is completely aware of itself, that this awareness is mindful of all saṃskāra and the vijñāna that arise and pass away within its faculty, is the awareness of Mind, In and Of itself. In his commentary on Satipatthana Sutta called Frame of References, Thanissaro Bhikkhu notes the following:

"And how does a monk remain focused on the mind in & of itself? There is the case where a monk, when the mind has passion, discerns that the mind has passion. When the mind is without passion, he discerns that the mind is without passion. When the mind has aversion, he discerns that the mind has aversion. When the mind is without aversion, he discerns that the mind is without aversion. When the mind has delusion, he discerns that the mind has delusion. When the mind is without delusion, he discerns that the mind is without delusion. [...]
"In this way he remains focused internally on the mind in & of itself, or externally on the mind in & of itself, or both internally & externally on the mind in & of itself. Or he remains focused on the phenomenon of origination with regard to the mind, on the phenomenon of passing away with regard to the mind, or on the phenomenon of origination & passing away with regard to the mind. Or his mindfulness that 'There is a mind' is maintained to the extent of knowledge & remembrance. And he remains independent, unsustained by (not clinging to) anything in the world. This is how a monk remains focused on the mind in & of itself.

Being aware, always, of any provocation of vedana as it is, of a rupa as it is, is mindfulness.
Preventing generation of new saṃskāra, to not judge, is samyak-samādhi.
To not formulate cravings or aversions, to remain equanimous, is prajyā.

To quote the Buddha again, "This is the direct path for the purification of beings."

Five Zen Koans (Feb '12)

2012-02-01T08:00:00.000+00:00

A compilation of five beautiful Zen koans and parables.

1. Finding a Piece of the Truth: One day Mara, the Evil One, was travelling through the villages of India with his attendants. He saw a man doing walking meditation whose face was lit up on wonder. The man had just discovered something on the ground in front of him. Mara’s attendant asked what that was and Mara replied,

"A piece of truth."
"Doesn’t this bother you when someone finds a piece of truth, O Evil One?" his attendant asked.
"No," Mara replied. "Right after this, they usually make a belief out of it."

❦

2. A Cup of Tea: Nan-in, a Japanese Zen master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), was part of the Hakuin branch of Rinzai Zen in Japan. Nannin received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea.
He poured his visitor’s cup until full, and then kept on pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself:

"It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"

❦

3. Is That So? The Zen master Hakuin was praised by his neighbors as one living a pure life.

A beautiful Japanese girl whose parents owned a food store lived near him. Suddenly, without any warning, her parents discovered she was bearing a child. This made her parents very upset. She would not confess who the man was, but after much harassment at last the girl named master Hakuin. In great anger the parents went to the master and confronted him.

"Is that so?" was all he would say.

When the child was born, the parents brought it to the Hakuin, who now was viewed as a pariah by the whole village. They demanded that he take care of the child since it was his responsibility.

“Is that so?” master Hakuin said calmly as he accepted the child.

A year later the young mother could stand it no longer. She told her parents the truth–that the real father of the child was a young man who worked in the fish market. The mother and father of the girl at once went to Zen master Hakuin to seek his forgiveness, to apologize at length, and to get the child back again.

Hakuin was willing. In yielding the child, all he said, "Is that so?"

❦

4. Until Sunyata: Two monks were returning to the monastery in the evening. It had rained and there were puddles of water on the road sides.

At one place a beautiful young woman was standing, unable to walk across because of a puddle on the road. The elder of the two monks went up to her, lifted her, and put her down on the other side of the road before he continued his way to the monastery. In the evening the younger monk came to the elder monk and said,

"Sir, as monks, we cannot touch a woman?"
The elder monk answered "yes, brother".
Then the younger monk asks again, "but then Sir, how is that you lifted that woman on the roadside?"
The elder monk smiled at him and told him," I left her on the other side of the road, but you are still carrying her."

❦

5. The Other Side: One day a young monk on his way home came to the banks of a wide river. Staring hopelessly at the great obstacle in front of him, he pondered for hours on just how to cross such a wide barrier. Just as he was about to give up his pursuit to continue his journey he saw a great teacher on the other side of the river. The young Buddhist yells over to the teacher,

"Oh wise one, can you tell me how to get to the other side of this river?"
The teacher ponders for a moment, looks up and down the river, and yells back, "My son, but you are on the other side".

J Krishnamurti - On Collective Consciousness and Individuality

2012-01-23T20:00:00.000+00:00

J Krishnamurti
["The Only Video You Need To See" at YouTube]

Transcript:

Please... We are looking at it together

Your own consciousness

Which is you

Fear

And with it naturally goes hatred

Where there is fear there must be violence

Aggression

The tremendous urge to succeed

Both in the physical as well as in the psychological world

Fear has many factors, which we’ll go into when we are talking about fear

And the constant pursuit of pleasure

Pleasure of possession

Pleasure of domination

Pleasure of money, which gives power

The pleasure of a philosopher with his immense knowledge

The guru with his circus

Pleasure again has innumerable forms

And, there is also..

Sorrow

Pain

Anxiety

The deep sense of abiding

Endless sense of loneliness

And not only the so-called personal sorrow

But also the enormous sorrow of mankind has brought about through wars

Through neglect

Through this endless sense of conquering one group of people by another

And in that consciousness
There is the racial group
Contest

And ultimately there is death

This is our consciousness

Beliefs

Certainties

And uncertainties

Great sense of anxiety

Loneliness

Sorrow

And endless misery

This is a fact

And we say, this consciousness

Is mine!

Is that so?

Go to the Far East or the other east,

India, American, Europe

Anywhere you go where human beings are

They suffer

They’re anxious

Lonely

Depressed

Melancholy

Struggling conflict

Same like you

Similar like you

So is your consciousness different from the another?

I know it’s very difficult

Maybe to logically accept

Which is intellectual verbally say yes

That is so

Maybe

But to feel this total human sense that there is no humanity except you

You are the rest of mankind

That requires great deal of sensitivity

It’s not a problem to be solved

It isn’t that, ‘I must accept that I’m not an individual

And how am I to feel this - a global human entity?’

Then you’ve made it into a problem

And the brain is ready to solve the problem

Do this

Don’t do that

Go to a guru

You know all the circus that goes on..

But if you really look at it

With your mind

With your heart

With you whole being

Totally aware of this fact

Then you have broken the program

See..

It is naturally broken

But if you say ‘I will break it’

You are getting back in the same

(I wonder if you understand..

Shall I go over it again?)

Is it necessary for the speak to repeat?

But please don’t accept this because the speaker feels this

To him this is utter reality

Not something verbally accepted

Because it’s pleasant

But it is something that is actual

Then if that is so

Which is logically

Reasonably

Sanely examine and you’ll see

It is so

But the brain which has been accustomed to

This program of the individuality is going to revolt

Which you are doing now

Which is the brain is unwilling to learn

Where as the computer is willing to learn

Here we are frightening of losing something

And if you don’t understand this

We’ll go over and over again

But a serious person confronting the world situation

The world catastrophe

The terror

The atom bomb

The endless competition between nations

That is destroying human beings

It’s destroying us

Each one

And the decision comes

When you perceive the truth that you are not an individual…

Video via Tumblr.

Mind Matter(s)

2012-01-20T11:39:00.000+00:00

Excerpt via Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists blog: How Universal Is The Mind?

If someone asked you to describe the psychological aspects of personhood, what would you say? Chances are, you'd describe things like thought, memory, problem-solving, reasoning, maybe emotion. In other words, you probably list the major headings of a cognitive psychology text-book. In cognitive psychology, we seem to take it for granted that these are, objectively, the primary components of "the mind" (even if you reject a mind/body dualism, you probably accept some notion that there are psychological processes similar to the ones listed above). I've posted previously about whether the distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive even makes sense. But, here, I want to think about the universality of the "mind" concept and its relationship to the modern view of cognition.

In fact, this conception of the mind is heavily influenced by a particular (Western) cultural background. Other cultures assign different characteristics and abilities to the psychological aspects of personhood. Wierzbicka (2005) delves into this problem in detail. She argues that speakers of a particular language make assumptions about what must be universal based on their own ability to imagine doing without a certain concept. Important cross-cultural differences in meaning become lost in translation. [...]

Generalisations about cognition must be made in some language, but, language is specific to particular cultures. Our choice of language, then, inevitably will bias how we talk about cognition across cultures. [...]

Cross-linguistic research shows that, generally speaking, every culture has a folk model of a person consisting of visible and invisible (psychological) aspects. While there is agreement that the visible part of the person refers to the body, there is considerable variation in how different cultures think about the invisible (psychological) part. In the West, and, specifically, in the English-speaking West, the psychological aspect of personhood is closely related to the concept of "the mind" and the modern view of cognition.But, how universal is this conception? How do speakers of other languages think about the psychological aspect of personhood?

In Korean, the concept "maum" replaces the concept "mind". "Maum" has no English counterpart, but is sometimes translated as "heart". Apparently, "maum" is the "seat of emotions, motivation, and "goodness" in a human being". Intellect and cognitive functions are captured by the Korean "meli" (head). [...]

The Japanese have yet another concept for the invisible part of the person - "kokoro". "Kokoro" is a "seat of emotion, and also, a source of culturally valued attention to, and empathy with, other people". To illustrate the contrast between "kokoro" and "mind", Wierzbicka gives the following example: A Japanese television programme proclaims, "The 21st century should be the age of kokoro. Let's make a point of meeting with other people". If an English speaker declared the 21st century to be "the age of the mind" then "meeting with other people" probably would not be a priority - thinking and knowing would be.

(image via The Union Jack Library [1894]).

Yours Professionally Socially Professional (Part 2)

2012-01-19T14:27:00.000+00:00

This is Part 2 of a two-part post on the title. Go here for Part 1.

Giggle twins: When it comes to explaining personality, it is always true that nature and nurture work together. But it is also true that nature plays a bigger role than most people realize. Consider the identical twin sisters Daphne and Barbara. Raised outside London they both left school at the age of fourteen, went to work for local government, met their future husbands at the age of sixteen at local town hall dances, suffered miscarriage at the same time, and then each gave birth to two boys and a girl. They feared many of the same things (blood and heights) and exhibited unusual habits (each drank her coffee cold, each developed a habit of pushing up her nose with the palm of the hand, a gesture they both happened to call 'squidging'). None of these would surprise you as much until you learn that separate families had adopted Daphne and Barbara as infants; neither knew of each others existence until they were reunited at the age of 40. When they finally did meet, they were wearing almost identical clothing.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, may be tempted to dismiss the above as one fine striking coincidence, and continue to argue that "You are what you learn" (try here. A compelling argument which he would then conclude in his characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner by suggesting to his readers not to take phycology advices from a cartoonist).

Who Am I?: Identity crisis is an old problem. Perhaps as old as the identification of individual personalities within mankind itself; though it is only in recent times, and with modernity, that it has almost become a crisis --in the sense of an epidemic. More so for the younger generation, the attention economy, and social media as the primary social interaction channel. (Modern) Profession as a role, acquired through skills and practice, is a different scenario from that of being born into a (older) profession. As the social structures mature, stabilize and become more risk-free, people get the option of starting from scratch and choosing a profession that does not have the support and benefits of the inheritance or direct descendance and lineage. Also in the eastern society, where one identifies one's (current, and hopefully last!) 'incarnation' as a function of the role that comes along with the circumstance (or accident) of birth, the identity crisis transforms from being a crisis to becoming an obligation - ideally, a humble service to the society. Furthermore, it can further be seen as an opportunity of performing the role at one's best capacity, and thus better the chances of fairing well at the final goal of attaining release from the whole cycle of samsara. The question such as Who Am I? here mostly has a very different context, and hence people end up figuring out for themselves even more varied answers (Aham Brahmasmi / Tat Tvam Asi / om manipadme hum / Shivohm).

A Thousand Gods, and then some: Broadly speaking, it can be argues that the above anecdote of the twin girls highlighting the nature aspect of personality and behavior of individuals, when coupled with the advantages that come with inherited professions, adds further merit to the gene-pool and pedigree patronage i.e. a certain group's 'natural' allegiance towards a trade, a profession, or a practice that has been running down through generations. There are always some exceptions to every rule, but barring those, such pedigree patronage also adds to the stability of the overall social structure where the supply of the given skilled labor for social consumption is assured via defined lineages. And by the way of reciprocity, all the roles and functions are almost equally respected, and controlled by religion through the respective deities, which are most often incarnations or avatars of a single main deity (mostly Vishnu), and thus has equality in status. Such an arrangement has obvious rigidities, but it also creates strong contrasting stereotypes, and results into social diversity where respect towards various social identities is hedged by common socio-religious code binding the whole samsara into something like a single extended family, while the whole system remains in accord and harmony with nature. (Perhaps this is also a (over) simplified explanation for anyone baffled by thousands of small gods of India, or those numerous tiny Buddhas, all flavoring seasons, staples and strides.)

American Identity Crisis: With this as the backdrop, I especially came to appreciate when Joe Robinson in this beautifully flowing huffpost article— American Identity Crisis: Are You Your Job? (try here)—focused on the identity crisis as seen in America, and thus differentiated the issue from Eastern counterparts in terms of problem definitions as well as solutions. The lineage specific arguments echo in his article when, compared to the cultural societies of Asia and Europe, he addresses the issue as associated with the "rootless culture with no obvious class markers" in America. The dealings with identity and their psychological nuances are most likely to meet different, even specialized, remediations for different cultures. Approaches by older cultures with respect to identity can hardly be segregated from their underlying socio-religious aspects and undercurrents, and that is where their fundamental difference begins with the modern, western, socio-economic approaches. For example, in the East you identify yourself with the God power, striving for that experience of identification with godhood—not just to be like god, but to be god—over years of dedication and practice; something which is downright blaspheme for Western organized religions.

Robinson speaks about "persona" and how the real identity gets highjacked in the performance intensive work culture. The problem definition sounds way too familier. And so does the solution, which incidentally (and, thankfully!) does not involve a psychologist's couch, or a priest's sermon. While Robinson's wisdom is deep, and his identity related help seems effective and thoughtful, my simpler summary of his article would be: the issue of hollowness within, or more technically, an absence, or maturation, of the inner identity to fall back to when the outer performance identity is challenged.

And so, the question really is, how to fill up this hollowness, and with what?

The Sacred Place: The experts say the answer to that question is within everyone's gasp, and fortunately it isn't bound by age, gender, race, lineage, culture or religion. Let's sample the following excerpt from a dialogue that is taking place in California somewhere in 1986-87 and goes to discuss something called "The Sacred Place":

Bill MOYERS: On my first visit to Kenya, I went alone to one of the ancient sites of a primitive camp on what used to be the shore of a lake, and stayed there until night fell, feeling a sense of the presence of all creation—sensing underneath that night sky, in that vast place, that I belonged to something ancient, something very much still alive.

CAMPBELL: I think it’s Cicero who says that when you go into a great tall grove, the presence of a deity becomes known to you. There are sacred groves everywhere. Going into the forest as a little boy, I can remember worshiping a tree, a great big old tree, thinking, “My, my, what you’ve known and been.” I think this sense of the presence of creation is a basic mood of man. But we live now in a city. It’s all stone and rock, manufactured by human hands. It’s a different kind of world to grow up in when you’re out in the forest with the little chipmunks and the great owls. All these things are around you as presences, representing forces and powers and magical possibilities of life that are not yours and yet are all part of life, and that opens it out to you. Then you find it echoing in yourself, because you are nature. When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he’d address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you’re addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you’re in, then you’re in your place in the world. It’s a different way to live.

MOYERS: You write in The Mythic Image about the center of transformation, the idea of a sacred place where the temporal walls may dissolve to reveal a wonder. What does it mean to have a sacred place?

CAMPBELL: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

MOYERS: This sacred place does for you what the plains did for the [ancestral hunter gatherers].

CAMPBELL: For them the whole world was a sacred place. But our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music that you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects. Or get the book you like to read. In your sacred place you get the ”thou” feeling of life that these people had for the whole world in which they lived...

[Reproduction] Aryan Mystery: Romila Thapar's Interpretation

2012-01-16T14:51:00.001+00:00

Blog admin's note: The following undated article is unavailable on the internet since Indoaryans.org servers went offline. This post is a reproduction from the Google cache pages, primarily for the purpose of readability - with very minor editing by the way of Italicising the Indic terms. There doesn't seem to be any apparent means of reaching out to the website owners for permission etc. in this catch-22 kind of a situation. Kindly leave a comment if you have any observations around the matter.

Since this is apparently a transcript of a lecture with no indications towards the use of support material such as pictures, maps, slides and other media, the article remains text-heavy. Though it seems some of my personal contributions at Wikipedia on the subject, and also those of the other colleagues and editors, mainly in terms of geographical maps and time-scales would be a good value add to this post. Time permitting, it shall be taken up. If the idea excites you as well where you too would like to contribute, you are welcome; please drop a note in the comments section.

With respect to the author per say, note that this blog does not endorse anything and everything, controversial or otherwise, that Romila Thapar may have said or done elsewhere. Other commentaries suggest to have found Tapar's position on the subject as "evolving" over time -- in a way, which may show an open mind towards new evidence on the scholar's part. Since this lecture and the original post are undated, it may fall anywhere within this spectrum between aeys and neys. It is left to the reader to affirm the (preferred) conclusion.

What follows next is the as-is reproduction.

* * *

Aryan Mystery: Romila Thapar's Interpretation

Excerpts from the lecture: It is tough to get credible information from the maze of political interpretations that exist on the net about Aryans and who they are. Here is a lecture by none other than famed historian Romila Thapar at JNU (Jawahalral Nehru Universiry, New Delhi)

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A r y a n s  

Now given the complexity, given the fact that you really have to know about these disciplines and understand the inter relationships between these disciplines, I am always amazed and surprised that so many people, totally untrained in any of these disciplines rush to make statements about the Aryans. Whether it is the media, newspapers, popular books, whatever it may be everybody imagines that they are experts on the Aryans. And you get an absolutes mass of total nonsense that comes on. And now a days of course the problem is that internet is getting full of all these. And so those students who think that they can bypass library reading by surfing the internet very often have a rude shock because they reproduce a lot of this garbage and then discover their teacher telling them they are getting failure grades because it does not hold. So do remember that when some sizzling stories appear in the newspapers about how somebody has solved the problem about who Aryans were, ask yourself the question what is the evidence that is being used and how is it being used. These are fundamental questions which we as a society tend not to ask and I am sorry that the Indian middle class is becoming more and more gullible as far as history is concerned. In the old days when I was a child, when I was much younger, I do remember people asking the question, somebody says that they have solved this historical problem but where is the evidence? What is the logic of the argument? But today it is the case of the newspapers or the Sunday glossy magazine that tells you that so and so has deciphered the Indus script and everybody says 'ho gaya' - it's been deciphered. Nobody asks the question what is the evidence for this decipherment? So do remember that it is a question, I shall also be talking about in a moment, which is politically highly charged. Remember that in all situations of nationalism, whether it be anti colonial secular nationalism or whether it be religious nationalism, the issue of origins and identities becomes a very major issue. Many a battle is fought over the question of origins and identities. So it is politically charged, it is sensational on the media and therefore the chances for serious scholarship to push through and say, no, wait, there is a different way of looking becomes increasingly difficult unless all of you as teachers of history go back to the question, the fundamental question, each time -- what is the theory based on and what is the logic of the argument. Now I propose to discuss the question in four different phases or stages.

First, I will talk a little bit about what we call the historiography of the question. Remember of course with all major historical questions the way in which the historians have handled a subject and data and how this handling has changed from time to time is a very fundamental question. So I will first talk little bit about the historiography of the subject, I will then talk about the archaeological background, then a little bit about the linguistic background and finally end up with an attempt at some kind of reconstruction.

Now, the historiography of the Aryan question goes back to the nineteenth century. The term Aryan as it is used in English with a capital 'A' was invented in the nineteenth century. It was invented by European scholars who then proceeded to project Aryan as both a language and a race. I will come to that in a moment. The term Aryan itself is derived from two sources. There is a very famous ancient text from Iran, the Avesta, which is linked to the religion of Zoroaster, what is known these days and practised virtually only by the Parsis. The Avesta which was probably written at approximately the same time as the Rigveda uses the term 'airiya' for describing the authors of the text. The authors refer to themselves as 'airiya' from which of course later on you get Iran. And the Rigveda uses the term Arya. So taking both these terms into consideration it was decided that this new language and these new people were to be called Aryan. Now the nineteenth century scholars, this includes people like Max Muller were fully aware that language and race are different things and yet frequently they confused languages with the race and equated them. And that is where in many ways the problem arises. They talked about an Aryan race on the basis of people speaking the same languages. Strictly speaking they should be speaking not about the Aryans but about the Aryan speaking people. But since this is an awkward phrase to use it got cut down to the Aryans. It ceased to be just a language label and became a label for a racial entity as well. The difference between language and race is enormous. The two cannot be equated. Why? Because language is cultural. It is a functional construct deliberately forged by a society for communication and articulation. When a society wishes to communicate within itself or with other societies it invents language. When it wishes to express something it invents language. So it is a deliberate cultural construct -- that is why a particular language has different forms and it varies from one social group to another. And when a person starts speaking in a language you can generally tell if you are familiar with the language which social group that person comes from.

Race on the other hand is physical, biological descent. It has got nothing to do with social construction. So language and race are in fact totally separate distinct features and the two cannot be equated. But right through the nineteenth century with reference to the Aryans the two were equated and right through the twentieth century in the popular mind in India they continue to be equated. So please keep this in mind that you cannot talk about an Aryan race. Similarly you cannot talk about a Dravidian race because once again the notion Dravidian race is based on language group, the Dravidian language group and it is incorrect to equate the two. Nor can you talk about a Munda race. These are all language labels and you have to be very careful to keep them as such. The implication of this is also that you cannot equate a language with an archaeological culture in the absence of a script. If you are excavating and there is no script available you cannot say this culture that I am excavating is Aryan or Dravidian or whatever it may be. This becomes an impossibility because Aryan is a language label and you can only call archaeological culture Aryan because strictly speaking if you find some evidence of the use of that language. Now the historiography then moves from the term Aryan, the use of the term both for language and race, to the writings of Max Mueller who uses the concept of the Aryan race as developed in Europe. There are many detailed histories of this which I would not go into here because that simply complicates the question even further. He uses the concept of the Aryan race here and applies it to Vedic India. Max Mueller argues therefore, that the Aryan races originate in Central Asia. One branch comes to Iran, then continues to India another branch goes to Europe. Now let me see if I can reach out to the map. The Aryans that?. This was the area. Some people say more towards the eastern side some say towards between Aral sea and the Caspian sea ? but this is generally the area where the Indo-European speaking people are first found, that is the mother language from which all other languages evolve which I would discuss later on.

Max Muller argued then that from Central Asia one branch came to Iran and that branch split and the Indo Aryans came to Afghanistan into northern India. So we are really talking about a large chunk of Central Asia, Western Asia, Europe. Now this is the point I would like to emphasize. When we are talking about this question we cannot restrict our discussion only to what is happening in the sub-continent. We have to take into consideration what is happening in present day Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. In fact, even further, as we shall see Turkey and Iraq and Mesopotamian centres are also involved. This is only to suggest once again how complicated the question is. It is even geographically not limited. Now Max Muller then says that there was this branch that came down into Iran and then after a while split off and one section moves into northern India. The Indian branch conquered the indigenous people and imposed on them its language, Sanskrit, and its civilization called the Aryan civilization. Max Muller's theory was that the foundation of European civilization and Indian civilization were from the same group of people they were related. What was the reaction to this theory? Max Muller is propounding these theories in the second half of the nineteenth century in various books. First of all there is the reaction of Indian historians who accept the theory and argue that this is relevant to the beginnings of Indian history. They also accept the theory of the Dravidian race on the basis of Dravidian languages and suggest that the people that were conquered were probably Dravidian speaking and they, as the popular theory has it, were pushed to the South where they settled down eventually and became the major group. Now what is interesting about this theory both from the British side and the Indian side is that whereas for colonial historians it was useful because they could argue that Indian has had a whole history of invasions from the west bringing in civilization. On the Indian nationalist side it could be argued that the upper caste Indian who has always been regarded as "the" Indian, that was the creator of the Indian civilization is Aryan and is related in fact to the coloniser, to the British. And there is one statement which I am very fond of quoting. I quote it in everything that I write, which is Keshab Chandra Sen talking about the coming of the British to India being the coming together of 'parted cousins' which in a sense gives you an idea of part of the reason why there is the interest in this theory. Remember of course, to be very cynical -- all historians when they put out theories have an axe to grind and have a political message. So always ask yourself, what is the political message of this historian that you might be reading.

Apart from this, this was one theory that had a very widespread popular appeal. All kinds of groups, all over the country picked up this theory and built their political ideologies on the basis of this. Let me give you two extreme examples of the way in which the theory was used. First of all in the later part of the 19th century there was a very famous person called Jyotiba Phule in Maharashtra, who accepted Max Muller's theory and went on to argue that therefore, the inheritors of the land in India are the lower castes because they are the real, original Indians and the upper caste, particularly the brahmins are the Aryans that came as alien invaders. The Brahmins were aliens, they were oppressive and they imposed their rule.

So this becomes an ammunition in the hands of an ideology which is arguing for caste confrontation and saying that the Dalits and the tribals are the indigenous peoples, not the upper caste people. He uses a lot of mythology very interestingly. In fact it is quite fascinating. He uses for example the myth of Parasurama, who destroyed the kshatriyas twenty one times. And he says, there you see this is the clear example of Brahminical destruction of the indigenous Indians. This is now being woven into what is sometimes called the dalit version of the theory. Those of you who might have read Kancha Ilaiah's book Why I am not a Hindu will find it plays an important part in that. Of course the weakness of the theory is that it avoids the discussion of how and why the lower caste became subservient. It is very easy to say X came in and conquered Y and therefore Y became subservient. It is much more difficult to try and explain the process by which Y became subservient. Now at the other extreme, giving a totally different interpretation to the theory, is the Hindutva version. First developed by people like Savarkar and Golwalkar and interestingly it very closely follows the theory that was put forward by the theosophists, particularly by a person called Col. Alcott who was a British theosophist and played an important part in the Theosophical movement.

To begin with, the theory of invasion was half-heartedly accepted but slowly it began to be discarded until finally by the 1930s, more exactly the late 1930s, it was vehemently denied. The argument was therefore that there was no invasion. Therefore, all Aryans are indigenous. Secondly all Hindus are Aryans ipso facto, therefore, all Hindus are indigenous and have not come from outside. Sanskrit is the earliest of the human languages and originates in India and the Aryan culture went from India to West Asia, to Europe. So India is the cradle of the world civilization. In this theory the further argument was, that all Hindus are indigenous, but the aliens or the foreigners are the Muslims and the Christians. In fact Savarkar also adds communists for good measure. But anyway, mainly it is the Muslims and the Christians who are described as aliens. And why are they alien? Because India is neither their Pitribhumi nor their Punyabhumi. It is neither the land of their ancestors, nor is it the land of their religion, the assumption being that all Muslims and all Christians are in origin people who came at some stage from outside India to India and certainly both Islam and Christianity had their origins in West Asia and not in India. The logic of this kind of thinking and it is the logic that we now facing in some of the recent statements that are being made about the Aryans, is that all Aryans are indigenous and all Hindus are Aryans, it is also that all major cultures have to be defined as Aryan. If Aryan is at the root of Indian civilization everything has to be taken back to the Aryan. Therefore, the Harappan culture, which most scholars have assumed to be pre-Vedic, has to be called Aryan. Therefore, the attempt today among some people to argue that the Indus civilization should be called Indus-Saraswati civilization and that it should be seen as representing archaeologically the Rigveda i.e. both the Rigveda and the Harappan cities represent identical cultures. Now what we have in these two extreme versions, and these are examples of the way in which the theory is used, there are many other versions in between. In one version caste is the criterion of difference, in the other, the Hindutva version, religion is the criterion of difference. So there is a kind of shift of emphasis and the shift of emphasis is determined by the politics of ideology, of looking at this history.

Throughout the 20th Century there have been attempts against the attempts of the nationalist historians who accepted this theory, and there have been other attempts to prove that the Aryans were indigenous to India. In the early part of the century the locations were Punjab, Multan, Kashmir, Himalayas. Now of course it is a problem because all the areas that were earlier located as the homeland of the Aryans are all in Pakistan. So the problem is how to retrieve them and bring them into India, which is a very difficult problem, but it is something that is being sought. The argument is largely based on the theory that the Rgveda does not mention migration and that if they had come from elsewhere we should find fragments of Rgvedic hymns in Iran and Afghanistan as well. That the focus of the ritual is the cult of soma, which is supposedly found on the mountain called Mujavant and this is in the Hindukush and therefore it is on the Indian side. The more recent attempts, i.e. since 1947, argue that there was no invasion because the Aryans are all indigenoustake the Rgveda in date back to the fifth millennium BC, 4500 BC, making it prior to the Harappan culture, even earlier than the Harappan culture. And the homeland is said to be in India, and therefore the Indus civilization should be called the Indus Sarasvati because the Sarasvati part of it is on the Indian side of the border. If the Rgveda then predates the Harappan civilization or is of the same date as the Harappan civilization, there is an "unbroken" continuity from the Indus Civilization to the present and that continuity is articulated if expressed in the existence of Hindu Culture so we're back to that. These attempts that have been made so far do not correlate all the evidence. There is a tendency to take even just the archaeology or just to read the particular vedic text, usually the Rgveda. They are generally unaware of the recent studies that have been carried out on the linguistics of Vedic Sanskrit, and they still argue merely from reading the texts. Nor is there an attempt to understand what is meant by interpreting an archaeological site. They are still people who simply go on talking about "this is mentioned in the Rgveda, this is found in such and such an excavation, there it is the same culture." Nor is there any understanding of the way societies function, that is the least of it. Right, now let me turn, so much for the historiography of it. Do you have any questions on this?

[questions] ?

Alright, now let's look at the archaeological evidence. Let me repeat once again that when we look at the archaeological evidence, we must try and understand the parameters of the Harappan system, how did it function as a system. It's not enough merely to look at individual objects. You must try and understand the totality.

There is a considerable difference in the early Harappan cultures leading upto the establishment of the urban centres. The earlier sites are in Baluchistan, places like the most famous site which is Mehrgarh, going back to about the 7th millenium, which is an extremely important site because it moves from being an agro-pastoral site to an agricultural site to then imbibing - some of the sites in the neighbourhood start imbibing - some of the characteristics of Harappan urbanization. So one can see a continuity of change from a village site to the beginnings of urban centres. Now that is Baluchistan. Does everybody know where Baluchistan is? We then move a little bit to the northwest - this area - which has sites like Rahman Dheri, slowly creeping up towards the urban centres the earliest urban centres which were present in Harappa and Mohenjo Daro. So really the action is taking place in this area and it's a fairly integrated, consolidated area where this is happening. What is now being argued is that along the Hakra river, which partly flows between the Ghaggar river, parallel to the Sutlej, parallel to the Indus, into the Rann of Kutch, its called the Hakra. The upper part of which is the Ghaggar and it is this which is sometimes equated with the Saraswati. It is now being argued that there were a number of sites in an area of Cholistan which is at the border of India and Pakistan on the Hakra. And that these indicate that the Saraswati valley was as important as the Indus valley and therefore the civilization should be called the Indus-Saraswati Civilization. If we're not careful by the time we finish with all this argumentation it will become just the Saraswati Civilization - Indus will be dropped.

But the point of course is that it is not the number of sites that matter, it is the nature of the sites. Are these sites conducive to urbanization? That is yet to be seen. At the moment they don't give that picture. The early Harappan sites of the Cholistan area are largely what are called camp sites. Nomadic, temporary. And it is only in the mature Harappan phase, when urbanization has already taken place in the Indus valley that there is a big increase in the number . And soon after the mature Harappan phase there is a desertion of these sites towards the Indo-Gangetic watershed. So the picture that emerges, if one looks at it carefully, not in terms of numbers but in terms of the nature of sites is one which would suggest that there really isn't a challenge as yet to the urbanization of the Indus valley -- to urbanization taking place earlier in the Indus valley rather than in the Hakra valley.

Now there is another complication, which is a linguistic complication. I won't go into the details just yet, I'll touch on those later. The Avesta which is the text of the Zoroastrians written in old Iranian, which is the language which is cognate with, parallel to, close to, related to, Vedic Sanskrit, refers to three place names - Harahwati, Harayu, Haptahindu. Now the old Iranian changes Vedic "s" into "h", consistently. Whatever begins with an "s" in Vedic Sanskrit, changes into an "h" in old Iranian. So Harahwati is in fact Saraswati and the Avesta describes it as a river in the Helmand area of Afghanistan. The Harayu is therefore the Sarayu, also a river in Afghanistan. Haptahindu is Saptasindhu and it is said in the Avesta that the Aryans, the Aireyas, migrated eastwards to various lands and they list 16 and the last of these is the Haptahindu, Saptasindhu. So the complication is that when we say the Rgveda is referring to the Saraswati, and the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, it challenges the whole basis of the location of the Harappan civilization. In fact, we have these developments taking place in Baluchistan and the Northwest and then later on in Gujarat and Saurashtra there is again the evolution from village settlements into urban centres and the urbanization is Harappan urbanization.

Now the other interesting thing is that the difference between the Rgveda and the Harappan is that the Harappan civilization or the Harappan contacts, more than civilization, cover a very much wider area than is even thought of in the Rgveda. Harappa, Harappan merchants have trading relations - Harappan seals have been found in Oman near the copper belt, so it seems that Harappan traders, manufacturers, producers of copper mined the copper in Oman and then carried it to Mesopotamia. Similarly, lapis lazuli has been found in Mesopotamia and it occurs all along this route to its place of origin which is in northern Afghanistan. So the Harappan traders are not only controlling a vast amount of territory, or lets say the Harappan trading culture is spread over a vast amount of territory whereas the Rgveda is only concerned with the Punjab and Rajasthan. The Harappan cities occur in far flung areas and Harappan traders have contact with many other parts of West Asia. These extended areas are not referred to in the Rgveda. In fact the geography of the Rgveda is fairly restricted. Once again let me repeat what I said earlier -- that in order to understand this question you must realize that it covers a huge geography - contacts, communication, inter-relations, exchanges are not restricted to India, they cover a vast area of West Asia and Central Asia as well.

The characteristic features of the Indus Civilization are that first of all it has an agrarian base. It is basically an agrarian civilization with facilities for storing grain. It is essentially urban with huge structures - brick platforms and buildings - and this would have required very elaborate arrangements for controlling the making of these and controlling labour, the construction of these huge platforms and the monuments. There is a clear demarcation between the citadel area and the residential area and there is in each Harappan city the gathering of resources and centres of craft production which would involve supervisors, managers, craftsmen. Crafts production being of beads, of copper, of ivory of various other things. The organization of such urban centres would have required sophisticated political control with very considerable supervision. It is essentially a copper-bronze technology. And the use of metal is fairly limited. There is a script - the famous Harappan script on the seals, which at the moment is undeciphered, in spite of various attempts to read it in various ways, it is still undeciphered. It could be connected with the people just to the west of the Indus valley - the proto-Elamite in Iran. It could be connected to the Mesopotamians, it might also have been used in the Oxus valley where the mining of lapis lazuli was done and Harappan sites were found. In other words what I'm trying to suggest is that the Harappan trader was probably multi-lingual, at least at the superficial level of using language for trade. And therefore when we talk of THE language, we have to be a little careful not to get carried away by the idea that there was just the one dominant language that was being used. Certainly there would have been the one dominant language within all the cities, but there would have been a familiarity with other languages around. And then there are all the other things you are familiar with - the religion is largely a fertility cult.

The decline of the cities, both environmental and economic - the important thing to remember about the decline of the cities is that the CITIES decline, the Harappan system does not necessarily disappear. The Harappan system as such gets disrupted because the cities declined. So the question one has to ask is what happened in the countryside. The cities are slowly getting poorer and poorer, the squatters are moving in, they are falling apart, etc. What is happening in the countryside, what's happening in the villages. And this is where post-Harappan archeology becomes important.

We find that there is a fair amount of activity on what is called the Indo-Iranian borderland the areas, the frontier zone between what would today be Pakistan Afghanistan, Iran. There is also an immense variation in the sites that you find in northern India. In the Punjab, for instance the post-Harappan situation is typified by the Cemetery H cultures which are new and different but are limited to the Punjab. In Cholistan there is a migration towards the Indo-Gangetic watershed. In Afghanistan in the Gomal valley there is the site of Gumla and Kot Diji which experiences a certain amount of destruction and fire. Not a massive destruction, but some destruction. In the Swat valley there are the sites of the Gandhara grave culture, and in the Bolan valley near the site of Mehrgarh is the site of Pirak which also suggests association with the Indo-Iranian borderlands. Now what is interesting about all these sites is that they do indicate the coming in of two new features in the second millennium, not earlier, but in the second millennium, there is the presence of the horse, there is the presence of iron, of iron technology, which is different from the Harappan which was copper-bronze, and the sites are all located in the valleys and passes along the northwest and the borderlands. So there is a multiplicity of groups of people settled along the frontiers. There isn't a single entry point into India, it is dispersed. And then when we come further into the Indo-Gangetic watershed, there is again, with the Painted Grey ware sites the presence of the horse and of iron technology. The horse therefore becomes a very important piece of evidence in connection with the arrival of Indo-Aryan speaking people.

So much for the archaeological background, let's turn to the linguistic evidence. First of all the reconstruction of Indo-Aryan. May be I should use the board here. Indo aryan, Old iranian simply to distinguish it from middle Iranian and new Iranian the same way as Indo aryan is distinguished from middle Indo aryan and new Indo Aryan. In between these two is Luristani which is spoken by a small group of people tucked away in Afghanistan and it is a combination of Old Iranian and Indo Aryan. Then you have proto Indo Aryan, which I will explain in a minute, and proto Iranian. Now these two, proto Indo European and Indo European are reconstructed languages, i.e., that they don't actually exist in records, there are no records of these languages, but that they are reconstructed from the distribution of Indo-European languages, and it's not just these two, you move further afield and there are languages in Europe like Greek, the Baltic region going all the way to the Celtic languages of Ireland, all of which are related to the Indo-European. So proto Indo European and Indo-European are reconstructed from a comparative study of all these languages. But the closely related ones, the ones that are really absolutely parallel are proto Indo Aryan for which the evidence is very limited and comes from Mesopotamia and later on, proto Aryan, Old Iranian and Indo Aryan. It is thought that Indo Aryan and Old Iranian developed out of proto Indo Iranian because of the closeness of the two languages. Now it is argued that Indo Aryan arrived in the midst of an area that was speaking other languages, possibly proto Dravidian, and Austo Asiatic, i.e. Mundari and so on. In other words there is a spread of a variety of languages in northern India prior to the emergence of Indo Aryan. That is an important fact. Indo-aryan and proto Dravidian are distinctively different languages. One is inflectional, Indo-Aryan, and the other is agglutinative. In Central Asia, it is thought that you had the origins of the Indo-European speakers. The earliest records of any Indo European language occur in Turkey and Mesopotamia and date to the second millennium BC. Now this is fairly late, this is post-Harappan in Indian terms. There are tablets from the site of Kultepe which have a few words which can be read as Indo-Aryan. They are not clearly Indo Aryan, but with a little bit of effort they can be read as Indo-Aryan.

The more direct evidence comes from Northern Syria where there is a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitannis, two groups of people, and in the course of this treaty they call to witness the gods of Hittites - Mitra, Varuna, Indra, Nasatya. They are actually written as Mitrashil, Uruvanshil, Indurah, Nashatyana. But they have been used as versions of what later became Mitra, Varuna, Indra and Nasatya. So that is one little bit of evidence of fleeting Indo-Aryan presence in Mesopotamia and Syria. There is also a tract on training of horses where a few passages have survived. Unfortunately in all these cases no full text has survived. There is just the occasional word and there are words used which can be again converted into Indo-Aryan which it is believed was spoken by those who trade horses. And similarly there are one or two other instances, very slight evidence, of the Indo-Aryans connected with horses dating to the second millenium, generally the middle of the second millenium BC, no earlier.

These Indo-Aryans, fragments of Indo-Aryans, survives for a few centuries, three or four centuries and then disappear. The languages of the area go back to being Akkadian and later on Semitic. Indo-Aryan does not survive or proto Indo-Aryan does not survive in this region. They did not then, whoever these proto Indo-Aryan speakers were, they did not replace the original language. There is also no evidence of hostility between the speakers of Indo-Aryan and the local people there.

Who were these proto Indo-Aryans? The problem is that they suddenly appear in north Mesopotamia, I mean the treaty I have been talking about, the tablets that have been found in north Syria, and the border of Syria and Turkey. There is absolutely no link between that area, Iran, or India. So the theory that was once put forward that the Mitanni-Hittite treaty was signed by Indo-Aryans who went all the way across there and conquered Syria and Mesopotamia, does not hold. There is absolutely not much evidence of connection between these two areas or for that matter a connection between Syria and the area of north eastern Iran. So it is thought that before proto Iranian split into old Iranian and Indo Aryan that the group of people probably from the Caspian Sea region went around following a trading route and established themselves in that area and were just swallowed up by the local culture. They were unable to establish themselves as a separate culture.

Let me turn to something which is much more comprehensible now -- the links between India and Iran, the links between the Rgveda and the Avesta. The Avesta consists of two sections, the gatha section which is the earlier section, and the Yashta and Vendidad which are the later sections. It is now dated to about 1400 BC and could therefore be a contemporary text with the Rgveda. The languages are cognates and there is much similarity in syntax and vocabulary. Those who I have referred to as the Airia and the Arya are the ones who speak these languages. They are grammatically very close and the sounds, the phonetic closeness is also very apparent. For example, I mentioned that the H and the S are interchangeable, so in the Avesta you have references to the Airia and the Daha which is the Dasa, and Dahyu which is the Dasyu. They are not mentioned as being black skinned. They are simply mentioned as being people in the neighbourhood. You have the hotar in the Avesta, you have the hotr and the hotar in fact in the Rgveda. You also have zautar because the z and h are interchangeable. So the Vedic hiranya becomes the Iranian zaranya and the atharavan of the Avesta is the atharvan of the Veda, the Mithra of the Avesta is the Mitra of the Veda. And so on. The Yima of the Avesta is the Yama of the Veda. It is very close. The Avesta does describe an Aryan homeland which it calls the arya nama veho, the way from which the aryas came or the way along which the aryas came. It describes the migration of people from the Oxus river to northeastern Iran, south western Afghanistan, the borderlands, to the regions that I mentioned earlier, Harahavati, Harayu, ultimately ending up in Hapta Hindu. So there is a clear geographical migration. If this is a later addition, i.e., two or three centuries later it reflects the kinds of ideas that existed amongst the Iranians about the migrations of the Iranian speaking people. There is also a similarity of concepts in the Avesta and the Rgveda, but they are often reversed. That is that you have the ahura in the Avesta, which is the great god, the great light, and you have the asura in Vedic Sanskrit which begins as the great god. Varuna is described as asura. Then gradually, the meaning changes and it becomes the negative, it becomes the demon. The daiva in the Avesta is the demon., Indra is a daiva in the Avesta and is a demon. And of course we all know that in the Rgveda he is not a demon. He is a great hero.

So the theory has been put forward that when the Iranian speaking people were living in Iran there was a split and one section moved off into Afghanistan and India and it is this section that created the language of Indo-Aryans. So the argument is that there was a split and a reversal. That is, everything that the Iranians believed in, the groups that began to move away believed in the opposite. They reversed as it were the concepts and possibly it is this reversal of concepts, it would seem, that arrived in India. The Avesta is also depicting a society of cattle keepers and the great honour given to the horse, the aspa. There is a closeness then of old Iranian and Indo Aryan, a closeness which is also expressed in the fact that the only two Indo European speaking cultures that have the cult of the soma plant, which is called the haoma in the Avestan, are the Iranians and the Indians. This cult does not exist amongst other Indo European speaking people. Therefore there is in fact a very close link between them.

Now I would like to turn to talking about something which has become very central to this discussion before I go on to the last part which is on historical reconstruction. What has become central to this discussion now is the whole question of the relationship between the Harappan culture and the Rgveda. I would like to argue that there is a substantial difference and that this difference needs to be kept in mind when we talk about the two cultures.

First of all the geographical extent of the two is very different. The Rgveda is very much smaller in area as compared to the Indus, both as compared to the Indus civilization in terms of the cities of the Indus, and, as well as the contacts which the Indus traders had. There are references to migrations. The theory that there are no references to migrations is incorrect. There are references to migrations and the migrations are generally in the direction of coming from Afghanistan to the Punjab and then crossing the Punjab to the watershed. Indra, we are told, helps the Yadu and the Turvasas to cross swollen rivers. Now the rivers feature a great deal in the Rgveda. Because it is a mountainous terrain, therefore any amount of migrating that people do would be along river valleys and the rivers are very important. There is to the best of my knowledge mention of only one mountain, the Mujavant mountain, where the soma plant grows.

The names of the rivers also migrate, and this is an important point. The Harahvati becomes Sarasvati, quite a distance away from Afghanistan to Punjab. The Harayu becomes Sarayu from Afghanistan to UP and the Gomati from Afghanistan again to UP. So there is the migration of names of rivers. Now this is not unusual. Names of places, rivers, and mountains frequently migrate. What is interesting is the direction in which they migrate and the consistency with which, at least in these three samples, they are moving from the north west from the borderlands towards, the watershed and the Ganges valley. We are told that the Bharata tribe, for example, migrates from the Ravi to the Beas, this is in the Punjab, and later on, the Srauta Sutra of Baudhayana refers to the Parasus and the Aratta who stayed behind and others who moved east into the middle Ganges valley and the places equivalent such as Kasi, Videhas, the Kuru Pancala and so on. In fact, when one looks for them, there are evidence of migration. The question really is what kind of migration and I would like to suggest that it was not in fact a massive migration, it was not an invasion because there is very little evidence for invasions, as I will try and suggest.

You did not have thousand upon thousands of people coming from the Khyber pass and settling down in the Punjab. You had multiple points, as I had tried to show from the Swat valley all the way down to the Quetta valley and you had small groups of people who come in and settle. I am rather attracted by the idea of what one scholar, Anthony has called a leap frogging migration, i.e., A moves to X , a section of A moves a little further down to Y, a section of B moves still further to Z. and these are small groups moving. They are interrelated up to a point, they are not related. They are moving some distances, they are moving in different directions. So the idea is not that there is a huge displacement of people and culture but a kind of slow trickling in of people bringing in new technology, new ideas.

The Rgveda then is a pre-urban Chalcolethic culture. It does not speak of any urban centres. It certainly does not speak of any settlements which have the characteristics of Harappan cities. For example there is no reference to citadel areas and residential areas, there is no reference to massive brick platforms on the top of which monuments are built. There is no reference to drainage systems or to streets or to granaries or warehouses or to a public bath or to a sophisticated exchange system or weights and measures on a graduated scale which was known as and described. To me these are the essential characteristics or Harappan urbanization and all these characteristics are absent in the Rgveda. You may have people saying 'Oh' but there were coins in the Rgveda and they mention the word 'niska'. Now niska can be a coin as was in the later period but during this period judging by the descriptions it was simply a little decorative piece in precious metal. These essential characteristics that I have mentioned none of these are referred to or described in the Rgveda. The people of the Rgveda are then agro-pastoralists with small scale village societies essentially indulging in cattle raids and predatory raids.

If you read the hymns the plea to the gods Indra, Agni, whosoever it is, is help us go and attack this 'dasa' village or this 'dasapura', help us get the cattle of the 'dasa'. It is always the cattle that they are wanting. There is no question of help us go into battle and take over a whole territory. It is limited to small areas of attack. They are mobile pastoralists and the cattle raids and the predatory raids are surrogate for warfare. There are in fact no great battles or campaigns. Even the famous battle of ten kings is over the change that is taking place that is being brought into function over the river waters of the Ravi. It is not as if there is huge encampment on a plain and the two armies have got together and are fighting each other. None of that. It is something that is very much localized and controlled.

Wealth, as far as Rgveda is concerned, is computed in horses and cows. You only have to read the 'danastuti' hymns to realize how strong this notion is of may I be gifted ten thousand horses and sixty thousand heads of cattle. Exaggerated figures, wildly exaggerated figures. Nobody had ten thousand horses to give to begin with. But this is what is wealth. The centrality of the cow in words like 'gavisti', the desire for cows which is also used for skirmish or a raid or 'gopati' as the head of a clan. The cow is also used as an item in barter and human life is calculated in terms of cows. Given this migration becomes extremely important because of the need to be continuously searching for two things - good pastures, access to water for the animals. We often forget we keep on talking about how water is important for irrigation for cultivators, but water is equally important for pastoralists, because animals need to have access to water and the shifting river courses in the Punjab obviously would create problems. You have a river like the Sutlej which is constantly changing its shape and size. So what are the pastoralists on the banks of the Sutlej to do. They have to be moving all the time. Once they are moving, they are looking for good pastures, and if somebody else is over there, there is a fight and they throw them out. And the prayers are frequently for rain for this is in fact a semi-arid region. Possibly even the migration eastwards was for better pastures.

The centrality of pastoralism is also seen in the many terms that are used for cattle, cows, and the relative infrequency of terms used for grain and for crops. Secondly, very importantly, the eating of beef, of the flesh of the cattle is restricted to special occasions and ritual occasions. Now this is a prime characteristic of pastoral societies. This comes through very clearly in Evans-Pritchard's work on the Nuer and the work of innumerable others who worked on pastoralist societies. Herders, animal herders, do not eat their animals indiscriminately. And they are particularly careful about conserving the good livestock of the herd because the future of the herd depends on it. And so the killing of the animals for food is usually connected with ritual occasions and with very special occasions. And this is exactly so in the Rgveda. Wherever there are references to the eating of beef, it is always in association either with the yajna or with the coming of the guest or some special occasion.

Furthermore pastoralists have what has been called symbiotic relationships with agriculturalists. And the symbiotic relationship is that frequently - and it's at two levels - one is, of course, at the level of exchange. The pastoralists bring in their products and the agriculturists have their products and there might be an exchange. For instance, dairy produce may be given to the agriculturalists, while grain is taken from the agriculturalists by the pastoralists. But there is a much more subtle and intensive interrelationship. For example when the crop is harvested and the field is covered with stubble - usually six inches high after the harvest has been cut. That's when the pastoralists come in with their herds and the animals feed on the stubble. And the animal droppings manure the field. To this day if you travel through Rajasthan at particular periods, particularly in spring, you will find herds of animals going along a circuit and the circuit is always that they will spend one week in this village, they will eat the stubble of the grain and manure the field and then the animal herd will move on to the next village and do the same. And this is an unwritten convention between the agriculturist and the pastoralist. And this is extremely important because one can't talk about the two being separate societies - they're integrated societies.

Then there is the centrality of the horse and the chariot. The horse which is totally absent on the seals of the Harappa culture - there are many other animals but the horse doesn't occur. The horse is central to the Vedic texts. The horse is central both as a functional animal - the horse draws the chariot, the chariot means speed, so if you're carrying out a raid, the more chariots you have the quicker you get there, you raid the particular place and you bring back the loot much faster than if you were going by bullock cart and bringing it back by bullock cart. That wouldn't work - the horse is necessary.

Secondly, the horse is ritually very important. And I don't have to remind you here that whereas for example in the Rgveda the sacrifice of the horse is a fairly simple, straightforward ritual of sacrificing a horse, what it becomes in the later vedic texts as the Ashwamedha is another story. It is ritually extremely important. And you don't get any reflection of this in the Harappan culture.

The wealth which is raided and brought back is then distributed at the meeting of the vidatha where the vis and the rajan - the two categories of the people that constitute the main society of the Aryas and the Rgveda - are gathered and therefore it is partly a functional occasion, partly a ritual occasion. There is also no description in the Rgveda of large scale trade. What is interesting is seas are mentioned, usually metaphorically, very seldom literally. There is a mention of a boat with a hundred oars. And I've always been mystified by this because I keep thinking to myself - where did they get this idea of a boat with a hundred oars? You don't need that kind of boat to sail down the rivers. Or you don't even need that kind of boat to take you across the sea. The Harappans didn't have boats with a hundred oars. This is again a fantasy because there is nothing in the texts to explain what the technology or navigation would be of a boat of that size, manned by that many people.

So let's turn then to the question of the coming of the Indo-Aryans. The very question that is largely accepted in academic circles except for a minority of people at the moment. And largely rejected by the media, that seems to support the notion that the Aryans were indigenous and didn't come from anywhere. By the Aryans please note that I mean people who spoke Indo-Aryan.

Who were they? They were the speakers of a language that belongs to the Indo-European family. They have common roots with Iran - Old Iranian, Indo-Aryan. There are similarities in the society of both. You have a warrior aristocracy, you have householders, you have ritual specialists. They break away from the Iranians with some ... and increasing it. Now in this situation there has to be, anybody who's raiding, is coming in and is a raider and is building his wealth on the basis of a raid, there has to be a dependence on the host society. They have to settle in the vicinity in order to carry out the raids. And they need to negotiate relationships with the host society. The negotiations may be - I'll come and bash you and take away all your cattle. But the negotiations may also be - let's come to some agreement, over pastoral lands, over water, over agriculture, over whatever it may be. Given the terrain of inhospitable mountains there would be a tendency to migrate in small groups, which means there would be a tremendous mixture of people, language and ways of life. You're not getting a huge bunch of people coming in the thousands. Small bunches of people means that there is much more intermixing. Language would register constant change moving from area to area and one has also to ask the question - did this encourage bilingualism? If they're speaking two different languages, if the local language is probably Proto-Dravidian or Austro-Asiatic and these people coming in and settling are speaking Indo-Aryan, did this result in bilingualism, that is some people who could manage to speak in both languages and make themselves understood.

What was their relationship to the sedentary agriculturalists once they arrived in the fertile areas? One was the immediate relationship which was to raid the local people and the Rgveda is the great text describing a constant wish to raid and get wealth. It would seem that the Aryas are not very successful to begin with because there is this continuous plea to the gods, please come and help us, please go and kill our enemies for us, please do this and please do that. It is as if there is a bewilderment about how they are to set about doing it. Then gradually that changes to a much more settled relationship. We are told in the Satapatha Brahmana that the asuras, and by this time the term asura is being used in the negative sense, were the cultivators and were extensively settled. So if there is a symbiotic relationship between the cattle herder and the cultivators where the cattle are coming and feeding off the stubble and manuring the fields and produce is being exchanged, there would be an exchange of other things -- language, possibly inter marriage, one does not know, rituals, the areas where usually exchange takes place. And all of this would also encourage bilingualism. The languages begin to change very rapidly and you would require then someone like Yaska to write an etymological text to explain the words because the meaning of words was becoming indistinct. And finally you have a Panini who says that I am going to write the rules of the language so that more changes are not introduced and the language does not go off the rails. No, he didn't actually say that. But that is the assumption behind an exercise of that kind. Did the existing sedentary agriculturalists appeal to an incoming pastoral chief for protection? This is a question I would like to pose. That you have these sedentary groups, they are people coming in who are attacking cattle keepers and sedentary groups. Did these sedentary agriculturalists who couldn't protect themselves and remember now that the Harappan system has collapsed, the cities have declined, the protection which the Harappan system would have given to these agriculturalists is not guaranteed. It may have existed, it may not. So what does the sedentary agriculturalist do? Doesn't he turn to the chief of this raiding tribe and say, please don't raid me, let's negotiate a settlement? So what I'm trying to suggest is that the pastoral chiefs come in at a level of dominance in terms of their relationship with the local population. But it is not a dominance based only on conquest. It is not a dominance based only on raids. It does include the possibility of some other kind of negotiation. This would then have galvanized the long term relationship between them.

Now why am I saying that there might have been this kind of negotiation. One of the interesting aspects of the linguistic study that has been done of Vedic Sanskrit words is that a number of words that relate to agricultural processes -- some very common words like langala which means plough, khala, ulukhala, so on, these are all words that come from non Indo-Aryan languages. They are either proto Dravidian or Austro Asiatic. So clearly there is a lot of mixing at that level for these words to come into Indo Aryan. Secondly, Indo-Aryan itself reflects features of proto-Dravidian. For example, what are called the retroflexive consonants -- ta, tha, da, dha, na. These are not Indo-European, these are proto Dravidian. They only occur in Vedic Sanskrit. They do not occur in any other Indo-European language. That is one reason why Europeans have such problems in pronouncing Indian words because their tongue does not go around the retroflexive consonants. So that is another indication. The third is that, in a number of what are called syntactic forms, grammatical forms, morphologies, the form of the language, phonetics, the use of this little word iti, which is very common in Sanskrit, Vedic Sanskrit and later on in Classical Sanskrit, this is a typical proto-Dravidian form, and again it is being argued that this is what comes into Indo-Aryan. What I am trying to suggest then is that if there is already the presence of non Indo-European in Indo-Aryan in the Rgveda, which increases in the later Vedic texts, there must have been some kind of negotiation other than just raiding, because, you don't get such a deep impression of one language on another if it is simply a case of I come in and attack you, and subordinate you and subdue you. I mean one can compare the amount of English that has entered modern Indian languages. It is minimal, minimal, compared to non Indo-Aryan in Vedic Sanskrit. So it does raise the question, I mean whether my answer is right or wrong. I do not know. I would like to put it forward as an answer. But it does raise a question that has to be answered. How do these linguistic forms come into Indo-Aryan. And the languages, that are current, we know proto Dravidian, Austro Asiatic, in Baluchistan there was Brahui, in central India there is Kuruk, Amaltuk, and further east there are various languages connected with the Austro Asiatic group. Gradually the languages come to be used not only in ordinary dialogue but also in ritual. This may take centuries and remember that the hymns of the Rgveda which are thought to have been compiled and edited around 800 BC may have begun to be composed 500 years earlier. So we are not talking about an overnight change. We are talking about a language change, a cultural change, a social change that is taking place over something like 500 years which is a very long time.

There has been a lot said about for example words for flora and fauna, animals particularly. Why is it that the elephant is called not by any other generic name but is called mrga hastin, the animal with a hand. It is because these people were unfamiliar with elephants, and the elephant of course is a very familiar animal from the Harappan seals. More interesting, the Harappans adapt some of the animals from the west Asian cultures, there is a very lovely seal, I don't know some of you might remember it, it's reproduced in many books. There is a man standing and there is a tiger on each side and he's grappling with this tiger. There is an identical seal of that kind which comes from Mesopotamia, except that the two animals are lions, they are not tigers. Now in the Harappan evidence, there is no depiction of the lion at all. The feline animal is always the tiger. In the Rgveda there is no reference to the tiger, there is only the reference to the simha as lion. And it is always, not always, but frequently, the roar of the simha. Somebody speaks and sounds like the roar of the lion. So there is no doubting the fact that it is the lion and it is an interesting question why are they unfamiliar with the tiger, if the tiger is in fact such a basic animal, particularly to the lower Indus. If they were indigenous, they would know it.

Let me turn now to the tricky question of the definition of the Arya and the Dasa. Was there in fact a racial distinction? Remember I told you that the argument was that the Arya race came and conquered the local race of the dasa. What is very interesting is that the physical differences that are mentioned all occur in the last books of the Rgveda, not in the first books. If there was a strong physical difference, marked physical difference, you would expect that from the very first compositions the composers would say that these dasa who are black skinned, thick lipped, bull jawed etc. all the descriptions, but no, the descriptions come in the tail end in the second half of the first book and the tenth book of the Rgveda. What you have then if one looks for the definition of the arya varna and the dasa varna from the Rgveda, these are groups of people that have distinctive languages, because the dasas are spoken of as being mrdhravac, speaking a hostile language or not speaking the language correctly. They are also described frequently as avrata -- they do not perform the rites, the religious rites, which the aryas perform. They are also akarman, they do not observe the customs that the aryas observe. The difference, the importance that was given to the difference of the skin colour was presumed because of the word varna. Varna means colour, it also means cover. But the point is that if you look at all the references to varna, the majority of them are not in connection with skin colour. In fact I can't think of a single varna reference that actually refers to skin colour, except one. For example in the ninth book which deals with the ritual of the soma karman where they talk about the hide turning black, the hide on which the ritual is carried out. Most of the references are used in a symbolic sense. You have the varna of the dawn, of the day, of the night, and of the clouds, and there is frequent reference to the dasas as the dark ones. They could be evil. They don't have to be necessarily always black skinned. In the same way as the Avesta refers to the daivas and says that they are the dark ones, the evil ones. These are the few, very few references to physical features. One which is frequently discussed tvacam krsnam, which occurs only once in a very late section of the Rgveda. And the question of course is if the skin colour was black why isn't it mentioned more frequently and in the earlier hymns. Why do they wait till this one reference right in the late period.

Then there is a reference to something that you are quite familiar with, anasa. And the argument in the old days used to be that it meant, a-nasa, that is without a nose, in other words, flat nosed. And of course, people like Herbert Risley and various British ethnographers went around measuring noses, the noses of Indians and arguing that those that had broad, flat noses were non Aryans, those that had sharp fine noses were Aryas. So the nose is very important and it has been rather amusingly brought out in the recent book of Thomas Trautmann, The Aryans in British India. Or you have the frequent reference to anasa, the noseless. This has also been interpreted by Sayana. Sayana was a very interesting person. He lived in the 14th century and did a commentary on the Vedic texts. I think it is very important for us as historians not just to stay with Max Muller's commentary on the Vedas but go back and look at what Sayana says. Sayana for example, when it comes to tvacam krsna says there was an asura called Krsna whose skin was torn apart by Indra. He does not read it a black skinned. There isn't a single racial connotation in any of Sayana's commentaries. So anasa, he says was an-asa which means without a mouth, that is people who didn't know the language and were therefor speechless. Alternatively there is no reference to the Aryas being fair skinned or white skinned, the other contrast which one would expect. Also what is interesting and this is simply my reading, I may be incorrect on this, but I would nevertheless like to float it. There are one or two places where the word arya is used in a verbal sense -- aryanti, they honour, and the root dasa is used again in a verbal sense -- dasati, to treat with hostility. If these words, arya and dasa can be used not only as nouns and adjectives, but also as verbs, it is most unlikely that they can be interpreted as races. They have to be interpreted in a much broader sense. Furthermore, the aryas and the dasas are not invariably enemies. There are referenes to aryas fighting aryas. There are references to dasa chiefs who are patrons of the aryan rtvij. Dasa chiefs like Balbutha, Turuska, Bhrgu, Sambhara, these are all people who have rituals performed for them and give daksina presumably to the rtvij who then proceeds to praise them. But the aryas attack the dasas for their wealth. The refrain is always, dasyu dhanina, they are constantly praying to their gods for wealth, rayi, vasu, dhana, ratna, hiranya. This is the obsession. Wealth consisting of cattle, and horses, garments, clothes and gold is thrown in for good measure. One does not know how much gold was floating around. Probably not much. And the attack is on the settlement of the dasas, the pura of the dasa in order to get their cattle wealth. There is in fact interestingly, immense greed on the part of the aryas, who seem, in comparison to the dasa, materially quite poor, because they keep talking about how wealthy the dasas are. So this old theory of the superior aryas who came in, invaded and conquered these poor indigenous people, poverty stricken and submissive, this certainly does not come from this picture.

What is the difference then again between the aryas and the dasas? If the distinction is not racial, it is linguistic, social and cultural. There is a difference, but it consists of other features. And if this is the distinction, then the terms, Arya and Dasa would have gradually acquired these distinctions and become intertwined with social hierarchies. Linguistically, Indo-Aryan in the midst of other languages like proto-Dravidian and Austro-Asiatic begins to suffer from the increasing influence of other languages. It's still Indo-Aryan. It clearly is a part of the Indo European family but there are more and more incorporations of non Indo-Aryan. And when these kinds of linguistic incorporations take place, as I said earlier, the historian has to ask the question, what is the social process that is going on and is causing this incorporation. And the alternative question, how does Indo-Aryan eventually become the dominant language? Those who speak it call themselves aryas, and who do the aryas consist of. --the rajan, the vis, the rtvij, and the kavi -- the bards and the priests.

Rajans are the chiefs owning horses and chariots or at least having access to horses and chariots. They are the raiders and the protectors. They raid some and protect some, and their victory lies essentially in cattle raids and skirmishes and they negotiate the protection of local societies against other people's raids either by the aryas or dasas. There is a certain moral righteousness that comes through in the hymn in the killing of the dasa because he is avrata -- he is without the correct rites. But that changes of course when the dasa chiefs start performing vedic rituals as rituals approved by the arya and start giving gifts to the priests. The question then is does he become aryanised as a result? If the dasa chief starts speaking a certain amount of even faulty Indo-Aryan and starts practising even some of the rituals of the Aryas, does he come to be accepted as the Arya? The Purus are a case in point. Very interesting. The Puru is a major clan mentioned in the Rgveda and mentioned through four or five generations. They are described in the Rgveda as being mrdhravaca, not speaking correctly and in the Satapatha Brahmana they are described as coming from asura-raksasa ancestry. Now no good arya would have an ancestry that was asura raksasa, so the question is who were the Purus? Were they aryas? Or were they these local dasa chiefs who negotiated, made good, became wealthy, were accepted, in effect became part of the aryan society? Even the laws, the customary laws, which may not have been very strict at this time could be broken. The first example of this of course is in again in the Brahmana literature, the dasiputra brahmanas, who clearly are the result of intermarriage, and if they themselves concede that their status is mixed, the rituals that they are performing may also have been mixed. One has to ask that question. By the mid first millennium BC the dasa emerges not as the enemy who is not performing the rituals and speaking the right language but as the impoverished person. He is servile to the aryas and as a sudra he is not permitted the arya ritual. Now this is a very interesting difference between the original dasa who is stigmatised because he is not performing the ritual and the priests are ready to perform the ritual and the sudra who is by right to perform the ritual . Obviously a big change has taken place.

What then was the nature of the Rgvedic society? First of all the Rgveda is not referring to a single society, it is referring to a number of differentiated societies, differentiated by language, rites, and custom. The perspective that we have is only one of them, those that call themselves aryas. Was it already the dominant group or is it that it is their literature that has survived, their compositions have survived? We don't know what the others thought about the aryas. We have no information on what the dasas thought or what the panis thought or what the raksasas thought about these people who called themselves aryas.

Interestingly, it has been argued by some people that the society of the Rgveda was an egalitarian society. But this is something that I disagree with. I think that internally the society of the Rgveda had a hierarchy. The hierarchy at this stage was not deeply demarcated but was visible and evident and functional. There was the rajan, the chief of the clan with access to horse and chariots, who led the raids and was the patron of the distribution of booty as is evident from the danastuti hymns which are addressed to the rajan, to the gods, and to the rajan for obtaining a share in the booty. Therefore the rajan is powerful with access to resources and the status of the rajan is reflected in the occasional attempts at small, scattered genealogies. When you have a body of literature in which it is said of a particular family that there was a great great grand father and great grandfather grand father, there was a son, and a grand son, each one did this, did that, you know that that family is slightly more important than another family that is simply described by one name and one generation. So there is this social differentiation also.

The vis was the clan subordinate to the rajan who herded and cultivated. What was the relationship between the two? The later texts, the later Vedic texts, particularly the Satapatha Brahmana speak of them as having been very close. They are eating from the same bowl at one point and the analogies are that the rajan is to a vis like Indra is to Maruts or Soma is to milk. And a whole series of other parallels of that kind. Which is why I have argued in the past, I have asked the question that were they both part of a lineage based society where recruitment into the clan was by birth? The senior lineage had authority over the junior lineage and status was dependent on rank within the lineage, and the relations of production literally what was being produced and the way in which it was produced was defined by kinship relationships depending on where you were born, which group you were born in, and this very closely embedded close knit society gradually broke down when the vis had to start performing labour for the rajan and make presents of tribute. This begins in a small way in the Rgveda and becomes intensified in the later period.

The third category of people are the rtvij and the kavi, the sacrificial priest and the bard. And there are a number of categories that are mentioned in one hymn. There is mention of several categories of priests. They do not belong to the lineage, but they do perform rites for the rajan. And there are some rituals that can be performed by the rajans themselves. Not all rituals require priests. They compose eulogies on the rajans, which is another indication of the special status that the rajan has. And they compete for patronage from the rajan, patronage in material terms of wealth. There is therefore a great need for social and economic adjustments, a sorting out as it were of the internal hierarchy. So that not only are people slotted into place but there is also space for other people to come in. The ritual specialists are socially more flexible groups and rituals become a form of incorporation. The later Vedic texts, again the Brahmana texts in particular, show this process. There is a contestation between the brahmanas and the ksatriyas. There is the subordination of the vis to the ksatriya. The sudra emerges as non kin labour, labour outside kinship groups and a separate category has to be created for providing labour, the category of sudra, which shows a different kind of society. This is not the same as Rgvedic society, it has undergone change, and among other things there is reference, increasingly, slowly but increasingly in post Vedic texts to the varna theory. This is not based on racial segregation as was earlier believed because if one is arguing that in fact racial segregation is not the central feature, then the varnas are not items of racial segregation. It is based, it seems to me, on three features, one is access to resources. Who has access to resources, who has access to wealth, whether it is cattle wealth, agricultural wealth, or horses and chariots, or whatever it may be. The rajan who conducts raids and gathers tributes? And indirectly, the brahmana who collects wealth through the dana and daksina that is bestowed on them? So that is one category, one basic requirement of varnas.

The second is authority and power -- temporal authority for the ksatriya, earthly authority, association with the deity for the brahmana. The brahmana therefore emerges as a person who claims that he can call upon the gods to bestow special divine elements on to the ksatriya through a ritual and this bifurcation of authority into temporal and divine or supernatural is an important matter.

And the third, which is very important is the deliberate distancing of those who provide labour. This distancing, pushing aside, pushing away and saying you are different, this is not the case in the Rgveda but becomes the case in post Vedic society. This is justified on the basis of ritual purity and exclusion. The sudra is ritually impure, he is excluded from participating in the rites of the upper varnas and this is made into a permanent disability since status is by birth. Degrees of pollution and purity are inherited. It is necessary in order to maintain the disability of pollution and impurity in order to have a permanent supply of labour. Now I'm not saying they sat and worked it out in these terms, but there are certain assumptions and presuppositions which are at work here which I am really trying to draw out and exaggerate a little bit so that you pay some attention to it. There are therefore multiple reasons why the Purusasukta hymn is included in the Rgveda. Because the Rgveda is not a static document. It is encapsulating this historical change that is taking place. The Purusasukta hymn describes the sacrifice of primeval man -- his mouth was the brahmana, his arms were the ksatriya, his thighs were the vaisya, and out of the feet came the sudra. There is already a distinction there.

But let me just conclude with two brief sentences. What I tried to suggest to you first of all is that the Aryan question is a very complex question and I hope you are all absolutely staggered by the complexity and reeling under all the complexities that I have pointed out to you. So please do not take one version as "the" version. Always question every version, including mine. The second point that I want to emphasize is that I think as historians it is time now that we moved away from this century and a half old obsession with who were the Aryans, what was their origin, how do we identify them, who has descended from them. These are irrelevant questions. These are questions that are only important to political parties and political ideologies. The important question is what is this data that you have for reconstructing the early phases of Indian society and how does one proceed to do this reconstruction. I have tried to suggest one way in which this reconstruction can be carried out. I may be incorrect but I would like you to look at this period now in terms of a search for a historical reconstruction of the times.

How Do you Physically Search A Certain Text In A Book?

2012-01-09T07:52:00.000+00:00

SURELY, THERE ARE PEOPLE, BOOKWORMS IN THIS CASE, who may do this better than others. And while I won't qualify myself as one, it may be interesting to share an experience of being a 'human google' to find something in a physical book.

While I started searching for that "giggle twin" example cited in Haidt's book for the other post, my reading in the book had already advanced to about 100th page. Looking at the chapter index for clues didn't help. The references section was the next place to look up in hopes for a title that might just give away the citation, but references were done rather lazily. So it came to visually locating a paragraph that I had read amongst 100 odd pages. My previous experience with this kind of needle-in-haystack qualified it to be a "patience test", where higher the patience, and slower the pace, usually meant better success rate during the first scan. (Though I like to think that I'm getting better at this, I tend to give up somewhere during or after the 3rd scan unless it is really critical to justify the effort and, more importantly perhaps, to fight against frustration.)

As the scanning began from the Introduction pages onwards, the mind was looking for clues such as the recollection of the physical location of the paragraph on the page layout. This usually serves an important visual markup that accompanies the memory of information in the brain. (e.g. on the left side page, bottom half, second to last para. Or, just after the section title, in the second line.) However, there were no such visual clues -or mental bookmarks- coming to recollection for this search. Though apparently, apart from the eyes, there were other processing faculties also that were 'looking' for any visual patterns that may correlate with the information of interest; mainly the three keywords- twins, ~40 years, same blue dress (incidentally, 'giggle' wasn't a part of it).

About four minutes into the physical scanning, somewhere on page 31, when 'Hemlet' was first encountered, the pace of scanning had to slow down. While there is no apparent connection between Shakespeare's character and the giggle twins of America, from the search patterns perspective there seemed to have some vague recollection of the two together in terms of 'flow of information' that the author had created. And there it was, on page 33, on the top half, the name of one of the twins, Daphne, that suddenly surfaced from the depths of recognition.

Happy for getting better at finding odd references buried into piles of text in rather obscure manners, but which I 'wanted' to remember. Not entirely sure if the faculty would be equally effective for the text I haven't read myself, and thus have the benefit of the visual patterns stored in the memory along with the information.

Happy New Year - 2012

2012-01-01T12:45:00.000+00:00

Happy • New • Year: 2012

And Welcome to the year 2012 that the poor Mayans became so infamous for.

Yours Professionally Socially Professional (Part 1)

2011-12-31T11:01:00.000+00:00

BOB DYLAN: No matter what gets in the way / or which way the wind does blow / I’ll just sit here and watch the river flow...

Image courtesy: circusarts.com.au

It was Aristotle who famously said, We are what we repeatedly do; Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. And in the context of modern mechanical life, it is perhaps one of the most misconstrued notion which was a humble meditation on perseverance by the great thinker. In a recent post earlier this month, Joshua at theMinimalist.com published an essay titled "100 Days with No Goal". Having gone two months in between jobs at that time, I thought I was in an interesting position to appreciate the idea. So, when it did little more than just scratching the surface --including, almost triggering a depression-- it was apparent that something was out of place, especially when my quitting of job was voluntary.

"Watching the river flow": Even while taking this idea literally outdoors with Shimano fishing rods to the nearby lack for angelical fishing-- I found the time flowing faster than any other perceivable paradigm. The slowdown of everything around you including your Self and metabolism could have a maddening effect, especially when time seems to start accelerating while you are at it (The notion of time is relative. Since it is a contant, it has contrasting effects on your individual perception of "slow" or "fast". More on this on a separate post). Unless your contempt towards your regular (corporate or otherwise) life set around social timetables is extreme, it is rather easy, or even a default response, to translate "no goals" into hopelessness, and then anxiety. It is indeed intriguing, and doesn't seem without intention, that the question "What's the purpose of life?" has deep connotations with hopelessness. (It would be really interesting if you could point out some happy-go-lucky guy, neck deep in spoils of life and wants for more, and yet pondering over the purpose puzzle. There is a 50:50 chance that the guy may end his life, ripe and rife with pleasures, a hedonist's dream personified, and never bothered about that purpose thing; which, in its own rights, may put a question mark on the supremacy of the question.)

For those flying-trapeze artists of the circus, to let go of one trapeze on a simple "hope" that the opposite trapeze would miraculously and timely intervene before gravity vetos the whole affair, can also swiftly become a free fall of panic when the acrobats suddenly realize that someone forgot to tie the safety net below. The spectators (society), on their part, enjoy to pay the circus not only for the acrobatic skills, but also for the (secret) "hope" to eyewitness that fetal crash some day. (A 100% negation of "hope" for that fetal fall could quickly put the circus out of business. But thankfully, while there is "hope", there are hardly any firm assurances and safety in real life, and so the society and the circus continue to attract and imitate each other.)

Repurpose life: On the other hand, the scene may differ if the transition is aided by respective rituals and care from forerunners (Buddhist sects aptly call them tathagata, meaning thus gone before), for initiation into a monastic order. Here, while it may sound like quitting and renouncing, it is more like trading one set of goals for another. Repurpose life, if you like, with the intention of having less of bad and more of good side-effects of your survival tactics onto the society at large. The alternative lifestyle and life-path is not without its risks, and the examples of experiments gone bad are aplenty. However, if you do survive the ordeal, and retain your faculties that can usefully reflect on the state of your previous "social" being, the society stands to gain from your "out of the box" thinking, mainly as a critic. As one of the contributing parameters, this contrasting and opposite point of reference, largely by the way of metaphors, may help the society in judging how good or bad its affairs are.

So, the point to ponder here is: If the promise of Moksha and then Nirvana is true, then the fully monastic order of a society is destined to disintegrate given sufficient time and a healthy success-rate of "release" from samsara. In other words, an end of the world for man. On a slightly lighter note, it would also be somewhat boring in such an order since there would hardly be enough people to preach to; not to mention that (unknighted) Sir Darwin would be utterly mad at such an evolutionary impasse, with impending exit.

Catch the concluding Part 2 of the post here.

You've The Answer? Then I May Have A Question

2011-12-30T13:17:00.002+00:00

YOU, THE HUMAN BEING, ARE THE ANSWER to the existential question, for that's what the Theory of Evolution suggests. For now at least.

Questions are also quests. And at times, they are life. You get the answer, and that's the end of it all. In the field of space and time, the dance of duality is a constant struggle to reach an equilibrium by bringing the two of the pair of opposites together. Some of the most elementary ideas and notions reflect this simplicity. Thirst and water; Food and the fire in the belly; Air and lungs; Male and Female: procreation; Day with night. Sin vs atonement. Dualistic categories of though; The causality continues.

Most of the time, we have questions. They remain so until they unite with answers. Their resolution converges into ideas, and tools of causality, for the next question. Some of these gets fulfillment, and so they just die and disintegrate. The energy is released, back into the void. But sometimes they become answers to some other quests, or someone else's questions. In the process, they also get transformed more often than not. For the flux of time is a state of constant change.

However, at some occasions, rarely but surely, we have answers. And the need there is for the appropriate question. Perhaps the best example of which is our being.

It is one thing to ask, "What is the meaning of my life?" And it is quite another to appreciate that we are the answer to something. One may end up short on resolving the question of the meaning of one's life if one is not particularly equipped for the intellectual quest of self inquiry (jyan yog). But anyone can become an answer, by simply being.

You are the best answer onto yourself; with no prerequisite of any intellectual capacity.
Since you are whole; a complete creation.
And when you are the answer, the pressure of seeking the answers to questions is removed. That is peace.
And when you are the answer, and the assurance of the question being out there; That is joy.
And when you are the answer, and the particular question finds you; That is bliss.

And when you are the answer to multiple questions, that is the play of 'reincarnation' (recurring patterns and phenomenon) in the field of time and causality. You as the answer remain the same, constant; the questions may change.

Or, you may recur as a question.

As a replica perhaps of you, with some subtle external differentiation; such as male instead of female form. But the quest continues. The tandava. The tick of time. Cyclic.

What Truth? [Ishavasya Upanishad]

2011-12-23T09:51:00.001+00:00

Truth? There is no 'Truth' as we know it.

'Pure abstraction' and such mesmarising ideas, what are they, if not cleaver wordplay masking the ignorance of misunderstood categories of thought?

The mystery within ias the mystery without.

Reason is but just one faculty in the arsenal of possibilities. Mind, but just an organ in the experience of being.

The best knowledge is at best the briefest signpost. The Upanishad which is one of the shortest, but has the highest number of commentary to it, says it all, thus:

[Go here for the Sanskrit text of īśāvāsya upaniṣad.]

A Dialogue on "Ciencia Contra Religion La Verdadera Diferencia" (Science vs religion: the real difference)

2011-02-06T19:05:00.000+00:00

To quote Albert Einstein, "There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle."

RECENTLY I CAME ACROSS this rather interesting conversation by the way of (old) Google Reader comments on this nice article that someone had shared there. The comments are between two individuals (and many spectators who were following this shared feed). They are named here as "RGD" who had originally posted the article, and "JM" who engages "RGD" in this theological dialogue (neither of them have English as their first language, and some of the submissions may have used a machine translation).

Illustration by Matt DeTurck

The original article is in Spanish, it can be sourced from here (try here for English via Google translate). It may be helpful to look at the article for the right context of the dialogue that will follow here. Do look at the comments there as well. As a side-note, apparently, this forum appears much more civil and respectful of participant's views than we normally find on such topics involving religion and science - especially in the English world.

JM: I am almost sure that already there is some 'church' out there picturing Einstein on its stained glass window.. Boy, and that would bring about sainthood coming of some age.

RGD: Hola JM, for sure there is such an 'organization'. Although it would be nearer to religion than science.
In my opinion, science has nothing to do with religion. Humans tend to be religious by nature. People need to answer somehow the question: "what is the meaning of life?". Needless to say this is far more difficult to do by using theories and mathematical formulas than by using something else, call it either religion or philosophy. But I also disagree with most of mainstream religions and their static points of view.

JM: Long time :) How have you been, RGD?

Oh well, someone that I know would passionately argue that Science has everything to do with Religion. It is but the tighter end of the same funnel.. :) And on my part, I would perhaps argue that everything in science that is not objective, is philosophy I guess.

Btw, my reference to Einstein for 'Sainthood' was more towards the evolving nature of the definition, qualification and function of 'saints' (read: leaders, achievers and roll-models) per say in the times we live in...

RGD: Yes, I was away for a while, craving for a good conversation :) What about you??

I guess science resembles philosophy in the same way that religion's.
They all look for the Truth somewhere somehow, but the methods they employ is quite different from each other.
Actually they were the same thing in ancient times, but they split up into different categories for some reason.
As far as I know, (not really well researched to say the truth) Science's proofs are experiments or data from physical world. Philosophy's proofs are other reasonings. Whereas religion doesn't really need proofs.

what do you think?

JM: Nice to see you around again :)

Well, I was very young - early teens perhaps - when I read or heard it being explained about the three most important and basic 'intellectual' questions: Who, What, Why.

And though its an entirely different context that we have here, there seems to be some relevance here of that model:

Religion claims to answer for Who.
Science contests conflicting answers (with 'proof') for What.
Philosophy tries to deal with Why.

What one calls Truth, the other calls Mystery and the third considers it simply a figment of one's own imagination.
Where as in actuality when one succeeds, all three succeed; And any one's failure defeats all three.

RGD: I love this model, it matches seamlessly in most of the cases.

'What' is usually something tangible or at least measurable; 'Why' is something you can ask for iteratively ad infinitum, (it's what children ask over and over again); 'Who' is the way we as humans try to see things around with an anthropomorphic point of view.

However there are some exceptions to the rule, e.g. mathematics could be something between science and philosophy? Buddhism is a mix of philosophy and religion? thinking of something kinda hybrid religion-science... scientology?

JM: That's a great analogy that you have put together there, mate :)

The consideration with this model is that all three refer or relate to the same 'source' or thought or idea or entity, (or non-entity or anti-entity or beyond-entity or whatever one fancies).

To address to and 'invoke' that 'source' effectively, and also make the address (method of 'worship') popular, a sect or a set of people may come up with any combination of Who, What, Why, that fits the bill in the context of their times, circumstances, surroundings, etc. (Organised religions. And from the socio-political perspective, it has been a greatly helpful thing.)

In doing so, they will also create rules.

(and while I might be guilty of over-simplification through this thread) In my humble view, Buddha simply said: there are no rules; Contemplate and create your own personal address.

RGD: Resuming the conversation :) I cannot find the flaw in the reasoning but everyday situations don't seem to verify the idea.

'Who', 'What', 'Why' build an interface between people and reality, but neither of them are reality itself.
You can choose the glass you want to look through (religion, science, philosophy), and it gives you an idea about the world around you.
So it doesn't matter if you're a believer or you explain things with a scientific point of view: that's not the Truth in neither case.

But which one is closer to reality? Is it useful to see things that way?

Science does believe there are rules, and using them makes our lives easier sometime, is it an illusion?

JM: Let's take a step back, and ask, what is that one 'purpose' that you see all of the three are/should be fulfilling? Individually as well as collectively.

RGD: elaborate on the question a little bit more, please...

JM: Since you said "I cannot find the flaw in the reasoning but..." we are primarily looking at this as empirical inquiry. At least for the moment.

So, taking a step back, let's see what are the reasons or purposes that Who, What and Why parts of the model fulfils. What is the one most important purpose or reason among them?

RGD: ok, I guess they all have their purposes, letting us know how different aspects of life are. Let's say it's all about knowledge.

'What', about the physical world.
'Why', about the underlying motive in the action.
'Who', about the actuator that carries the action out.
These three big questions depict differently what we call reality or whatever.
And all three, are useful sometime somehow (kind of true), but does it mean we can trust them equally?

We can test the truthfulness of a scientific statement by foreseeing future events through them.
We can test the truthfulness of a philosophical statement iteratively by breaking it down into simpler statements (that we know are true in the same way).
I don't really know how to test a religious statement, but it doesn't mean they are false, but simply means they are unverifiable.

Something could pass one test but fail another. So we can almost say that there are at least three entities or realms or whatever out there and they have their own Truth.

SOS: This is a dead end. I'm blocked now.

JM: I'm afraid, the comments that follows is rather longer than I am generally used to... :)

I just got reminded of reading somewhere in the introduction section of Margaret J Wheately's very interesting book Leadership and New Science.

Wheately argues that the Newtonian principles that drove forward industrial revolution of the planet also deeply influenced the management practices and philosophical thinking over the past 500 years or so. The fundamental building block of this thinking is to break things down into smaller and smaller chunks for 'ease' of management, understanding, analysis, etc.

This works wonderfully upto a certain extent but beyond that point, it actually start crippling the thinker for want of or lack of the 'big picture'. She argues that all major ecosystems of the world, with billions and billions of life forms, spread across thousands of miles as a colony, primarily work as a single system. And the Newtonian unitization and simplification could hardly help you understand how everything fits in together and works as a kind of seamless, interdependent, organism made up of individuals.

Interesting concepts, explained using empirical methods, making some strong cases in favour of unlearning some of the information consumption patterns that we pick up from childhood. (Not a very easy book to read through though, because true to its message against overuse of unitization, the book does not have paragraphs and each chapter is written as a single block to text.)

Personally, I consider Why as a bridging part between What and Who of the model. And when we say that "We can test the truthfulness of a philosophical statement iteratively by breaking it down into simpler statements (that we know are true in the same way)." We might be missing something here, as Wheately suggests...

Science (assuming Mathematics as a part of it) has turned out to be terrible at predicting future. Its primary forte is analysing past data and reach a certain understanding. Nicholas Taleb (who claims that Mathematics is his meditation) has some interesting and insightful, as well as rebellious, points on this.

And, imho, neither of these two would be much useful methods in 'validating' the Who part...

RGD: Firstly, I thank Wheately for helping us out in this chaos :)

I'd dare to say that an important part of Science is understanding things by partitioning them into simpler pieces that you take for granted that are true. I would even add that Western reasoning laws work in that way eg (A & B) is true if (A is true) & (B is true).

On the other hand, the further you go the fuzzier it gets (like in my argument two comments ago).

Maybe is the way we think what misguides us and lead us to an endless process.
The later you halt, the neater the outcome.
It reminds me vaguely Heisenberg uncertainty principle and Gödel's incompleteness theorems.

The world we live in vanishes when we try to comprehend it.
We can both, being satisfied with an ever more accurate approximation or as Buddha said: "Contemplate and create your own personal address".

poor we :)

JM: Well my friend, Science existed long before the scientific method of "partitioning things" came to be :) Anyway, Buddha would also suggest that the ethically judgemental mind - the 'reasoning' and 'logic' - would be one of our major stumbling blocks to overcome..

I like the depth, length and breadth of Jung's saying that "Religion is a defence against a religious experience." It seems that right there it is, a few worthy books and some lifetimes worth of wisdom in a line, to contemplate about.

But then, my question about that one purpose that each of the faculties fulfil remained unanswered.. :) Some other time perhaps..

MIL: http://goo.gl/R9Rk - Prof Sandle's lecture on moral philosophy. Could be an interesting reading.

RGD: Thanks for a remarkable text, Mil.

An idea that caught my attention:
"philosophy teaches us, and unsettles us, by confronting us with what we already know, [...] not by supplying new information, but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing."

Also think that both risks personal and political, are worth taking to set you free.

MIL: That's my favourite line as well. And also: "Self-knowledge is like lost innocence; however unsettling you find it, it can never be 'unthought' or 'unknown'... philosophy is a distancing, even debilitating, activity."

JM: yeah, agreed, philosophy is a lot of waste of 'time' :-)
And I guess so much as it is true for the questions of morality, the recurring and persisting nature of the inquiry is equally true for the questions of theology as well.. Perhaps because it is about 'You'.

* * *

Hope you enjoyed!

Life in "P"

2010-03-16T17:49:00.000+00:00

The Cupid Knows

2010-02-14T12:35:00.005+00:00

“The Cupid Knows” is the theory for falling in love that I like.

It says that falling in Love is a chemical process, driven by the hormones in the human brain.

Hormones are perhaps the most powerful catalytic system that there is in the Biological world. Their grip on “senses” is so powerful that it could make one crazy to the point of being suicidal.

In his brilliant TED talk in 2002 called Dangerous Memes, neuroscientist and philosopher Daniel Dennett illustrates this point by giving a real-life example where a parasite infects an Ant’s brain with its hormones and to highjack it. The parasite needs a cattle’s stomach as a host to grow and multiply. And thus, this virus, this parasite using its hormones, drives the Ant suicidal where the ant starts climbing the blade of grass and reaches its top and stay there such that it can be easily eaten by the cattle. Dan goes on to use his atheist whip against religious fanatics by using this analogy, but I suppose the point is pretty much applicable to ‘love hormones’ for my discussion here. More on Dan at TED is here.

Hormones can compel one to ‘fall in love’ with all its vigor and ferocity, making one believe that that is the only purpose of life (at that point in time, at least). The urge, the need, the reason that this force makes one behave in this manner could be various: need to multiply, to find acceptance, looking for validation, seeking fulfillment, as well as jealously, revenge, recognition, or any combination therein.

And thus, we fall for it.

For all the good things in life that there is, it is a wonderful experience – Falling in love: invigorating, engulfing, enriching, vitalizing, life giving, fulfilling, enlightening.

And sometimes, stupid as well.

Some of these ‘falls’ are long lasting, even permanent. But many are just a blip in those individuals’ lives.

There are times where we never thought that we would fall for a given person, and then there are times when in spite of our feeling fully convinced about you ‘love’ with the person, it falls out.

Sometimes, it is an instant ‘fall’ and at other times, it is a slow fall that takes its own time to come about.

And then again, what would be the ‘longevity’ of it is almost always unpredictable.

However, there was something, somebody, who knew everything all along.

The Cupid.

The cupid knows what the real deal is in all falls.

The cupid is inside of you, somewhat unaffected by the clouding by the hormones, seeing everything and knowing everything.

The cupid knows the instant when you come across someone whether you love the person or not.

And that is mostly definitive.

This is how we ‘finally’ fall for the friend after ten years of being just friends. And this is how we fall our even after ten years of passionate and mutual nuptial plumage. The cupid knew all along that he was the one, and she was not the one, in both of these cases. For the fall was hormonal.

The cupid that is Consciousness.

Experiencing Life and Expressing it

2009-07-18T16:46:00.006+01:00

HUMAN BIRTH IS PRECIOUS, they say.

Life is remarkable and superior (if at all) to other creatures only because humans get to experience life and can express it.

And that to me sums up all *purposes* associated with a life.

However, both these aspects of life - experience and expression - are powerful volatile forces.

Journey towards Nirvana then is to minimise on this volatility by expanding experiences and restricting expressions. And also restricting experience and expanding expressions.

Certain environments call for a balance between experience and expressions with no particular emphasis on either expansion or restriction. Whereas some conditions call for a suppression of both these aspects of life.

All major spiritual traditions, ancient or modern, subscribe to one or more of these tenets.

Related post (Einstein and miracle quote): A Dialogue on "Ciencia Contra Religion La Verdadera Diferencia" (Science vs religion: the real difference).