Faith amidst the destruction of truth : A spiritual journey

'Right wing fundamentalism or pseudo-religiosity bears little resemblance to genuine spiritual practice.' In today's intolerant world, religion is used by many as a means to establish power. In such an atmosphere, it is imperative, says LATAMANI, that each of us experiences our own true spiritual awakening.

HOW does one articulate belief in the divine in a world where so much intolerance and bigotry seeks religious sanction? How can one take a stand in truth distinguishing oneself both from rabid fundamentalism and an anxious or arrogant secular rationality?

Faith is not the outcome of reasoned argumentation. One cannot convince anyone to have faith in the divine. Faith simply is, although it is not natural or beyond social construction. The forms taken by faith are socially and culturally marked. Still, much of the faithful experience exceeds rationalist conceptualisation. When I say faith simply is, I refer to its mysterious aspect: to the process by means of which even someone who, like myself, has been a sceptical secularist can find herself plucked out of the perceptual frames in which she has sought to comprehend the world. What arises in place of what one has hitherto held to be true is shaped by many factors, including one's social conditioning and politico-philosophical orientation. The expressions of faith, the consequences of belief thus straddle the social and the extra social, the knowable and that which may be described as beyond cognition, beyond language.

Mumbai, December 1992. Around me a right wing organisation Shiv Sena, borrowing the name of the Lord of Stillness, had wreaked death, despair and destruction. Over 2000 dead and the city never the same again. Even as I was, unbeknownst to myself, hurtling toward spiritual transformation, I was cursing God for what had transpired in the city that I had loved for its plurality and cosmopolitanism. Those whom I had assumed would know better were now championing the cause of Hindu majoritarianism and finding their erstwhile neighbours to be inalienably Other. Increasingly, secularism was being revealed as a thin gloss willed into existence by idealist law makers, philosophers and social activists. In the wake of the Ram Janmabhoomi controversy, the ideal of a secular public space, though never fully thought through nor ever realised seemed impossible to posit even as a goal. Secularism became a dream destroyed by the political right - RSS, VHP, BJP.

The popularity of a politically motivated religiosity called into question many cherished beliefs about post-independence India. What was the nature of Indian secularism? What was its genealogy, its history? To whom had secularism appealed and why? Why had it never had a mass base? Was India's trajectory properly mapped as the gradual evolution from religious pluralism to secularism, a progression disrupted by the Right (whether conceived as obscurantist or postmodern)? Or, was it more appropriate to describe Indian society as charactarised by religious pluralism, a reality which secularism had failed to dislodge, but which since the late Eighties the Right was seeking to undermine by means of the aggressive assertion of Hindu majoritarianism?

Awakening to the Divine is a mysterious process. It is impossible to logically account for the shift in one's consciousness or the transformation of one's ways of seeing the world. Yet, is it not just like Kali to take someone of my political orientation, that too on the heels of one of the biggest massacres in the city of my youth, and proceed to open me into Her truth? I had not invited Her. She had come to fetch me. Like the dark night studded with stars, She would descend upon my consciousness and I could not resist Her frequent and potent visitations. I had not been especially drawn to Kali prior to this, though when She came it was as though a severed connection was being restored. She rarely spoke, but the energy did its work to melt me over and over, out of all that I had believed to be true. Worldlessly, She conveyed to me that I could persist in clinging to a view of life that I had somewhat uneasily and incompletely taken to be my own. Or, I could die out of all I had known myself to be and be reborn in Her. This invitation to continue reincarnating the past or to be birthed anew repeatedly arose in my consciousness, refusing to dissolve.

Early on it became clear that this experience was unlike anything that I had glimpsed as possible in the sanitised, codified and caste ridden Hinduism of my youth. The naked wildness of Kali, the uncompromising nature of Her truth, Her love, Her compassion, Her utter detachment in relation to human wiles, made Her radically uncontainable within any socially sanctified religious system. I could in no way confuse Her presence with that which I had justly abhorred, the smug conventionalism and bigotry of liberal Hidus and the much more overt hostility of conservative or right wing Hindus. As layer upon layer of misconception and misperception was peeled away from me, She laid upon me the bracing warmth of Truth, mercy and love. The deeper I dove by Her will, the more the sense of duality between inside and outside, myself and others, good and bad softened, though not into some indistinguishable reality. Rather, I was urged to look within even as I appeared to look without, to ensure that that to which I pointed in others was not present in me, albeit wearing a different face. The honesty this required me to cultivate made me far more humble than I had previously imagined myself to be.

It is often thought that those on a spiritual path become incapable of critical analysis. It is feared that opening to unconditional love leads one to unconditionally accept everything and everyone "as is where is," as the saying goes. Like many misstatements about spirituality the element of truth here is distorted. Certainly, it is true that the cultivation of acceptance is the first step toward clarity. Insofar as we are expending cognitive energy in bewailing the status quo, many questions remain unasked and therefore unanswerable. Acceptance frees us to look unflinchingly at the social facts. If properly practised, Truth will keep us sharp witted. But Truth also makes us aware that the qualities we are so tempted to decry in others, may be present in us. The presumption that there is no hatred in our consciousness may prompt us to match hate with hate, rather than meet it with love, truth and detachment.

The awareness of how fear, greed, attachment and rage can fundamentally structure our perceptions of reality makes us recognise that the work of social transformation cannot proceed without revolutionising the consciousness of each individual. As long as fear, greed, attachment and rage exist, various ideologies that seek to narrativise these sentiments in some coherent form, however monstrous, will find adherents. If the lies of the right-wing cannot seem to be countered by the facts it may be partly because the fears capitalised upon by these forces are not being addressed in the response of progressive truth tellers. And even if such negativity were to be engaged, as long as there is a clinging to fear, greed, attachment and rage, little transformation of consciousness is possible. Even spiritual wisdom about the sources of suffering cannot bring about a change of heart. Genuine change requires those preaching hatred to be willing to look within as to what motivates and grounds such desire to inflict suffering on others.

The spiritual path requires one to rethink conventional notions of responsibility and action. One discovers forcefully the inextricable inter-relatedness of everything in the phenomenal world. As the Zen master Thich Nhat Hahn once said, if a butterfly flutters its wings in Tokyo, a leaf may tremble in Manila. Each one of our thoughts, each one of our actions reverberates to the farthest reaches of the universe and even affects the cycles of nature. Our benigness, our very breath has an impact on the universe. It is impossible for an individual to have no effect on her or his environment. In that sense one develops an acute awareness of one's every thought and action. Simultaneously, one becomes ever more conscious of the complex dance of cause and effect, the layering of individual, community, national, international and planetary action and the ignorance and multiple investments that can transform dharmic intent into adharmic practice.

The greater awareness that is the fruit of spiritual practice may not yield a blueprint for action, but it need not lead to a paralysis of will. Certain principles come forward on the basis of which action can be contemplated: selflessness, non-injury, harmonious coexistence with nature and with other sentient beings, renunciation of ego and its strategies for self- preservation. The aspirant strives to practise these principles in surrender and with detachment as to the outcome of her actions. Detachment from the fruits of one's actions does not, however, mean indifference to the effects of one's endeavours. One's practice must be congruent with Truth. Non-attachment is rather a refusal to be distracted from Truth by one's hopes and desires. One cultivates detachment by serving Truth, leaving to Truth the task of transforming the hearts and minds of others. Responsibility thus emerges as the ability to respond in Truth while action is that which arises from the cultivation of Truth.

Right wing fundametalism or pseudo-religiosity bears little resemblance to genuine spiritual practice. Where the latter encourages the divinisation of humanity and the sacralisation of all activity, the former is explicitly concerned with self- aggrandisement, with fortifying the ego. Thus love, compassion and dispassion are conspicuously absent while greed, hate, violence and untruth abound in rhetoric and action alike.

It is an oft-stated truth that God is an experience. God cannot be legislated into one's heart or kept there by fear or persecution. Likewise, God cannot be driven out of the consciousness of those who feel this primal bond regardless of whatever forms of re-education are dreamt up by those seeking to replace "religion" with "science". Certainly much of the critique of religion is just. Spiritual truth has been disfigured by many false beliefs. Likewise much of what has been proven by science is also true. However, neither religion nor modern science is free from the distortions of space and time. Both are social constructs and must be evaluated as such. Faith born of direct experience, faith cultivated in the steadfast pursuit of Truth makes it possible to separate the essence of dharma from its socially conditioned distortions.

The writer is the author of Contentious Traditions:

The Debate On Sati In Colonial India, OUP, 1999.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Features
Previous : In virtual territory
Next     : Do not press the panic button