India and America

 

Dr. Micheal Miovic

I am an American doctor, a psychiatrist by profession, and have long been an admirer of India and of things Indian. I was recently discussing the relevance of Indian spiritual thought to Western psychology with some doctors at Harvard, where I work, and was not surprised to find that there are still a one or two who believe there could be nothing more irrelevant to our field than a “bunch of superstitions.” A century ago such comments might have been cause for a diatribe, but today all I could do was chuckle. Alas, the poor chap who said that has no idea that the tide of history flows against him, and that sooner or later--and probably sooner rather than later--he will be inundated in a flood of Indian thought and culture that will change the entire landscape of Western culture.

The portents of the coming rapprochement between East and West are all around us. In America, Indian spirituality has been permeating the popular culture ever since Henry David Thoreau read the first translations of the Bhagavad Gita and shared them with his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. That seminal event lead to the genesis of transcendentalism, the first genuinely American philosophical movement, and ever since then America has been slowly, and now rapidly, imbibing the spirit of India. She opened first to India's great ideas via Vivekananda and the string of gurus high and low who have followed him to these shores, and then in the 1960s to India's music via the influence of the Beatles and George Harrison's association with Ravi Shankar. Today, America is importing India’s mathematical and engineering talent via the information technology industry, and tomorrow she will open to India’s film industry. And of course America is fascinated with Indian cuisine, and is absorbing an ever-swelling number of Indian immigrants into her cultural melting pot.

Today, when one looks from the West towards India, one sees a tremendous nation on the rise. Put aside for now the Pakistan-India conflict and Bush’s designs on Iraq; these are conflicts of the moment (alas, perhaps a very long moment) that must with time right themselves. The big picture is that India is the oldest and most complex continuous culture on earth, and she is but a scant 55 years into her current reincarnation as a modem democratic state, and that after nearly a millennium of foreign invasion, exploitation, and domination. Naturally India will have a sea of internal and external problems to surmount in order to gain the position of influence and power in the world she rightly deserves, and shall have. If we take the example of America as a rough model, it may well take a century or more for modern India to find her way. Certainly the evolution could happen more quickly, and one hopes it does, but as we say in the medical business, experience teaches us to hope for the best but prepare for the worst. By the very virtue of her vastness and complexity, India has a deeper task to accomplish than other nations, and so the forces of darkness that dog human progress at every step may well put up their stiffest resistance in India, precisely because she has such a wealth of spiritual and cultural power to share with humanity.
Sri Aurobindo, one of India’s great modern rishis, says that every nation is not just a physical mass of people with certain political and socio-cultural bonds, but is more importantly a soul, a living being, a force of the Divine that has come to advance the evolution of consciousness by bringing its gifts to earth. Every culture has a purpose and mission, be it explicit or as yet veiled, and in the case of India and America these are clear. Each of our countries has a well-articulated mantra, a summary statement that captures the essence of our people’s aspiration and sets a purpose for our tenure on earth. The American mantra is stated in the rhapsodic opening lines of her Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

This is, admittedly, a high task and Americans, being human, have often done it quite poorly. We had a civil war--one of the bloodiest and most vicious conflicts in the entire cruel history of warfare--to establish that “men” means men of any race or color. It then took us another full century after the abolition of slavery to create legislation to ensure equal rights to all Americans, and to begin to acknowledge that “men” means really “human beings,” including women. We are still not a society of equal opportunity, though perhaps we are doing a little better in this regards than prior civilizations, and we have yet to clarify for ourselves what exactly “liberty” and the “pursuit of happiness” mean. So far, we have tried to achieve these freedoms of the individual in a rather simplistic, external, and materialistic fashion; the widespread sense of alienation in American culture today is proof that this experiment is failing, and eventually the pain will become acute enough to make us try another route.

My hope is that we shall try next a more spiritual path to liberty and happiness, shift our considerable energies from expressing the mental and vital ego, to freely expressing the soul, which is the true basis of individuality. If America does this, she will renew her mission on earth and again offer something new and beautiful to humanity; if not, we will go the way of Rome and sink under the weight of our own decadence. This is, I believe, the secret meaning for America behind the terrorist attacks of last September 11, and the ongoing scandals in the Catholic Church and the business sector (Enron, WorldCom). America speaks of leadership in the world, but if all she has to offer is an amoral capitalism and liberty to indulge the lower impulses, she will fade and fail, because she will have betrayed her own mantra by ignoring the rights of the poor and the weak.

India also has a mantra, indeed, she has many. Yet of all her many illumined statements, perhaps none voices the essence of her aspiration more succinctly than the famous lines from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1.3.28):

“From the non-being [lead us] to true being,
From the darkness to the Light,
From death to Immortality.
Om, shanti, shanti, shanti.”

This ancient dictum of the rishis is an even higher goal than that voiced in the American mantra. Indeed, it is the highest goal that human beings have ever conceived--to know and be one with Divine in all worlds and on all planes of existence. Accordingly, therefore, the great soul of India has been patiently laboring away at her cosmic task since the dawn of history, and still but a few recognize the true and vast aim of the ancient mother. Her obstacles are plethora, her sets endless, her fruits seemingly the very opposite of that to which she aspires. It is only too easy for the foreigner to set foot in India today and be impressed--or rather overwhelmed--by a spectacle of poverty, overpopulation, squalor, disorder, religious conflict, and epidemic political corruption, the magnitude and lethargy of which are stunning.
However, to mistake this mass of outer problems for the inner soul of India would be akin to reducing America to slavery, the genocide of Native Americans, smog, handguns, pornography, Yankee imperialism, colossal bad taste in art and thought--and then package all that in a McDonald’s value meal and, oh yes, supersize it with a gallon of Coke and drive it home in an SUV. America is no more her failings than is India hers. Rather, each nation-soul has set before her a labor to do in the world, and the problems of each are simultaneously resistances against the transformation of consciousness proposed, and challenges necessary to point out defects in the work and lead eventually to a perfect perfection. To the degree that America has succeeded in resolving some of her most egregious problems internally, she has been able to radiate the gains of her sadhana externally and offered, at least in moments and to some, a ray of hope and the promise of a better life. Likewise, in the proportion and measure to which India looks inward and puts her own mantra into daily practice in all her affairs, she will be able to radiate that wisdom, grace, beauty and power in the world around her,

In the last century, Sri Aurobindo came to tell India and the world that this monumental spiritual work can be done, and that the key to accomplishing it lies in the ancient method of Indian yoga, Only, this yoga must not be taken up along the old lines and outer methods, but cast along new lines suited to the evolving spirit in humanity. Like all yogas, it must be based upon a turning inward and an aspiration to know, feel, and be one with the Divine, but it must proceed from there to embrace all life. It must pour the splendors of the Spirit into the world, or as Aurobindo says so handsomely, “to make of earthly life the life Divine.” This is the extraordinary goal that the soul of India sets for herself and, by example, for the world. It is a goal of which most Indians are likely not conscious, no more than the average American grasps inwardly what is the purpose of the United States’ existence, but that is the goal nevertheless.

When I was in Calcutta last year, I was looking at a map of India and it struck me that the general shape of India resembles that of a giant cardiac silhouette, as one sees when looking at a chest X -ray. This is a rather unpoetic medical image, I know--and here my training as a doctor betrays itself--but to me it seemed apt and suggestive. For India is indeed the spiritual heart of the world, the great bellows of God that tirelessly pumps the lifeblood of the human aspiration. I suppose, to extend the metaphor, one would have to say that India has had a few myocardial infractions in her long life, and has suffered centuries of heart failure, but, you know, the wonders of science are great, and the wonders of God even greater. India can be reborn. If the last two centuries have been, in a general sense, the story of America’s rise to world-prominence as a leader of freedom and democracy, the next few centuries will be the story of India’s renaissance. I shall not be a hypocrite and begrudge India her claims to material wealth and military power--she has as much right to those as America or anyone else--but I do pray that she remember her mantra and her mission. For the soul of India alone can give these supreme spiritual boons to humanity, and we shall all be the lesser if she does not.
In closing, I wish India a very happy birthday at the dawn of this new millennium. I think that if India is true to her mantra, she will show America how to be truer to hers, and India will then find in America a faithful companion, a younger sister full of enthusiasm, hope, creative dreams, and enormous vitality. The French have a tired old saying that runs like this: “if only age were able, if only youth knew how.” Well, like a good American, I’ll better that one with a proposition to India. Let’s make a deal: lend me your knowledge and I’ll lend you my energy, and together we ain’t just gonna pursue immortal happiness, why, I reckon we can actually catch the darn thing.