The Continuing Cold War in the North & India’s Foreign Policy Confusions

A remarkable capability of the human mind is the ability to reduce the entire world to a single thought and the entirety of time to a single moment. And this seems to be something that reflects in the lives and work of some of the most successful people in our world, how their ideas or creations aim towards the entire world, for all time, something that probably needs to exist in their minds in a way that it can process them.  

Think about the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Nobel laureate and humanist. Or of the actions of someone like Mahatma Gandhi. A notable facet of their humanism is that their minds processed the facts of their time altogether into sets of singularities,  as is evident in Tagore's spiritual guidance to humanity (speaking about the spiritual condition of all humanity) and Gandhi's prognosis of what was wrong with India in the 20th century (speaking about facts that affected the entire sub-continent). Through the thoughts that they entertained in their own minds, they were able to create entire networks of truths that influenced the thoughts of generations of Indians.  

And they were not the only ones. There were many competing versions of "truths" as applied to the Indian mind and Indian world even at that time. Gandhi's truths about India did not extend to the world views of many people, Hindus as well as Muslims, like the right wingers of Maharashtra like V.D. Savarkar and the Muslims who supported the creation of Pakistan. There were also notable and influential people in the Princely States who did not want anything to do with independent India. For all of these people, in some way or another, the Gandhian network of truths clashed with their own political ideas and identities. It is hard, on the other hand, to think of contemporaries of Rabindranath Tagore who captured a competing vision of the Indian mind. His network of truths was somewhat greater than Gandhi's in that it was from the start a universal humanism (as opposed to Gandhi's anti-colonialist humanism). His understanding of humanity would somehow capture in it the truths of even those who had already established their own mystical constructions of the world like the Gaudiya Vaishnavas and the Vedantins like Ramana Maharishi. They would probably not agree with each other especially when it came to doctrinal truths, but Tagore's ideas contained enough of the essence of the thoughts of these competing versions of truth that they were a better representative of the Indian mind for the masses of Indian and foreign people.  

And it seems to me that the great scientists and philosophers of the Western world like Newton, Einstein or Plato also did something very fundamentally similar to these Indian luminaries. They were able to subjectify the world in a constructive and effective way that enabled them to make such observations and devise such machinations that encompassed the entire network of the world that they inhabited in such a way that they were "giving back to it". They were creating for the world. But what was it in their mind enabled them to do so? I think, it has two important elements. First, is knowing the fact of the world and then understanding one's own identity as having something to do in it, i.e., a sort of Foucaultian subjectification, but not of people but that of the entire world-fact. Second, the removal of all distractions in the way of one's expression of that embodied identity as an agent in the world. The second step inevitably follows from the first because when one starts to identify consciously or unconsciously as an agent in the world at large, other aspects of that person's identity will start to clash with his new identity as an agent towards the world at large. He will be irritated and staggered by things that he consciously or unconsciously understands as standing in the way of his expressing himself in the form of sets of world-facts. For instance, Tagore likely learnt at a very young age about the universal humanist ideas in Hindu religious literature from his family and cultural environment, and then he had to learn how to construct the world in a way that is in accordance with that despite all of the facts that would be apparently the very antithesis of this world view. And of course, in a country like India, it is not at all very hard to find facts that are the anti-thesis of the universalist humanism of early Hinduism, even inside Hindu society. He would not only need to be convinced about the universal humanism, but also come to identify and embody them and then reconcile that fact with all the facts that seem to contravene it. And he was able to do it very successfully and in a way meaningful enough to influence many of the people around him to a very great degree, at least to the degree that people were able to accept the assumption of the universal humanist ideas. 

A similar process is at play in the case of  those who profess the knowledge of Self or knowledge of God in the Upanishadic sense. The Upanishadic vakya, "brahma satyam jagan mithyā" (Brahman is true and the world is false) stands in contradistinction to the understanding of the thinkers that identify with the world or humanity or any other such construct of the mind. The world is understood as unreal because of a discovered reality that is beyond it, which is in some way superior to it in the perceptive experience of that person. He removes the world like it is a distraction because he gets a greater pleasure from the inner-knowing of something that is in his experience and understanding superior to the world, seemingly "more real than the world". Something that is non-different from himself. So his intellect is oriented towards its source or Self or "God" like the intellect of the scientist or humanist is oriented towards the world. 

But whether it is people who are chasing after God-knowledge or those people who are chasing after worldly knowledge, they can exist in different mutually exclusive bubbles of meaning because of the finitude of their existence as souls and their limited reach in the world. The most prevalent way of reconciling one's universal identity with the limited scope of one's ideas is the idea of attributing some sort of ignorance towards those who are beyond the scope of one's ideas. The scientists on having understood the world say that the ones that don't understand those are ignorant, the spiritualists push a similar line towards against those who aren't interested in God. There are numerous examples of how almost everyone uses a process similar to this to reconcile themselves with facts that are seemingly antithetical to their existence. Now, of course, this doesn't sound very nice to a modern mind, and it seems rather ignorant to attribute ignorance to others or something like that, but it is in some sense required for a person who wants to continue acting in a universalized way to reconcile his self assumed or realized identity with the facts of the Universe that are antithetical to it. In fact, the person's intellect does not even perceive the facts that are antithetical to it as separate phenomenon warranting any particular attention, but rather, as singularities similar to the first subjectification of the world-fact. And they are expressed in much the same way, the singularity of ignorance (for knowledgeable people when they encounter people who are the opposite of them), the singularity of "non-believers" (for religious folk when they encounter atheists), etc. There is more that can be said about this, but I think I will save it for another time. 

This remarkable capability of the intellect to reduce all of everything, whether it is the world, or all of time, into singularities is very interesting and it holds the key to understanding how people work the world psychologically. It seems to be important also for successful people to solidify their own path as world-winners. Once a complex phenomenon is understood, or completely absorbed by the mind: then when intelligence starts to flow through the mind, it flows in such a way that takes into account the phenomenon that have been absorbed and is able to express meaningful truths about entire networks of truths that define human reality. Therefore, it is important in my understanding to truly digest the things that we learn so that we can make meaningful contributions to the world. The important difference,I think, between those who have been successful at this and those who are unsuccessful seems to be that the successful ones have adequately reconciled their positions with those facts in the world that are antithetical to them. There also seems to be an element of Truth that is involved, the more truthful you are, the more likely your ideas and actions would likely succeed. 

I think, for now, I will conclude this blog post here, it seems to have taken a form that I could not have imagined as possible. Anyway, Mahashivaratri greetings to all.