Upanishads provide the solutions in a fractured world

We live in the age of great turmoil, trauma and transition with the old collapsing and the new struggling to be born. And we find ourselves precariously poised between a disappearing past and an uncertain future. In Hinduism, we have a whole richness of scriptures. Among them, the Vedas are considered to be of supreme wisdom. The Upanishads are the essence of the wisdom of the Vedas, and are known as the Vedanta because they come at the end of the Vedic collection. This underscores ‘The Growing Relevance of Vedanta’. 

The first concept of Vedanta is the concept of unity of all existence, what is known as a Brahman. It is this magnificent universe — the billions and billions of galaxies that surround us — and not the tiny speck of dust that we call planet Earth. The universe is Anadi Anant, without beginning and without end. The Upanishads even talk about swayambhu, a self-created universe; perhaps you do not need a creator.

There are a huge number of galaxies and vast aeons of time. The whole concept of infinite space and infinite time are found in the concept of the all-pervasive Brahman.

Then the second concept is of the atman. The atman is the spark of that divine within each one of us, not with any particular caste or any creed but with everyone. The Lord resides in the heart of all beings. We say this is our clan, this is our people but in the Upanishads, every individual, everywhere, has a spark of the divine, the aatma. So, you have the all-pervasive Brahman, you have the divinity inherent in each human being, the atman. And joining these two is the real goal of life. The process of joining these two is known as the yoga.

There are four main parts of yoga, the first is gyan yoga, the way of the mind, the discrimination between the real and the unreal. The gyan yoga is a way of wisdom and that is one of the important ways of realising the unity between the atman and the Brahman. The second part is the bhakti yoga, which is the way of the heart. Bhakti yoga is the way of the heart where unless your emotion flows along with your intellect, you will not be able to move on the spiritual path.

Then you have the karm yoga, it is not just any karma, everybody is doing some action or the other, but karm yoga is the action dedicated to the divine. Karm yoga is only if you are involved with some great enterprise of serving humanity and serving your fellow beings. The fourth part is the Raja Yoga, the way of the breath. Breathing is the most fundamental thing that everybody does from even before birth. And we believe that in our breath or in our own body we have the power and the glory and the wisdom to be able to directly confront the divine.

So, you see you have these four. Look at the integrated nature of the philosophy. It deals with the intellectual, the emotional, the physical, and the psychic: the dimension of the human body. In this day and age, my view is that we have to participate in some way or the other in all the four yogas.

Now, I will come to one more remarkable concept, the concept of the world as a family. This is mine and that is yours is a small and narrow way of looking at the world. For those of the higher consciousness, the world itself is a family. But the world today is fractured and fragmented. But in the ultimate analysis when nationalisms would have been transcended, unless we come finally to the conclusion that the human race is one, we are going to destroy ourselves.

At the end of the last century, we saw that we were moving towards globalisation. But then we were hit by two black swan events. First one is the Brexit! Who would have thought that the British would suddenly commit suicide by opting to leave the European Union. The European Union is in chaos and Britain is in chaos. The second black swan event, of course, was the election of President Donald Trump. Who would have thought that the oldest democracy in the world and the greatest nation in the world would elect a man like this? These two black swan events have made globalisation wobbly. At some point in time, I submit that we will either blow ourselves up or come around to the concept of the world as a family.

Author is a poet and politician