The Huffington Post has a great opinion piece up on Hinduism and the changing face of its mythology – Mythology, Media and the Future of Hinduism.
The evolution of the gods
Here’s something that struck me recently. The deities that ruled the pantheon of Hindu gods in early Vedic times were markedly different from the ones that define Hinduism today. The old gods are still well-known, but they do not find worship, or even charitable mention in the more modern texts.
Indra (god of thunder, king of gods), for example, was once a mighty hero who went up against universe-threatening monstrosities and displayed plenty of courage and strength. He had vices too, but these went into giving him the appearance of a flawed hero. As time passed, these flaws became the centre of his being and he was portrayed as a constantly fearful, irresponsible, and power-hungry keeper of the throne of heaven. Take a look at any of the current mythological TV serials and you will see what I am talking about. All he ever seems to do is enjoy the company of women, bully others, and run to the higher gods whenever faced with a threat to his power.
The same goes for other Vedic deities like Agni (god of fire), Varuna (god of the seas), and Vayu (god of the winds). These guys used to be big-time legends back then. But now they have become side characters as our focus on the pantheon has shifted. And this is what brings me to my point.
I think the shift has been in a general direction. The pantheon of India’s gods, goddesses, and other deities is a spectrum of qualities and characteristics. Each god has a personality and the state of India’s civilisation has been reflected in its choice of gods. Modern India worships Ganesha (god of knowledge, remover of obstacles), Lakshmi (goddess of prosperity), and Saraswati (goddess of wisdom and knowing).
The focus has shifted from gods that govern the elements of nature to gods that govern abstract concepts of the mind. These are not new gods. They have always been around, but as times changed, they were given newer responsibilities and their hidden facets came into play. Saraswati is no longer simply wife to Brahma (creator of the universe), Ganesha is much more than the dutiful son to Shiva (destroyer of things) and Parvati. They have, for lack of a better word, grown up.
This brings me to the next logical point. If the gods of yesterday were elemental, and the gods of today are conceptual, what will the gods of tomorrow be like?
I think they will continue down this same road and end up being even more immaterial – like ideas, archetypes, qualities and characteristics. The whole business of having gods is about prioritising – about telling ourselves what our place in the universe is. It is about making an orderly list of important things and putting ourselves in the list somewhere. The nature of this list keeps changing as we learn more about ourselves and the world we live in.
So while once upon a time the elements of nature were things we considered to be above and beyond us, now we consider knowledge, wisdom and prosperity to be more important. We have changed our minds about what really matters to us. We were survivalists back then – people whose primary concern was to keep the forces of nature happy. Now we are less concerned with survival and more with meaning and learning.
My hypotheses is that in the future, humanity as a whole will become man’s primary concern. The list we have been maintaining will undergo a vital transformation as we realise that the universe is less of a hierarchy and more of a network – one where all things were created equal with the same energy at the core. When man begins looking at himself as just another part of the network, he will find himself at par with the highest of gods and with the lowest of life forms. That is when man will realise his divinity.
Our ideas regarding god are moving outwards. We know there is something out there, but we don’t know what exactly. So throughout history, we have continued pointing at various things in the hopes that they are divine. “Maybe the elements are divine? No? Well then, maybe our feelings are divine? Maybe the pursuit of knowledge is divine.”
We will keep at it and our conclusions will keep moving outward until the definition of God is widely understood to be “everything”.
So the gods of the future will be immaterial, practically non-existent abstractions. They will be qualities that we will ascribe to each other and everything around us. I imagine that this will entail a coming together of disciplines. The explorer of the future will be scientist, philosopher, priest, engineer, storyteller; all rolled into one.
Is this magic or madness?
I find that I do my best writing when I have no idea what I am doing, like right now. Taking notes, making plans, and plotting prose works when you have the luxury of time. But more often than not, that is not the case. Most of the time, all I can fall back on, is spontaneity.
The fact that pieces written on-the-go (so to speak) turn out to be better than those written with premeditation is surprising when you look at it from an outsider perspective. But it makes perfect sense when you realise that creativity is more the work of your intuition than your intellect. It springs from chaos and it happens when I least suspect it.
When I look at the end product, I sometimes wonder at its existence. Where did it come from? I did not make it. I merely sat down and wrote it down without thinking. Sure, my knowledge of language helped, but I am definitely not the one who created it.
Over the years, I have become certain that there are two kinds of ideas — the manipulated ones and the pure ones. The manipulated ones are created by working with known things and altering, juxtaposing and shifting them until they start to resemble something decent. These are market ideas. Copywriters and people in the "idea business" do this all the time. The other sort are the pure ideas. These come out of nowhere and make the writer their host. The writer merely channels them through herself/himself. He is not the creator of them.
I have also become certain that these ideas are not born in my mind. Instead, it is more a matter of being receptive to signals from the place where ideas come from, wherever that is. Bringing these ideas to life on paper (or computer screen) is like channeling a spirit. They come fully formed, with an enormous package of details and a tone of their own. The writer can only obey, nothing else.
Some time ago I came across comic book author Alan Moore’s view of this matter. He is of the opinion that the act of writing is magic — actually, literally magic. Magic is understood to the art/science of altering reality with a word, gesture or some other physical act. Writing does exactly that. The writer makes something up and the reader experiences a shift in mood, mindset, or worldview as a result of reading it. This applies to all creative modes of expression of course. Dancers alter their audience’s reality with gestures and body movements, artists do it with lines and colours. It’s all, quite literally, magic (minus the special effects).
I have come to believe that there is a place (for lack of a better word) out there where ideas "exist" independent of minds. In fact, I think minds are secondary — channeling devices and calculating machines. They are like radio sets, and ideas are the signals that make them work.
To the question of where this "place" is, I have no clear answer. But like always, let us fill the gaps with speculative thinking. There is a scientist called Rupert Sheldrake who has proposed the idea of ‘morphic fields’. These fields are basically information embedded in nature — information that decides the shape of the world around us. So there is a morphic field for the human form and one for the grasshopper and one for bacteria and so on.
Think of them as invisible containers into which matter falls and takes a certain shape — just like water takes the shape of the container it falls into. This is interesting because if Sheldrake is right, then information (ideas, plans etc) can exist independent of physical reality and therefore, can come to the writer as signals that he may channel.
Pretty fancy eh? Of course, all this may be wrong and we creative people may simply be mad. A recent study found that creative people share a lot of brain chemistry with schizophreniacs. Basically, the writerly quality of being able to live an imaginary life is key to what is wrong in those considered mentally unwell. Or perhaps, the unwell are merely in a high-creative state in which they actually see and hear things that most people consider imaginary. Who knows!
I myself have often found myself inside my imagination. I have cried and I have shaken with anger when writing about my characters going through those emotions. Afterwards, it appeared only slightly awkward to me. I find it most difficult to write something without believing it to be true and I am sure a lot of other writers feel that way too. Losing yourself to imagination is an occupational hazard.
This is how writing has changed me. I am either a magician, or I am a madman. And I am not even sure anymore if those are two different things.
Posted in Writing
Tagged alanmoore, brain, creativity, ideas, information, madness, magic, mind, sheldrake, universe, Writing
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Hinduism as open-source faith
Huffington Post has a great post up defining the Hindu way against the backdrop of what religion is commonly understood to be. The author Josh Schrei compares it to the open-source philosophy in software.
If we consider god, the concept of god, the practices that lead one to god, and the ideas, thoughts and philosophies around the nature of the human mind the source code, then India has been the place where the doors have been thrown wide open and the coders have been given free reign to craft, invent, reinvent, refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of the spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated, and documented.
Atheists and goddess worshipers, heretics who’ve sought god through booze, sex, and meat, ash covered hermits, dualists and non-dualists, nihilists and hedonists, poets and singers, students and saints, children and outcasts … all have contributed their lines of code to the Hindu string.
via Josh Schrei: The God Project: Hinduism as Open-Source Faith.
I have a half-written article somewhere on my computer titled ‘Hinduism is an open-source religion’. I guess it is time to hunt the file down and delete it. I couldn’t have done it better myself. Schrei’s article brings the right things into focus the right way.
Indian comics, Indian mythology and the Indian image
Someone asked me recently why Indian comics are stuck with mythology as a core theme. I gave a brief answer as it was only an email, but I think should elaborate. There is more to this than is obvious at a first glance. Complaining aside, I think we should try and focus on ways to make this marriage work.
Comics and mythology gain from each other’s respective specialties. Both have qualities that the other can profit from. While some think Indian comics are doomed to retell tales from Indian mythology forever, I feel that in the long run, the trend will help the cause of comics becoming a popular medium in the country.
Ideas from Indian mythology are deeply ingrained in all of our daily lives. ‘Ram-Ram’ is a greeting in our villages and good brothers are called ‘Ram Lakhan ki jodi’. Family disputes are referred to as Mahabharats and mischievous babies are frequently compared to the image of Krishna when he was a baby. This awareness of mythic themes spreads across lines of region and religion, all over India. Comics are a popular medium. They tell stories to the masses, just like Bollywood does. But comics in India are not as pervasive as movies are. So comics as a medium can ride on the reach of mythology as a language that every Indian understands. Mythology as a core theme can help a lot of people overcome the initial obstacle of getting comfortable with a new medium.
On the other hand, stories and ideas from Indian mythology haven’t really had the ‘pop’ treatment until recently. One of the first things that pop into most people’s minds when the word ‘mythology’ is uttered are memories of TV serials with bad special effects and theatrical dialogue. India’s ancient tales have evolved along with India herself. The Ramayana alone has been retold more than 300 times in at least 300 different ways. Comics as a medium can be a whole new grassy field for our mythic cows to feed on and grow fat. Comics dealing with mythology, both as retellings and as reinventions, can expose people to a whole new way of looking at our thousand-year-old stories.
Comics dealing with Indian mythology in any way can be a great tool for Indian soft power the world over. I have often marveled at the magic that the Bruce Lee worked for the popular perception of Chinese culture. Nowadays, whenever I see a grim looking actor with Chinese features on the screen, I expect him to break into Kung-Fu and destroy everything and everyone around him. 
Granted, it is a stereotype, but it is an empowering and positive stereotype — way better than the bumbling and clueless chinaman image early Hollywood perpetrated.
Imagine retold mythology doing the same for India. Our stories are the most powerful export we can give to the global market in this age. India has always been a land where fantasies flourished. Mythology can help strengthen that image in modern times.
Bloggers as media-lovers
Right from the time when the average Joe sitting in his living room became capable of letting the world know what he thinks of it, a debate has raged about whether he should be allowed to do so or not. This debate keeps raising its head in India from time to time. First it was blogging, then Twitter, and in the middle, for some time I think, even Youtube was under the media’s scornful gaze.
The thing about these tools is that they are just tools. It is the average Indian who is behind them. If a lot of people started calling up the media with criticism of their work, would the media condemn the "telephoning elite"? I don’t think so.
But blogging isn’t telephoning, is it? What hurts the media into making such sweeping condemnation of bloggers and tweeters is the fact that it all happens out in the open. The average blogger or tweeter is opinionated and the thought of pretending otherwise never crosses his mind. He simply sees no reason to do so. The phenomenon of web publishing using easy and affordable tools has spawned an entire generation of commentators free from the constraints of format, policy, codes, and sometimes even propriety. This is the age of the writing mob.
Interestingly, when the writing mob comes into areas that were previously exclusively populated by the writing elite, that is, journalists; the problem simply becomes one of authority. Who decides what the format is? Where do you draw the line between what is proper and acceptable and what is not? Is it even right to make such rules?
The simplest way around this problem is through some obvious questions. Why does the media exist? What is its purpose? And most importantly; how does the media know it is fulfilling its purpose?
The TRP system is a numerical indicator of how popular something on a news channel is. It indicates how many people are tuned into what is currently being shown on a channel. Through TRP ratings, news people reach conclusions about how much people like something and try to do more of it.
This is of course fine and dandy as far as a purely mechanistic way of "measuring" popularity is concerned. But then where do all the ideas about doing what is good for the society go? Even a circus gives people what they want. The media is supposed to be different, right? It’s supposed to show us things we need to watch. People may like what is being shown to them for various reasons. But is what they like always what needs to be on TV?
The media is in the business of answering that question. I know they are supposed to be objective and all, but everyone knows they are not. The media is in the decision-making business. They are the ones that decide what direction society takes. Thay decide what should worry us. They decide what we should get angry about.
I don’t think anybody believes the media is objective. Curiously enough, nobody even seems to care about the media’s objectivity. Most watchers of mainstream TV news have elaborate mental lists of news channels and their respective ideological slants. Everyone knows their bias and everyone has accepted them as they are.
Why then, do bloggers often end up criticising what news channels do?
The answer is obvious. Any blogger who pays any amount of attention to what news channels show, and then takes the time to blog what he thinks about it, is obviously a fan! The blogger is part of the news channel’s target audience. But he is also part of the small minority of the target audience who talks back at the broadcasters. He tells them, like the average Joe he is, what he "loves" and what he thinks "stinks".
The media has this tendency to see itself as "The Media" and to see everyone else as "Them". These classifications are somewhat ancient now, seeing as how every Ram, Rahim, and Harry these days thinks himself capable of doing what the media does — pass judgment. It’s the flavour of the season and is likely to remain so for quite some time. The media keeps getting sour at the idea of being in the same compartment as "them". But I don’t think that is going to help.
I think a better way for the media to look at the matter is to start considering blogging voices a complement to what TRPs tell them. So here is my advice to the Indian media:
On one side you have this numerical indicator to tell you how many people are tuned in to what your channel is showing, and then here comes an actual human voice with opinions on how it was. Don’t push the opinion away because you don’t like it. Don’t let the numbers trap you into thinking you have it all measured out.
You have fans because you do a certain service to society. They pay you attention because they think you are worth it. It is a kind of irreverent respect. There is nothing inherently respectable about you. Your worth is defined by what you do. And the people who decide your worth happen to be the exact same ones you keep blaming for criticising you. Sure there is a lot of vulgar noise out there, I won’t deny it. But you can’t let that blind you to the fact that there are sane voices out there too. Look for them, you guys are supposed to be good at this sort of thing. Don’t push the criticism away. Listen to it.
Unless of course, you want to be in the same league as a circus, in which case, carry on.
Posted in media
Tagged authority, bloggers, blogs, ethics, feedback, media, msm, newspapers, publishing, technology, tools, tv, tweets, twitter
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I want to tag my Facebook photos
I think Facebook photo albums are cumbersome. There is no easy way to arrange photos into albums and there is no clear album-management system. Albums created long ago, just disappear under a pile of new ones and one never sees them again. Besides, if Facebook is serious about its mobile user base, it should definitely do something to ease the album-making process. As it is, Facebook’s official mobile application posts photos to an album called ‘Mobile Uploads’ by default.
The simplest solution that occurs to me is tagging. Have users tag their photos with keywords before they upload them and end the entire albums mess in one go. This will bring the focus to individual images, make for easier navigation through photos relating to the same topic, and it will also keep photos in circulation for longer. Every time I upload a photo tagged car, my older photos tagged with car turn up on the side as related items. How does that sound?
Tags are any day a better way to organise things than albums (or categories) are. If you are like me and have hundreds of albums, then you may like nothing better than to ditch the whole lot of them in favour of something simpler.
Posted in World 2.0
Tagged architecture, categories, facebook, information, photos, tagging, tags, tagsonomy, web2
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You are more than just your genes
Biologist Bruce Lipton recounts a startling revelation that the scientific world encountered soon after the mapping of the human genome. Turns out, what we are isn’t solely determined by our genes.
The results of the Genome project reveal that there are only about 34,000 genes in the human genome. Two thirds of the anticipated genes do not exist! How can we account for the complexity of a genetically-controlled human when there are not even enough genes to code just for the proteins?
More humiliating to the dogma of our belief in genetic determinacy is the fact that there is not much difference in the total number of genes found in humans and those found in primitive organisms populating the planet.
via Bruce Lipton : Biology Of Belief : The Human Genome Project.
Researchers hypothesised that because human beings are so incredibly complex, they must at least have a 100,000 genes to make it all work. What they found was a number closer to 34,000. In addition to being a serious blow to genetic determinacy, it once again threw into darkness the question of what makes us tick. Genes do play a major role in deciding who we are, but the idea of them being all there is to us is now old hat.
What I find funny about this is what Lipton does. Every single time we imagine we have the universe all figured out, it comes from behind and renders a well-placed kick in our collective nuts. It happened when quantum physics toppled traditional mechanistic physics and now it is happening to biology. What fun!
Posted in Science
Tagged belief, biology, brucelipton, genes, genetic, genome, research, science
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Are dreams more than just dreams?
The New Scientist magazine has an interesting report on the ongoing research on human consciousness and how dreams play a large role in unfolding its many mysteries.
The mental life of your common or garden human, however, is a lot more complicated. That’s because we are “aware of being aware”. This allows us to reflect upon ourselves and our feelings and, in an ideal world, make insightful decisions and judgements. This state, dubbed secondary consciousness, is thought to be unique to humans.
“When you’re awake, you have both primary and secondary consciousness. Secondary consciousness is that reflective awareness that determines a great part of waking consciousness,” says Voss.
Pinning down how our brain produces these two, subjective, states of consciousness is a tough challenge, because it’s difficult to isolate the different aspects of consciousness in fully awake subjects from other neural processes unrelated to awareness.
via Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams – life – 15 June 2010 – New Scientist.
The field of dreams has been acknowledged as being worth study ever since Sigmund Freud. Later, when Carl Jung established links between dreams and myths, it became even more interesting. My personal interest in dreams roots from the fact that they have often been described as ways to other worlds.
Consciousness is a huge mystery, especially since old-school neurology has started appearing less and less capable of explaining it away as an epiphenomenon of the brain. The school of thought that postulates the brain as being secondary to consciousness (as opposed to consciousness being a byproduct of chemical processes in the brain) has been gaining in prominence in recent years.
So my fingers are crossed and I’m betting on dreams.
Posted in Science
Tagged asleep, awake, aware, awareness, consciousness, dream, dreaming, mind, psychology, science, understanding
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Compassion as a universal constant
Cosmologist Brian Swimme, in an interview he gave to EnlightenNext magazine a few years ago, posited the idea of kindness and compassion being far more than biological characteristics. He implied that what we know as compassion is some sort of universal constant that manifests as love and kindness in biological organisms.
Well, when we use words like compassion, we tend to limit them to the human world. And part of this goes back to what I said before, that we think of the rest of the universe as being stuff, and we don’t use words that are spiritual or warm or emotional concerning them. The scientific tradition has always called that “projection”—projecting your own qualities upon the universe as a whole or upon nature. And that’s supposed to be a terrible thing to do. But I think that’s breaking down as we begin to realize that it’s all one energy event. It’s one journey, one story, so that the qualities that are true of the human are in some way or another true of other parts of the universe. So I talk about compassion as a multilevel reality. It’s not just something that’s true of humans.
My interpretation is this. I think that gravitational attraction is an early form of compassion or care. If there weren’t that kind of care at the foundation of the universe, there would be no formation of galaxies—and we wouldn’t be having this discussion. This care or compassion begins to show up in the organic form when you have a bond developing between a mother and her offspring. You know, for a long time, there’s no bond. There’s no care—at least no visible way of seeing care—for instance, with bacteria. They replicate. There could be care there, but we haven’t recognized it yet. But by the time you get to mammals, two hundred and twenty million years ago, you have this bond between the mother and the child. That arrives as a genetic mutation. But because of that, the offspring have a higher chance of surviving. So that mutation then spreads and starts to characterize the entire population. That’s just the bond between a mother and an infant. Then other bonds develop between siblings, and they have a higher chance of survival. All of what I’m saying fits into Darwinian biology. This isn’t outside of mainstream science. What it says is that the dynamics of Darwinian biology favor the appearance of compassion. It shows up between mother and child. It shows up between siblings, and it even develops between kin groups. And it starts to spread.
via Brian Swimme: Awakening to the Universe Story.
This is the closest anyone (in my readings) has come to giving a scientific colour to the idea of love being a characteristic of God. The idea, simply put, is that “love” is something all-pervading. The force that keeps you living with your partner is the same force that keeps planetoids in orbit around each other. Think about it. What a grand idea!
Posted in Theories
Tagged biology, compassion, cosmology, god, kindness, love, oneness, universe
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