Avril Robarts looks briefly at some Indian religious ideas and practices and how they have helped her.
Those in the SOF Network and many others, I’m sure, have turned away from some traditional religious ideas without, necessarily, turning away from the belief that there might be a spiritual way of life. I am aware of the downsides of some Indian views and practices but, in a modern secular society, I am able to cherry pick what is helpful, as a way of considering my own life’s challenges without being tied to cultural artefacts.
The Indian writings cover nearly two thousand years, and have an infinite variety of views, but several main themes emerge and develop over time.
The first spiritual/religious experiences recorded in the Vedas included the ritual ingestion of soma.
Scholars now think that this was the mushroom amanita muscaria. Many early cultures used mindaltering drugs to communicate with the gods. They apparently sometimes had ‘bad trips’, as the Vedas contain prayers to the soma gods not to harm them.
The US psychologist Abraham Maslow, in a 1943 paper then in a 1954 book Motivation and Personality, proposed a hierarchy of needs.
Religious belief and practice may have developed to fulfil those needs.
Indian spiritual traditions recognise four legitimate goals: dharma (righteousness, moral values), artha (prosperity, economic values), kama (pleasure, love, psychological values) and moksha (liberation, spiritual values). Of course, there are many different strands of Indian religious and spiritual thought. Some are body- and worlddenying, some quite the reverse.
Questions posed in the Upanishads have quite a different starting place than the Judeo/Christian/ Muslim faiths, where irrefutable teaching is given by a creator God who must be obeyed. By Upanishadic times in India, people were beginning to question the old priestly rituals and their efficacy. If the Ultimate – Brahman – is neti, neti (not this not that), how can we know the right way to live harmoniously with it? This is the concern of the Bhagavad Gita (5th to 2nd century BCE) where Arjuna, the general, is about to fight for the legitimate king in a terrible civil war. He realises that he will kill friends, relatives, elders whom he should honour, and, overcome by horror, feels unable to fight.
His charioteer, who happens to be the god Krishna, tells him that he must fight for the maintenance of order in society. Arjuna asks how he is supposed to know the spiritual way in such circumstances. The Gita then becomes a dissertation on the practice of Yoga. At this time, Yoga was not the posture Yoga that we know today, but a variety of meditative and/or devotional practices. Yoga is described as ‘skill in action’. This led on to present Hatha Yoga.
In about the same period, a prince in Northern India rode out in his chariot. His charioteer was again Krishna, who showed him examples of old age, disease, and death, to which all are subject.
Gotama left his palace and, after practising many austerities, meditated under a tree and suddenly saw a way for humans to live in the face of such suffering. He became known as ‘Buddha’ (the enlightened one).
He said that his main teaching was dukkha (suffering from uncomfortableness) and the cessation of dukkha. Buddha prescribed an eightfold way of living, including moral behaviour and meditation. Whereas the former spiritual teachings had been for the priestly and warrior classes of India, Buddha’s teaching was available to all. A prince asked Buddha how you could tell if someone is enlightened. His answer was, ‘Watch them in community.’ There are many different kinds of meditation practices in the Indo-Tibetan traditions, but all are based on the Buddhist idea of realising impermanence. Nagarjuna, the great Buddhist philosopher, said, ‘Since all is empty (impermanent), all is possible.’ One form of meditation is the Tibetan sand drawing, where total focus is on creating a mandala.
What happens if things go wrong? This Tibetan tradition absorbed the demon figures to turn them into ‘protectors of the truth,’ usually translated as ‘wrathful deities’, though they are not treated as gods. As a meditation focus, they represent the power to destroy hindrances such as anger and craving. The idea, as I understand it, is that in difficult circumstances, wisdom and compassion need some help from power to change hindrances to good.
In Indian iconography, Shiva dances phenomena into appearance, and dances it out of manifestation again.
What is the end result of all this? The Gita says (6:19) our peacefulness will be ‘as a lamp in a windless place which does not flicker’.
Avril Robarts is a Yoga teacher with an interest in Indian religious traditions.