Vedanta - Discussion Forum I (introductory))

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Comments from guroos eagerly awaited.. <!--emo&:eager--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/lmaosmiley.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='lmaosmiley.gif' /><!--endemo-->:

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Excerpts from a recent paper from Balu to be published in JAAR. I am posting portions of it. Of interest to this thread is the difference between the christian experience and the indic experience..

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><i>A Christian Religious Loop</i>

Let me begin with a medieval monk. There are several reasons for this choice as a starting point. Firstly, there are quite a few works dealing with medieval religiosity (including autobiographies and hagiographies) that can be fruitfullyused in this context. Secondly, one can contrast my outline with the processes that such works portray in order to identify deficiencies in my sketch. Thirdly, one can extend such a sketch to the modern-day world as well: many people (like Söderblom, for instance) have left enough material behind them for us to pursue this line of enquiry without getting caught in the normative discussion about what a religion ought to be. Fourthly, thereafter, we can see whether the modern man has ‘spiritual needs’ too, the way he is alleged to have ‘religious needs’ as well. For all these reasons, let me begin with the medieval monk.

As a deeply religious person, this monk believes that man is a sinner but God loves him nonetheless. He believes too that one could experience the infinite love of God if only one opens up one’s heart to God’s grace. In a way, you could say, he believes them as ‘true propositions’. He does not yet appreciate their depth, or their true meaning, because he has not quite experienced what they seem to say. This is how he embarks on his quest: because he knows them to be true (this is his faith), he wants to experience this love ‘first hand’. So, he begins a process of fasting, prayer, study of the scriptures, and whatever else his monastery prescribes. After some suitable length of time, he discovers that no matter how hard he tries, he does not experience God’s love for him. Anxiety begins to gnaw: why does he not have this experience when the scriptures, the saints, some fellow-brethren, all assure him that it is real? Is he not sincere enough? Does he not try hard enough? Is he approaching it the wrong way? Are his sins too great for God to forgive them? The soothing words of the Abbott, that the monk too shall experience this love if only he ‘opens himself up authentically’, instead of comforting him, transform his anxiety into downright panic: because no matter what he does, he does not have that experience.
The monk now enters a loop: the more he tries, the less successful he is. The less successful he is, the harder he tries. Each circuit through this loop increases the stress, and that merely makes the subsequent traversing of the loop even more stressful. Very soon, this loop opens up another loop within itself. The monk begins to doubt whether he will ever find God’s love. However, to entertain this doubt is to doubt the truth of the scriptures. Believing in the scriptures is leading him experientially to doubt the truth of the scriptures. His faith assures him that he too shall experience God’s love; his experience makes him doubt whether he ever will. (This is the second loop.) Now the monk is undergoing what could properly be called a spiritual crisis: he has begun to doubt the words of the Holy Spirit.  It is important to note that the monk does not doubt whether the Holy Spirit exists or whether his faith in this entity is misplaced. If he doubted this, he would be undergoing a crisis of faith. As a man of faith, it does not even occur to the monk to doubt the Holy Spirit. On the contrary. His spiritual crisis occurs precisely because of his faith. That is to say, a spiritual crisis occurs within the confines of a faith and within the parameters set by the latter.

The spiritual crisis suggests to the monk that the reason why he does not find God’s love is to be located in his ‘state of mind’. His state of mind assures him that his sins are too great: he has even begun to doubt God’s love for him. His faith tells him that this is his greatest sin and confirms what he knows: the Devil is sowing these seeds of doubt (about God’s Word) in his mind. Thus, he tries harder; prays that God rescues him from the clutches of the Devil. He is filled with self-loathing and self-disgust for not being able to resist the Devil and ‘truly believe’. The intensity of travelling through the loops increases, the stress and tension grows, the pitying looks in the eyes of his brethren become more noticeable, until, one day, the inevitable happens: he suffers an absolute, total and complete nervous breakdown, the price for getting caught up in an unending loop.

<i>The Christian Spirituality</i>

Let us notice the ‘psychological’ transformations he has undergone in the process of suffering the nervous breakdown. Firstly, his sense of agency is shattered. He is unable to do the many things he could do with consummate ease before. Perhaps he is even unable to take care of his personal hygiene; he starts crying for no apparent reason. He flies into uncontrollable rages; perhaps, cannot stop eating or drinking. In short, he realises that he has no control over himself, while he previously thought he had. Secondly, because of this realisation, his vanity is shattered. All his ‘urges’ are sins, and he cannot control them. The Devil can do what he wants with this monk and he is powerless to stop Him, something the scriptures and his religion always proclaimed. Thirdly, his sense of value is shattered: he now realises that all men are sinners like him, and he is the worst sinner of all. In its wake, his sense of worth is shattered as well: he is more loathsome than the crawling worm and the poisonous insect; at least, they are not tainted by sin the way he is.

In this situation, in the depth of despair and self-disgust, there is still hope for him because he is a man of faith. The monk knows from the scriptures that God has proclaimed His love for the humankind and sent down His only son to save them. This realisation is, perhaps, the most shattering of all: how can God love such sinners as this monk, and promise to save them? Such a love cannot simply be conceptualised, and the monk is dumbstruck by it. The monk is not worth it, this he knows in his heart, and yet, in His infinite mercy, God promises to save him. At last, he understands (from the bottom of his heart, so to speak) why God’s grace is incomprehensible and infinite.

It is this realisation that opens the floodgates. His heart is filled with what he was looking for: God’s love. God was always present; the monk went through the purgatory in order to emerge purer of spirit and stronger of faith. He starts recovering from his breakdown, and finding God’s love is crucial to this process. He now ‘discovers’ God’s grace, and finds out why it is called the healing grace of God. Indeed, this experience starts to heal him, and in the reconstitution of his personality, these elements are never far away. Our monk has had a spiritual experience, and he will perhaps end up becoming another example of those touched by God. Just for the sake of convenience, and only for its sake, one could also put it this way: if the monk was a religious person before, after his experience he has become a spiritual person as well. In this process, our monk realises that his earlier ‘failure’ to discover God’s grace was not, strictly speaking, a failure at all. It is only thus, and no other way, could he open himself up to be filled with God’s love.
Perhaps the above picture is a bit too Augustinian, but, as an illustration, it should do. What I want to get at in this picture is the fact that his religion steers the monk in a particular way, sets up a loop, generates a breakdown, and helps him emerge out of it with the means to reconstitute his personality that is more in consonance with itself. Needless to say, the community (that the monk is a part of) plays a significant role both in steering him towards a breakdown as well as help him recover from it. In general terms, the path of the monk is that of ‘conversio’ but he will truly understand its meaning as he starts recovering and assumes his duties. It is a process of turning himself inside out, an asymptotic process, the completion of which is not possible through human hands and human efforts.

From the above hypothesis it does not follow, firstly, that all monks underwent (or undergo) this entire process. No teaching process can make all the students learn the same thing in exactly the same way. A differential learning is an inescapable fact for all teaching processes. This is ever truer for a teaching process that works upon and (trans)forms the experience of its students. Secondly, it does not follow that this ‘spirituality’ is only to be found among the monastic orders. There is no reason why some of the laity cannot undergo a similar process outside the confines of a monastic order. However, it is highly probable that one finds significantly more ‘spiritual experiences’ within the ambit of the monasteries than outside it.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

On the Indic experience, some moons ago, a question had been raised, what do different darshanas mean in the indic context and what does it mean when we say one is true, also how does it differ from the abrahamnic cults, etc.. Balu addresses that question here..

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A Loop in the Indian Traditions

How could we conceptualise such an event (or process) in the Indian culture? I would like to begin with the questions of the middle-aged man, and locate him within the Indian culture.4 Because of his location in the Indian culture, its resources open up to him in his attempts to pursue answers to these questions.

The first and the most important thing about the resources of the Indian traditions is the assurance they give him: what the person seeks, call it eudaimonia (or ‘happiness’) till a more appropriate term is introduced, can be found. Not only has the person heard about the indefinitely many people who have found eudaimonia, but also knows that there exist indefinitely many traditions that claim to teach the path leading to it as well. Perhaps, he even sees people who have sought and found what he himself is looking for. In other words, he knows before he undertakes his quest that his questions have answers and that they can be found. All he has to do is try.

Thus he begins his quest. Very quickly it is obvious to him that what he seeks is not to be found in the outside world, but inside him. A period of ‘introspection’ is initiated and, after a suitable length of time, the person comes to the conclusion that introspection does not help. Not only is such a process equivalent to entering a bottomless pit but his ‘internal life’ is also as varied, rich and complex as the world outside him. The answer, in other words, is not found in the inside either.
Now the loop gets set up: the answer is neither inside nor outside him. But it can only be in one of these two ‘places’. Perhaps, his ‘introspection’ was not done the right way; may be he did not look hard enough; perhaps he was not sufficiently perceptive. Be it as that may, he starts traversing the loop: from the inside to the outside; from the outside to the inside. Each journey through the loop increases the tension: why does he not find it, when others have? What is he missing? What does he not see? His tradition assures him that he too can find the answer. What should have been a fruitful search seems to culminate in a fruitless movement through the loop.

By now, the tension has become unbearable. He does not know what he is looking for, but he knows that ‘it’ is there to be found. Clearly, he is missing the obvious, but the obvious refuses to ‘reveal’ itself to him. Despair sets in, helplessness overpowers him, and he even wants to stop searching because he has exhausted himself. None of this works; his journey on the loop becomes more intensified, fed further by his day dreams of the answer occurring to him in a ‘flash’ or of a kind ‘guru’ guiding him in this process. Knowing that the answer is ‘obvious’, but not finding that which is apparently so ‘obvious’ deepens the loop. There is one predictable end to this loop as well: a total and complete nervous breakdown.

Experiential knowledge and the Indian Traditions

Much like the medieval monk, this middle-aged person too experiences a shattering of his sense of agency, but here all further similarities cease. The reason lies in how this shattering is further experienced and what it consists of. To the middle-aged man, this experience comes as a ‘revelation’: it is as though a cloak is lifted from his eyes and he is looking at the world for the first time. He realises that he was never an agent, even though he always thought he was one. His breakdown provides him with this knowledge, and he recognises it as such because of his tradition. He is now enlightened, and if he pursues this path, he pursues the path of enlightenment. He sought eudaimonia, and he has found it in knowledge.5 Even though many people had repeatedly spoken of the same ‘knowledge’ from his tradition, it did not appear to help him before his quest began. That is because this knowledge is of another type: it is an experiential knowledge that involves his situation.

In other words, this person realises that all his endeavours, projects, dreams, desires and frustrations were never really ‘his’. His unhappiness arose not because these projects were pursued, but because he thought they were ‘his’. He has still to work out many things: whose projects were they, if they were not ‘his’ projects? Why and from where did he have the experience of being an agent? etc. The important point here too is that the Indian tradition steered the middle-aged person in a particular way, helped him set up a loop, and generated a breakdown. The middle-aged man must now emerge out of it, and use his insight to reconstitute his personality in a way that is in consonance with his experience.

Religiosity and Spirituality

Very often, ‘religious experience’ is described in terms of states that are typical of all breakdowns: the ‘feeling’ of insignificance, worthlessness, and such like. What is wrong with these descriptions is that they describe a religious experience as a set of ‘emotions’ or ‘feelings’: resulting from something else (e.g. gazing up to a starry night in a meadow) or as a state of mind (‘epiphany’, for instance). My story of the medieval monk provides a different picture: a religious experience includes the path travelled and the path to traverse. It is a particular way of experiencing (oneself and the world); the particularity of the way cannot be specified without speaking about how one has come to a particular ‘point’ and where one is going thereafter. What we choose as a significant unit of experience in order to elucidate the religious experience is merely a ‘point’ on this path. It does not, however, provide a description of the religious experience itself and, as such, is arbitrary if taken to stand for religious experience as such. One could take any other ‘point’ on this path as well. A spiritual experience is part of such a religious experience.

In other words, there is a distinction between religiosity and spirituality. The latter is the subset of the former: spirituality is a particular kind of religious experience. While one could be religious without being spiritual, it is not possible to be spiritual without being religious. This distinction requires to be more carefully worked out than I can in the confines of this paper. Because nothing in my argument revolves around this distinction, I will leave this problem aside.

However, there is another distinction that is more crucial to this paper: the difference between the Indian traditions on the one hand, and a religion like Christianity on the other. I have exhaustively argued (see my 1994) that if Christianity, Judaism and Islam are religions, then the Indian culture does not have any native religions. That is to say, entities like Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, etc. are not examples of the category ‘religion’ the way the Abrahamic religions are. I am not presupposing these arguments in this paper, but elucidating the differences in yet another way. The goal of Indian traditions is to enable the practitioner to achieve ‘enlightenment’.6 Let us see how this is different from the end result of the Christian Monk.

The experience of enlightenment in the Indian tradition is fundamentally dissimilar to the religious or spiritual experience. The middle-aged person’s insight into the nature of agency breaks radically with the experience of daily life. It tells him that his experience of daily life is something of an illusion and, by doing so, reorganises the way his experience was structured hitherto. But this restructuring does not tell him how he should go further, or what he has to do next. Enlightenment involves a restructuring of the travelled path, but says nothing about the path to traverse. In so far as the middle-aged man still has a future, all he can do from now on is act thoughtfully, and, in this process of thinkingly-doing-something, try to sustain and develop his insight further. What does this ‘thinkingly-doing-something’ mean? It means constantly attending to his insight in all his future endeavours. In the language of Nichomachean Ethics, the middle-aged man has acquired an ability to act thoughtfully and he has acquired it by gaining an insight (knowledge). In other words, our middle-aged man has found eudaimonia.7

Does it mean that similar quests always require a breakdown of the people who undertake such a journey? After all, nervous breakdowns have nothing heroic or romantic about them; they are always sordid and messy affairs. Besides, the outcome is unpredictable. Yet, with respect to Christianity, my answer is a qualified ‘yes’. It is my impression that the Catholic and the Protestant religions are far more inclined to induce a breakdown than the Indian culture. My impression is based on some reasons. Firstly, it is my belief that my description of ‘religious experience’ closely tracks what is called the religious experience in the Christian tradition. Secondly, I believe that the monastic orders appear to have developed methods to induce a spiritual experience. While it is undeniable that a spiritual quest in the Christian religions could be undertaken successfully without a messy experience, it is my guess that one will find significantly more spiritual persons with such an experience than those without it. Thirdly, perhaps more importantly, there is very little satisfactory reflection about spiritual experience within Christianity. Its nature has not been conceptualised enough.8 In a way, such a situation stands to reason: how do you conceptualise either God’s infinite Grace, or His unbounded love? What can you say about the experience of your heart being filled with His love for you and mankind? One may wax eloquent, or live like a saint; neither helps in reflecting about this experience. The ‘mystics’ in the Christian tradition speak a language that only fellow-mystics can understand, and their reflections are not helpful to the non-mystic. Perhaps, that is the reason why spiritual experiences have something mysterious about them; such people appear to have been ‘touched by God’, as it were.

Do the Indian traditions induce nervous breakdowns in individuals on a quest to enlightenment? The answer is in the negative: they do not. While such breakdowns can and do happen, the energy of the Indian traditions have been focussed towards teaching and guiding individuals towards enlightenment without such an experience. Using many different strategies, the Indian traditions mould the experience in such a way that the insight of the middle-aged man can be taught without inducing a nervous breakdown. As we have seen, the middle-aged person’s insight was that he was never an agent. Paraphrasing Aristotle, let me “start with this experience, and discuss about this experience”.

Enlightenment and Plurality in the Indian traditions

One possibility of understanding his experience is to say that he was never an agent (nor could he be one) because there are no agents. This is the answer, for example, of the Buddhist traditions. I say ‘traditions’, because there are several ways of understanding the absence of agency. One could say there is no agency at all and that the experience of agency is totally illusory. (This is the ‘doctrine’ of anatta.) Or one could say that acts give birth to an illusory ‘experience’ of agency. To understand the illusory nature of this experience requires an insight into the relation between the organism and the actions.9 These different accents roughly indicate in the direction of the different traditions in Buddhism.

The second possibility lies in taking the insight in another direction: Who is the ‘he’ who realises that ‘he’ was never an agent and all agencies are illusions? ‘Whose’ illusion was it, and why did ‘he’ succumb to this illusion? When these questions arise, a new ‘interiority’ opens up that is different from and other than the internal mental life. That is to say, the middle-aged man discovers that there is a difference between his persona and ‘himself’. Here too different possibilities open up. Either the person discovers that the ‘he’ cannot be a particular, because particularity is a property of the organism and the persona. In that case, he is heading towards the Advaita traditions. Or he could experience the particularity of the ‘he’ in a different way than the particularity of the persona: in that case, he could head either towards the Jain traditions or towards the Dvaita traditions.

The third possibility is this: the illusion lay in the fact that the middle-aged person thought that he was the agent, while he never was. Actually, some one else is the Agent and this agent is acting through the middle-aged person all the time. The middle-aged person now sees his role as a conduit, and no more than that. Now, we approach the various Bhakti traditions.

Religions and Traditions

Even though I began the paper by putting both the Christian monk and the middle aged person in an analogous situation, their evolution, as we have seen, diverge in fundamental ways. Even the destinations of their journey appear different. I would like to suggest that this is one of the parameters for outlining the differences between entities like Hinduism; Buddhism, Jainism, etc. on the one hand and religions like Christianity on the other. There is a difference in kind between these two sets of entities. What one needs to do in the filed of religious studies, to the extent that one speaks about an agenda for the future, is to not only say more clearly what the differences are but also theorise the implications of these differences. Let me continue to spell out some other differences of import between Indian traditions and religions like Christianity.

III

Earlier on, when I located the middle-aged man in the Indian tradition, I did so only to provide him with the means to set up a breakdown. What would be the nature of his insight if he belonged to a particular tradition? That is, how would he experientially understand his insight if he was, say, a Buddhist? The reason for this question should be obvious. If Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, the Bhakti traditions, etc. were all to be religions, there would be a great difficulty involved in the migration of ‘doctrines’ across religions.10 To what extent would the Buddhist enlightenment be ‘different’ from the advaitic enlightenment? Given what I have said so far, such a differentiation does not make much sense: because they are experiential insights, it is not possible to differentiate them ‘doctrinally’. However, it might be possible to postulate such a divide when one starts providing further explanations for these experiential insights. Therefore, let me take a ‘Buddhist formulation’ of an explanation: attachment to the worldly things and events is at the root of the illusion that we are agents. Let me look at the several ways in which this ‘explanation’ could be recuperated by the different Indian traditions. I will do that by suggesting that the differences between these entities can be re-described in a different way: it makes no reference to the doctrine, but speaks of the activity instead.

Recuperating the Differences

One way encourages an unremitting reflection and analysis of the experience of being an agent. Who acts? What is acting? In what does the attachment consist of, except the feeling of ‘I’ and ‘mine’? What are these two terms? Is the ‘I’ the same as this body, or this organism, or this persona? Does the sense of ‘I’ undergo change and development as the organism or the persona undergoes change and development? If not, what is the relation between the ‘I’ and the other two? This is the path of knowledge (Gyana) that changes the nature of experience by correcting it.

Another way of reaching the same insight is to go deeper into experience. Any attachment requires constancy: of the object or the event one is attached to, and of the ‘agent’ who is attached. The deeper one delves into locating this constancy in experience, the more one discovers discontinuities and inconstancies. One discovers that neither the ‘structures’ of experience nor their ‘constancy’ are given in experience. Rather, they are provided by the descriptions of the said experience. This would be the meditative path to such an explanation. By relocating the subordinate units of the daily experience, the meditative path (Dhyana) restructures it.

The third way of achieving the same insight is to notice that ‘attachment’ is also a particular human emotion. To be unattached requires an altering of this emotion. One can do that using other kinds of human emotions as ‘meta-emotions’ directed towards emotional attachment. Attachment to objects, events, and persons are seen as situations a person is caught up in. Ironical and humorous descriptions of such situations enable the person to achieve a sense of distance from those situations; compassion and sorrow, directed towards the situation of suffering caused by attachment will help loosen the hold of the emotion of attachment. Music, rhythm, cadence, dance and poetry (in combination) work on generating such sets of ‘meta-emotions’. This is the devotional path (Bhakti) to such an insight. This path restructures experience by altering the force of emotions invested in such experiences.

A fourth way of achieving the same insight is to try and severe the relation between action and its outcome. Attachment can also be seen as the experience of relating action to its outcome and claim that one is the fruit of the other. One decouples actions from human intentions, and such a decoupling can be achieved by building reflexivity regarding action and ‘its’ intention. One acts ‘observantly’, observing both the nature of action and ‘its’ alleged intention, only to discover that ‘intentionality’ is no ‘property’ of the ‘agent’ at all. This is the action path (Karma) to the insight. This path transforms the daily experience by severing the relation between human action and human ‘intentionality’.

Consider how a fifth way would approach this insight. Whatever one experiences, there is but one means through which one experiences: through the organism that one’s body is. Consequently, one can also begin to understand what experience is by experimenting with the experience itself. One way of doing that is to begin manipulating experience, begin assembling and reassembling it. One’s body is not only the means through which experience is possible but it is also the instrument to experiment on experience itself. That is, the focus shifts to the body, its sense organs, and such like in order to understand what the ‘insight’ is. This is the Yoga path to further the insight.

Thus one could go on. But my purpose is served. One could differentiate the Indian traditions on the basis of their ‘doctrines’; equally, one could differentiate them according to the activities they encourage; one could do both and graft doctrines or activities onto each other. All these possibilities indicate that the activity of ‘distinguishing’ the Indian traditions from each other is classificatory in nature: why one chooses one way of doing it and not another way depends upon one’s purposes for wanting to classify them. It also suggests that one’s ability to classify depends upon the categories one brings to bear in the study of these traditions. To suggest that ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Hinduism’ are two different religions and that their doctrinal differences are crucial to this divide is not a claim about the structure of the world. Instead, it is a claim about one’s classificatory scheme.11

The above point is important enough for us to linger a bit longer. When scholars come up with stories about the ‘religions’ that exist in India and the differences between them, mostly the belief is that they are making claims about the nature of Indian culture and her traditions. That is what the intellectual world has believed so far as well. This situation is understandable: one knows that one has merely classified the world in one particular way, only when one comes across alternate methods of classifying the same. Until such time, one believes that one’s classification mirrors the structure of the world. That is the case with the students of Indian traditions as well.

If so, it is obvious that the debates about ‘who speaks for…?’ question become more than a bit irrelevant. If what one calls ‘Hinduism’, ‘Buddhism’ and ‘Jainism’, etc. have more to do with one’s classificatory scheme than with the structure of the Indian culture and the nature of her traditions, what exactly does one ask for, when one raises the question, ‘who speaks for Hinduism?’ or Buddhism, or whatever? What would constitute answers to these questions? This situation should further indicate to us that something is seriously wrong with these kinds of queries.

Multiplicity of Teaching Methods

Be it as that may, let us continue. I have provided thumbnail portrayals of (some of) the paths based on a very summary description of a single insight. The only purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate the heuristic productivity of this approach in capturing the diversity within the Indian tradition. That can be highlighted by further showing that this approach captures disputes among these traditions as well. From the description I have given of these paths, it is obvious that each is present in the other: reflection on experience cannot be undertaken without emotion; poetry and music without thought are impossible; one cannot go deeper into experience without thinking about experience; reflexivity without thought and emotion is impossible, etc. In other words, the practitioners from each of these paths are likely to have disputes with the others that their way is superior because it incorporates other paths as well. Such is the case in India. Such disputes are also productive: they generate newer ways through cross-fertilisations. Techniques and strategies migrate and the diversity in the tradition increases. Such an end-result is both necessary and desirable: no particular teaching process can teach every individual in the same way and to the same extent. The presence of a multiplicity of teaching methods can only increase their total efficacy.

What kind of teaching methods am I talking about? Let me answer this question by looking at how the teaching methods have ‘segmented’ the phases in learning. Because a teaching method can teach only if it dovetails with the process of learning, it is of importance to know how they steer the process of learning. Broadly speaking, there are three phases to this learning process: (a) the process of listening or reading; (b) the process of analysis and achieving insight; © the process of contemplation. (Even here, a thumbnail sketch will have to do.)

The first phase appears quite straightforward. To the questions the middle-aged man raises, different traditions provide different answers. One listens to or reads these answers, reflects about them so that one grasps the meaning of what is heard or read.

The second phase involves reflection and analysis of what is understood. It is also the process of making use of the analytical and cognitive skills one has learnt in order to draw inferences, formulate hypothetical answers, and test them out. This phase could also be called ‘internalisation’ of answers.

The subsequent phase is one of contemplation. One contemplates the insight achieved and observes its impact on experience. To do so, one has to learn new skills other than the cognitive skills one used in the previous phase. These new skills are achieved only by contemplating the internalised answer. There is nothing ‘circular’ about this: one can ‘skilfully’ do something only by acquiring the said skill; the only way of acquiring that skill is by doing it.

Here too, one could say that the first two phases are really unnecessary. In fact, one might even find them counter-productive because in the third phase one has to think differently than in the previous two phases. As a result, one can develop a teaching process that further sub divides the third phase into successive stages and concentrate on teaching that. Zen Buddhists do precisely that; together with their meditative techniques, their koans are the means of teaching the ability to think without thinking about.

The refinements in these phases and the development of further techniques to successfully negotiate such phases; the inevitable migration and cross-fertilisation of strategies; these add to the diversity in an already enriched landscape. By now it must also be clear that there is no need for any kind of a loop or breakdown. What is required is merely the presence of these teaching traditions in the culture.
It requires noting that I have continuously spoken of migration and cross-fertilisation. That means to say that the strategies, techniques, and insights can migrate across different traditions and different paths. The Buddhist and the Dvaita are examples of different traditions; they do have their ‘own’ identities. There is a divide between them too, but it is not a doctrinal divide. We need to conceptualise the difference between traditions in a different way than we do that with respect to philosophies or religions. The Buddhist insight about desire being at the root of sorrow is as much Upanishadic as it is Buddhist. It is an experiential insight not confined to specific traditions. Does that mean that such insights are true descriptions of the world, and nomenclatures like ‘Buddhist’, ‘Advaitic’ etc. simply identify the origin of these truths? Einstein’s theory of relativity merely tells us that he formulated it in the first place. Is an analogous claim being advanced here? Not quite. I want to put across the claim that these insights are primarily guides to action and they are that in a particular way. These insights are rooted in experience and help you in its transformation. Even though such insights do have a descriptive role, they are not (in any straightforward sense) descriptions of the world. Let us see whether it is possible to make sense of this qualified claim.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

This paper was uploaded on Balu's yahoogroup. Due to copyright issues I cant copy paste the whole paper but if somebody is interested i can email the paper.