Rhythm of Being, Design of Life1

Mihir Shah2

Dear Friends,I am here to speak to you today as a fellow student of design. I have studied design not in a Design School but in what we call the “living laboratories of learning” in remote rural central tribal India, where my colleagues and I have lived and worked over the last 3 decades. Our relocating there, from India’s metros where we were brought up, was a reflection of our anger at what we saw around us – a system that bred profound injustices and discrimination against the weak and powerless. It is the story of our attempt to craft a creative response and build a meaningful alternative for all of us, living and working with those who had been discarded by the mainstream.

We have been students of design in multiple arenas: designing watershed structures in catchment areas of rivers, so as to ensure water security; constructing green buildings woven into the contours of nature, economising on cement and steel, while lowering the carbon footprint; practicing non-chemical agriculture, respecting the cycles of life, from the water cycle to the so-called pests and the smallest inhabitants of the soil; designing garments, home linen and accessories stitched by women who have never held a pair of scissors in their lives; crafting people’s institutions, under the leadership of tribal women, so that they could become instruments in the empowerment of the weakest, while at the same time bringing institutions of the state to account; drafting national programs and policies, to make sure that the mistakes of the past were corrected and a new kind of planning for and by the people became possible; and designing courses, curricula and training material for students from universities to the grass-roots for social mobilisers, barefoot engineers and para-hydrogeologists, across the length and breadth of the country.

The word “I” is used here to refer to the large collective that really constitutes who I am, the collective which has been striving to do all of this, as part of the work of Samaj Pragati Sahayog (SPS)3 in the most deprived regions of India. All that I know today owes to years of living and working together, as part of this community. As Gilles Deleuze would say, “Who speaks and acts? It is always a multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts. All of us are ‘groupuscules’”.4 What I present today, therefore, is the distillation of the experience and learnings of these 3 decades, as propositions and suggestions that I would invite you to verify experimentally and experientially in your own lives.

As students of design, the question that we have been faced with is the question I want to pose to you today and I will propose some answers, based on where this exploration has led so far: Can we speak of a design of life or what Raimon Panikkar5 has called the “rhythm of being”6? If yes, what are the features that characterise such a design? And much more importantly, as designers can we afford to ignore the key elements of this design? Do we not need to take cognizance of and be fully mindful of these elements in the solutions we propose to our clients? Could it be that acting in complete unawareness of this design of life, we propose design solutions that end up making the problem even worse than it originally was? I will argue that this has, indeed, been the case historically in so much of human endeavour, especially in the 20th century.

Inter-connectedness, Diversity and UncertaintyThe three key elements of the design of life, as I have understood it, are inter-connectedness, diversity and uncertainty. This is evident whether we look at nature or at society.

Most of my work has had to with water and nothing illustrates inter-connectedness and diversity more vividly than water. India’s most important water resource is groundwater. Today we face a water crisis, almost entirely engendered by the way we have gone about managing, or rather mismanaging, our groundwater. Groundwater is a shared, common pool resource. It is found in underground reservoirs called aquifers. These aquifers do not recognise legal boundaries of land ownership. Thus, the water in an aquifer belongs strictly to all those who have land over it. It needs, therefore, to be shared, managed collectively. If I over-extract groundwater below my land, I directly impact the access

1 Srishti Commencement Lecture 2017. I am truly grateful for the inputs provided by Satya Ambasta, Sanchita Bakshi, Nivedita Banerji, Rita Banerji, J. Cathrine, Raghav Chakravarthy, Vinay Dabral, Arshima Dost, Oran Jain, Rochi Khemka, Asmi Khushi and PS Vijay Shankar that went into the making of this lecture

2 Secretary, Samaj Pragati Sahayog (mihirbhai25@gmail.com) 3 samprag.org4 ‘Intellectuals and Power: A conversation between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’ libcom.org/library/intellectuals-power-a-conversation-

between-michel-foucault-and-gilles-deleuze, 19725 Raimon Panikkar was a Spanish-Indian Roman Catholic priest, a great proponent of what he called “intra-religious dialogue”, who once said “I left

Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist without ever having ceased to be Christian”6 Raimon Panikkar (2010): The Rhythm of Being, The Gifford Lectures, Orbis Books, New York

to this groundwater for those who share the aquifer with me. And since nearly two-thirds of India is underlain by “hard rock” formations, drilling deep for water can create a serious crisis of sustainability in these regions, where the rate of natural recharge is very low. Unfortunately, both our legal and economic system are designed to incentivise atomistic over-exploitation of groundwater to such an extent that the resource itself has been destroyed, both through a decline in levels, as also in its quality. Today water tables have fallen precipitously and there is arsenic, fluoride, mercury, even uranium in our groundwater. This is a direct consequence of not recognising the inter-connectedness and diversity that characterises the nature of this most precious resource.

We have paid an even worse price for ignoring the inter-connectedness of groundwater with surface water. You know what has happened as a result? All our peninsular rivers have begun to dry up. Very few people realise that the flow of water in these rivers after the monsoon comes from groundwater. Once we over-extract groundwater, we dry up this vital source of water for peninsular rivers after the monsoon. Something similar happens when we destroy the underground springs, which feed our Himalayan rivers.

You would all have heard of the humongous plan to inter-link India’s Himalayan rivers with our Peninsular rivers for inter-basin transfer of water, estimated to cost Rs. 11 lakh crore. Not only does this plan have unimaginable ecological and energy costs, it has also been argued out that the scheme could have a disastrous impact on the very integrity of the monsoon cycle. The presence of a low salinity layer of water with low density is a reason for maintenance of high sea-surface temperatures (greater than 28 degrees C) in the Bay of Bengal, which contributes to low-pressure areas and the intensification of monsoon activity. Rainfall over much of the sub-continent is controlled by this layer of low salinity water, which arises because the fresh water of India’s rivers flows into the sea. A disruption in these flows, and as a result, in this low salinity layer, could have serious long-term consequences for climate and rainfall in the subcontinent, endangering the livelihoods of a vast population. Once again not recognising how each element in the monsoon cycle is deeply inter-connected with the other, could be a disastrous mistake.

Inter-connectedness is also palpable when we study the economy and society. Perhaps the greatest economist of the 20th century was John Maynard Keynes. The very survival of capitalism is at times, in my view not entirely incorrectly, seen as owing to the life and work of Keynes, especially his seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. A key element of his work was to explain how the interests of the capitalist class were intimately bound up with that of the workers, through his concept of the marginal propensity to consume and the multiplier. Hence, when there is widespread unemployment, a government would be well-advised to create purchasing power in the hands of the workers so that they would have the capacity to buy what the capitalists produce, enabling them to earn profits and carry on the process of capitalist accumulation, thereby generating employment in turn, and so on in a virtuous cycle of inter-dependence. This is what explains the so-called Golden Age of capitalism from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, after which it has been lurching from crisis to crisis, one worse than the other. And today, no less than the very bastion of free market fundamentalism, the International Monetary Fund, argues that the sharp increase in inequality in recent decades has played a key role in slowing down the rate of growth of the economy. Policies aimed at taxing the rich and supporting the poor, thereby reducing inequality, recognising the inter-dependence of the destinies of rich and poor, are what is necessary today7. Not entirely coincidentally, this has also been a period where natural systems on the planet are facing the gravest threat to their very survival, in this age of the Anthropocene, of man-made climate change8. Thus, inter-dependence can be seen wherever we care to look -- nature, economy, society.

Clearly then, a recognition of inter-connectedness must inform the design of our social and economic policies, not doing which will only continue to perpetuate the disasters and violence we see all around us. Many African nations, therefore, espouse a commitment to Ubuntu as a governing principle:

“In South Africa, Ubuntu9 is our way of making sense of the world. The word literally means “humanity”. It is the philosophy and belief that a person is only a person through other people. Our humanity is bound up in one another, and any tear in the fabric of connection between us must be repaired for us all to made whole. This interconnectedness is the very root of who we are”10

India is a land of enormous diversity -- in rainfall received, in soil and rock type, in slope and contour, in animal forms, in kinds of vegetation, crop or forest -- and each of these and each combination of these, has different implications for the possibilities of striking, harvesting and storing water, as also the possible forms of livelihood (agriculture or pastoralism, nature of crops that can be sustained, kind of livestock to be raised etc). Many of these variations occur even within a small micro-watershed. And this “natural” diversity has a complex interplay with the socio-cultural 7 Era Dabla-Norris et al (2015): Causes and Consequences of Income Inequality: A Global Perspective, International Monetary Fund8 To understand the situation better, you may like to watch Beyond the Anthropocene, a talk by one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Johan

Rockström (www.stockholmresilience.org/ research/ research-news /2017-02-16-wef-2017-beyond-the-anthropocene.html)9 “’A person is a person through other people’ strikes an affirmation of one’s humanity through recognition of an ‘other’ in his or her uniqueness

and difference. It is a demand for a creative intersubjective formation in which the ‘other’ becomes a mirror (but only a mirror) for my subjectivity. This idealism suggests to us that humanity is not embedded in my person solely as an individual; my humanity is co-substantively bestowed upon the other and me. Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. We create each other and need to sustain this otherness creation. And if we belong to each other, we participate in our creations: we are because you are, and since you are, definitely I am. The ‘I am’ is not a rigid subject, but a dynamic self-constitution dependent on this otherness creation of relation and distance” (Eze, M. O. (2010): Intellectual History in Contemporary South Africa, pp. 190–191)

10 Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Revd Mpho Tutu (2014): The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Harper Collins

tapestry of these regions. That includes values regarding life-goals, priorities (e.g. security in view of pervasive, inherent uncertainty), understanding of and relationship with natural forces and resources. Which has evolved over centuries, if not millennia.

This diversity poses a unique design challenge to the development planner, the scientist, the social activist. Those who seek to intervene in any context, but especially in one with such potential fragility, cannot do so on the basis of a notion of “mastery” over nature and society. With mastery and control, comes the resort to simple tech-fixes -- monocultural, unilinear, indiscriminate. Irrespective of the specific challenges of each situation, an unthinking, insensitive bureaucracy seeks to impose its own pet “solution”: tubewells, eucalyptus, soyabean, Holstein Friesian. Appropriateness does not matter. Sustainability is of no concern. Dialogue is not attempted. History is given a go by. With disastrous consequences.

Design solutions must, therefore, take into account this diversity if they are to be effective. By contrast today, we see a great emphasis on the imposition of sameness, as well as dogmatic certitudes. Keynes was somewhat more than an economist and also helped us understand the third element of the design of life I mentioned a few minutes ago: uncertainty. As Keynes says:

“. . . our knowledge of the future is fluctuating, vague and uncertain. . . By ‘uncertain’ knowledge, let me explain, I do not mean merely to distinguish what is known for certain from what is only probable. The game of roulette is not subject, in this sense, to uncertainty. Or, again, the expectation of life is only slightly uncertain. Even the weather is only moderately uncertain. The sense in which I am using the term is that in which the prospect of a European war is uncertain, or the price of copper and the rate of interest twenty years hence, or the obsolescence of a new invention, or the position of private wealth-owners in the social system in 1970. About these matters there is no scientific basis on which to form any calculable probability whatever. We simply do not know.”11

In my essay, The Power of Uncertainty12, I attempt to establish the inescapable presence of what may be termed irreducible uncertainty in our knowledge of the world, teasing out the many sources and ramifications of this uncertainty for social and economic policy, and transformative action, in general. As design students I would like you to reflect carefully on whether the solutions you propose to the multiple problems you are confronted with, take into account these three elements of inter-connectedness, diversity and uncertainty. At SPS, this is what we have learnt through three decades of work on the ground. Whether this be in our attempt to weave watershed interventions into the contours of nature, or to build people’s institutions in a manner that seeks to develop partnerships with all relevant stakeholders in the development space. My wager is that recognising the design of life will make you much better designers, in whichever sphere of application you may be engaged in.

Inter-connectedness, Diversity and Uncertainty in the Spiritual TraditionsToday I want to build upon this theme by taking it much further, bringing out the insights of multiple spiritual traditions on the questions of inter-connectedness, diversity and uncertainty and the guidance they provide us students of design. Here we get glimmers of the rhythm of being and design of life, which have profound implications for the most fundamental questions relating to the quest for freedom and joy in our lives.

As is well-known, the spiritual tradition of the Buddha proposes a vision of a deeply inter-connected cosmos, where “you are, therefore, I am”. Buddhism, like many other spiritual traditions, teaches that all life is inter-related. “All things, mutually supportive and related, form a living cosmos, a single living whole. By engaging ourselves with others, our identity is developed, established and enhanced.”13 We then understand that it is impossible to build our own happiness on the unhappiness of others. We also see that by ourselves we are incomplete and we need others and partnerships with them to bring true joy into this world.

This is the Buddhist teaching of Pratitya Samutpada14. In the words of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh,

“this is sometimes called the teaching of cause and effect, but that can be misleading, because we usually think of cause and effect as separate entities, with cause always preceding effect, and one cause leading to one effect. According to the teaching of Interdependent Co-Arising, cause and effect co-arise (samutpada) and everything is a result of multiple causes and conditions... In the sutras, this image is given: “Three cut reeds can stand only by leaning on one another. If you take one away, the other two will fall.” For a table to exist, we need wood, a carpenter, time, 11 J.M. Keynes (1937): “The General Theory of Employment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, pp. 213–21412 Mihir Shah (2010): ‘The Power of Uncertainty: Reflections on the Nature of Transformational Initiatives’, Economic and Political Weekly, June 1913 www.sgi.org/about-us/buddhism-in-daily-life/interconnectedness.html14 “The word pratitya has three different meanings–meeting, relying, and depending–but all three, in terms of their basic import, mean dependence.

Samutpada means arising. Hence, the meaning of pratitya samutpada is that which arises in dependence upon conditions” (Dalai Lama, 1992: The Meaning of Life, translated and edited by Jeffrey Hopkins, Wisdom). In the Theravada-tradition, Pratitya samutpada implies that “several causes give rise to several results: a single cause does not give rise to either a single result or several results; nor do several causes give rise to just one result; but rather several causes give rise to several results.”

skillfulness, and many other causes. And each of these causes needs other causes to be. The wood needs the forest, the sunshine, the rain, and so on. The carpenter needs his parents, breakfast, fresh air, and so on. And each of those things, in turn, has to be brought about by other causes and conditions. If we continue to look in this way, we’ll see that nothing has been left out. Everything in the cosmos has come together to bring us this table. Looking deeply at the sunshine, the leaves of the tree, and the clouds, we can see the table. The one can be seen in the all, and the all can be seen in the one. One cause is never enough to bring about an effect. A cause must, at the same time, be an effect, and every effect must also be the cause of something else. Cause and effect inter-are. The idea of first and only cause, something that does not itself need a cause, cannot be applied”15

As the 13th century Japanese Buddhist monk Nichiren wrote, “If you light a lamp for another, your own way will be lit.” This is also the core teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, exemplified in the concept of yajña. As the Gita says,

III.9 ;KkFkkZr~ de.kZ% vU;= yksdks;e~ deZcU/ku% A

rnFkZ deZ dkSUrs; eqDrlax% lekpj AAAll actions other than those done in a spirit of giving, end up becoming a source of unfreedom in this world. Therefore, O Arjuna, act in this way, for the sake of giving, with equanimity, without desperation or anxiety about outcomes

III.14 vUukr~ HkofUr Hkwrkfu itZU;kr~ vUulaHko% A

;Kkr~ Hkofr iTkZU;ks ;K% deZleqn~Hko% AA

III.15 deZ czãksnHkoa fof) czãk{kjleqn~Hkoa A

rLekr~ loZxra~ czã fuR;a ;Ks izfrf”Bre~ AA

III.16 ,oa izofrZra pdz% ukuqorZ;rhg ;% A

v?kk;q% bfUnz;kjkeks eks?ka ikFkZ l thofr AA He, who does not, in this world, act in alignment with this cyclical flow of interdependence, delighting only in selfish pleasure, lives in vain

The cosmic order is a wheel, a cycle whose dynamic equilibrium must be sustained. Through the imaging of sacrifice we are called upon do all our work, small or big, dedicated to the preservation of this moral ecology, in gratitude towards all that lives. Moral ecology comprehends all the smaller notions of social and ecological balance put forward from time to time and also provides them with an altogether more profound ethical foundation. Without which they risk running aground somewhere or the other – as the repeated historical experience of social reform, religious and revolutionary movements shows.

Thus, it is suggested that neither joy nor freedom can be attained without recognising the fundamental inter-connectedness that characterises the design of life. The main reason for this is that not recognising inter-dependence means acting from the “separate self” or the “false self” or the ego, as we sometimes call it. Once we do that, as the present age of the “virtue of selfishness,”16 strongly urges us to do, we get caught in an endless vortex of unfreedom and sorrow. In the words of the Gita,

III.27 izd`rs% fdz;ek.kkfu xq.kS% dekZf.k loZ’k% A

vgadkj foew<kRek drkZ vga bfr eU;rs AA

III.28 rRofoÙkq egkokgks xq.kdeZfoHkkx;ks% A

xq.kk xq.ks”kq orZUr bfr eRok u lTtrs AAAll actions everywhere are performed by the dispositions (gunas, energies, tendencies) of Prakriti (Nature). The deluded egoistic person thinks “I am the doer”

But she who knows the truth about the respective spheres of the gunas and their actions, understanding that it is the gunas (as sense-organs), which move (act) among the gunas (as sense-objects), does not get attached.

15 Thich Nhat Hanh (1999): The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching, Three River Press16 Ayn Rand and Nathaniel Branden (1964): The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, New American Library, New York

Such a person understands the inter-dependent nature of the world. What flows from this recognition is an attitude of humility and an acknowledgment of the need to build genuine, mutually respectful dialogue, based on deep listening, across multiple forms of diversity, in a true spirit of partnership. Whatever design solutions we are to propose, they will be much more powerful and effective, if they are arrived at through a robust process of this kind. This has been the experience of the three decades of work my colleagues and I have done in the remote tribal areas of the country, patiently building dialogue across sharp, at times, violent differences that would, from time to time, threaten to explode beyond repair. Each time we learnt, each instance taught us the art of building bridges where conflicts seemed irreparable.

We must also realise that when we do not recognise this fundamental design of life, we make our happiness dependent on what we believe to be the successful outcome of our actions. We have an overbearing sense of determining agency in all that we do. That arrogance confines us in a prison of our own expectations, anxieties and disappointments. Since we cannot be fundamentally certain about the outcomes of our actions, about the fulfillment of our desires, this uncertainty fills us with fear and trepidation about the future. And a sense of frustration and anger through failure to attain our goals. There is also inevitably so much injury, hurt and suffering in every life. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu and his daughter Revd Mpho Tutu say

“Because we are human, some of our interactions will go wrong, and then we will hurt or be hurt, or both. It is the nature of being human, and it is unavoidable.”17

How then can we develop the capacity to be able to act in recognition of inter-connectedness, diversity and uncertainty? Where do we get the strength to overcome the hurt caused to us, the deep resentments we feel? Where do we gain composure, faced with the enormity of our guilt for the wrongs we have done? Where do we get the strength to cope with the apparently insuperable vicissitudes of life? And feel able to take on the risks necessarily involved in a life devoted to finding innovative solutions to the most intractable problems facing society?

Joy and Freedom: A Possible Way Forward?The spiritual traditions propose a series of hypotheses, based upon which they derive a possible way forward. This is a description of the design of life, the rhythm of being, as they see it. And on that basis a path is suggested that we can experiment with, through our own life experience. This is what I am here to describe to you and to suggest, you take the plunge! Do bear in mind, and I would be completely failing in my duty to convey the spirit of what is being proposed, if this were not to be carefully understood: I am not here proposing a series of moral diktats or commandments. This is actually more of a description of what will tend to become our natural state of being if we were to follow the proposed path. These attributes, these ways of being in the world, will spring spontaneously out from within us, the more we adopt the practices suggested. It is somewhat like tuning a musical instrument, to enable melodious harmonies to flow. The relationship that we build with our “true self” will enable us to be better cognizant of the design of life and help us to discover more appropriate design solutions for the problems we are confronted with.

The Yogasutras of Patanjali provide us four inter-related threads or keys (sutras) for our living in this world, in harmony with its rhythm: maîtri (loving kindness for all), karuna (compassion towards those who suffer), mudita (joy in the success of others) and upeksha (not getting hurt by the unkindness of others)18. But how do we acquire the capacity to be able to be like this?

The proposed path is simple. But it does demand a radical shift away from our current way of living, surrounded as it is by the cacophony of noise. This does not mean abandoning the world; rather, it calls for a new way of living within it. As one of the greatest teachers of Yoga in the 20th century, Swami Satyananda Saraswati says, following the Yogic path “you will experience absolute peace even in the middle of the market; otherwise you will never attain peace even in a remote corner of the mountains”.19

Let me put forward a set of interconnected propositions in an attempt to describe the path and its potency, for you to test experimentally, through your own experience and then to decide whether to accept or reject the path. My only request: be open, don’t reject it without giving it a try! Please recognise that the intransigence of atheism can sometimes be as virulent as the obduracy of religious fanaticism.

1. The natural tendency of the human mind is to seek joy

2. Thus, the mind travels far and wide in the world in pursuit of this seeking

3. But the joys of this world, this dukhaalayam ashaashvatam,20 as the Gita calls it, are necessarily transient and ephemeral, and result in much suffering

17 Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Revd Mpho Tutu (2014): The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Harper Collins18 Yogasturas of Patanjali Chapter 1, Verse 3319 http://www.yogamag.net/archives/2007/emay07/man.shtml. As Richard Rohr says, “Christ is found as much in the middle of civilization as in

quiet retreats and hermitages” Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation June 25, 201720 a home of transience and sorrow

4. The good news is that the natural state of the mind is also, you guessed it, joy!

5. So all we need to do is to allow this natural state to express itself

6. This requires letting the noise drop away

7. The noise is not just that of the external world; the more troublesome noise is of the human mind itself, with its endless maze of thoughts, from which there seems no escape

8. Allowing this noise to die a natural death, moving into silence, enables us to connect, re-connect with Being, the Unmanifest Real, which is of the quality of sat-chit-ananda (True-Bliss-Consciousness)

9. It enables us to tune our “receivers” to be able to receive what is already and always present and available to us but which we cannot experience because we are not tuned into it21. It is essentially about changing the “software” that has got coded into our brains, which makes our responses to stimuli, part of a mechanical and pre-determined pattern, thanks to our “conditioning” since childhood (as Jiddu Krishnamurti would call it).

10. 1This state of silence does not constitute a moving away from the world; rather it provides us the strength, the necessary set of capacities, to be in the world

11. This moving into silence is the necessary preparation that transforms our relationship with the world

12. It does not separate us from the world; rather it makes us realise in a radically more profound way, the quality of inter-connectedness that characterises everything in the world.

13. And the strength derived from the joy we experience through this practice of silence, gives us the wherewithal to deal, in a much more wholesome way, with uncertainty, which is an integral element of the design of life

14. This is a reunion, making us recognise the roots of the word religion in the Latin religare and religio, meaning “union” or the word yoga, again meaning “union” in Sanskrit

15. This reunion makes us much better apprehend the truly inter-connected nature of everything in the world and enables us to, therefore, discard our “separate self”

16. It is this clinging to a separate self, which is responsible for our relationships in the world becoming a source of suffering22

17. Once our relationships emerge not from this “false self” but from the “real self”, everything is potentially transformed. Because now instead of sorrow, the deeper we are established in Being, in true-bliss-consciousness, it is joy that begins to rule our life

18. Both because we are more deeply connected to true-bliss-consciousness but also because our relationship to the joys of the world is now completely transformed. Instead of being sources of sorrow, they too give us joy because now we experience them not with the anxiety of losing them but with a sense of newly found freedom and lightness, in full recognition and acceptance of their transient character.

As the Gita says

VI.5 m)jsr~ vkReuk vkRekua u vkRekua volkn;sr~ A

vkReSo fg vkReuks cU/kq% vkReSo fjiq% vkReu% AAThe real self is your friend, the false self (ego), your enemy. Let the self be a source of your upliftment, not your downfall

Perhaps the greatest living exponent of the distinction between the false self and the true self is the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr, a truly inspiring teacher, whose books and talks I would highly recommend to each and every one of you.23 As Rohr says:

“Your False Self, which we might also call your “small self,” is your launching pad: your body image, your job, your education, your clothes, your money, your car, your sexual identity, your success, and so on. These are the trappings of ego that we all use to get us through an ordinary day. They are a nice enough platform to stand on, but they are largely a projection of our self-image and our attachment to it. We split ourselves from other selves and try to live apart, superior and separate.

When you are able to move beyond your False Self—at the right time and in the right way—it will feel precisely as if

21 “Prayer is primarily about changing our own mind so that things like infinity, mystery, and forgiveness can resound within us” (Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation, June 30, 2017)

22 “Whenever we’re led out of normalcy into sacred, open space, it’s going to feel like suffering, because it is letting go of what we’re used to. But part of us has to die if we are ever to grow larger. The false self is small and self-serving. It doesn’t know the full picture, but it thinks it does. In the great spiritual traditions, the wounds to our ego are our teachers and are to be welcomed.” Richard Rohr’s Daily Contemplation, July 14, 2017

23 I would especially recommend finding, in your undoubtedly busy life, the 90 minutes needed to watch Rohr’s talk Contemplative Prayer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPb3Z51gLcY)

you have lost nothing. In fact, it will feel like freedom and liberation. When you are connected to the Whole, you no longer need to protect or defend the mere part. You are now connected to something inexhaustible.”24

As Stephen Levine, the poet and spiritual teacher, remarks: “If you made a list of everything you own, everything you think of as you, everything you prefer, that list would be the distance between you and the living truth”.25 For Rohr, this living truth is the true self.

In our time, in the urban world, when we are in distress, the most frequent resort is to the psychoanalyst. In universities, this seems to owe to the enormous stresses of student life. But sadly what most therapists end up doing is to provide coping mechanisms for your specific false self. As Rohr says, “There is a comfortable contract between personal egos and an entire egoic culture” (ibid) and therapy essentially enables us to live up to the demands of and the standards set by this egoic culture. I am not suggesting you stop seeing the therapist. Each situation is different and the needs of each person are unique. No one can say from the outside exactly what they need to do. All I am suggesting is that, under good guidance, it may not be a bad idea to consider exploring any one of the multiple spiritual paths, readily available to us. And even among therapists to seek out those who are attempting to provide therapy aligned to these deeper sources, who have the requisite humility not to presume to know the answers to all situations.

The Practice of SilenceThe Vedic Rishis of ancient India suggested a different path in response to the inevitable sorrows of living in the world. They posited that cultivating silence would potentially allow the rhythm of Being to express itself and allow us to contact the real or higher self. It would bring us in contact with Being, the unmanifested Reality of all that exists. The nature of Being is true-bliss-consciousness. As Maharishi Mahesh Yogi explains, in touch with Being, we experience an unimaginable freedom that enables us to “infuse the power of Being into the field of karma, leaving the mind free from the bondage of karma, for the mind is then established in eternal bliss consciousness”26

The Trappist monk, who could be said to have led the revival of Christian mysticism in the mid-20th century, Thomas Merton suggests that “a world of propaganda, of endless argument, vituperation, criticism, or simply of chatter, is a world without anything to live for”27. In the words of Robert Cardinal Sarah:

“try to be Mary before you can be Martha . . .The life of silence must be able to precede the active life. The silence of everyday life is an indispensible condition for living with others. Without the capacity for silence, man is incapable of hearing, loving and understanding the people around him . . . Silence and peace have one and the same heartbeat. . . The greatest things are accomplished in silence—not in the clamor and display of superficial eventfulness, but in the deep clarity of inner vision; in the almost imperceptible start of decision, in quiet overcoming and hidden sacrifice. The wonders of creation are silent, and we can admire them only in silence. Art, too, is the fruit of silence. How else but in silence can we contemplate a painting or a sculpture, the beauty of a color and the correctness of a form? Great music is listened to in silence. Wonder, admiration, and silence function in tandem.”28

Richard Rohr expresses this through reference to the Archimedean point:

“Archimedes noticed that if a lever was balanced in the correct place, on the correct fulcrum, it could move proportionally much greater weight than the force applied. Archimedes imagined a fixed point, the fulcrum, in space. The fixed point is our place to stand. It is a contemplative stance: steady, centered, poised, and rooted. To be contemplative, we have to have a slight distance from the world—we have to allow time for withdrawal from business as usual, for meditation. However, in order for this not to become escapism, we have to remain quite close to the world at the same time, loving it, feeling its pain and its joy as our pain and our joy. So the fulcrum, that balancing point, must be in the real world. In order to have the capacity to “move the world,” we ironically need some distancing and detachment from the diversionary nature and delusions of mass culture and false self.”29

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks of the Buddhist idea of “thundering silence”:

“When we release our ideas, thoughts, and concepts, we make space for our true mind. Our true mind is silent of all

24 Richard Rohr (2013): Immortal Diamond: The Search for our True Self. As Rohr said in his Daily Meditation of June 19, 2017, “we are already connected to everything—inherently, objectively, metaphysically, ontologically, and theologically. This gives us a foundation for understanding the sacredness of everything and our connection with everything.”

25 Stephen Levine (1982): Who Dies? An Investigation of Conscious Living and Conscious Dying, Doubleday, New York26 Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (1963): Science of Being and the Art of Living27 Thomas Merton (1953): The Sign of Jonas, Harcourt, San Diego28 Robert Cardinal Sarah (2017): The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Ignatius Press, San Francisco. Mary represents the life of

contemplation, Martha of worldly action. The two do not contradict, but complement each other, one being the pre-requisite for the other29 Richard Rohr’s Daily Meditation July 3, 2017. Please do note that this must not be confused with the way the early John Rawls uses the term

Archimedean point, which is quite clearly open to legitimate critique

words and all notions, and is so much vaster than limited mental constructs. Only when the ocean is calm and quiet can we see the moon reflected in it.

Suppose you sit outside and pay attention to the sunshine, the beautiful trees, the grass, and the little flowers that are springing up everywhere. If you relax on the grass and breathe quietly, you can hear the sound of the birds, the music of the wind playing in the trees. There is peace and joy in your listening, and your silence is an empowered silence. That kind of silence is dynamic and constructive. It’s not the kind of silence that represses you.

In Buddhism we call this kind of silence thundering silence. It’s very eloquent, and full of energy. Often we have retreats where thousands of people practice mindful breathing in and out silently together. If you have been part of something like this, you know how powerful a freely shared silence can be. . . noble silence promotes understanding and compassion”30

Silence is also strongly commended in Islam in order to build the inner strength required to deal with the provocations of the world. Explaining the significance of the holy month of Ramadan, the great Islamic scholar Hamza Yusuf speaks of sakina (mentioned in 6 verses of the Holy Quran), an indwelling presence that provides stillness, peace, balance, composure and equipoise, the blessing of God that enables restraint in the face of provocation. To be able to experience this gift requires silence, prayer and fasting. Despite the massive provocations and violence of life today, this sakina gives us the capacity to respond with restraint and mindfulness, to move beyond pre-programmed patterns of behaviour, to liberate ourselves from the rule of the reflexes, to walk gently on this earth.31 To be able to live in this world, characterised by so much violence, with fortitude, forbearance and forgiving, we need the daily practice of silence, also called meditation or prayer.

Bishop Malusi Mpumlwana suffered excruciating torture at the hands of the South African police after he was arrested as an anti-apartheid activist. In the midst of the torture, he had an astonishing insight: “These are God’s children and they are losing their humanity. We have to help them recover it.” As the Tutus say:

“It is a remarkable feat to be able to see past the inhumanity of the behavior and recognize the humanity of the person committing the atrocious acts. This is not weakness. This is heroic strength, the noblest strength of the human spirit. . . Forgiveness is the way we set those interactions right. It is the way we mend tears in the social fabric. It is the way we stop our human community from unraveling.”32

The Irish poet and exponent of Celtic spirituality, John O’Donohue provides perhaps the most beautiful expression of what we are trying to say here:

“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening, our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing.

It would be infinitely lonely to live in a world without blessing. The word blessing evokes a sense of warmth and protection; it suggests that no life is alone or unreachable. Each life is clothed in raiment of spirit that secretly links it to everything else. Though suffering and chaos befall us, they can never quench that inner light of providence. . . .

In the parched deserts of post-modernity, a blessing can be like the discovering of a fresh well. . . It is ironic that so often we continue to live like paupers though our inheritance of spirit is so vast. The quiet eternal that dwells in our souls is silent and subtle; in the activity of blessing it emerges to embrace and nurture us. Let us begin to learn how to bless one another. Whenever you give a blessing, a blessing returns to enfold you.”33

Restraint as a Condition for FreedomRecognition of inter-dependence also signals to us the paradoxical relationship between restraint and freedom. Especially in a society with multiple axes of power, around which severely exploitative relationships are formed, only restraints on the freedom of the powerful can guarantee the freedom of the oppressed. Thus, the freedom of men, the rich, the “upper” castes and those in the mainstream, needs to be kept in check, if we are to ensure the well-being of women, the poor, the Dalits and the marginalized, such as the Adivasis. Restraint or maryaada is a key spiritual precept. It is so fundamental that one could say without restraint, life itself would become impossible. We can already see this in the imminent destruction of the planet, thanks to the unsustainable use of water and energy, fuelled by endless 30 Thich Nhat Hanh (2015): The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise, HarperOne, New York31 “with the dignity of a lion”, as Hamza Yusuf (2011) puts it in Ramadan Advice, Fasting & Taqwa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5s-VKHqrHo)32 Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Revd Mpho Tutu (2014): The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World, Harper Collins33 John O’Donohue (2007): Benedictus: A Book of Blessings, Transworld Ireland

consumerist greed. But, of course, we must hasten to add, that as with many other religious precepts, the invocation of restraint has historically been done invariably by those already in the seat of power, in order to perpetuate the exploitation of the oppressed. Thus, great care (restraint!) needs to be exercised in the advocacy of restraint as a spiritual principle. In my lectures on the Political Economy of India’s Development at Ashoka University, I describe four inter-related meanings of maryaada:

1. giving up what is not strictly necessary; needs some restraint and some giving up, certainly

2. responding to external stimuli not in a programmed manner but with mastery and restraint, which develops in us through regular spiritual practice

3. an awareness of human finitude (groundwater; Anthropocene)

4. respectfulness towards others (non-violation)

Religious Diversity and InclusionIn this time of violent religious strife, it is the tendency of many of us (!) young people to abhor and move away from these spiritual traditions. If there is any single purpose in my coming here to speak to you today, it is to urge you to reopen your eyes, your hearts and minds to the treasures that may lie unseen by you, on the spiritual path. The reason I have cited from so many, very diverse religious sources is also to re-emphasise that I accept the validity of all these paths, each one attempting to restate the same fundamental insight in their own inimitable way. No one has expressed the need to respect this rich diversity better than Swami Vivekananda in his lecture on The Way to the Realisation of a Universal Religion at the Universalist Church, Pasadena, California on the 28th of January, 1900:

“Our watchword, then, will be acceptance, and not exclusion. Not only toleration, I do not believe in it. I believe in acceptance. Why should I tolerate? Toleration means that I think that you are wrong and I am just allowing you to live. I accept all religions that were in the past, and worship with them all; I worship God with every one of them, in whatever form they worship Him. I shall go to the mosque of the Mohammedan; I shall enter the Christian’s church and kneel before the crucifix; I shall enter the Buddhistic temple, where I shall take refuge in Buddha and in his Law. I shall go into the forest and sit down in meditation with the Hindu, who is trying to see the Light, which enlightens the heart of every one.

Not only shall I do all these, but I shall keep my heart open for all that may come in the future. Is God’s book finished? Or is it still a continuous revelation going on? It is a marvelous book — these spiritual revelations of the world. The Bible, the Vedas, the Koran, and all other sacred books are but so many pages, and an infinite number of pages remain yet to be unfolded. I would leave it open for all of them. We stand in the present, but open ourselves to the infinite future. We take in all that has been in the past, enjoy the light of the present, and open every window of the heart for all that will come in the future. Salutation to all the prophets of the past, to all the great ones of the present, and to all that are to come in the future!”

As Swamiji stated in his address at the final session of the Parliament of Religions in Chicago on 27th September, 1893:

“The Christian is not to become a Hindu or a Buddhist, nor a Hindu or a Buddhist to become a Christian. But each must assimilate the spirit of the others and yet preserve his individuality and grow according to his own law of growth. If the Parliament of Religions has shown anything to the world it is this: It has proved to the world that holiness, purity and charity are not the exclusive possessions of any church in the world, and that every system has produced men and women of the most exalted character. In the face of this evidence, if anybody dreams of the exclusive survival of his own religion and the destruction of the others, I pity him from the bottom of my heart, and point out to him that upon the banner of every religion will soon be written, in spite of resistance: “Help and not Fight,” “Assimilation and not Destruction,” “Harmony and Peace and not Dissension.”

TranscendenceTo end, let me clarify that what is being proposed here is not the acceptance of the status quo as it is, nor is it being suggested that wanting a change in one’s life situation, in whichever aspect, is to be somehow looked down upon. Unfortunately, a lot of mainstream religious discourse has tended to say this or has been conveniently interpreted as saying so, by the powers that be, in order to buttress their power in so many historical situations. This is truly ironic because the founders of these religious traditions were all social revolutionaries of their day, advocating the overthrow of oppressive systems of power.

As the Buddha emphasises, fire is the foundation of civilization. In his exposition of the Four Noble Truths, the first is Dukkha, which is the spark that spurs action. The second noble truth is Samudaya, which connotes the fire that rises within us in response to the spark of dukkha. The Buddha does not advise us to repress the fire. Rather, he asserts that the fire is vital to keep spiritual development moving forward. What is critical is the third noble truth Nirodha, wherein

we are asked to “bank the fire”34, to harness all our energies in a constructive direction, leveraging the fire that burns within to try and make change happen. But in order to be able to do this in an effective, non-destructive manner, such that neither do we get engulfed in the fire, nor do we burn others in its flame, we need to re-activate, re-energise the primordial connection, which we are all blessed with, but which we have become deeply unmindful of. Let all our work emanate from this place of transcendence, which is all the time available to us, if only we are prepared to spare a few moments every day, to allow this silence to speak to us and transform us through its inimitable power.

Once we do this, we are transformed, because our relationship with the outcomes of our actions is transformed. It is not that we do not desire. But the critical change that comes over us is that we are not broken, through anxiety, frustration, anger or despair, when our desires cannot be fulfilled. We acquire a new strength, which gives us composure and equipoise in the face of failure. This is not a state of passive resignation; it is rather a spirit of active acceptance. This changes everything and fills us with a new energy to be able to work even harder, with far greater wisdom, for the change we are committed to try and bring about.35

In the beautiful words of the Gita,

II.70 आपूर्यमाणमचलप्रतिष्ठंसमुद्रमाप: प्रविशन्ति यद्वत् |तद्वत्कामा यं प्रविशन्ति सर्वेस शान्तिमाप्नोति न कामकामी ||

The one who remains ocean-like, still and steadfast, even as all desires enter her just as all rivers enter the ocean ever being filled, she attains to peace, not the one who hankers desperately after objects of desire.

Without this kind of preparation, without this understanding of the rhythm of being, there is the danger that our interventions, as students of design, will end up only adding to the discord this world is already filled with.

This is my prayer, my aagraha, for all of us to come together to build peace in our time. Albert Einstein is said to have once remarked, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it”. Transcendence is indeed the condition for transformation. Speaking as I am in Bengaluru, what could possibly me more appropriate than to end with these immortal lines from Kuvempu, the greatest Kannada poet of the 20th century:

O nanna chetana

Aagu nee aniketana!

(O my consciousness, transcend all boundaries!)

~ Thank you so much for giving me the time and listening to me with such patience ~

34 akin to building a choolha to cook a roti35 “Could it perhaps be that the message of the sages was directed toward helping us open a “third eye” by which we could see and live another

dimension of reality? The experience of this third dimension, without alienating us from the world, allows us to live a full and realistic life in this world of ours. It liberates us from the despair of impotency and the anxiety of a barren existence. Furthermore, the experiential vision, liberating us from all fear, empowers us to work for the enhancement or perhaps transformation of the human condition.” (Panikkar, ibid.)