On Medium: Modern Self-Deification and the Array of Religions

Here's an article about the ideological resources the world’s religions have for accommodating the modern rise of science and secular humanism.

On Medium: Are We All Illusions that Lead God Astray?

Here's a dialogue on nonduality, Western and Eastern views of enlightenment, and the implications of regarding our personal minds as misleading illusions.

On Medium: The Sage’s Mission in a Harmonious Universe

Read on for a dialogue on alienation, renunciation, and the moral calling in Hindu monism and the secular Enlightenment.

On Medium: From Eckhart Tolle’s “Power of Now” to the Horror of Nature

Read on about pantheism, the artist’s perspective on perceptions, and the horror of recognizing the mindless artistry behind the qualia found in any present moment.

On Medium: The Enigma of Yahweh’s Sole Avatar

Read on about the strangeness of the divine power's having only a single avatar, such as Jesus, and how Roman imperialism disrupted the Hindu logic of Christianity’s latent polytheism.

On Medium: Hinduism’s Gambit of Inclusivity

Here's an article about the existential problem that arises in Hinduism due to the formality of its inclusive spirituality, and the politics of multiculturalism.

On Medium: Ancient India: The Citadel of Disaffection

Read on about how Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism trump Western monotheistic religions in promoting religious alienation from the apparent world. 

On Medium: Secular versus Religious Enlightenment

Here's a lengthy dialogue I had with a monistic mystic on the nature of enlightenment and God. Should enlightenment be secular or religious? Should we be traditional mystics or cosmicist pantheists? Should the sage show compassion or transhuman amorality? Why would God create anything?

The False Synthesis of Hinduism

Besides its great age, what distinguishes Hinduism is its inclusivity by way of its systematic, comprehensive approach to the question of how best to live. Rather than being narrow-minded or dogmatic, the Hindu has multiple spiritual paths available, each of which finds its proper place in the sprawling edifice of religious and philosophical thinking from ancient India. In pop cultural form, you find the New Age writer and speaker Deepak Chopra, for example, tackling spiritual questions like a businessman or a politician, with a 12-point plan, appealing to various stages and hierarchies and principles. That approach derives from Hindu scriptures, according to which there are, for example, the four purusarthas or main goals in life: ethical action (dharma), wealth, pleasure, and liberation or spiritual release (moksha). Likewise, there are four ashramas or stages of life: student, householder, retirement, and renunciation. Of course, there are also the varnas, the proper social classes, as well as a god for every occasion, in the Hindu pantheon. No part of life is left out of the Hindu analysis.

What can seem like its greatest strength and sign of maturity, however, namely this eclectic, practical approach to life may instead be a profound weakness.

Historically, what scholars call “the Hindu synthesis” was meant to reconcile the ancient Vedic scriptures and principles with the Sramana or renouncer religions, among other Indian cultures and traditions. In the Vedic period of Indian history, dating from around 1,500–500 BCE, Indo-Aryans fled from the demise of the Indus-valley civilization, which had flourished for over a thousand years in the Bronze Age in South Asia, and migrated to the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent. The Vedic culture was priestly, ritualistic and hierarchical, and developed into Brahmanic orthodoxy.

Key Hindu concepts such as dharma and karma derive from the Vedic ideas of satya and rta (rita), of the underlying, absolute order of all things, and of the natural process of organizing everything to be in line with that order. These two foundational concepts are found in numerous ancient religions and philosophies. In Greece, the similar concepts are telos and logos, inherent purpose and rational organization. In Confucianism, there’s li, a system of ritual norms that establishes harmony with the laws of Heaven, while in Taoism there are tao, and te, the proper flow or way of nature, and how an individual cultivates and expresses that flow. All such teleological concepts hearken back to animistic prehistory, when there was likely no rigid distinction drawn between subject and object, when the human experience was childlike and magical on account of the intuitiveness of the animists’ free-flowing anthropocentrism and of their projection of social categories onto nature.

Vedic culture faded during the Second urbanization, between 600-200 BCE when a reform movement gained prominence in Magadha, in the Central Ganges Plain. These reformers were the Sramana, the ascetics who rejected Brahmin political authority as well as the spiritual authority of the Vedic texts such as the Rigveda. Jainism and Buddhism grew out of this independent religious and philosophical counterculture in ancient India. Whereas Vedic religious concepts were liable to be political, since they had to regulate a social order, the ascetics (rather like the Gnostics) put individual spiritual liberation ahead of all other undertakings. Ascetics who renounced wealth and pleasure, politics and violence were omegas (last in the social hierarchy) and social outsiders. Their commitment to spiritual enlightenment must have provided for a devastating juxtaposition with the ulterior motives of the Brahmins, whose scriptures and rituals could have seemed like so many convenient rationalizations of a corruptible, arbitrary political regime.