Chapter X

Onward and Upward?
BACK TO ATLANTA
   

    There was no question in my mind in 1991 that it was “dharma” for me to return to Atlanta. The inner impulsion, as if by a strong hand on my shoulder, was the primary mover, but the predicament of the work in Atlanta seconded the motion; the situation prevailing in Ganges finalized it. In the autumn of that year I decided to make an exploratory trip to that southern city to see what support remained when the Vedanta Society founded by Swami Bhashyananda was no longer active. Long urged by the eagerness of devotees to have a continuing center going once more and a swami to serve them, I returned in September of 1992 and, with their help and support, took an apartment in the suburb of Decatur. Two meeting places were rented, one for the Sunday service and one for the evening class. We coined a new name for the enterprise, “The Eternal Quest,” because my earlier experience had shown that Americans, and Atlantans in particular, did not understand and were not familiar with, the word Vedanta. We felt we needed an English phrase which would be at least partly equivalent.
    Our attendance was small but dedicated. On Sundays we used a professional yoga studio, quite new and shiny. There were no chairs; we sat on the floor, some of us with pillows, some against the walls. It was on such a morning that the discourse “Onward and Upward?" was given—a title which, by the way, may aptly describe, perhaps without question mark, the subsequent history of The Eternal Quest. The following is an expanded editing of the original talk.
   
   
    The idea of progress is dear to the heart of everyone, but dearest, it seems, in the heart and mind of Western man: most notably from the time of the Renaissance. The notion that the human race (and one’s own society in particular) is ever on the rise, despite appearances, has had a persistent hold on thinkers and their followers. “Onward and upward” is the minimum expectation; “every day and in every way we are getting better and better,” is the most sanguine. Granting, now and then, that it may be a spiral sort of progress, dipping down before rising again, the meliorists have convinced themselves and would like to convince us all, that technology, science, or the spread of religion or some other panacea, or the mere flow of history itself, is carrying us along into a better, brighter future.
    Truly, we cannot live without hope. Hope supports, energizes and augments our aspirations; the question is, for what do we dare to hope? Realistically, what meaning can we give to the word progress? In which direction does it lie? Progress with respect to what? Whose advancement is it we are envisaging? And in what time-span?
     Usually we mean the furthering or improvement of society—human relations and circumstances. But if we listen to the words of Swami Vivekananda, we hear that the phrase “social progress” is an oxymoron. Today, when the teeter-totter of economic health vs. political expedience has become obvious; few would quarrel with that judgment. Swamiji also said, “Every machine that saves labor puts more stress upon labor.” Machines do not, he said, solve the poverty question either; they simply make men struggle the more. Do we not see it all around us today?
   
   
A challenging claim
   
    However, this runs against the grain in our age of technology, and you may think it difficult to demonstrate. But let us consider some of the evidence.
    Middle-class families of three generations tell us that wages have risen but the standard of living has fallen. There is less home-time, for nurturing children, for reading, or for exercise. Hours at the computer and other repetitive devices have given us "carpal tunnel syndrome." Our technology in medical research has brought us longer lives, often of lower quality: physical survival coupled with mental senility. We see among us the walking dead. It appears that if we fix one thing, another goes out of joint. With the length of life continually extended, where is the means for giving extended care? In our drive for comfort and labor saving we have become more sedentary, losing the health benefits of exercise and physical activity.
    All of this has its mental concomitants. How dependent we are now, on monitors, alarms, timers and the like! The art of memorization is a dying one. Stress and mental disorder have increased so much that counselors themselves are requiring counsel. One of the trustees of a big charity, with a dozen years of voluntary youth work behind her, has said that social workers are freaking out all over the place because of their own personal problems. Many are in desperate need of help. Most recently, distributors of aid to the poorest in Africa are accused of trading these for sexual favors. [1] Where do the helpers turn for help, when personal problems and the pressure of work become too great to bear alone? In the old days, one just provided food, warmth, and a bit of companionship. Now people’s needs are far more complex. There was not much strain on helpers when I was young, but today we have become far more conscious of the frailty of our minds.
   
   
Evidence in education
   
    Let me cite my own experience with a social experiment in India where young boys from the tribal area of the Northeast Frontier were in my care. They had been selected for education at a top-notch school in a “civilized” area. They were bright; they fairly quickly picked up math and composition and conversational language skills in the new medium; they also picked up the deceit, cheating, chicanery—and other social ills of the urban and suburban milieu which were unknown in their hill communities. Many of us can tell true stories of this kind.
    Look at the quality of our general level of education. One hears of “exciting new methods” of teaching math, yet students continue to arrive at our higher institutions unable to compute, except by machines. Television constantly refines its technology and cheapens its content, with the result that millions of the children drinking it in have to be diagnosed as “attention deficient.” Admittedly some applications of technology stimulate and improve mental performance, but trouble saved by gadgets can turn to new troubles, when the gadgets reduce our independence and resourcefulness. As one wag has said, “Progress is the substitution of one nuisance for another.”
   
   
Prices we have paid
   
    If this is not evidence enough, there is much more which we have learned: for example, the “titration” of the environment. The pollution of our surroundings can be measured, almost drop for drop, as we exploit resources for our greater comfort and convenience. Just one example may be mentioned which may jog the memory—asbestos: an “improvement” offering great fire protection but a polluter of the air and lungs, is now being ripped, expensively, from building after building where we so trustingly installed it.
    Do you know that the pretty story of the first Thanksgiving at Plymouth, with the “Pilgrims” and the Native tribes is disputed by Native American historians? [2] Why history? Just the other day the British government acknowledged that its attempt to reduce use of tobacco by high taxes has resulted only in a flourishing smuggling trade. And so on.
    Take a look at the present conversion of technology from analog to digital: it is faster, more efficient, easier to communicate! And the cost to the whole society? This has not yet been calculated. New compact disks are being developed which will hold 800 times as much as today’s, on a surface no larger than a penny. Easier to lose! Did we, you or I, ask for this?
   
   
On the social scene
   
    Higher technology requires more white-collar workers, displacing manual labor. On the one hand it gives more opportunity for women in the workplace, and on the other it takes them from the home, the effects of which are known to all: broken families, disadvantaged children, single parent homes, sexual harassment and other ills.
    Let us look at the geo-political scene. World peace is one of the hopes held by masses of people of good will. Yet is it not evident that peace brings its own problems? In the wake of peace in Nicaragua, thousands were left without a source of income. Better than dying and killing, you say? International bodies mandate boundaries to bring peace between quarrelling nations only to stir up racial hatred, communalism and genocide. Economics? States may recoup the wealth from tobacco companies to cover health-care costs but what will be the lot of the growers of tobacco?
    When I lived in England in the seventies I could see from that distance the rabid hatred and dread of people in the United States toward Communism. It was not felt in quite that way by people in England and on the Continent. Anathema to Americans, the denial of much that we hold precious, the communist system had, one must admit, its admirable aspects: the de-emphasis of personality and competitiveness, non-possessiveness and an attitude of detachment toward some of the more crass dimensions of human life. These are qualities admired in the culture of India and other parts of the East; they were preached by Mahatma Gandhi.
    Can we be sure that the territory once known as Yugoslavia is, in balance, better off today than it was in the time of Tito?
    Swami Vivekananda wrote an essay called “The East and the West” which received wide circulation. In it he remarks, “What is the meaning of the ‘Progress of Civilization’ which the Europeans boast of so much? The meaning of it is the successful accomplishment of the desired object by the justification of wrong means, i.e., by making the end justify the means…it guides and justifies the well-known European ethic which says, ‘Get out from this place, I want to come in and possess it.’”
   
   
Realism
   
    “Stop, stop!” you may cry. “Enough of negativity.” But in fact Vedanta is not pessimism—it is realism. The way of Vedanta is to affirm our inherent and potential divinity, our capacity to penetrate beyond the pessimistic and optimistic views of life. We see the idea of progress as inevitable and essential to life; that self-assertion and self-effort have a large part to play in our spiritual evolution. Is any social reformer likely to be discouraged by the facts we have given above? No eager medical student is hampered by knowing that bodies are mortal, subject to constant attrition, prone to new illnesses as soon as the current ones are taken care of.
    The true fighter will always say, “It is my nature; never mind the odds.”
    Nor are we existentialists. If accused of carrying on a Sisyphus-style activity—spiritual practice which brings no tangible result—we have a reply: whether the stone stays on top of the hill or rolls back down, Sisyphus is strengthening his muscles for a future struggle. We, too, work at changing things, mostly for the change it brings about in ourselves. It is not that objective improvements are impossible so much as that we remind ourselves of the cyclic nature of time. Our sun has a past of 5,000 million years and a future of the same. Is it not a “cop-out” that religion in the West has always thanked God “for our creation, preservation...” (as the prayer goes) but not for our dissolution? Only now, with the evidence of black holes, has the idea of involution been given any consideration at all in the speculative and experimental doctrines of evolution.
   
   
Other voices
   
    Let the historian Arnold Toynbee speak for us here: “Technology cannot be enlisted to save us from its consequences. Man needs to reintegrate himself into the nature of which he is, in truth, an integral part, and he can do this only through ecstasy or contemplation—through religion or philosophy. The way of ecstasy is illustrated by St Francis of Assisi’s canticle, the poem in which he expresses his feeling of brotherhood with the rest of nature, which he put into practice in his daily life. The way of contemplation is illustrated by the Hindu conviction that when a being looks inward, with his mind’s eye, and plumbs his self to its depths, he finds that it is in and behind and beyond the phenomenal universe. Such is the vision modern man needs to regain.” A holy man well-known in Russia, the starets Ambrose, who lived in the 1870s, remarking on the progress in external human affairs, in the comforts of life, was of the opinion that in many sciences or branches of knowledge no progress was apparent. He suggested that our modern scholars do not know and understand mythology or classical antiquity as well as did Basil the Great and Gregory the Theologian.
   
   
The oldest voice of all
   
    The focus must shift inward, if we are not to regard action as a squirrel’s treadmill. It is in the Katha Upanishad that we find this pungent verse: “The Self-existent One created the senses turned outward; therefore a person sees what is outside instead of looking within. A certain wise one, senses turned back, and desiring immortality, beheld the Self within.” [3] To the spiritual aspirant this is the beginning of a long journey to the condition of Self-realization or the experience of Truth. The very same mentality which the meliorist maintains in his view of the world will be held here, for the time being, by the hopeful aspirant: there will and must be progress, onward and upward. The examples and pronouncements of the spiritually great will loom before us with enticing promise and we need to act on that. Without the expectation of inner discovery we may never care to turn our glance there or set foot on the path. This is the essence of St. Paul’s “faith, hope and love.” We have the divine promise that to take one step in God’s direction brings him ten steps in ours. Even if takes years—lives—we shall have the patience and perseverance to carry on until we reach the consummation of this adventure. Every great “revelation” holds this ideal before us.
    Then do we have to ask, Is spiritual progress too, an oxymoron? Sitting in the railway yard in a stationary car, we see the trains moving here and there alongside, giving the eye and mind the impression that we are moving. The notion of progress comes from the constant comparison of our real nature with its wobbly reflections in the impure mind—which we like to call “our present condition.” But this comparison inspires us to hope, to struggle. We know it is a middle state, a provisional entity which must be “outgrown.” We recognize direction. We know there are certain criteria by which we can measure, as it were, our progress—purity, patience, sympathy, self-control, dispassion, generosity, detachment. And as Swami Vivekananda has promised, no matter how far down a person may fall, the time must come when his course turns upward again to complete the cycle. “It [progress] does not consist in the amount of money in your pocket or the clothes you wear or the house you live in, but in the wealth of spiritual thought in your brain—that is what makes for human progress. That is the source of all material and intellectual progress, the motive power behind, the enthusiasm that pushes mankind forward.”
    We use the ego of aspiration then, until we lose ourselves in the game. It is not so much a personality-change, as cultivated, for instance, by some aspirants who attempt to squeeze themselves into the straight-jacket of an ideal Personality; we are reminded here to heed Sri Sarada Devi’s warning: “Even to wonder how far you’ve progressed on the path is a form of vanity.”
   
   
Transcending progress
   
    How and why do we go beyond the concept of progress? The non-dualist will of course reply, He whom we seek is the Unchanging. What “purpose” can there be for the soul, pristine and complete as it is and has ever been? Toward what shall it progress—that which is already perfect? Even the seeker must at last be lost in That which was so long sought. The feeling of time, of space, of being the Doer—all these diminish for one who is at the brink of realization. The culmination is self-surrender, a non-event which cannot be hurried.
    “Take all thought of growth off of your mind,” says Vivekananda, in one of the most sweeping declarations of the Advaitic position. Like the moon which remains just what it is, though to our perception it waxes and wanes, so the Atman. This is the revelation of the Upanishads. “He who has it here, has it there.”
    If you do not like this monistic language, there is another way, highly championed by Sri Ramakrishna: travel along as the Lord’s devotee; be the playmate of the Mother in Her cosmic lila. When he was in the West Swamiji was once asked if it were true that the universe is a gymnasium where we exercise our moral muscles, and he shot back: “No, no, we are clowns who have come here to tumble.”
   
   
  1. Broadcast on "Morning Edition," National Public Radio, Feb. 28, 2002
  2. The Center For World Indigenous Studies. The Fourth World Documentation Project, Olympia, Washington
  3. II.1.1.
   
       
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