The Europeans are angry that the Americas have destroyed their culture. The paradox is that something has destroyed American culture too and America does not know whom to blame.
That same 'something' is heading towards India-perhaps the last bastion of culture. If Indian culture cracks, many people the world over (like Kathleen Raine) fear, humanity is lost, for India is not a geographical entity but a name for free mental climate, for a quest of truth with a "disinterested dedication without the constraint of creeds and dogma."
You cannot blame America for whatever is happening. They might have created this Frankenstein, but it is no longer in their control. Nothing perhaps shows American helpless-ness better than American parents' calling the American film industry "an all-powerful enemy, an alien force corrupting their children and assaulting their cherished values." "Films are being honoured because of their hideous elements, not in spite of them." They talked in 1992 of some force beyond the control of Americans which is "enthusiastically compelling them to embrace ugliness."
the There is, however, a silver lining to this tragedy body is tasting liberation. Much against what Aristotle said that reason should control the body, and also against the Islamic belief that the soul should control the body, the ancient Indians believed that the body should be liberated from the dominance of both, for its guidance comes from a light different from spiritual or rational. It is a somatic light (Samskara) which also governs the rotation of seasons, the im-maculate movement of planets and the growth of life and vegetation. This third source of light has been forgotten by the civilized man and needs to be rediscovered. He committed the error of replacing this innate physical light by reason. The modern revolt of the body against subjugation to the rational is aggressive nudity, a general devaluation of the human, and carnal excesses. It should not stop at this. It should also search constructively its true source of light.
Man is a confluence of at least three lights. The soul, the mind and the body-three different orders of creation-meet in him, each with its own light. Throughout the history of civilization the effort has been to control the body with the rational or the spiritual light. Nobody ever suspected that the body could be having some light of its own, which, in spite of being very irrational and very unspiritual, could guide it still better. Yet the ancient Indians believed that the body has a somatic source of light which alone can lead it to physical enlightenment. The soul's enlightenment is not the body's enlightenment and one who goes for a total flowering will attain the two enlightenments separately.
When William James talked of pragmatism he did not know that he had done the beginning of what was later to be-come the quest of physical enlightenment. Unfortunately, the modern pragmatism of America is a poisonous, self-destructive weed grown in the original, not an improved variety. The earlier it is removed the better, for America is in a position to spread it all over the globe.
It has already killed the values that Americans had been cherishing ever since the Declaration of Independence. They are baffled at the speed with which greed has replaced their value structure. Their earlier paradigms have changed into something ugly and sub-human and they feel powerless against the wave.
The neo-pragmatism has been misled to frustrate the basic pragmatic quest. What it has achieved is prosperity coupled with constant worries, pleasure-houses haunted by frigidity, plenty with poverty of sensations. Passions have waned for which so much was done, for which European romanticism and idealism were given a joint farewell. What a sad spectacle it should be for Walt Whitman, William James and Herman Melville to see that what they had understood from passion has been thoroughly contorted in the minds of their great grandchildren, that it means to them only misadventure over timid and innocent people, child abuse, shooting humans for fun, a male husbanding another male, and bizarre cults like the Branch Davidian which burnt alive all its 87 members on 19.4.93 to prove the ghastly apotheosis of its leader, David Koresh.
In this welter of confusion one thing has clearly emerged-people are not prepared to govern their bodies with the spiritual or the rational light. They can go to any extent, to obscenity, to free sex, to the liquidation of the family, but they would not submit their bodies to these lights.
Like a common, though vague intuition, it has dawned upon the modern people that the body has an independent and natural source of light and it is the same from which it gets its pleasant sensations and sensuous pleasures. But a rock covers this source of light and billions of people are beating this rock frantically while the rock shows no sign of giving them a way.
If the neo-pragmatism of America is successful it is because it is the only systematic power searching the somatic light, though it is also apparent that it can never find it.
Those who seek this physical light have to pass through more temptations than those who seek the spiritual light. Pragmatism has surrendered to the temptations and forgotten the light. This surrender is the cause of so much violence and vulgarity.
Pragmatism perhaps will be recorded in the long run as the blind beginning of a new era of man's effort to discover truth physically, not conceptually a discovery made by the human body independent of the intellectual quest. The sexual excesses of our times are blind pragmatic explorations of bodily happiness. Its subtleties and sophistications apart, pragmatism is only a variety of hedonism and like hedonism it can not take us far. To reject the ideals of rational behaviour in economic, political and social life, and to ask the intellect to chase an ever-changing data collected by senses is to trust blindness against sight. The senses have no light of their own but they can have access to a wholly different kind of light which illumines desires, impulses and passions, making them meaningful in a profound sense.
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