Pluralities

However, Hinduism also offers hope. It is imbued with features that make room for positive change and growth. Subsummation, the very feature that was (wrongly) used to undermine and absorb other cultures, is also Hinduism’s strength and herein lies Hinduism’s greatest paradox.

'You could be an ostrich at this moment. Standing in the queer pride parade two years ago, in solidarity with friends, could you have thought of this moment? You lean back against the wall, shut your eyes, and think of the many hers you know, but all that you see are the cops who had lined the road that day, not intruding but ready.'

Never before in human history have we faced such a dire crisis, where human beings and much of our bio-diversity are threatened with extinction: the sixth extinction. Clearly, there are distressing signs in this direction. But all is not lost. We humans can rise to the challenge, change our life-styles and patterns of production, pressure our governments, and where necessary, mobilize mass civil disobedience and non-cooperation movements of an entirely non-violent nature.

A glance at global history reveals that periodic attempts to diminish and contain this complexity of stories in the name of various causes have been a running refrain. This is particularly evident to those who are or have been at the receiving end of stories -other peoples’ stories, while their own remain muted.

We cannot any longer afford to live under the illusion that we alone possess the only true perspective of the world and that this can just be handed over in readymade form to the others. For a genuine unity-in-difference to take place, it is necessary to establish a mode of conversation between diverse transformative movements from below that can allow for changing ourselves while changing society.

Now, when we are faced with a climate crisis, we are struggling to find a sense of relatedness that includes difference and diversity. Unity is not something that can be imposed rationally. A human world-view tries to impose an order on the natural environment, which like artificial intelligence, follows the working of the human mind.

The idea that we may be really related to animals in much more fundamental ways may come as a shock (or be rejected) by some, but if grasped, becomes one of the major avenues through which we reestablish a sense of unity with nature that strongly resists the temptation to exploit, damage it, or treat its sentient occupants with cruelty.

These Sufi mystics and poets understood the violent jealousy of borders and so they aimed, in the words of Dārā Shikōh, to etch lines of demarcation in water rather than in stone. In Ibn ‘Arabī’s school, the variegated cosmos is nothing but the endless self-disclosure of the One as the Many. The One Reality or Essence shows itself by hiding as the many, effectively veiling itself through its unveiling.

When those two words, ‘spiritual’ and ‘material’ appear in the same sentence almost always they are opposed to one another. If you trace this historically, this has done vast damage, not only philosophically, but in extremely practical terms