Yesterday, the Indian mystic Sadhguru made a presentation at the National Cultural Center, along with the Soca artiste Machel Montano, as part of his Isha Foundation’s “SaveSoil” project. This endeavour is to raise awareness of the need to replenish the soil with organic matter, without which it is simply sand, which is incapable of sustaining plants, and therefore food protection.
One may wonder why an Indian mystic would be involved in what would be considered an “ecological” project, but then that would simply illustrate the profound lack of understanding for what has been dubbed “Hinduism” by the West. In its own designation of itself – “Hindu Dharma” or “Sanaatan Dharma” – the “eternal way of life”, the earth has been revered as “Mother”, or Dharti Mata”, for eons. One of the prayers that are uttered by Hindus every morning before stepping out of bed is to ask forgiveness from Mother Earth for stepping on her.
Sadhguru is the designation adopted by the 65-year-old Jagadesh Vasudeva from South India, who started out as a poultry farmer after earning a degree in English. He said he had a mystical experience in his twenties, and after training under a guru in Yoga, established the Isha Foundation to teach Yoga based on his apprehension of the Divine Cosmic Consciousness of Shiva. In traditional Hindu Dharma, Shiva is regarded as one of the three elemental aspects of the Divine – Brahma, the Creator; Vishnu, the Sustainer; and Shiva, the Destroyer. But as Jagadesh apprehended, they were a unity that we humans could only conceive cognitively in various aspects.
There was no “creation” since –as has been now proposed by modern science – the cosmos merely projects itself outwards after immense periods of contraction (billions of years), after which it will contract again. The new Webb telescope is supposed to literally look back in time at stars born millions of years ago in the last “Big Bang”. Sadhguru started writing in a local paper and giving talks about these ideas of Hindu Dharma as “seers” had done for thousands of years. But his wit, humour and connectedness with the challenges of modern life – plus his impeccable English articulation – have made him into a world-famous personage, thanks to the new technologies now available and accessible through his business acumen.
He has stressed the basic facticity of Hindu Dharma, that the entire “creation” is interconnected at a fundamental level through vibrations and movement all the way down to the cosmic energy that is sometimes perceived by our senses as “matter”. This constant movement that “sustains” the universe has been represented by the sculpture of Shiva dancing as “Nataraja”, This message had been brought to the West by Swami Vivekananda in 1993, and is reflected, for instance, in the description of the philosopher Coomarswamy, curator of Boston Museum, in his 1918 book, “The Dance of Shiva”:
“In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it. He rises from His rapture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fullness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives now rest. This is poetry; but none the less science.” The “science” was stressed by the writer Aldous Huxley in 1961: “The whole thing is there, you see. The world of space and time, and matter and energy, the world of creation and destruction, the world of psychology…We (the West) don’t have anything remotely approaching such a comprehensive symbol, which is both cosmic and psychological, and spiritual.”
Sadhguru has endeared himself to modern audiences through his return to the Dharmic position that truth (“Sad” or “Sat”) can only be “experienced”, rather than “understood”. And exemplifies this by his stress on music and dance as integral practices in what is considered “worship” of the Divine, even though he disavows this word “worship”.
He stresses that these dances all originated in ancient spontaneous practices, and were captured in the imagery and sculptures later placed in temples. As such, he had invited Trinidadian artiste Machel Montano of Soca fame, and a graduate of his Isha Yoga programme, to perform at his last Maha Shivratri commemoration. Eighty years ago, Shiva devotees from the Indentured Indians in Jamaica had introduced the smoking of ganja and notions of the non-duality of the Divine to the founders of the Rastafarian Movement.
