At The Root Of Evil? Eric Voegelin and India by Renaud Fabbri

Added: 2026-05-14

[00:00:08]At the root of evil, Eric Vergalin and India by Reno Fabri.

[00:00:17]Eric Verglin, whose works have begun to be translated into French, is a German-born American political philosopher best known for his study of political gnosticism.

[00:00:30]According to Valin, most of Western political ideologies or political religions such as communism, fascism, or national socialism are best interpreted as part of a revival of ancient Gnosticism.

[00:00:47]But whereas gnostics of ancient times sought to escape the material world through knowledge and thus be reunited with the true god, the god of the beyond. Modern gnostics are pursuing a different agenda. Their goal is to iminatize the escaton by which viral means establishing paradise here on earth even if it is at the cost of extreme forms of violence as illustrated by the crimes of 20th century totalitarian regimes.

[00:01:24]The characterization of these movements as gnostic has understandably aroused fierce scholarly debates, especially among scholars of religions. The movements Verglin had in mind are probably best described as millinarian or apocalyptical.

[00:01:44]What proves even more problematic to those familiar with Indian thought is that Verolin seems to suggest that at the root of all those ideological evils lies the belief in the supreme identity between the individual self and the absolute which viral reduces to a form of self argrandisement.

[00:02:07]To this we should add that although the term nosis can be more or less directly translated by the Sanskrit term janana the nondualism of shankara bears little resemblance with the dualist speculations of western gnostics in late antiquity.

[00:02:27]In this article, we shall show that Valulin when searching for the origins of modern political ideologies was looking in the wrong direction.

[00:02:38]From the time of the ancient seers, India has recognized in the self a mystery higher than all the gods. At the same time, Indian consciousness never experienced the type of derailment that occurred throughout Judeo-Christian and Muslim history and gave birth to the apocalyptical and millennarian movements. A discussion of Veralin's approach to Hinduism will also lay the foundation for a critical examination of the phenomenon of political religions in contemporary India. the distortion of traditional Hinduism in neo vidanta and Hindu nationalism.

[00:03:24]Before discussing Verolin's treatment of Hinduism, we should first provide a brief overview of his phenomenology of consciousness and philosophy of history, seeking to avoid as much as possible to dwell into the most technical aspects of his thought. Whereas the initial impulse behind his theory of consciousness was his critique of totalitarian regimes, his philosophical language gradually developed from his study of ancient thought and from his critical reception of the phenomenology of Huserel.

[00:04:01]As Valolin wrote in a letter to Alfred Schutz, later republished in anomnesis, he could not accept Huseler's idea that consciousness was primarily oriented toward objects.

[00:04:17]Intentionality only represents one side of the experience of consciousness.

[00:04:24]Virgulin refers to the other side as its luminosity.

[00:04:29]Veralin analyzes the luminosity of consciousness as an experience of participation matexis to what is ultimately a transcendent reality quote the divine ground of existence end quote the perspective of participation end quote means that quote man is not self-contained spectator he is an actor playing a part in the drama of being." End quote. For Veralin, who was somehow a mystic philosopher, the most fundamental human experience is an experience of tension toward the divine, which finds its expression in symbols, which lie at the root of all the mythological, religious, philosophical, and even political worldviews ever produced by mankind.

[00:05:27]Fergalin's phenomenology of consciousness as represented in his magnum opus the five volumes of order and history traces the evolution of these symbols through history. The experience of the sacred is constant and universal but in its archaic form. The sacred is experienced in the compact unity of the cosmos full of gods with quote God and man, world and society end quote forming quote a primordial community of being end quote.

[00:06:03]To put it simply, Verglin's quote primary experience of the cosmos end quote bears many similarities to what is usually called pantheism. During the ecumenic age, a radical transformation, a process of differentiation took place, however, that destroyed the unity of the cosmos and contributed to a demonization of the world.

[00:06:28]Verdalin's notion of ecumenic age builds upon the writings of Carl Jasper's on what the latter called the axial age, the pivotal period in human history between the 8th and the 2nd centuries BC which witnessed almost simultaneous spiritual outbursts across different civilizations from Greece to China. It is during this period that what Max Vber calls the universalistic quote religions of deliverance end quote and what most people would spontaneously think about when they refer to religions took shape.

[00:07:08]Compared to the axial age, Verlin's ecumenic age extends chronologically to include the rise of Christianity. In addition to the notion of spiritual outburst, Verlin adds the experience of imperial expansion and the development of historioggraphy as defining characteristics of the ecumenic age.

[00:07:34]From the perspective of his phenomenology of consciousness, the ecumenic age is marked by a discovery of the soul or psyche. As the idea of an extra mundane god beyond the gods of the pantheon emerges, cosmological symbols prove more and more inadequate and are replaced by philosophical, knowetic, or theological, pneumatic symbols.

[00:08:01]With the disassociation between the world and the divine ground, the soul becomes aware of itself as the true seat from where God can be experienced.

[00:08:13]Veralin describes this evolution as a quote progression from compact to to differentiated experiences and symbols end quote.

[00:08:24]As a consequence of the emergence of more differentiated symbols, older forms of cosmological symbolization started to be rejected as untrue.

[00:08:38]Although in their essence they expressed the same human thirst for the sacred which Verglin acknowledges by referring to quote the equivalence of symbols end quote. Veralin was a Christian and he believed that the Christian revelation represented the pinnacle of human experience with the divine. And he did not hesitate to interpret early modern religious heresies as well as secular revolutionary movements as a Prometheian revolt against God and his radical transcendence from both man and the cosmos. Gnostics want to abolish the tension between God and man by suppressing either the world in which he lives or God. Whereas ancient Gnostics sought to divonize man or at least the elects. Modern ones prefer to reduce God to the world to realize the kingdom of God here in this earthly realm. In effect, they are creating an imaginary world, a secondary reality to justify their illusions, but also too often their thirst for violence and blood when the world they inhabit does not live up to their foolish expectations.

[00:09:54]The original plan of order and history suggests a gradual advance from compact to more differentiated symbols on a chronological axis from the ancient near east to Israel and Greece all the way to the rise of Christianity.

[00:10:16]Although later in his work he gradually broke with the scheme of a uni unilinear development severely criticizing Hegel's philosophy of history as an intellectual forgery. Veralin never revised his original negative appraisal of Hindu spirituality. For Veralin as for Hegel India remains the land where the spirit has not awakened yet from its mythological slumber. According to Jaspers, the upanishads and the predication of the Buddha occupy a place similar to Greek philosophy in the process by which quote man became aware of existence as a whole of his self and of his limitations end quote. experiencing for the first time quote the absolute in the depth of the self and in the clarity of transcendence end quote. The questioning about the existence and nature of self atman and the path to an extra mundane deliverance mosha or nirvana became the central concern of both Hindu and Buddhist schools to this day. Veralin did not ignore the spiritual significance of the Indian experience but as we shall see he deemed it incomplete compared to the achievements of ancient western philosophy.

[00:11:41]At the heart of the wisdom tradition of India lies the Vedas. Their teaching seems to illustrate directly what Verlin refers to as quote the primary experience of the cosmos end quote.

[00:11:57]According to the rigveda the casts varnas are born from the sacrifice of the primordial man pushia. Not only are the gods or devas of ancient India India symbolized by intracossmic forces but a web of correspondence connects the gods of the pantheon with the straight of society. The tripartite organization of society between the twiceborn casts namely brahinss, chhatrias and vashas is modeled on the vadic pantheon with mitra and varuna at the top symbolizing sovereignty followed by Indra the god of war and the twins nasata and dasra representing fakandi. In his new science of politics, Verlin without directly mentioning the ca the case of India has called quote transcendental representation end quote the process by which an historical society shapes its internal order on its understanding of the truth regarding the cosmos. The emergence of the upupanishads in the axial or ecumenic age marks a spiritual outbreak with the double discovery of the Brahman, the metacosmic ground and the atman, the universal self. The disassociation between the cosmos full of gods and the divine ground is expressed in one of the most famous passages from the rigida hymn 10 129 describes how in the beginning only the one was and how moved by a primordial desire he manifested the world. The hymn is particularly interesting because according to the Vadic composer, neither the intracossmic gods nor even the Veruna, the first among the gods, really knows about the beyond and how being came out of non-being.

[00:14:01]The text is frequently regarded by indologists as a prefiguration of vanta philosophy. To put it in Voggelian terms, the Shankarian commentary, Bashia on the revelation shruti amounts to a knowetic interpretation of the tension between man and the divine ground which had been recorded for the first time in the Rigveda. The compact unity of the vdic cosmos is dissolving giving birth to the upanishadic literature in which the question of the self also emerges.

[00:14:41]According to Michael Hulin the two lines of mystical investigation about the nature of personal identity can be delineated in the upanishads. The first one focuses on the constituents both gross and subtle of the individual. If at the moment of death the body dissolves with the elements and faculties returning to the cosmic matrix, what about the person the parusha? Is there a self Atman, an inner regent Antaramin?

[00:15:18]And if there is one, what happens to it when the body dies? Certain texts suggest an archaic identification of the atman with the breath prana. But others breaking up with the analogy between the microcosm and the macrocosm identify the self with the ground of being with Brahman itself.

[00:15:41]According to the teaching of Udalaka Aruni to his sonetu recorded in the Chandogia upanishadi that thou art the self is Brahman.

[00:16:03]Later upanishads like the Ashvatara upanishad give however a more theistic description of the relationship between the individual and the ground leaving to the different schools of vanta and Indian philosophy in general to decide if absolute reality is dual or nondual it is the ecumenic age that Verglin offers its most systematic treatment of the Upanishadic experience. In particular, he focuses on a passage from the Bradarayan Yaka Upanishad in which Gi Vatak Navi questions the sage Yaj Navakalya about the ultimate ground of existence.

[00:16:55]In their intellectual inquiry, the two gradually ascend from lower to higher degrees of cosmic reality all the way till the absolute. For Verolin, the passage echoes some of the core intuitions of Greek philosophy from the ecumenic age. Yet although quote the dialogues of the upanishadic type enact the question that leads toward the ground they understand this movement beyond the myth not as a break with the myth end quote. In other words, the differentiation of consciousness remained incomplete in India and the Hindu sages ultimately failed to reach their goal because they proved unable to completely free themselves from quote the primary experience of the cosmos end quote. Verlin does not hesitate to assimilate Hindu thought to the still primitive mythos speculations of the Ionian predecessors of Plato and Aristotle.

[00:17:58]Philosophically, it cannot compete with the two luminaries of Greek thought, nor does it compare with the religious revolution that shook ancient Isra Israel. Referring to the comparative study by Rudolfph Otto on Shankara and Maestra Echard, Vergelin writes that even the perspective of the foremost teacher of Vidanta remained somehow impaired by the intrinsic limitations of the spiritual tradition he came from. As in the case of the prescratic teaching of Parmenades, Shankara's intuition of being was centered on the difference between the changing and the changeless.

[00:18:43]The result was the that the experience of the world was not given its proper significance and the acharia could conceive the relationship between God and the universe only in terms of a simplistic dichotomy between the real and the unreal if not pure nothingness.

[00:19:03]At the risk of falling into orientalist cliches, Verolin also claims that Hinduism failed to develop a sense of history as it remained trapped in a cyclical conception of time. Already in animenesis, Verglin could write that quote, "Historioggraphy has arisen in mankind's history in three focal points in Helas, Israel, and China." End quote.

[00:19:35]pointing at the failure of India to develop a reflexive approach to history in the ecumenic age.

[00:19:44]Veralin traces back this inability of India to think history to more theological roots to the absence of an historic theophony comparable to the epiphany of Christ. Hinduism conceiving itself as the eternal religion sanatana dharma ignores history and sees the world as a mere thing undergoing meaningless changes through aons of time. The man vantaras and the yugas of the Hindu doctrine of the cycles.

[00:20:21]By contrast, the Judeo-Christian God, when entering history, first indirectly through the Jewish prophets and then directly with his son, infuses it with an esqueological meaning, introducing a radical sense of a before and an after God's coming.

[00:20:43]It is not difficult to see that Verolin's treatment of ancient India largely betrays euroentric assumptions common in his lifetime even in the scholarly literature. One may recall Huserel's assertion that philosophy is a purely western phenomenon in his crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology or the neotoist attempt to reduce Hindu spirituality to a form of nature worship unable to appe approach the true god as we shall establish these prejudices ultimately prevented Verlin from understanding the Indian attitude toward time and history in its own terms and more importantly from realizing that the secret of the remarkable stability of Indian spiritual consciousness for millenniums probably lied in the non-dualistic ornostic teaching of the upanishads.

[00:21:44]We need to address successively the three shortcomings of Hinduism as identified by Veralin. One, the incompleteness of its break with the primary experience of the cosmos. Two, the absence of theophanes of first magnitude. Three, its relationship to history. One, Vulim himself has sometimes expressed some concerns about the spiritual consequences of the demonization of the world and of the flight of the gods on the average man.

[00:22:19]In the new science of politics, Vergelin remarks that in Christianity, quote, the feeling of security in a world full of gods is lost with the gods themselves end quote only remains quote the tenuous bond of faith end quote. But this bond quote may snap easily end quote causing an individual and collective quote breakthrough of faith end quote.

[00:22:47]Building on an intuition that Verglin did not pursue, one may make the argument that it is the gradual liquidation of cosmological or pre-ecumenic symbols in Christianity, a phenomenon that culminated with the reformation combined with the scientific revolutions that contributed more than anything else to the secularization of the west. The process of rationalization of Christianity. From the marginalization of the devotion to Mary and the saints to the lurggical reform of Vatican 2 has caused a prodigious loss of the sense of the sacred, a breakthrough of faith in the western world. By comparison, Hinduism has managed to remain a vibrant tradition to this day despite having to defend itself against the existential threat of Muslim invaders and later western colonialism.

[00:23:43]Moreover, the supposed incompleteness of the Indian spiritual outburst might well be the secret of the prodigious continuity of the sonata dharma since antiquity. What singles out Hinduism among the world religions has been its capacity to preserve the most archaic layers of its own experience of the sacred and to assimilate the other making it part of its own tradition.

[00:24:10]The cosmological symbols of earlier times were not devalorized as untrue as it happened in monotheistic religions but have been reinterpreted and continue to play a role in ritual practices. As far as the Hindu conception of the divine is concerned, it is characterized by an equilibrium between God with form Saguna Brahman and the God without form Nirona Brahman.

[00:24:38]The daily religious practice of the individual is centered on the worship of an ista devata or a deity of election.

[00:24:47]But this god or goddess endowed with cosmic attributes is conceived as a gate toward the supreme Brahman of the upanishads, the ultimate ground encompassing the individual self ja, the world jagat and the personal god Ishvara.

[00:25:06]Hindu incompleteness could therefore be redefined in terms of harmonious integration between preaxial/cossmological elements and postaxial elements. Whereas the monotheist man burns what he has adored. Hindu man adopts a more knowetic posture reinterpreting continuously rather than discarding old myths. Two, the question of the divine theophanes.

[00:25:34]What Veralin insufficiently takes into account is that the Christian doctrine of the incarnation contributed not only to esqueological valorization of history but also in its own way to the secularization of the west. Compared to other religions like Islam for instance, Christian theology and liturgy are focused on the figure of the mediator, not on the invisible reality it is supposed to represent. The original tension captured with the dogma of the two natures formulated at the council of Chalsedon gave way to an increasing humanization of God over the centuries ending up with the depiction of Christ in the 18th century as a moral teacher illegitimately divonized by his disciples.

[00:26:25]Hinduism did develop a relatively similar doctrine of the divine incarnations or descents avatar.

[00:26:32]Hindu bacti is centered on the interpersonal relation between the devotey and his deity of election which is often a divine descent Rama or Krishna itself part of a sacred narrative in India. However, the personalist and anthropomorphic conceptions of the divine are always compensated by more metaphysical and aniconic approaches which historically prevented the emergence of a purely imminentist vision of man and the world.

[00:27:06]Three, finally, the development of historioggraphy and the Christian valorization of history as a meaningful drama provide the necessary though not sufficient background for millinarianism.

[00:27:21]On the contrary, India, at least until the colonial period, seems to have remained largely immune from apocalyptical and millinarian distortions of reality that have periodically caused bloodshed throughout western history.

[00:27:38]What Verolin tends to overlook is that although there was little appetite in traditional India for recording the details of profane history, Hinduism built a quite elaborate theology of history found mostly in the epics and in the Perunas which deserves more than a passing reference. The theory of the yugas, which closely parallels Hessiad's teachings in works and days, makes the present state of social and moral disorder the culmination of a downfalling process of spiritual decline. Each age down to our age, the kaliuga is characterized by a decreasing length and perfection. In vishnavism, the dharma, the socio-cosmic law is periodically restored by the coming of avataras. Whereas the description of the first divine descents that like Matisa the fish, Kurma the turtle or Baraha the boar up to Narasimha the half lion half human avatara and Vammanana the dwarf contains legendary traits. The later descents are presented as semihistorical and endowed with human form. The last avatara of Vishnu, the khalkin avatara is yet to come and his advance will coincide with the end of the kaliuga and the restoration of order.

[00:29:17]One also finds in the Hindu literature narratives about the origin of social but also political institutions.

[00:29:25]According to Louis Dumo, one can distinguish between two types of stories about the origin of monarchy in the Indian epics, the Manushmi and the Piranhas. One making it a divine institution from the golden age and the other the product of a contract passed between members of society to counter increasing spiritual and moral evils.

[00:29:54]Dumont interprets the development of this contractualist interpretation of kingship as a sign of early secularization which would find its completion in the Machavevelian Art Shastra attributed to Chanaka.

[00:30:10]The phenomenon was not accompanied, however, by a decline of religious authority per se. And for this reason, it seems more appropriate to use the Vogalinian concept of differentiation to account for the gradual separation between temporal power and spiritual authority in ancient India.

[00:30:33]At first glance, there is no reason to treat Hindu narratives differently from similar Egyptian and Greek semi- mythical constructions.

[00:30:43]What cannot be denied, however, is that these stories never ended up in a both grandiose and self-defeating conflict as the one that opposed Roman, Jewish, and Christian historians in late antiquity.

[00:30:59]nor did they solidify to the point of taking the shape of a monolithic and unilinear narrative. One reason for this was probably contingent the relative instability of imperial structures in ancient India. Another was the fact that these narratives are found mostly in the smi which is considered of human origin and of a lower level of authority than the shi or revelation.

[00:31:27]Finally, there is the observation already made by Schmool N Eisenht in his comparative study of axial age civilizations that India never considered the political sphere as a domain where man could fulfill his highest purpose in life. Arta the pursuit of material success and power remained always subordinated to mosha to the pneumatic quest of ground on the traditional scale of values purush arta the result of this so-called failure of India to develop historioggraphy was the spiritual balance of consciousness was better maintained by the incomplete breakthrough that took place in Hinduism than by the supposedly more complete one that occurred in the west. India was thus preserved for centuries from the fury of apocalyptic millennarianism that devastated the west and was has undermined its religious tradition up to this day.

[00:32:37]Making a step further and at the risk of being accused of somehow parodying Marx's gesture towards Hegel, we should not hesitate to turn Vogalin on his head. What prevented ancient India to experience the same type of millennian derailment as the west was the very teaching of the Upanishads regarding the identity between the self and the absolute. Whereas in the west, millennian movements sought to abolish the tension between the self and the divine ground of existence by building a great narrative about the end of history and the transfiguration of life on earth through either a divine intervention or a man-made revolution. Indian consciousness remained faithful to the core teaching of the ancient seers, remembering that divine perfection was to be pursued nowhere but within one's own self.

[00:33:35]We do not intend to deny that our position entails nothing less than to reverse the hypothesis at the core of Vergalin's work. It was not the Gnostic claim that the self and God are one that planted the seeds of all later evils, but on the contrary, dualism, the view that God is other than the self. The necessary connection between melaninarianism and dualism is illustrated within the Hindu tradition itself by the case of the devotional and epic literature.

[00:34:07]As it is well known, the Mahabraata tells the story of an apocalyptical war between two clans, the Kawaravas and the Pandavas. This conflict was plotted by the gods to cause the downfall of the Chhatrias and precipitate the advance of the Kaliuga, the last and dark age of mankind. More than any other Hindu text, the Mahabraata portrays a millennarian bend is pervaded by an apocalyptical climate reaching its climax with the final battle and the destruction of Dvar Raka by a flood which unmistakably reminds us of the fate of Atlantis.

[00:34:57]What is significant is that the Mahabharata is not centered on the pursuit of knowledge but on the question of honor and duty and contains the Bhagavad Gita which at least for most commentators places emphasis on devotion to Lord Krishna to a personal god.

[00:35:16]Similarly, the Khalkin Avatara, at least in its present form, is ignored by the Vadic literature and displays all the features of relatively late edition more compatible with the sectarian religions of medieval India than the sapiential perspective of the Upanishads.

[00:35:40]If we consider the history of religions, it teaches us that millennian creeds have sometimes been traced back to ancient Persia, to this branch of Indo-Uropean civilization that saw the world not as a divine play, Leela, but as a scene of esqueological conflict between two principles, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mayu, the god of light and the spirit of darkness. Millennarian expectations and dualism seem to always go hand in hand, be it in India or elsewhere.

[00:36:14]Before turning to modern and contemporary India, let us add that even if the devotional tradition of India did develop a vision of history that partially echoes the western apocalyptical fears. We should never lose sight of the fact that for the sanatana dharma, the end of the world remains the end of a world. The closure of a cycle always coinciding with the opening of a new one. Even more important, Indian religious consciousness prudently pushed back the end of the kalyuga to a very distant future more than 400,000 years from now.

[00:36:54]thus reminding us that we have more pressing concerns than waiting for the parasia.

[00:37:03]Beyond passing remarks, Verlin did not directly approach the question of the influence of modern gnostic ideologies on non-western societies in the wake of European colonial expansion. The case should be made though that colonial empires like the empires of the ecumenic age have accelerated the process of demonization of the world. Colonialism and more recently neoliberal globalization by causing the collapse of traditional landmarks have created a spiritual vacuum progressively filled by political religions like Islamism for the Middle East or Hindu nationalism in India. Hindu nationalism which found its first doctrinal expression in the writings of Vi Savar emerged toward the end of the colonial period with the rise of tensions between Hindus and Muslims as a prelude to the partition. It was however after the emergency 1975 to 1977 and the Aayotaa crisis that the Hindu nationalists started their rise to power which led to the formation of the first BJP government in 1998.

[00:38:19]The influence of the western political religions in India and more particularly fascism and national socialism remains controversial but is well documented notably by Kristoff Jaffer.

[00:38:34]To some extent, it should also be argued that Hindu nationalists have more or less unconsciously modeled themselves on their enemy, Islamist militant groups that were also flourishing in India at the time and later in Pakistan after the partition.

[00:38:54]Like any ethnationalist movement, Hindu nationalism remains intellectually unsophisticated.

[00:39:02]Yet it was capable of capitalizing on certain tectonic shifts triggered by western colonialism and the reformist response among native intellectuals.

[00:39:18]Among these intellectuals stands first and foremost the neoidantist thinker Ram Moan Roy whose rationalist critique of the worship of Istar Deata as mere idolatry probably struck the first blow to the balance of consciousness in traditional Hinduism to the awareness of the imminence of the in transpersonal absolute into cosmic forms which had been the defining feature of Hinduism since the ecumenic age.

[00:39:52]In Roy's studies of the scriptures, symbols lose their metaphysical transparency, their capacity to point toward super rational reality. They are reduced to the level of mere allegorories carrying a moral teaching at best. rituals are to be replaced by a purely mental worship of the pure being, the creator of the universe. One can argue that Ram Moan Roy contributed more than any other reformist to a process of disenchantment of the Hindu worldview.

[00:40:28]His gesture did not remain unnoticed.

[00:40:31]Not only did it trigger a critical response from traditionalist circles, but one can also interpret the work of later neo-Hindu thinkers such as Tilak Gandhi or Vivikananda as a reaction to Ram Moan Royy's abstract monism as an attempt to reconcile God and the world by restating vidanta as a practical philosophy.

[00:41:00]with a true political and ethical content.

[00:41:05]It was however Sri Arobindo Go who arguably sought to operate a full re-enchantment of the world at the risk of operating an imminentization of the Hindu escaton and thus creating a spiritual disorder on which nationalist movements could later capitalize.

[00:41:27]This claim may come as a surprise considering that Orobindo is mostly known in the west today for his ashram in Pondicherry and for Aroville the utopian city he and his successor Meera Alfasa also called the mother established although for 4 years between 1906 and 1910 he belonged to the radical fringe of the Indian Congress writing nationalist pamphlets and even landing in jail for re revolutionary activism.

[00:41:58]Arobindo quickly withdrew from politics and his later writings bear witness of a deep awareness of the dangers of reactionary modernism.

[00:42:09]Peter Heath was therefore probably right to argue that placing Arobindo in the genealogy of contemporary Hindu nationalism as Marxist intellectuals have frequently done since the 1970s is misleading implying a simplification of his of his thought quote to a point of caricature end quote. Still, although the political use of Arobindo as a symbolic icon, a mascot, may tell us more about the Hindu nationalist search for intellectual respectability than the Bengali philosopher himself. We would like to make the argument that his thought, whatever its intrinsic value, epitomizes a process of millennial derailment of the upanishadic experience into a world imminent ideology and thus unwillingly prepared the ground for the spread of Hindu nationalism under the cover of a rebirth of Indian culture. As we shall see ultimately Arobindo proves to be more a disciple of Hegel and Nze than he was of judge Navalia or Shankara.

[00:43:25]According to Indrasen Arabindo's life divine raises the following question.

[00:43:31]How is divine life a full life of the spirit possible on earth? How can spirit be reconciled to matter? For him, Mayavvada, the doctrine of the cosmic illusion betrays the original intention of the Vadic Sears, which he claims to have rediscovered with his pioneering study on the esoteric meaning of the vadas because it fails to account for both the absolute reality of Brahman and the relative reality of the world. The world is not a mere illusion mitty, but a divine playa.

[00:44:07]In other words, the absolute should be conceived of not as an unfathomable and unspeakable one, but as a process to which man can partake through the awakening of what he calls the supermind by which he can see the one in the many and the many in the one. In fact, Arobindo claimed to have experienced the type of samadei described in the vidantic and yogic literature only to reject it and to search for a higher experience of enlightenment. Let us remark that tantism wi with its alchemic rather than aesthetic bend has indeed already loosened the boundaries between deliverance moka and enjoyment poker contributing to an imminentization of the blissful experience of the jivan mukti.

[00:45:02]Still, Arubindo was quite clear that his integral yoga was departing from traditional yogic practices, even of a tantric variety. as he himself put it.

[00:45:18]Whereas in tantism, the sakti was used as a means to realize the supreme spirit, his method was working the other way around from the sakti to the cosmic energy.

[00:45:32]With the descent of the supermind and the transfiguration of man and life on earth as the ultimate goal, Arobindo saw these perusiatic events as the end of history. Borrowing from the Hindu doctrine of four ages, Arobindo delineates a two-fold process of spiritual decline and material progress driving human evolution. The east symbolizes the original state of perfection but it gradually fell into a form of spiritual slumber during the third age or devapara yuga. On the contrary, the fourth age or the kaliuga is dominated by individualism and rationalism with the west exploring the power of individual subjectivity possibly driven by the secret desire to recapture the spiritual intuitions gradually buried beneath misunderstandings and dogmas. In this endeavor, the west has unfortunately unleashed However, apocalyptic forces that caused the two world wars. In his lifetime, the west was still controlling the world world. But Arobindo was convinced that as the cycle was coming to an end, humanity would reach higher levels of consciousness and he foresaw a role for India as the vanguard of the pending spiritual revolution.

[00:47:03]Unfortunately for Arobindo and his disciples, they waited in vain for the fulfillment of their delusional dreams.

[00:47:11]Like Hideker's last god, the supermind remained deaf to the prayers of Arabindo. His project of crowning all the incomplete teachings of the past with his own naive little system simply miscarried. Looking back into Arobindo's failure, one may only agree with GK Malcani's response to Arobindo's almost Hegelian claim that quote, "Consciousness must pass beyond this finite reason and the finite sense to a larger reason and spiritual sense in touch with the consciousness of the infinite and responsive to the logic of the infinite which is the very logic of being itself." end quote. With all due respect to the sage of Pandicherry, quote, the logic of the infinite can only consist in the recognition that the infinite is wholly transcendent and unrelated to the finite and that the latter is only an erroneous formulation of the former that requires to be negated end quote. It is therefore illusory to search for a quote higher or larger reason that can reconcile the two or abrogate the law of non-contradiction itself end quote as Sri Ramana Maharshi another South Indian guru and contemporary of Arobindo was teaching the real goal of spiritual life is to silence the mind so that the everlasting everpresent reality can manifest itself self. Like the Hegelian system, Arobindo gives less than it claims. Arobindo's supermind is not located beyond the mind, but in the mind itself when it has lost awareness of its own limitations.

[00:48:58]From a more vogalinian perspective, it seems that Orurabindo has contributed more than anyone else to introducing millennian expectations in an imminent end of history into the Indian imaginary. Worse, Arubindo has secularized or iminatized the idea of release mocka from the cycle of rebirth samsara, replacing it with the prospect of an intramundane progression of consciousness. The first step should be the self-determination of nations like India. The march of history ending with the establishment of the unity of mankind and a collective enlightenment under the guidance of Orurobindo the prophet of the supermind.

[00:49:46]Orobindo illustrates a very puzzling case of ideological distortion.

[00:49:51]not being one of these religiously illiterate gurus who have flourished in India over the last decade decades and attracted so many westerners and lapsed Hindus. He knew that he was distorting the doctrine of the yugas. He was also aware that by turning the transcendent absolute of the upanishads into a spirit realizing itself within the world by temporalizing the absolute he was contradicting the core intuition of advite vanta regarding the nature of reality. As Gaudapada declares in his Mandukia karikas, quote, "Something that already exists cannot be reborn and something which has never existed cannot come into existence." End quote. From the ultimate standpoint, para martika, nothing has ever come to existence.

[00:50:45]There is no becoming, only pure and eternal being.

[00:50:50]Arobindo knew about adjativada, the doctrine of non-birth, the ultimate teaching of advanta. And yet he chose deliberately to discard it, to disturb the serenity of the one reality by making it part of a temporally oriented process. Because he could not have possibly missed the fact that if quote there is neither birth nor dissolution, no aspirant to liberation, nor liberated nor anyone in bondage end quote. His attempt to reconcile time and eternity being and becoming mosha and arta to say nothing of his political theology will prove utterly pointless. In fact, Arobindo illustrates the case of a brilliant intellectual whose feeling of alienation under colonial rule was so unbearable that he felt compelled to create a secondary reality, a pseudo myth that disfigures the much richer and sober Hindu experience with transcendence.

[00:51:59]Much like many of his generation, Arobindo was also horrified by the destruction and spiritual disorder left behind by the two world wars. And he sought to interpret them in esqueological terms as signs of a cosmic struggle and of the advance of a new age in which the drama of mankind would finally reach its happy ending.

[00:52:27]Little remains of the most profound insights of Arrobindo in Hindu nationalism. His universalism has fallen in the background. The order in society no longer depends on man's living inwardly and outwardly in conformity with the truth but in Schmidian terms on the awareness of a dichotomy between friends and foes. If however in Hindu nationalism the nation Rashtra could be turned into a sort of imminentist substitute for the divine ground of existence with the quest for a collective identity replacing the search for self-nowledge. It was because of western colonialism and later the response to this challenge by thinkers like Ram moan ree vivikananda or arroindo had destroyed the spiritual balance of consciousness in India.

[00:53:25]The rise of new political religions in India has therefore little to do with the supposed incompleteness of differentiation in ancient India or the gnostic nature of Hindu wisdom diagnosed by Verolin. One may wonder however if India will finally succumb to the same sort of spiritual disease that is slowly killing Islam from within. The career of Swami Karapatri, a charismatic Samyasin from Utar Pradesh who offered in his writings a metapolitical critique of Hindu nationalism accurately portraying it as a modern counterfeit of Hindu spirituality, a political ideology dressed in vidantic clothes should provide reasons for hope. Yet his work to say nothing of the small political party the Ram Raja Parishad he created after Indian independence has failed to produce any tangible political result at least on a large scale. This failure plus the state of inner disorder in contemporary India reflected in the blatant commodification of spirituality by self-appointed gurus and the enthusiasm of the younger generation for the most absurd expressions of western culture leave little room for optimism at least for the foreseeable future. If you value my work, I'd be most grateful if you would like, subscribe, leave a comment, and share this video with anyone you think might be interested. If you would like to support me in working on this project, I'd be deeply thankful if you would consider becoming a regular supporter through Patreon, or making a one-time donation through coffee. Links in the description. If you do subscribe, please remember to hit that little bell icon because otherwise YouTube won't inform you when I upload new videos. If you'd prefer to read my essays over the video format, they are all available in written form on Substack. Link also in the description.