1.5 Is Vedanta Relevant Today?

That the body we presently inhabit is marginally different from what it was one or two million years ago is a fact, but that it is an improvement is not necessarily a fact, assuming that the word “evolution” means improvement.

It was probably as perfect as it needed to be for Cro-Magnon man and the issues he faced. The one we have now is not significantly different but will probably get us through the difficulties we face too.

But a human being is more than a food tube. In spite of the minor changes to the body over time, there is no evidence that in the days of yore we were not conscious, had more or less than ten senses, a mind, intellect, memory and ego and were not driven by driven by fear of and desire for various things.

For the spiritual evolution argument to make sense, its proponents would have to show that the subtle body – the mind, intellect, ego and memory – were fundamentally different from what they are today. And they would have to show that human beings then did not desire and fear the same kinds of things we do.

If human beings had the same equipment for experience then as we do now and similar priorities and values – security and pleasure, power, virtue, etc. – how much evolution has taken place?

The plow, for example, is still an iron implement that disturbs the earth. Is it an improvement over its wooden predecessor?

Did not the wooden plow – or the sharp stick that proceeded it – serve the needs of the humans that used it at the time? You may consider a long bank of steel plows or a device with dozens of nozzles that sprays poison on the earth as it is pulled by a huge polluting tractor an evolutionary advance, but is it an improvement?

It is apparently what we need to survive these days but is it a sign of advanced intelligence?

We seek food and shelter. We love certain things and hate certain things. We lie, cheat and steal. We wage war. We paint on our walls like the cave dwellers at Lascaux. We worship our idea of God and believe in angels and devils.

Some of us think the world is about to end disastrously and others believe that The Millennium is at hand. Did the human beings who went before do anything else? Did they think differently?

When you look at the effects of complex technology on the environment and the human body, it is difficult to accept the idea that we are somehow better than our ancestors, that we are in fact even superior to our animal brethren.

No animal that I am aware of builds a nest, defecates in it and lives in it. And even if some animals do, they can be excused insofar as they have yet to evolve intellects.

Yet today the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat is hopelessly contaminated. How evolved does that make us?

One might rather make the argument that in spite of our mighty intellectual powers we are actually less evolved than our predecessors.

So if we cannot even get our relationship to the physical environment right, how likely is it that we can evolve new “spiritual” institutions?

But there is no evidence that time is linear or that it is anything more than an intellectual projection based on a faulty view of the nature of reality.

If reality is non-dual, time is non-existent and can at best be said to be an apparent reality, an attempt to measure transient events with reference to each other.

If events are projections brought about by the nonapprehension of the non-dual nature of reality – an attempt to structure the formless ocean of conscious in which we live and move and have our being – then nothing actually ever happened– which admittedly is not how it seems, but is actually the way it is.

Inside every human mind lives a frightened little dwarf that longs to be loved and respected. Doing good is the royal road to fame. When you do good, people love you and you feel important.

But if you know who you are, you do not care one iota what people think. You do not have to do good – because you are good. Goodness flows automatically from you. Doing is not involved.

You can never be sure when a person’s good deeds are motivated by an un-self-conscious response to suffering.

Probably the first few times you lend a helping hand, no thought is involved. In an unconscious way you understand “there but for the grace of God go I” and you extend yourself to yourself in the form of the other.

But then, as time passes, you see results: people love you. That little person inside feels “better” and motivates you to do more good.

No blame, but goodness is not generated by good deeds. It is the nature of the self, something that can only be understood and appreciated.

If the little person within has not been resolved, after a few good deeds the un-self-conscious impulse gets buried beneath a self-conscious desire to make oneself feel virtuous, ergo evolutionary spirituality.

Come up with a world-saving idea like new institutions and traditions and that unrecognized little person inside will trouble you no more. People will flock to your banner and you will feel important.

Let the evolutionary people actually “evolve” institutions that save our poor souls. Until they do, it is all grandstanding.

In the first place true spirituality has nothing to do with society or institutions. Behind that small, inadequate person lies a gigantic person – a timeless, universal person – who has been sleeping for a very long time.

One fine day that person begins to stir and from that point on it does not matter if there is a world outside, much less institutions, to help it actualize itself. All that is required is that you listen to that person’s voice and let it guide you home. It cannot be denied.

In the second place, the argument that we need to evolve our traditions “to keep pace” presupposes that there is something wrong with the world as it is and that keeping pace with the rat race is desirable.

As far as I can see there is no evidence that there is anything wrong with the world, apart from the belief that there is something wrong with it.

Wrong from whose point of view?

In reality, “the world” is just an individual’s idea of the world, a thought in consciousness. It has no objective reality. If you think it is good, it is good for you. If you think it is bad, it is bad for you.

Even if you take the world to be a real place with real things going on, you would need an impartial study to determine if your new institutions had actually corrected the problem.

Before you evolved your institutions, you would need to wire up sensors to every living being and monitor its happiness index over a long period of time and compare it with its unhappiness index.

Next, you would need to develop a way to determine degrees of happiness and misery.

Finally, you would have to subtract the unhappiness totals from the happiness totals to come up with a proper figure.

Then you would need to evolve the new institutions, analyze the figures and compare the previous results with the new results.

Not only is this impossible, our sources of information about the state of the world are biased and inadequate. In the media world there is a famous saying: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Disaster and misery sell.

But for every Taliban killed by the Americans there are five million little old men and women sitting on their verandas happily nursing their beers as they watch the sun go down.

Dream good and dream evil exist in it. The yin-yang is a good symbol of it. The white yang contains a black yin dot and the black yin contains a white yang dot.

The white yang shrinks as the black yin grows until it eventually becomes a full-blown yin. But as soon as the yin attains its full potential it begins to wane and eventually becomes what it was before, a black yang.

When it is yin, is it really yin? When it is yang, is it really yang?

In this apparent world good and evil are just two ways of looking at the same reality. They are constantly equilibrating.

Sometimes it seems that one dominates the other and vice versa, but is anything actually happening? The law of unintended consequences bears this out.

To wage war in Afghanistan, which many think is a bad thing, the American military buys gasoline from Saudi Arabia for $1.00 a gallon delivered to the port of Karachi, Pakistan. By the time the fuel convoys wend their way across the plains and work their ways through the treacherous Kyber Pass and reach the battlefield, it costs $423.00 a gallon!

Even for profligate Americans, this is untenable. So the Pentagon invited companies to develop renewable technologies that could supply power on the battlefield, many of which are now being tested in Afghanistan.

When America gets bored with its war, declares victory and leaves, these technologies will eventually become available to the public and the world will benefit greatly.

In this world every downside has an upside, every upside a downside. Duality is a zero-sum game. Everything – the good and the bad – serve the self, the one reality.

This fact came home to me with particular force during the war in Serbia between the Christians and the Muslims. When I read about the atrocities – I don’t have TV nor do I watch it – I was horrified.

My idea was that that these people were some kind of stooped, hairy, apelike troglodytes with prehensile tails skulking around in slimy sub-Saharan swamps.

Then one day I was near a TV when the news came on, and I got an idea of what the country was like. I was astounded to learn that those who were raping and killing and torturing each other lived in nice, tidy, bourgeois homes watched TV, wore Adidas, drove Toyotas and paid with plastic. They are “modern” people, but so what?

At one time the spiritual world thought that Theosophy was the answer and that Krishnamurti was going to usher in The Millennium.

Later, Aurobindo and the Mother, two do-gooding worldsavers, burst on the scene with the idea that the Overmind was about to descend and if we just transformed our cells we could save the human race. To date our cells remain untransformed.

In keeping with the times – the Eighties – Rajneesh offered his “copulate your way to God” idea and tens of thousands flocked to him. He even updated the ancient institution of sanyass, renunciation. Where are the Neo-Sanyassis now? 

Perhaps the best example of the failure of modern man to evolve new institutions is Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a man who in the Seventies made upwards of a billion dollars on Transcendental Meditation.

He declared the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment and established a laughable “world government” that was meant to usher in The Millennium. Where is his Golden Age now? TM is just another failed utopian movement consigned to the dustbin of history.

Even Neo-Advaita, which briefly flirted with non-duality in the Nineties like a nervous teenager at a cotillion, has lost its luster. These were all “modern” spiritual solutions for modern people. Where are they now?

It is not a means of salvation, like religion, available to everyone. It saves qualified individuals from ignorance of their true nature. It was designed to save “the world.” It has been successfully doing what it does for thousands of years.

Only a handful of people in any age attain enlightenment and they do it irrespective of time, place and circumstance.

Vedanta is like the wheel. The wheel is eternal. It is pure knowledge. It goes around and does its job. There is no need to “evolve” it.

If somebody wants to invent a square wheel or an oval wheel or an oblong wheel – God bless his pointed little head – let him do so, but the attempt is little more than well-meaning vanity.

How is the chronocentric view any different from the belief that one race is superior to another or that one religion is superior to another? There is no time. There is knowledge and there is ignorance. Beliefs are ignorance. How can anyone take the Neo-Neos seriously?

The nail in the coffin of the evolutionary spiritual idea is the fact that revelation is independent of time. For truth to be revealed, all that is necessary is a pure mind.

The Upanishads, which are the source texts for Vedanta, were revealed to people whose minds were pure. There are pure sattvic people in every age and truth is revealed to them too. Not everyone who lives today is contaminated by the extroverted vulgarities of our neurotic modern world.