the speaking tree - Come To Sense The Inner Heart of Trees

Shri Shri Anandamurti





Penetrating the psychic sphere can be done in two ways: through applied psychology and through Cosmic Grace. When you attain the quality of macrocosmic omniscience, by His grace, your mind can easily enter the minds of others. Most people can reach the stage of superficial psychic assimilation. With this superficial knowledge pundits debate amongst themselves, scholars write theses, and groups of intellectuals repudiate each others' arguments. But superficial psychic assimilation of external objects through direct perception, inference or authority is very unreliable.In the stage of knowledge wherein one draws closer to the Atman, one enters the psychic stratum. Take the case of the palmyra tree. What group does it belong to? It belongs to the palm group. What are the physical characteristics of the trees of the palm group? What are their psychic wants? By posing such questions you will gain knowledge about the palmyra and its special psychology . You will realise that if the saliva of any animal touches the palmyra tree, its growth gets stunted.Suppose an animal eats the leaves of a palmyra sapling and drops a little of its saliva onto the plant. The speed of its growth will certainly be hampered.
Coconuts and betel nut trees have the same characteristics.When you sit beside a tree you will intuitively understand what the tree is thinking. Of course, the tree won't say anything loudly , but you will be able to communicate with it because your mind has established a link with its mind. So in the course of seeking Atman, one comes in contact with the inner heart, life and the inner mind of all objects, leading to one's knowledge becoming deeper and more confirmed.
The mind derives much contentment from its contact with the inner mind of certain plants, animals and human beings, for through such contact one can render better service to them.One will develop a certain degree of self-satisfaction for one's psychic assimilation will have been of some use. This is also a step in the acquisition of knowledge. But it does have a particular disadvantage. This contact with the inner mind of a tree, animal or human being depends on the freshness or strength of your mind.
If for some reason your mental power has lost the capacity to acquire knowledge through superficial psychic assimilation, your progress towards Atman will also be lost.
People who have practised the sadhana of avidya tantra can develop the power to know the minds of others. But such acquired power is short-lived ­ it will desert them one day. If they misuse even a small amount of this acquired power, they will lose it immediately . Perhaps you have heard of certain instances when this has happened.
Permanent knowledge is not possible through perception, inference, or authority , or by studying books or discourses. The knowledge which one attains by expanding one's mind in the psychic sphere through the practise of sadhana (spiritual practise), which I call upa atmastikarana is also not everlasting, although it does last for a certain period.
Knowledge only becomes permanent when human beings withdraw the entire intuitive element and focus it on their spiritual point of ideation. At that time the entire universe comes within the scope of their mind, and they become omniscient.
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Economic and Political Weekly: Table of Contents

After the Hanging

Vol - L No. 32, August 08, 2015 

• Editorials

There is no closure; we must ask again why what happened did happen.

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Some Issues of Muslim Religious Schools in India

Vol - L No. 32, August 08, 2015 | Shirin Dalvi 

• Web Exclusives

“Modernisation” of Madrassas has become a regular catch-phrase for governments, yet there has been negligence in meeting the educational needs of the Muslim minority. It is high time that Muslim institutions and intellectuals come together to work out Madrassa modernization which meets the needs of the community.

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Editorials The Importance of Protest By persisting, FTII students have exposed the government's insidious intent. Read more	Editorials A Symbolic Presence There is reluctance to truly empower the National Commission for Women. Read more
Ht Parekh Finance Column Black Notes in the Stock Market C P Chandrasekhar The 27 July blip in India's stock markets was triggered by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team's report on black money. This report called for an identification of the owners of Participatory Notes, the instruments used... Read more	Commentary The Indian Financial Code The Good, the Bad and the Ugly K Kanagasabapathy The Government of India has gone against the spirit and content of the comprehensive recommendations of the 2013 report of the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission. It has revised the commission's draft Indian Financial Code (which... Read more
Commentary An Impossible Dream? Depoliticising the Central Bureau of Investigation Shiladitya Chakraborty The politicisation of the Central Bureau of Investigation as reflected in the investigation of several high profile cases has eroded its image in the public eye. A number of measures suggested in this article can help preserve its autonomy. Read more	Commentary Copyrights for Farmers Role of Agricultural Intermediaries Shalini Bhutani A number of state agencies and non-governmental organisations have come forward to facilitate farmers/breeders to register their crop varieties and obtain plant variety certifi cates. But can these agencies bring forth a change in the mindset of... Read more
Commentary Bringing Back Social Forestry Irshad A Khan India's social forestry programme promised much in the late-1970s and mid-1980s. It became the programme to be emulated for many developing countries. But the programme was not backed up by adequate research and was jettisoned, in the early... Read more	Commentary A Principled and Knowledgeable Critic Praful Bidwai on Nuclear Weapons and Energy M V Ramana An appreciation of Praful Bidwai's knowledgeable critique of nuclear energy and nuclear power. Praful Bidwai, 66, died in June. Read more
Book Reviews Risking the Farm Will the Smallholder Survive? Richa Kumar The Future of Indian Agriculture: Technology and Institutions edited by Nilabja Ghosh and C S C Sekhar, New Delhi: Academic Foundation, 2013; pp 263, Rs 895. Read more	Book Reviews Between India and Israel Vijay Prashad The Evolution of India's Israel Policy: Continuity, Change, and Compromise since 1922 by Nicolas Blarel; New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2015; pp 472, Rs 995. Read more
Perspectives India's Handloom Challenge Anatomy of a Crisis Ashoke Chatterjee The Indian weaver is dismissed in high places as an embarrassing anachronism, despite demand for his or her skills and products. In the new millennium, globalisation and a mindless acquiescence to imported notions of a good life threaten to take... Read more	Special Articles Growth and Inequality in the Distribution of India's Consumption Expenditure: 1983 to 2009-10 S Subramanian, D Jayaraj This paper undertakes an assessment of the evolution of inequality in the distribution of consumption expenditure in India over the last quarter-century, from 1983 to 2009-10, employing data available in the quinquennial "thick" surveys of the... Read more
Special Articles Why Women Teachers Matter in Secondary Education Kameshwari Jandhyala, Vimala Ramachandran There have been plenty of policy recommendations and interventions to increase the pool of women teachers in India, especially at the school level. Despite this, research in three districts of Rajasthan shows that any such attempt would need an... Read more	Special Articles On the Question of Capital Punishment Nishad Patnaik This paper examines the two basic types of ethical justification usually advanced in favour of capital punishment--those of deterrence and retribution. It contends that deterrence-oriented arguments, which fall under the rubric of utilitarianism... Read more
Notes Economic Survey 2014-15 Growth Policy and Theory Alex M Thomas The Economic Survey is an important economic document published every year by the ... Read more	Discussion Measuring Indian Growth Why the Data Should Be Doubted Less Ashima Goyal The article offers some explanations for the large changes in growth rates in the rebased gross domestic product series, but argues that these do not imply a recovery in the macroeconomic cycle. Changes in estimates of savings and investment also... Read more

Historians prevent us from becoming a people without history

It is hard to miss the irony in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s effusive praise of Shashi Tharoor’s debating skills at Oxford University. The former minister of state for foreign affairs and human resource development (2012-2014) not only let fly a scorching and withering critique of British Imperialism but carried out the charge with such stirring eloquence that the word empire itself was ingloriously flung into the dustbin of history. And of course, this triumph was crowned when the debate went ‘viral’. The media in India too gushed with fulsome praise for delivering to the citizens of an erstwhile colony a total victory in a single afternoon of compelling prose and exemplary erudition.

In the fog of this oratorical victory, Modi seems to have failed to fully grasp the colour of the arguments that he was praising. History as the sword of choice in the Oxford University Union debates always comes encased in an ideological sheath. Tharoor was rehearsing, if not ably belabouring, a critique of British colonialism that drew upon rich scholarly contributions of Left-nationalist and Marxist historians. This avowedly Left-wing anti-colonial scholarship of the immediate post-Independence period not only built on the early economic criticisms made by Dadabhai Naoroji and RC Dutt but also further explained the complex financial mechanisms of colonial exploitation.

In the course of painstaking research, these scholars were able to credibly build a distinct anti-colonial historiography, which could convincingly explain independent India’s economic backwardness. Poverty and underdevelopment, they argued, could be squarely traced to historical injustice through notions such as the ‘drain’ of wealth from India to Britain, the de-industrialisation of the country by British manufacturing interests and the strategic colonial neglect of Indian industrialisation. Seminal contributions by Bipan Chandra, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Barun De and Sumit Sarkar, to name a few, were foundational in disproving the claim that gnawing economic underdevelopment in British India was simply a result of the Empire’s unsuccessful attempts to civilise South Asia.

Read | Tharoor: Modi talks of development but condones its opposite

These Left-wing nationalist and Marxist historians were able to very substantially upturn the ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Utilitarian’ histories that the likes of Alexander Dow, William Jones, Max Mueller or James Mill had assembled as a style of framing South Asia in terms of an unchanging, spiritual and passive ‘people without a history’. In such colonial interpretations, the South Asian subcontinent was essentially made up of a collection of loose internally contradictory cultural blocs comprising castes, religions, endogamous groupings and tribes who could not provide the social or political ingredients for modern nation-making.

This colonial view of the subcontinent’s pasts, moreover, was further undermined in the early decades of India’s independence with the emergence of modern professional history writing and the embrace of a decisive secular and material turn. In particular, a prolific set of pioneering publications dealing with the ancient and medieval periods by the likes of DD Kosambi, RS Sharma, Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib (to mention a few) made a strong case to understand Indian history as a rational project that was very open to non-spiritual reasoning. It is this rich legacy of Left-nationalist and Marxists scholarship that in fact made Tharoor’s unimpeachable facts and claims possible.

Ironically, Modi’s praise for the victory at Oxford University comes at a time when his government has been actively undermining these very same intellectually robust secular and material histories by trying to resuscitate instead the much-discredited Orientalist notion of an unchanging religious India.

Tharoor cannot entirely escape the accusation of strangling Indian scholarship. As minister for education, his tenure was more than lacklustre, even somewhat fatal, for social sciences research in India. The UGC, for example, was allowed to run riot with conflicting rules and instructions. Instead of helping augment the government’s ability to deliver on public education, especially for higher learning in the arts and humanities, what one saw was a drift and the steady dismantling of institutions. For the field of history, nothing was done to rebuild, restore or even revive the decrepit state of archives. The case of Delhi University is only too well known to bear repetition. History writing in India today happens under the most trying infrastructural and financial constraints. One wonders if there are ways to demand reparations from ministers of education who wreck and debilitate scholarship?

Read |  I was impressed by Modi's gesture: Tharoor

But the last laugh must still, ironically enough, belong to Oxford University and Britain in general. The fact is that the British library and its well-maintained collections still remain the premier archival holding on India’s colonial past. The British University system, moreover, continues to fund and maintain its historians and the study of history with superior infrastructure and commitment than what India offers to its relatively impoverished counterparts.

It is all well and good to play victim in the charmed environs of Oxford University or tickle the conscience of the British elite, but the real defeat of colonial arrogance would have been more meaningful if lesser-known Indian universities like Tilka Manjhi Bhagalpur University in Bihar or Indira Kala Sangit Vishwavidyalaya in Chhattisgarh had been given the infrastructure, the libraries and the resources to produce great scholarship and historians.

The ‘idea’ of India, at heart, is a project of history and any government that fails to nurture, develop or sustain this historical imagination by encouraging good and rigorous scholarship plays dangerously with its foundations. Already the better libraries, archives and collections on India lie abroad. Eliminating historians and their craft is but one step to becoming a people without history.

(Rohan D’Souza is associate professor, Graduate School of Asian and African Area Studies, Kyoto University. The views expressed are personal)

The dark side of pleasure

The question is not whether certain kinds of pleasure are innately bad but whether a society can reject forms of pleasure that arise from the exploitation of others.

The recent blocking of some pornographic websites by the government has set off some sharp criticism and mockery. Understandably, the unexpected and largely unexplained manner in which the step was taken was interpreted as one more instance of a conservative government seeking to impose its own version of morality on the people.

Like the ‘beef ban’, the ‘porn ban’ turned quickly into a slogan and symbol of oppression. Some observers went so far as to ask if the disappearance of pornography from the screens of Indian consumers would be followed by the disappearance of people too, on par with the actions of brutal and totalitarian governments elsewhere.

Now that the ‘porn ban’ has been effectively withdrawn and freedom restored, it might be helpful to ask ourselves if there is something in our humanity that we have forgotten in our rush to defend a fundamentally exploitative practice. After all, we are not talking here about the government intruding into a form of pleasure that is without cost to others, but about product from an industry often associated with violence and coercion against women. The key question here is not whether certain kinds of pleasure are innately bad or ‘sinful’ but whether society can teach its members to reject forms of pleasure that arise from the exploitation and degradation of a section.

‘Consuming’ women

Coincidentally, in the case of both the controversial Indian bans, there is one important work that is relevant to the present-day debate — Carol J. Adams’ The Pornography of Meat. Ms. Adams shows us the striking parallels between the representational practices of carnivorousness and patriarchy in Western popular culture.

While the generalised practice of referring to women as ‘meat’ is bad enough, what pornography does is to magnify the process of viewing women not as humans but essentially as ‘cuts of meat.’ Through an extensive study of advertisements that present women’s bodies as ‘meat’ to be consumed by men, Ms. Adams reiterates the key concerns that should be informing many of our debates today: “How does someone become something? How does someone come to be viewed as an object, a product, as consumable? How does her use to another as this product, this consumable object, become more important than her own inherent value, her own complete and unique self?”

The debate on animal subjectivity and suffering may still seem remote to too many self-assured ‘omnivores’ at the moment, but there should be no ambiguity at all on the morality of objectifying and ‘consuming’ women.

The irony is that often the same voices, who claim to speak for women when it comes to aspects like the debatable role of Rama in exiling Sita in the Ramayana, become oblivious to the real, ongoing, widespread brutality against women that exists in the culture industries today. After all, we seem to think nothing is wrong with Western cultural products that celebrate the denigration of women, like the50 Shades novels and movies being dumped into our markets and minds, because to protest such things might be deemed conservative, puritanical, maybe even Hindutva. Yet, we welcome uncritically contrived and specious ‘analyses’ and documentaries about how our culture, religion and tradition is responsible for the suffering of women in India, because that seems to be the progressive thing to do.

Critical reflection

The truth is that our critiques have not kept pace with the intensity and scale of the cultural changes brought about by new media technologies. We must recognise that we live in a world very different from that of Kama Sutra or Khajuraho monuments — despite the desire of some scholars to view that world through such orientalistic fantasies about violence. We also need to understand that we are yet to decolonise ourselves from some of the basic myths acquired through colonial encounters on nature, human nature, sex and violence.

Our liberal education has, at best, taught us to note that present-day Indian conservatism on such matters is really a Victorian inheritance, and a distortion of ancient Indian sexuality. It might be so. But have our schools and colleges been encouraged to teach us that the overblown sexual world that exists in the media and Internet today is no simple fact of nature, that it is an enormously distorted and distorting political creation, a craven, cannibalistic, commercialised machine almost beyond control?

We need to move beyond Kama Sutra and free speech talking-points and explore how we can offer a culturally rooted, yet universally ethical vision for young adults as they begin their journey into consuming pornographic entertainment. We need to find a way to tell them that these pictures you see are of real human beings, and some of them might even be dead now, or dying, given the brutal conditions many of those unknown millions unjustifiably face.

For our efforts, we might be deemed eccentrics and party-spoilers. True. But we cannot go on peddling platitudes, as we have been doing about sex — calling it a ‘need’ without balancing the right to pleasure with the duty to recognise and minimise pain.

One way to do this perhaps, since precedent exists, is to respect freedom and allow individuals to go where they wish, but include statutory warnings on the perils of the pleasure industry they are seeking to indulge themselves in. That way, there is no absolute restriction on freedom to consume pornography, but there is at least a token investment to make consumers informed and, eventually, ethical agents.

Language of dissent

Those who oppose pornography on religious or cultural grounds may not always have the rationale for their opposition. However, that cannot just be explained away as an innate antipathy to freedom. It is more because of their lack of education in reconciling traditional narratives on pleasure and duty with modern thinking. Secular critics of pornography would do well to recognise that a ‘Hindu stance’ against it comes from thoughts having greater depth than what the dichotomies of religion-modernity and oppression-freedom would allow.

Our religious thought is concerned deeply about freedom too, and not just in some metaphysical sense. What an enlightened Hindu — or a Jain or a Buddhist or any other spiritual practitioner — may be striving for when he or she talks of kama, in conjunction with dharma, is not the suppression of human emotions in the name of celibacy but positive restraint.

Freedom, in this worldview, is less about rules and regulations and more about cultivating a way of living that ensures freedom from unnecessary debt to others for what we have taken from them. And the debt that we accumulate, as individuals and as a society, for suffering of women around the world whose images adorn our private spaces, is enormous.

(Vamsee Juluri is a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco and the author ofRearming Hinduism.)

Keywords: Pornography, Pornography ban, sex education, porn ban, freedom, The Pornography of Meat

Democracy’s essence

India’s fundamental belief in democracy is often taken as a given, but it is instructive to understand the basis and strength of this belief. A new national survey by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies shows that in 2013, under half the country unequivocally preferred democracy as the best form of government in all cases; the outcome was the same when a similar survey was conducted in 2005. The proportion of those who believe that an authoritarian government is acceptable in some cases has grown, but at 11 per cent it remains a minority view, and significantly lower than those with the same view in neighbouring Pakistan. Among the poor, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, the preference for democracy was not what was significantly higher, but indifference as to the type of government. Satisfaction in the functioning of democracy has declined sharply in India, and with it, presumably, the belief that a form of government in which one notionally has a voice is the most desirable. Preference for authoritarianism was higher among those with the highest media exposure, those who lived in metros, those who were rich and those who were college-educated — groups for which democracy has delivered much more than for the marginalised sections, yet among whom such conservative views are growing. Even among those who identify themselves as democrats, many believe a strong leader would do well to take decisions on his or her own and do away with elections and Parliament, the survey reveals. Perhaps this reflects frustration with a system which while representative is simply not delivering equally and efficiently to all.

India would do well to watch out for the growth of such authoritarian tendencies, especially when they come in the garb of patriotism. This is evident, for instance, in the branding of criticism of the death penalty as “anti-national” and in support, even among some journalists, for the government’s move to go after television channels which aired views against Yakub Memon’s hanging. Simultaneously, the government would do well to not misunderstand the nature of its democratic compact with its people, especially the poor. Top among the essential characteristics of democracy as rated by respondents in the survey was the freedom to take part in protests and demonstrations, evidence of a country that holds the right to dissent dear. Several welfarist ideals — provision of basic necessities such as food, clothing and shelter, as well as a narrowing gap between the rich and the poor and job opportunities for all — came next in the list of most cherished tenets of democracy. The everyday experience of dealing with the state for these is no doubt frustrating — ration shops are ranked as being among the most corrupt, and the police are seen as the least trusted. Majoritarian and jingoistic notions of democracy are not what the people of India are looking for, but a welfarist democracy that delivers.

Keywords: Indian demcracy, electoral activities, Yakub Memon, jingoistic notions,