Dr.King - Author of books on Yoga, Spirituality and Indology

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      When you interact with the world around you, have you ever noticed something? No matter what your eyes see, or ears hear, or tongue tastes, or nose smells or your hands touch, it is your mind that ultimately provides you the information. If you are asleep, or unconscious, no matter what your eyes see or ears hear, and so on, you will not be aware of anything! So, it is the mind that sees, or hears, touches, tastes, and smells. That being the case, how do you know that what you see, or what you hear, or what you touch etc. actually exists out there?

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In the previous episode we saw how science adopts a monistic view of the world and reduces everything into mere objects. And that ‘everything’ includes each one of us. Science is also so paranoid about subjectivity that it emphasizes on objectivity and looks down on all subjective aspects of us. On the other hand, many of us, either by training or by intuition believe that we are not just the body, but we also have a soul that gives us the subjective experiences.

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 Most of us never get this question. We always assume that the world is indeed what we perceive it as. That is our notion of reality.

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Probably you think that it sounds like a long list of unrelated practices. But they are not. All of them belong to an overlapping series of mystic practices. These practices can be found in almost any part of the world, in any time period, though these keep changing in terms of their meaning, details, and the purpose.

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  Have you ever tried listening to some wonderful music recital on your mobile phone, sitting in a bustling market place? You know it is futile, unless you are wearing noise cancelling earplugs. The surrounding noise would totally submerge the music coming from your phone. Either you have to move to a quiet place or use an appropriate device.

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  Honestly, I don’t know what many of the modern Gurus mean when they say that they are ‘realized’. Someone attains realization while sitting casually on a rock, another gets it when waiting for a train in a busy railway station, and so on!

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I was once asked this question when I wrote my first book on Yoga. Well, let me remind that by Yoga I meant some meditative practice, and not the physical discipline that the word represents these days 😉 I was a bit irritated by that question. I was a purist who believed that Yoga is beyond experiencing, beyond mystifying. It is a journey beyond the mind. Hankering for some experience was demeaning the potential of Yoga, that is what I thought.

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In the last episode we saw how the Varna and caste system in India developed over a period of time. Its main drawback was that it became more and more dependent on the birth of an individual rather than on his/her nature or profession as originally envisaged.

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 In the previous episode, we discussed the Varna system that was prevalent in India. It is this Varna system that later gave rise to the often-criticized caste system.

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In one of his talks, the well-known Hindu revivalist namely Mr. Rajiv Malhotra almost accuses India’s past colonial rulers for giving rise to the caste system in India. This great scholar based in US, with several books to his credit, goes into the genesis of the word ‘caste’ and tries to absolve India from this dark spot which has always tarnished the glorious past of India.