Science: ???
Unlike most entries in this series, I shall not start this piece with the dictionary definition or the etymological path of the modern word “science”. Unlike other words in the series so far, the modern definition of "science" represents a distancing from the original meaning of the word by those who practice it, rather than a deviation of connotation driven by environmental changes taking place externally. It is those who call themselves scientists, themselves who have adopted a changed definition for their practice.
It is thus pointless to mention the modern definition of the word 'science', because let's just say, it's not that.
This deviation, possibly amusing or just plain interesting for other words, stands in the case of this word as an indicator of a central malaise plaguing modern society, important as it is to our fundamental understanding of the world around us and our relation to the same.
Science is how we know.
In the search for what we know, modern science has left behind the question of how we know on the backburner, postponing it to the absolute possible deadline just like the spotty, nerdy, green college geeks that modern science is driven and steered by. This has been compensated by the classic overcompensationary tactic of heavy, often-dogmatic emphasis on the use of modern science, i.e. its principles, hypotheses, assumptions, and processes, in all questions of knowledge acquisition, not just by the institutions of the world but in the minds of the planet’s people themselves. Modern scientific principles have been elevated to the place of the default rationality, the de facto reasoning of the world, aided subtly by an effort to eradicate other ways of reasoning altogether, when there is absolutely no reason to do so, and quite a lot of harm coming out of it - all buried, of course, under pretensions of perfection, progression, and wisdom. Modern ‘spiritualists’, ‘alternative practitioners’, and ‘new age people’ face the same outlook from today’s churches that Galileo faced from the churches of his day, albeit possibly less intense and death-y.
Divided public discourse and generation gaps have always been the lot of humanity, but the fact that almost every single ancient religion (i.e. way of life) is distanced by the modern scientific mentality, not just as a source of historical facts but even as a source of ideas, even as a source of guidance on how to live; the fact that modern science often genuinely considers fiction and narrative to be a useless, even harmful way of gaining knowledge; and the pernicious invasion of the principles of modern science in not just public discourse but private thinking, makes it doubly important to clarify the meaning of this word, in the hope that as we know more about how we know, we can learn how to know more, how to know better, how to know more easily, more efficiently, and more productively.
Part 1: Just What the Hell is Science Anyway?
The benefit of a jargon rooted in organic custom is precisely that words, like rivers, can be traced back to their source, astounding journeys one and all, remarkable if made, and not for the faint of heart, a fact consecrated in the older religions by considering both words and riverfronts a sacred place, with the origins of many Indian rivers, certainly, being considered places of great calm and bliss and power and potential in Indic thought since time immemorial. In the context of the Indo-European languages, certainly, the importance of root sounds in cognition and motivation is well recorded, and pioneering branches of science such as psycholinguistics are progressively showing the high relative weightage given not to ascribed meaning but organic perception in the cognition of sounds in the human brain.
Science, or "knowing" from its original linguistic root, sciencia, means knowledge. However, rather than referring to a stored body of facts, the word, in its original context, rather refers to the state of finding out – the state of becoming knowledgeable. The state of discovery. The state of inquiry. Sciencia, in the original meaning, is the state of expanding the limits of knowledge. It does not denote a state of possessing previously gained knowledge, but rather that of discovering new knowledge in the first place.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book that comfortably stands among my top five and comes with a strong personal recommendation, describes Quality in the exact same fashion.
Quality is the primal subconscious perception of something before it has been defined by the cognitive capabilities of the brain, mind, and ego. This is that feeling that just doesn’t go away, that sensation that is recallable years, even decades later with perfect clarity, that experience for which words will never suffice. Quality is the instinct beyond words, the knowledge beyond doubt, the vision beyond sight. This is the “gut feeling” that some people remember as the thing they stopped listening to to their peril and some as the thing they chose to never stop listening to, usually to great success. Yes, that last bit was meant to be read in a Borat voice.
This is the instinct that is required for any world-beating contender, be it in business, academics, sport, theater, commerce, military, labor, take your pick, allowing as it does a continuation of action that is not random, not reactionary, but proactive, forethought, deliberate, through the spacetime continuum that is life. It is the instinct that allows strikers to “sniff out” the goal, that allows batsmen to “know where the ball is going to land”, that allows businessmen to make “shrewd”, “market-beating” decisions, that allows actors to turn mistakes into highlights, that allows bands to remain “in tune”, “in sync”, “in the loop”. To stay “in the zone”, as this state is often called, is to sideline entirely the cognition, even perception, of anything that is not useful to what we are doing at the moment, focusing all cognition and perception to the task at hand, be it football, corporate mergers, elections, exams, or, like in Phil Dunphy’s case, tightrope walking. To chase being in the zone rather than to chase victory and achievement is to remain in pursuit of quality, is to awaken to a world that is dynamic, never static.
Any verbalisation of this experience is but translation, not transcription. Trying to find reason or logic in this experience may prove to be a futile task, and yet the experience remains undeniable, true, real. Like the Ancient Language in the Inheritance Cycle (a highly recommended tetralogy by a barely-legally-able-to-drink Christopher Paolini about dragons, fear, love, the mind, magic, power, notion of self, and more), in which none can lie, and which every being speaks purely by the virtue of being alive, experience of Quality happens regardless of your circumstance and position in life, just by the virtue of being alive, which as a basic necessity requires perception, cognition, and motivation in one form or the other.
Part 2: कविं कवीनाम् उपमश्रवस्तमम् – Ganapati as the Personification of the State of Quality
कवी, or rather कवि, in the word's original form, with the short ‘i’ sound rather than long, comes from the same root form that practically all European languages - as well as Sanskrit itself - use for the state of having questions: क्वि, which is the same as the Latinate qui linguistically. Qui is part of the Latin group of question words beginning with qu, also including quo and qua, for instance, and which is related via a historical vernacular shift to the wh group of question words of the English language – where, what, when, what have you.
Linguistically, the word “कवि” is not related to the word “poet” at all, which is nominally given as its translation, but to the common morpheme in questioning words in pretty much all the languages of Eurasia – quo / qua / qui. A कवि, linguistically speaking, is a connoisseur – someone with curiosity. Which, incidentally, is the actual meaning of the word ‘connoisseur’.
A “कवि”, linguistically speaking, is someone who asks the questions, someone who has questions to pursue, on the inside and the outside. A poet is the one with the questioning mindset, the puzzled unpreparedness, the bewildered confrontation that is characteristic of the nameless, definition-free territory of Quality. The words ‘quirky’ and ‘queer’, which both usually indicate human behaviors that seem to harmlessly transcend the boundaries of normality that we are used to, are also notable in this context, coming as they do from the same root word. It is expanding the limits of knowledge, not possessing previously gained knowledge, that the questioning mental state of a poet refers to. A good poem is thus one that expands the limits of our mind, i.e. the limits of our understanding, the limits of our own conception of the world. A good poet, in no uncertain terms, is one – anyone – who is unafraid to go boldly where no man has gone before.
Curiosity and Surrender: Heads, Babies, and Elephants
It is an individual’s curiosity that drives the pursuit of Quality, filtering as it does the unbroken, continuous flow of information from the sensory organs about the world without, through the prism of our personality, to attract our own, personal attention to it. Innately human curiosity, which all healthy infants should display, creates the persistent questions, the seeker mindset, the exploratory urge that drives the creative, the adventurous, and the insane. And, of course, the epitome of all three – babies.
It is this selfless surrender to the questioning drive in their own psyche that made babies Nietzsche’s ideal for the realized, enlightened being who saw no need to prove anything, but only to find out, and then find out more, and then find out some more. A true poet's sensitivity is to this Quality experience, and the deeper the experiences goes, the ‘better’ the poetry turns out – in fact, this is in many ways the only real method to determine poetry for the better or for the worse. The nameless, formless language of quality is shaped personally for each individual being by its own life experience, which sets up its own contexts for itself, as well as from congenital individual differences that have had no explanation so far, other than reincarnation, which remains difficult to believe in, if not impossible. This is why poetry – at least good poetry – can sometimes be difficult to understand, originating as it does from a deeply personal concatenation of circumstances and contexts that the reader simply may not possess. It takes a Christian fully steeped in the faith – to the point of acting it out successfully – to truly understand the Bible, just as it takes a spiritual reader to truly understand a good poet, who is necessarily deeply spiritual.
Hindu thought has always seen this spirituality, this selfless surrendering, this constant pursuit of quality, as the highest, most fulfilling, and most rewarding experience that humans can have. The alignment of this culture, this civilization, this society with the formless and nameless that is above the forms and the names is such that it made Ganapati, the god of perception, cognition, and understanding, into its highest deity, and called Him, among other things, कविं कवीनाम्, i.e. the discoverer among discoverers, the problem-solver among problem-solvers, the creator among creators. It is essentially important to read the word within the context of a psycholinguistic system that connects कवि with quality, curiosity, and questioning, not the one that connects it exclusively with rhyme, rhythm, and form.
Ganesha is not the all-knower god, but the all-discoverer god. He is the explorer god. He is the creative mind. He is the Lord of the vijnanamaya and anandamaya koshas, the second and first sheaths of the aatman in yogic philosophy. This refers to the power of the human body-mind to discriminate, to choose, for the better or for the worse, and to discern, from the grossest level to the subtlest.
Discrimination, the Subjective Mind, and the Continuum of Spacetime: A Very Indic Way of Looking at the World
Ganesha, in this way, becomes the embodiment of not just a stored factsheet, not even just the process of knowing itself, but of the fundamental ability to differentiate and to perceive, encapsulated perfectly in the Sanskrit term नीरक्षीरविवेक, which literally means the ability to separate the milk from the water, i.e. to separate the actually valuable from the worthless, the useful from the useless, the applicable from the inapplicable. Once again, we must remember that this doesn’t refer to any static ability that is gained at once and then held on to, but the dynamic ability to keep making a choice as we traverse our life, throughout our life.
Modern self-help philosophy tells its adherents to treat life as a day to day phenomenon. The better among those go so far as to call for living life from minute to minute, or even breath to breath. Ganesha, however, is the Lord of those who consider life not from anywhere to anywhere, but as an unbroken sequence constantly lived in the present moment. In fact, Lord Ganesh symbolizes the human / animal ability to split the infinite cosmos at all in the first place. He is the often-ignored ‘continuum’ in the term ‘spacetime continuum’ – the one who walks the spacetime continuum on His wish alone, lighting the fire of consciousness and stoking the embers of intellect and intuition wherever he goes.
Despite calling (or agreeing to call) the universe a ‘spacetime continuum’, modern science is strangely averse to considering the significance of the ‘continuum’ part of the phrase, instead steadfastly insisting on treating every single thing in the universe as a separate, cut-out entity. Despite naming reality as a spacetime continuum, modern science is strangely ignorant and uncaring about the mind’s ability to recreate feelings from the past and the future in the form of memory and anticipation, respectively, as well as its ability to stay firmly rooted in the present, lending the wielder such abilities that those who managed this were hailed as divine by people whose minds were not fettered by delusions of objectivity, empiricism, and materialism.
It is the subjective mind alone that can truly traverse the ‘spacetime continuum’, going as it does from place to place, and from time to time, with seemingly no effort or even intention. It is crucial to understand the nature of the mind first, in order to understand how the mind learns and integrates new information, in turn leading to a better or worse progression in the individual’s interaction with the world.
Part 3: The OODA Loop: Staying atop the Wave of Quality
The OODA Loop, tabulated by military strategist, fighter pilot, and aircraft designer John Boyd in the 1960s, presents a codified method to remain aware, alert, and effective on the battlefield. Like all good lessons, the OODA loop is not only useful in the battlefield, but also in corporate boardrooms, where many companies have succeeded by implementing it in their operations, and parallels extremely closely yogic methods of remaining disattached even while retaining proximity to the metaphorical battlefield of life. Remember, it is not consumption, contact, or proximity prescribed as the obstacle in yogic science, but attachment.
The OODA Loop stands for Observe. Orient. Decide. Act.
To observe properly is to get the most useful picture of the thing you're interacting with. As far as the life experience of humans is concerned, this means properly refining the sense organs so that they present not only all the information they receive, but information that has been gathered in an accurate, detailed, structured manner.
To orient properly is to, as the saying goes, "pick our battles", i.e. to decide which parts of the picture we want to zoom in on for a better understanding. Popular phrases such as "the grass grows where you water it" indicate the colloquial awareness of the importance of the allocation of attention in the orientation and consequent motivation of an individual. Only with proper allocation of attention can the third step of the OODA loop, Decide, be crossed.
It is only with open-eyed observation and intelligent orientation that the best decision in any given situation can be made. It is here that military strategists and sport tacticians alike make their money: making the best plan for either your team to win, or for the other team to lose. It is in the individual’s appreciation of the battleground before him that his strategy can be found.
That just leaves the tiny matter of acting it out. This is the crucial step that separates the men from the boys, true knowledge from idolatry of the same. This is the reason why "armchair theorization" is looked down upon – coming up with an idea of how to do something, coming up with a plan to do something, and actually doing that something, all three happen to be different things. The first is by far the easiest, the second can be achieved with purely theoretical knowledge by an expert in the field, but it takes a real scientist to take the last step and act out what he has discovered, in the faith that the truth he has discovered will sustain him.
It is this faith and this determination that mark out an explorer, a scout, a hero, someone who expands the borders of a civilization, physically or ideologically. It takes the same faith, confidence, and determination to be an effective military commander as it does to come up with practically usable, unconvoluted, precise mental models of reality as a scientist. Both require their practitioners to stay alert to new developments, subtle developments, as well as the context of the particular event, with equanimity and poise. While militaries implement the OODA loop in the battlefield, teams of scientists, theoretically the defenders and champions of the process of knowing, need to implement the OODA loop mentally.
To stay in line with the OODA loop works out to be the same as it is to stay in tune with the flow of dynamic, pre-definitional Quality, or of an unbroken sequence of quals (individual unit of perception). To stay in an unbroken flow of quality perception, which is the same as to stay in the vernacularly popular "flow state", turns out to be the same as to consciously, with knowledge, make the choice to OODA again and again until it becomes not just a valued habit but your second nature. The OODA loop is useful in any life situation you can think of, and thus valuable as not just a value addition to but the core of one's life. Particularly if you want to call yourself a wo/man of science.
The linear progression of the Observe - Orient - Decide - Act loop essentially defines the experimental method of science, starting from observation, to brainstorming to hypothesis formation, to experiment design, and finally to experimentation, with a "repeat if hypothesis proved false" loop built-in to make the process not just linear, but sequential, i.e. a ‘loop’. The “Act” principle in the OODA loop, when applied to an individual’s life, ensures a “repeat if hypothesis proved false” loop, with proper usage of the other three – OOD – principles expected to result in progressively better results each time the individual acts upon similar obstacles.
It is essential to act not only because you believe you are going to succeed, but because to act is the only way to find out whether or how you could succeed in the first place. This is the way of life that Nietzsche envisioned for his enlightened souls, whom he called ‘babies’. Babies are famous for being unafraid to do things that would terrify a “grown-up” because everything they do is organic, unhurried, playful. There is no reason to suspect any ulterior motive in a newborn baby’s behavior, and what’s more, nobody does, because the obviousness of the organic nativity of their behavior overpowers all doubt, all reflection. This obvious naturalness of babies is, incidentally, quite fittingly reflected in the Latin-derived modern words for birth and birth-related things such as ‘nativity’ and ‘natal/prenatal’ care, with the same root suffix ‘nat-‘ playing the same role in nature, nativity, and nation (and, incidentally, the extremely related Marathi word नाते). This is also the reason why Hindu thought termed Krishna’s whole life as leela, i.e. playful behavior, behavior of play. It is Nietzsche’s enlightened superhuman baby that is evoked in the Bhagawata Purana and the Mahabharata when it tells of how Krishna played and danced and sang his way through his superordinary life. Remedios the Beauty from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, whose choices made out of her own sense of personal comfort start fashion trends among those who never knew the reason for those changes in the first place, and who one afternoon flies off to heaven while hanging out the laundry to dry with no explanation or forewarning, represents another literary allusion to the nature of man (literally meaning creature of mind, not male human) as a bridge between the material and the immaterial, rather than as a purely material being.
Part 4: शरीरमाद्यम् खलु धर्मसाधनम् – How Awareness of Body-Mind Unity Elevates the Individual
Acting out your philosophy, your intentions, in this properly exploratory manner requires familiarizing yourself with each of your own bodily processes, each of your bodily organs, each of your bodily functions, which lead to your bodily actions, with closeness, reassurance, trust, honesty, and fortitude, so that the coverage of ‘your’ conscious agency goes from the gross to the subtle, to the even subtler, and eventually the subtlest. The subtle drives the gross, always. The rationality for your grossest actions can be found in the subtlest of subtle root causes, emerging as they do from the very real, tangibly existent unity of body and mind, not from two different places as modern science still continues to preach. It is integral to understand and feel your way to the unified nature of body and mind if any pretension of knowledge is to be made.
क्षेत्रक्षेत्रज्ञविभाजन: How the Brahmanic Indics saw Human Materiality
The stronger an edifice is at and near its foundation, the more liberties one can take as one goes progressively higher up. The foundation of a healthy human body-mind is the seamless unity of the material and the immaterial, of the gross and the subtle, of the tangible and the intangible within it. It is not through a proliferation of either one that humanity has become the dominant megafauna on the planet, but precisely through the combined application of the two, leading to strategic, tactical, decisive, planned, effective maneuvering through the world. Whenever might has failed us as a species, we have relied on our intellect to survive and thrive. But where else does our intellect have its home, if not in our own conception of ourself, which is heavily reliant on our sensory perception of the outside world and our relation to it? After all, a yogi who has discarded all of his bodily functions is said to be in ‘samadhi’; He is no longer of this world, though his body may be in it. In fact, yogic science does not consider the intellect to be an incorporeal phenomenon at all, irremovably tied as it is to the corpus of human beings, i.e. their body.
In being of this world, in carving out a claim in our own name, humanity has had immense success when the reigning philosophical paradigm was that of an immaterial possessor, i.e. the soul or the spirit, being responsible for the welfare and the actions of his material habitation, i.e. the individual body (which Hindu thought saw as being made out of the five great forces of being, the panchamahabhootas, as well as faculties we would today term mental or psychological, such as mind, ego, and intellect). The latter concept is known as देह (deha) in Hindu thought, meaning the body, intellect, ego, and mind, while the former, known as देही (dehi – dehin), means something like “the one with the body”, “the one who has (taken on) a body”. The Bhagawadgeeta, of course, famously refers to these concepts as क्षेत्र and क्षेत्रज्ञ in its thirteenth chapter, the Sanskrit word ‘क्षेत्र’ referring to any empty space that has its own boundaries, including but not limited to the human body.
The distilled message of the thirteenth chapter of the Geeta, titled "Treatise on the Differentiation of the Body from its Wielder" in slightly more poetic Sanskrit terms, refers to the abstract ‘understanding of space’ that more often than not marks out excellence in performance regardless of the vocation of choice. It is the same ‘understanding of space’ referred to in the 13th chapter of the Bhagawadgeeta that allows excellent singers to truly capture an audience with a well-constructed musical edifice, excellent football players to dominate the play and win matches consistently by being in the right place at the right time, excellent engineers to build better, longer-lasting, better-performing constructions by putting everything where it should be, and excellent writers to compose prose that connects not only through the words but through the structure of its composition, building an emotional connection by invoking the fundamentally human ability to perceive space.
This is why ancient Hindu thought, just like its dear sibling ancient Greek thought, places great emphasis upon physical metricity and proportionality even among those who have renounced the world of the senses and have retired to the peaceful solitude of the self. The physical practices of Yoga, which are one of the prominent faces of ancient Hindu thought in today’s world, are aimed not at bolstering the mind, or even strictly at bolstering the body, but rather at strengthening the connection between the mind and the body, at making them better specifically at the job of working together. It is only a better-coordinated smaller fighter who can take on a ‘larger’ fighter and come out victorious, because he is able to handle his own capacity better – more habitually, more intelligently, more effectively – than the larger fighter can handle his own. Krishna’s slaying of Chanura and Kansa speaks to the recurring inference to this concept in Hindu thought, with proportionality in construction and skill and efficiency in the use of available resources always being considered the greater good in Hindu thought over sheer mass or scale. It is in this way that Krishna earns the moniker Yogeshwar (योगेश्वर), meaning lord and master of yoga.
Hindu thought unabashedly terms physicality as the first duty of he who would be virtuous, as exemplified in the well-known Sanskrit phrase “शरीरमाद्यम् खलु धर्मसाधनम्”, meaning ‘the body is the first instrument of dharma’. While parallelling the popular phrase ‘charity begins at home’, this approach takes the scope for one’s charity to even subtler territory, from the physical house of the individual to the physical house of the individual’s spiritual operator, i.e. the body. Unsurprisingly, this Indic approach to physicality and life mirrors extremely closely that of the Roman Latins, as seen in their enduring maxims like "mens sana in corpore sano", meaning a healthy mind in a healthy body, which the Romans saw as the foundation of individual virtue, honor, success, respect, and achievement. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, whose idea of forms strikes very close to the Indic conception of the absolutes of the world, was famously a wrestler and bodybuilder, literally sweating it out in his own gymnasia, or the place to be naked, not only in the physical, bodily sense, but also in the intellectual, mental sense. It was fighting it out with the iron - the pursuit that in many ways has become a prominent face of the men's rights, male community, and men's togetherness movements in modern times - that led Plato to his model of the cave, his plan of forms, and his Socratic dialog of the charioteer who drives towards the sun, i.e. the Satya Shiva Sundar of Hindu thought, with two horses - one dark and intemperate, representing the passions, or indriyas in Indic thought, and one humble and fair, representing the spark of the infinite, unbound, limitless, in the finite, bound, limited creature that is man. It is this last reference, by the way, that gives this very blog - the Two Wheeled Rambler - its name. Just a passing reference, moving on.
The basic craft of all physical exercise – how to do it properly – is to:
1. Observe our body as it is, which is something many people avoid in the first place due to repressed shame and/or guilt,
2. Orient it towards the best future fitness depending upon your own present, past, and future circumstances, which is another step many people fail to take due to lack of knowledge and/or self-belief,
3. Decide the best plan of attack based on your own specific strengths and weaknesses, and
4. Act out the mapped-out journey from a body that doesn’t fit your purpose to a body that does, with a ‘modify but do not stop regimen if results not obtained’ loop built in to ensure sustainability.
All athletes – from the new guy at the gym all the way up to the giants at the top of professional sports – follow this exact same pattern if they want to exercise in a way that is productive at optimal cost.
Rocky Balboa: A True Scientist
But the ulterior motive behind physical exercise is to train the mind, not just the body. This is the attitude that good gym trainers will look to instill in new students, and it was this mindset that allowed Rocky Balboa, a literal nobody, to last the whole distance against the reigning heavyweight champion, the actual victory he celebrates with his love interest Adrian after technically losing the fight on a split decision. Winning the fight against Apollo Creed was not as important to Rocky – he considered himself a goner anyway – as it was to last the whole distance, to stay in the ring till the end, to take it on the chin and stand right back up no matter how hard he was hit. It was his fight against his own weakness, against his own desire to quit the pain and hardships, in the ring and in life, against his own self-doubt, that Rocky Balboa really wanted to win.
Mirroring the fisherman Santiago’s dispassionate disinterest in the skeletal remains of his marlin at the end of Old Man and the Sea, Rocky doesn’t even notice it when the judges declare the split vote declaring himself as having lost the match, nor does he demand a rematch, an outcome that would have been entirely logical considering an absolute nobody had just held the reigning heavyweight champion to a split decision, not a unanimous victory, and definitely not a knockout. In the end, it is Rocky’s will to not get knocked out until the bell rings that prevails, pushing him closer to victory than anyone had thought possible, let alone likely.
It is acting out his determination to believe in himself, his determination to have a himself he could believe in, rather than self-belief per se, that allows Rocky Balboa to last fifteen rounds against Creed, going closer to victory than even he himself thought possible. Despite his scarcity of self-belief, which would have constructed elaborate, detailed explanations for why he couldn’t possibly win the match to soothe his own ego in the event of a knockout or forfeiture, it is his choice to stick with his virile determination, with his gut, with his ‘chin’, rather than his intellect or mind alone, that takes him within a whisker of victory without ever meaning to. Speaking of ‘chin’ being what makes Rocky Balboa a champion, by the way, can anyone think of a Hindu god known for – in fact named for – his prominent ‘chin’? Anyone? Anyone? More on that later.
Had he not fought Creed, Rocky would’ve always believed himself to be a nobody, as everyone else sees him at the start of the movie. He would’ve bowed to his circumstances, to his material hardships, to his lack of certifiable intelligence, never having known the majesty of which he had always been capable. It is not even because he believes in himself but because he wants to believe in himself that he pushes himself into territory he had always believed to be beyond him, inherently and inevitably. In this way, Rocky Balboa becomes not a brainless physical brute but a daring scientist, a true man of the mind, not only obstinate on testing out his hypothesis because he needed the hypothesis to be true on an existential scale, but also brave enough to enter the experiment willingly, intending not to win, but simply to last. It could be said that it was this choiceless desperation that made Rocky Balboa’s hypothesis come true, in a way that modern science could never predict or even explain, when every ‘logical’ prediction stated there was no chance a rookie would even last two rounds against the reigning heavyweight champion. Perhaps this is what Schroedinger’s famous cat experiment was actually meant to convey – not the shifting, uncertain reality of an unobserved phenomenon, but the concrete reality of a phenomenon that is observed, willingly and doggedly.
Individual knowledge thus gained from acting out the theory that sustained it is never, can never be decided by consensus. Knowledge thus gained is necessarily personal.
Part 5: The Misguided Effort of Modern Science to Materialize Anything and Everything
Science, thus properly personalized, never works on consensus. It cannot work on consensus. What does work on consensus, however, is belief. It is not science if it works on consensus. It's superstition. It's wishful thinking. It's a religion without an establishment in truth.
I've always had this bugbear with the way the modern science industry works:
The modern “rational method”, the "scientific method", emerged in contrast to religious paradigms, which, while often harmful and tyrannical and deceitful, maintained the position of "truthgiver" in the mob's mind because they could point to (supposedly) unchanging notions as the basis of their own supremacy and the social order they brought about, relying on the mob's gullibility to maintain the order they wanted to maintain.
Modern, post-Enlightenment science, in contrast, has always prided itself on being ever-changing, ever-refreshed. It was the ability of science to adapt to new information, we were told, that made it more reliable than religion in terms of truth-finding. However, the newfound authority of "science" following the murder of God (ref. Nietzsche) around the 17th and 18th centuries meant that every new development in science has been treated - had to be treated - as absolute truth in terms of its relevance to the day to day lives of the plebs of science – those who Do Not Know. Modern science still remains stuck in this contradiction of being forced to claim every new advancement, and thus every new self-contradiction, as not just true, not just equally true, but as vindication of what is supposedly the strength of modern science and what was supposedly lacking from the derelict vestiges of the old religions – the ability to change its mind when presented with new information.
It is, of course, the mark of an intelligent man to bow before reality when his opinion happens to contradict with it, but an overwhelming majority of scientists, particularly in the pre-modern era, did not see their expansion of human knowledge as being in any way antagonistic to the way people lived their inner spiritual lives, which was most often on the basis of one or another religion. Science, in this era, had no ambitions of becoming a ‘way of life’, let alone a way of life that was set on cutting the branches of culture and religion on which it sat so comfortably at a time when the world was still fairly new and things were still being found and named. The constancy of religion comprised the perfect rock for people upon which to build the churches of their lives, edifices of actions lived according to a shared, honorable code in confusing, shifting times.
The Robespierre-esque, Reign of Terror-esque hatred of anything that predated the revolution and had the potential to dilute the percolation of the new values of the republic into the masses didn’t enter the courts of science until well into the 20th century, a time when, as mentioned in my previous piece, empires were unprecedentedly turning into nation states ruled by the people rather than by god and king, consumeristic capitalism was fast becoming the norm, and the world was looking to rise anew from what were seen as the ashes of a horror of years gone by: War.
The agency and intentions in the social changes that took place in this period are hard to judge, with both constructive rebuilders as well as narcissistic deconstructors sensing an opportunity to make gains in an empty field. What is undeniable, however, is that the definition of science that entered the second half of the twentieth century was unlike any the world had ever seen, rooted as it was in a rejection of the subjective rationality of the older religions (which had been shaped by life rather than aimed at shaping life) and aimed at improving not the inner lives of the constituent individuals of a society, but material abundance for consumers of legal individuals with no roots.
What was being manifested in the world of money as consumerism was being manifested as nihilism, selfishness, and a shrinking of the spirit in the inner lives of the citizens of the newly founded republics. With democracy came a collectivization of the truth, reflected in the founding of the modern peer review process in ‘science’ in the mid-1970s.
The truth was no longer individual, no longer a matter between oneself and one’s inner perception of Quality, reflected in the various and different deities worshipped in various places all over the world, but a matter of collective uniformity, reflected in its insistence upon consensus as the marker of verity rather than concordance with reality. It was suddenly “important” for all the peoples of the world to share one way of living, and more importantly, one way of thinking - an attitude that was being universally denounced as 'colonialism' at the same time as when modern science was adopting it as its anthem, constitution, and penal code.
In creating a new world “free from the oppression of religion”, modern scientific thinking has helped remove "good" and "evil" from our dictionary, because there is no basis for these terms that exceeds individual perception, which modern science doesn’t accept as credible evidence regardless of whether or not it accords with reality. By cutting off the branches of subjectivity that sustained it in the first place, modern science has cut off all routes to the Quality perception that gave humanity both its purpose and its meaning. The results are there to see for all in the world we live in right now.
In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues that money, religion, etc. are useful fictions that hold human society together in spite of their lack of absolute concordance with reality. Modern science has become nothing more than such a useful fiction today, and it's useful to the same people for whom the stability enforced by religious ideals, even more than religious institutions, was useful in the pre-enlightenment days: The landlords, the moneylenders, the ‘ruling classes’. Capitalists or political leaders in current times can tack on "scientists say" or "studies show" to pretty much anything they want to put out into the world, and in a democratic society, there will always be a critical mass of people who will believe it because they have been taught nothing more than to respect authority by their society, and nothing more than to respect the findings of science rather than the process of science by their schools.
Science hasn't replaced religion as the primary truthgiver at all. We are no closer to discovering the fundamentals of reality / existence with materialistic modern science than we were with spiritualistic old religion. In fact we were way closer with religion, a fact easily apparent once the religions are understood within their own context rather than in the enforced universal context of the modern scientific mindset, which demands guarantees before starting a journey rather than the faith to start journeys that have no known ending point but present themselves to you nevertheless.
Modern science has only replaced religion as the primary way to enforce mass belief in the social order desired by the ruling classes. It has only replaced religion as the preferred sleight of hand. The magic trick is still very much a magic trick, and what's more – it is still very much the same magic trick that it was five hundred years ago.
Scientific understanding is supposed to change with new information. The thing about that sentence that modern science seems to have forgotten is that you can remove the word "scientific" from there and the sentence works just fine, even better in some sense. There is no obligation on understanding to be material, empirical, or even rational. In what is quickly and rather unexpectedly becoming a theme with the WWotW words, the original meaning of "sciencia", what it connoted, was the state of discovery, the process of finding out itself, rather than the passively stored body of knowledge hunted and gathered by humans using that process. This state, this process, goes beyond the known world of terminologies into the heavily foggy land of dreaming, feeling, emotions, reflex actions, nightmares, and motivations.
Part 6: गणानां त्वां गणपतिं हवामहे – Follow the Feeling, Not the Thought
The word ‘Ganapati’ breaks down linguistically to mean ‘the protector / commander / leader of the ganas’. There is a mythological aspect to this description, which shows us a physical, supposedly empirically verifiable being that lives on Mt. Kailash and sorts out the world’s problems while riding a mouse. But there is also the other side, the aspect that relates the mythos of Hinduism to its ethos by equating the world with the worldview of the individual body-mind that sees it, and denotes Ganapati as a human, biological, neurological principle that resides within an individual body, sprouts life from the muladhar, where He eternally resides, and acts as the leader and commander of the various parts of the body, aiming forever for optimization and sustainable thriving.
The Ganapati Atharvashirsha makes this formulation explicit, stating that the world arises from Ganapati, stays with/in Ganapati, is destroyed by Ganapati, and is ‘brought back to life’ through Ganapati alone, who literally resides in the tangibly real muladhar chakra of the individual human body-mind and who came into being before Purush his father and Prakriti his mother. It is important to remember that within the context of Hindu thought, ‘the world’ refers to both the physical world all around us and the mental world that each of us inhabits in our own unique, specific way. Hinduism sees the individual body-mind as merely a microcosm of the universe, not any entity that is in any way distinct from the same – a major way in which modern science differs from the ancient science. As far as Hindu thought is concerned, the world begins with our biological Ganapati principle perceiving it, not with the big bang or anything similar, because for the people that sustained this philosophy and the prosperous culture that supported it, accepting that ‘the world’ and ‘I’ are never seen without each other, was not a contradiction to cover up, but a blissful affirmation of their own discovery of the unity of the body and mind, and of the individual and all that there is.
The ganas whom Ganapati leads, controls, and monitors, are the individual constituent parts of not a literal army of a blue-throated humanoid Shiva, but the literal army of constituent parts that make up an individual’s body, ruled and governed by the principle of exploration, the principle of discovery, the principle of play, the principle of growth enabled by the acquisition of new knowledge, standing on the shoulders of the fundamental principles of homeostasis and well-being, which can be said to be the principles of Shiva, the extremely static, extremely lonesome, extremely disinterested hermetic householder, i.e. world-holder. The principle, in short, of sciencia. Of science.
In this aspect, the Ganapati principle refers to the physio-psychological capacity within the human body-mind to gain awareness of our own body parts, individually as well as how they correlate with each other, not through any external imaging or diagnostics, but through the same internal feeling that tells us when we are hungry, thirsty, sleepy, in pain, happy, and everything else that feelings tell us.
Our scholastic achievements, our professional careers, our ability to succeed on a day to day basis in the world that we have been given, depend entirely upon what we really – really – want to do with the time that has been given to us. As mentioned before, the quals that attract our attention are detected only by a corresponding quality drive within the individual, which makes someone really, biologically, evolutionarily happy only when they are doing some specific activity. Often relegated to the sidelines for ‘not being commercially viable’ in the ‘practical reality of day to day life’, it is this quality drive that determines an individual’s interests – literally meaning ‘the things one would like to interact with, would like to mingle with, a longing to belong (with it), a mutual attraction’.
In many ways, these specific things can be seen as an evolutionary calling, a biological roadmap, further shaped by the troughs and crests of experiences and contexts of the individual body-mind, providing that individual body-mind with purpose and meaning so dense, so streamlined, so filling, that, if allowed to, it starts to generate its own gravity, attracting others attentive to the same quality perception to modify their own behaviors, starting ‘trends’ at smaller scales and groundbreaking revolutions at larger ones. Anything good in a society can only be preserved by individual people with first-person association with the mythos and ethos of the society in the context of contemporaneous reality standing up for what they truly believe in, on a behavioral level, in the spirit of true inquiry, exploration, and discovery, not in the spirit of proving something to be right or wrong. To be this, takes closely aligning with who we are at our core, products as we are of the same world that created us and thus unlikely to perish due to basic unfamiliarity. It is crucial to remember that we are not alien to the earth. We are native to the earth. Of the earth.
Our body-mind knows this already, on a spiritual level. This truth has been propounded by every saint, noted or otherwise, in the Hindu tradition, as well as by a long line of darshaniks (unravelers, ‘those who show’ in the literal sense – quite possibly followed by “… don’t tell” in the original connotation) from various philosophical factions, including Sri Raman, Osho, Nisargadatta Maharaj, Ramakrishna Paramhans, Neem Karoli Baba, Sai Baba, and any other who’s worth his salt. Corroboration by consensus, ironic in the case of modern science, fits the paradigm of these time-tested ways of looking at the world perfectly, relying as they do on the lived experiences of people, the strength and depth of their perception, and a mutual reliance on self-awareness, which is the timeless ruling principle that has sustained societies, civilizations, cultures throughout the history of humanity on this planet, and remained an integral part of not just society but of institutional science until being eradicated well into the 20th century by the rot of materialism and the ironic, inappropriate reliance on peer review, as mentioned previously.
Hindu thought consecrates this unity of body and mind into the very building blocks of the personification of its highest ideals, which are its deities. Ardhanarinateshwar, the half-man, half-woman form of Shiva and Shakti, represents a balancing of the material and the immaterial, the dynamic and the static, the bright and the dark, the eternal and the ever-changing, not just in ‘the world’, but within individual body-minds. However, the conceptualization of body-mind unity in Hindu thought truly rises to its peak in the form of the wise warrior Maruti and the remover of obstacles Gajanana, or Ganapati.
Part 7: Jitendriya and Vighneshwar : How Hanuman and Ganapati Illustrate the Way to Know
One of the most important nomenclatures of the son-of-the-wind Maruti is Jitendriya (जितेंद्रिय), meaning one who has won (over) the indriyas – a word which has many meanings in the sanskrit language revolving around a common theme: Sensory organs, mental ‘factors’, ‘objects of valid knowledge’ according to the Nyaya school, ‘controlling faculties’ according to certain lineages of Buddhism, and sensory and motor faculties according to some others. In short, they are, according to all sources each in their own way, the primary means of perceiving, knowing about, and interacting with the world for us humans.
Jitendriya is one who has won over, who has total control over, who is owed obeisance by his own indriyas, i.e. his own worldview, the character of his perception, and the depth and nature of his cognition. One who holds in his own fist the way he looks at the world has no want for power – in both senses of the phrase.
It is this self-mastery that is revered above all in the worship of Hanuman, even more than his impressive physical and mental capacity. It is this self-mastery that is supposed to be imbibed by the gymgoers who ‘worship’ Hanuman, not just the well-built body. It is the ability to look beyond the bodybuilder Hanuman and to see his uncomplicated inner solidarity that brings about the change that iron wants to bring about in bodybuilders. It is this self-mastery that makes man out of monsters, and the lack of it that makes monsters out of man. More than any other attribute of Maruti, it is his ‘chin’, his ability to take the blows of life without flinching, which gives him the name Hanuman / Hanumant, and which Rocky Balboa turns into his sole fighting card against world heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, that gymgoers should imbibe from the divine form of Hanuman. Be someone who can dish it out, by all means, but never forget to work out your ability to take it on your chin.
Brought about by his meeting with Rama, which turned out to be a happy accident for all parties involved, Hanuman’s realization of his own power – not the conquest of someone else’s power but his own recollection of his own forgotten powers, remember; it is crucial to remember that personal growth is not a zero sum game – leads to such self-mastery, such self-control, such self-actualization that he gains the power, might, and virility to fertilize an animal of a different species from a drop of sweat that accidentally drops into the sea as he is flying over it. This drop, incidentally, carries such potential that it births Makardhwaj, a crocodilian ape whom Ahiravan, the mightily capable lord of the underworld, sees fit to become the sentry to hell itself. Whether you see the narrative literally or figuratively, the lesson is not hard to miss.
Bihemispherical excellence may be a new concept to Europeans, but Hindus have been well-versed in it since the days of talking apes and flying chariots. Hanuman and Ganapati are both examples of what can happen when an individual integrates both halves of his personality, much as Carl Jung talked of integrating the shadow, mere millennia after Hindu thought elaborated pretty much the exact same concept in the form of not ‘scientific fact’, but ‘religious idol worship’.
In addition to being frighteningly strong, Hanuman is also said to be the highest among the intelligent (बुद्धिमतां वरिष्ठम्), as per Hindu scriptures. In addition to being smart and capable, he is also the exemplar of devotion, the ideal devotee. Even more than being Lord Ram's military general, he is his humble servant. He is not only well-trained in the martial arts, but is also a singer and poet par excellence. He is not drunk on his magnificent power, but perfectly in control of his physical body (जितेंद्रिय). He is eager not just to lay enemies to waste for Ram, but also to praise and glorify Ram through emotive, evocative, devotion-filled keertan (religious singing). He is not just a destroyer of evil, but also an able upholder of the good. He has not only placed Ram on his shoulders, but installed Him in his heart of hearts. Rama, for Hanuman, is not a mere worldly concern; He is the core of his very being.
Exactly the opposite fate has befallen Ganapati. While the famous elephant-headed god is, in actuality, the commander of Shiva's diverse and fierce forces and son of the war-goddess Chandi (a manifestation of Parvati) herself, we are loath to look past his pleasing, erudite, sophisticated persona as the god of the arts and sciences. He is not just the remover of peril (विघ्नहर्ता), but the knower and master of peril (विघ्नेश्वर). He doesn't just keep his devotees safe from danger, but enables them to see the peril for what it is, to understand its nature, and to derive useful lessons for future progress from it. In this way, he is a willing and able safeguard against chaos and peril, which is inevitable, not the idle, languid, almost Bohemian dreamer and artist that we have made him out to be.
Speaking in the biological sense, it may well be that the bhootaganas of Shiva – who, remember, is described in various places as the timeless slayer of evil, the eternal, the god among gods, the fearsome destroyer capable of destroying the whole world, and the one who holds the embodiment of toxicity itself in his throat to protect the rest from it – refer to the agents of immunity, a congenital autonomous phenomenon that continues to baffle modern medicine despite literal centuries of trying to figure it out, with the Ganapati principle playing the elusive role that hope, belief, determination, recall, emotion, longing, and other psychological factors have been observed to play in recovery regardless of the extremity of the peril and the hopelessness of contemporaneous medical science in situ. Doctors may ‘marvel’ at a ‘hopeless’ patient making a ‘miraculous’ recovery, but why it happens often remains a mystery even to the battling vanguard of medical science, who are categorically denied entry to the annals of religion and spirituality so that they may not defile themselves with the stench of subjectivity, irrational knowledge, and unprovable ideas. Smart doctors should have also spotted that Ganapati's role as the bulwark against the inevitable chaos of life, as the principle that allows "the world" to learn from the chaos instead of succumbing to it, is more than slightly reminiscent of the ability of the human immune system to build up an immunological memory, which is used at an uncomfortably fundamental level in modern medicine in the form of vaccines.
Along with the modak, a symbol of a clear, open, enthusiastic mind, Ganapati also holds his battle axe in his hands, showing his battle-preparedness and alertness even when, as the phrase goes, ‘things are good’. There is a thin line, usually somewhere around the third pint, that shouldn’t be crossed no matter how enjoyable we may consider the experience to be. Ganapati is that twinge of guilt, that twinge of conscience, that can stop even seasoned drinkers when their priorities are well-adjusted and aligned with the mental and physical world that they inhabit. While one of Ganapati’s hands is raised in the abhay mudra (the stance of fearlessness), granting courage to his devotees, another holds the ankusha, the peg, which stops the errant mind from wandering off into the inutile, unwholesome reaches of human consciousness. A more complete picture of Jungian exploration into one’s own mind will be hard to find.
Similarly, the mighty, all-powerful arms of Hanuman are forever prostrated before the majesty of Lord Rama. The tumult of Rama's righteous war and the melody of the soulful praise of Rama are equally pleasing to this great lord of simians. This is the Great Man, the पुरुषोत्तम, that societies have revered throughout our own very short history on this planet; from Gilgamesh to Shiva, from Jesus to George Washington, it has always been the pacifist warrior, the intelligent warrior, the one who chose not to start every fight he knew he would win and who chose to win every fight that came to him regardless, that has attracted attention, reverence, even obedience from people who sensed from an evolutionary, genetic perspective, which is often the source of unshakeable intuition, that what this guy was doing was the right thing to do, without being told so by anyone, least of all himself.
Part 8: Accordance with Reality: The Distinguishing Mark of Good Science
To know for sure, it is critical to align your theories, your experimentation, and your results with the reality that is, the reality that has always been, and the one that will always be.
It’s no use for your results to align with your hypotheses if the latter are not based on a solid understanding of how the world does and should work.
Morality and ethics is one field where modern science has barely attempted to even scratch the surface, instead contenting itself with the role of ‘knowledge-giver’ in an objective, third-party sense. But this refusal to engage in ethics reveals at once the weakness and the abuse of science in the 20th and increasingly the 21st century.
If ‘knowledge’ gained from ‘science’ is not going to have – is not supposed to have – any utility in living a more meaningful life, then what use is that information, not just to ‘the common peasant who doesn’t understand it’ but even to the ivory-tower graduates who allegedly do understand it?
Possibly through not its own fault, but indubitably nevertheless, modern science does occupy a pretty important role as the truthgiver, the lawmaker, the fundamental principle of discrimination of our time, with ‘scientific backing’ being sought for even spiritual practices and products that explicitly come from a zeitgeist with more than one principle to work with.
For science to be good science, it has to work in situ, in vivo as the ancient religions not only did but were supposed to work even in theory, not just in vitro. It is in the dead and pathetically reanimated in-vitro nature of modern science that the roots of the malaise of modern society, and of modern science, lie. It would be too cruel to the nerds to end this piece by saying ‘touch some grass, geek boys!’, so instead I’ll end it by reminding you all that the way in which I have gone about describing science, or ‘knowing’, in the piece above, as well as my concluding insistence upon the incompleteness of modern science as it continues to ignore ethos while creating a mythos that, intentionally or not, sucks the light out of society, is nothing new.
The understanding that understanding can only be truly complete if it aligns with reality at every level was the discovery of animistic faiths from so long back in time that even their echoes need to be refreshed now and then just to maintain some memory of their halcyon days. The Sanskrit word for knowledge, विज्ञान, which essentially became the modern Hindi word for knowledge, विग्यान, is the same as the German word for it, Wissen, with one specific, historically recorded linguistic shift responsible for the difference in spelling, and also goes hand in hand linguistically with the ancient Greek word for it, Gnosis. The ancient Indians, the ancient Norse and Germanic tribes, and the ancient Greeks were all seamlessly formed in a worldview that saw ‘the one who sees’ and ‘the one who is seen’ as not distinct, but united, not separate, but one, at some level of life awareness, i.e. vital consciousness. The Latinate Romans, of course, were the ones who came up with the words ‘science’, ‘conscious’, and ‘conscience’, meaning ‘knowing’, ‘with knowledge’, and ‘common knowledge’ or ‘shared knowledge’, showing their alignment with the worldview that knowledge is incomplete if it refuses to take into account the spirituality of man, which is as inherent to him as modern science considers his materiality to be.
It is also interesting linguistically to consider the proximity of the German word for science, Wissen, with the Germanically derived modern English word Wise, a sentiment echoed in the proximity of the Sanskrit word सूज्ञ (soodnya, meaning something on the lines of ‘the one with good knowledge’) with the root word for knowledge, ज्ञ – one who knows, and ज्ञान – knowledge. This speaks to a common instinct among the ancients to consider knowledge in the same vein as wisdom, with knowledge that had no beneficial practical applicability to sustained thriving of the society being considered less significant, less important to possess. This instinct is, of course, not only lacking but proactively rejected in modern science, just one of the many ways in which it fails to make the lives of the humanity it informs meaningful with the information it provides.
It is not by feeding just the material, nor by feeding just the spiritual, but by feeding both proportionately that the individual man can go beyond, can overcome – not in the context of any particular obstacle but as a general outlook on life – which is the sense in which Nietzsche used his famous term Übermensch, or ‘the man who would go beyond’. It is this attitude, this approach to life that has fed the best of humanity throughout time and throughout space, including all the 'advancement' in knowledge and material prosperity that modern scientific principles, i.e. modern science, have brought about, amidst all else. It is also worthwhile to note that Hindu faith continually alludes to this very behavioral tendency in the character of Hanumana, starting right after his birth, where he went straight for the sun, confusing it for a ripe luscious mango, overcoming boundaries that were not supposed to be overcome, to the time he jumps the sea to reach Lanka the first time, to when he adapts infinitely to the various and multiple ploys of the cunning and capable Ahiravana, to when he reveals to a stunned Ayodhya court that he holds his idol Seetaram, truly in his heart, the core of his very being. It is for this reason that 17th century Hindu saint Samarth Ramdas, an ardent actualizer (उपासक) of Hanuman, described the central principle of the character as "वाढता वाढता वाढे", i.e. the one who keeps growing, regardless of position or circumstance, the one who keeps going beyond. It is a Nietzschean Übermensch indeed who serves the highest ideals of Hinduism. Coming from the same root form as the Sanskrit and Latin words for ‘mind’, the word ‘man’ – referring to the entirety of humanity rather than just its male gender – itself carries within it a snug little seed of the awareness of the unity of mentality and materiality that makes man a special beast.
It makes man the beast with knowledge. The beast who would become God.
The beast who would go beyond.
Having dived deep into the fundamentals of rationality this week, next week we will take a look at a word denoting a concept that is supposedly diametrically opposed to rationality: Love.
© Tanmay Viraj Tikekar
04/06/2025
tikekar.tanmay@gmail.com
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