Anubhav Kandpal’s ‘We Get to Live: A journey into the Wonders of Nature and How We are Connected to Everything’ is not an easy read. Neither was Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus The treatises of Abhinavagupta fall in the same genre. But this does not take away from the seminal value of these works. Kandpal has delved deep into works of a wide spectrum of thought leaders from Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Foucault, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Alan Watts Frijitof Capra, Alfred Einstein, David Bohm, Humberto Maturana, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Thich Nhat Hanh, amongst many others. As such, this review is invitation to absorb the insights which Kandpal offers in his meditations on quantum physics, the function of the mind, questions of foundational myths, issues of control and identity, the nature of the self, time as an arbitrary category, tragic optimism, the nature of love and power as well as issues of surrender and transcendence and finally the integration of the subjective with the objective. I propose to do this review in two parts – for a typical 1200 word review cannot do justice to the conceptual framework backed with empirical evidence and possible prognosis for the future that Kandpal brings to the fore.
He begins with an interesting postulate – nature is as dependent on us, as we are on nature. And whatever we do has an implication elsewhere, and everywhere. It is true that Newtonian Physics and Cartesian Philosophy saw matter and energy as apart. For Descartes, there was a fundamental division of nature into the mind – or the res cogitans- the thinking matter, and res extensa- the extended thing or matter. But as Einstein said ‘When something vibrates, the electrons of the whole universe resonate with it. Everything is connected. The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness’. Our physical and metaphysical worlds come together in David Bohm’s model of Quantum Potential in which we understand that nothing is a static, concrete entity, but a flow – for every moment there is an ‘unceasing process of becoming and unbecoming’. The view of reality as being both permanent and fleeting is reconciled in the Buddhist concept of looking at Annica (the impermanent) and Anatta or Anatam (the permanent) as two sides of the same coin, an understanding which goes against the Judaic religions which posit the Lord above as the creator, and all else as absolutely dependent on Him, existing at His will and pleasure. But when the Bhagwad Geeta looks at Purusha (spirit) and Prakriti (matter) and Ksetra (field) and Ksetrajana (knower of the field) , there is an understanding that the substratum which hold them together is the Brahman – the ultimate reality.
This all-encompassing Reality makes no distinction between sentient and non-sentient beings. But the image of God is actually the image of the people who look up to him, and so all societies have their own metanarratives about the origin of the world, and fashion their gods and spirits accordingly. This explains the many different ways of the iconic representation of Buddha, Maitreyi and Tara in the different regions of South, South East and Central Asia. The Buddha of Sri Lanka and of Mongolia are made by different sets of artists over a long canvas of space and time.
This brings us to the concept of time, which today is regarded as singular and linear, but from another perspective can also be looked upon as ‘cyclical’. In fact it was the commodification of nature during the first agro-industrial revolution, coinciding with the advanced techniques of watchmaking that led to the postulation of the Divine as the ‘watchmaker of the world’ who did everything with exact precision, overriding the cyclical nature of seasons – with nature manifesting herself through the colour of spring, the fury of monsoons, the falling leaves in autumn and the chill and frost in winters.
‘The association in people’s minds of the regularity of a clock with heavenly bodies suggested that the world, much like a watch, must have been designed and set into motion by a watchmaker.’ But in the post industrial age, God is no longer the watchmaker, and the population of believers is declining not just in Christian Europe and USA but also in Iran. Moreover, there is an increasing realization about the interconnectedness of everything to make sense of the world. Thus, the loci of control is shifting from the external to the internal. This also means being more responsible – both as an individual and as a society.
In his mediation on Humankind and Nature, Kandpal, quoting Carolyn Merchant, explains how the feminization of nature gave a patriarchal justification of control and domination over it. This fitted well with the Judaic tradition, it was the male God – Moses, Christ or Mohammed who created the world, and had the exclusive rights on the path to salvation, which was an end unto itself. It was an extension of husbandry – the control over the regenerative and reproductive rights. This fitted well into the ‘commodification of natural resources’ that came about with the development of industrial agriculture as the peasant mode of production gave way to mono cropped fields and plantations, thereby changing Wordsworth’s landscape for the Dickensian world. It is true that compulsions of democratic polity created better ‘physical working conditions’ for the workers in the Western World . The counterfactual is the establishment of sweatshops in poorer regions – from Bangladesh to Guatemala and the rural districts of China – as the sites of production for global brands which spend more on brand building than on wages for the factory worker. As consumer durables become cheaper in an increasingly urbanizing world, the disconnect with nature is complete. As Bruno Latour points out in Facing Gaia ‘our ecological crisis is not about the eruption of nature into public space, but the end of nature as a concept that would allow us to sum up our relations to the world and pacify them’. At the same time, the Luddite argument for a return to nature will not work, for the pre-modern world did not regard nature as a separate domain: they were unaware of the distinction. Being unaware is different from having an integrated view, which is perhaps the only view to avoid the ecological destruction caused by Sumerians in the Fertile Crescent or the Mayans in Americas. But there is hope. Unlike in the past, we understand the interconnectedness of things. We know that the air we breathe has no national boundaries, that plastics in oceans will not just affect marine ecosystems, but our food chains, that glacial melts will see the submergence of many islands and coastal regions, and finally
‘Our skin is not where our insides end, and the outside begins: like the eyes, ears and nose, it is where we let the outside in.
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