Suspect the integralists and the post-humanists

Re: The Athenians and the Visigoths and the Modern Gurus
by RY Deshpande on Sat 20 Oct 2007 06:47 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link

There are modern gurus who tell us to forget all that old Wisdom, kind of useless Wisdom, and recognize the fact that today we live in a Quantum world, that this is a world in which everything is connected with everything else which the ancients didn’t know. Forget about Socrates and Plato and Aristotle and espouse the integralists and the post-humanists, look for the spiritual masters who are living amongst us. But will or can the quantum Wisdom take care of the modern Visigoths?

Fundamentally, it is not a question of ancient or modern Wisdom, of the classical or quantum Wisdom; it is the question of Wisdom itself, the Ageless. In our universities and cultural centres what is expected is the promotion of this ageless Wisdom. Athenianism is that quality, that ageless Wisdom, and the regret is we are forgetting it. Art and craft and skill and perfection should not mean dismissing thought and intuition and the possibilities of brighter visions. They should not be one against the other, even as they complement each other in a greater fulfilment.

I remember William Shockley, one of the inventors of transistor, who had given an apt phrase in a slightly different but pertinent context. He bemoaned, to paraphrase him, the Brahmins of Physics looking down upon the Shudras of Technology who in turn were wasteful outcastes in the Industry. He called Technology as the “Excluded Optimum”, desirable at both the ends of the spectrum—Wisdom and Wealth—but loathed and disdained by both. We have to have W-T-W.

But we are making Maheshwari and Mahasaraswati as competitors to promote Mahalakshmi in our educational institutions and that is unfortunate. Indeed, all the Four Powers, Maheshwari-Mahakali-Mahalakshmi-Mahasaraswati should work together in the cosmic scheme and it is in that perfection that the higher powers can enter into the evolutionary process. RYD