Understanding deprivation

Deprivation is considered to be one of the primary factors leading to social strife and human suffering. The United Nations (UN) defines deprivation as the inability of a social group to effectively participate in the larger society and sustain their livelihoods. One of the primary sources of deprivation is poverty, where extreme poverty is defined as living below US$1.25 a day. 

Several initiatives under goal 1 of the UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) are underway across the world, to identify deprived sections of the society and to bring them into the mainstream. 

In this post, I would like to argue that, deprivation is a result of two kinds of factors, and it is important to distinguish between the two. 

The first form of deprivation occurs due to lack of equity within a given paradigmatic framework. Such forms of deprivation is well addressed and well understood. For a variety of reasons, several social groups get excluded from relevant opportunities that can enable them to pursue their needs and exercise their agency. Such forms of deprivation are a result of inadequate social mechanisms that can recognise deprivation within a society and implement affirmative actions to mitigate deprivation. 

There is however, a second form in which deprivation manifests, which makes things more complex. This is what I call paradigmatic dissonance. In this form of deprivation, a social group appears greatly deprived when their lifestyle is interpreted through the lens of what is considered the "mainstream" worldview, and when the mainstream tries to mitigate this deprivation through its lens, it causes more harm than good. 

As an extreme example, consider the Sentinelese tribe in the Nicobar islands. This tribe has maintained a lifestyle that goes back to more than 60,000 years. Their primary avocation is hunting and fishing, using tools like bows and arrows that are considered to be very "primitive" in the mainstream worldview. There have been several attempts to integrate the Sentinelese into the mainstream, but all such attempts have been met with immense hostility from the tribe. The most recent incident was in 2018, when the tribe killed a missionary from the US who attempted to "save" the tribe by converting them to Christianity. Such has been their resistance to "modernity" that this tribe is now protected by Indian law, and people are prohibited from approaching them. 

The tribe is clearly very deprived when seen from our mainstream lens. They still use primitive tools for fishing when they could have easily integrated into the mainstream and have opened a fishing industry on their island. They don't have electricity, running water, Internet, or any of the necessities that are needed in the modern world. 

Yet, during the 2004 tsunami where close to 300,000 people lost their lives in different countries of the world, not a single casualty has been recorded from the Sentinelese. The tsunami devastated the coral reefs surrounding the islands where this tribe lives that even destroyed the places where the tribe usually went fishing. Yet, there is no discernible change in their population or their lifestyle. 

It is not just this "primitive" tribe that knew how to survive the tsunami. There are several accounts of animals that moved to safer locales on the day of the tsunami, well before the huge waves hit. In contrast, in the mainstream civilisation, when the sea receded suddenly in places like Phuket, many tourists at the beach resort, instead of running to higher ground for safety, ventured out into the barren seabed, without realising that this is the last thing they will be seeing in this world. 

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While the Sentinelese may be an extreme example, what we often fail to realise is that human civilisation has had multiple paradigms and world-views with which it has interpreted the universe, and built its lifestyles. But when a few of them get into a "saviour complex" and actively tries to digest all other paradigms into what it considers the mainstream, we run the risk of losing important knowledge that may be critical for our overall survival. What we consider "mainstream" is typically the result of the most dominant paradigm that has become dominant primarily because it interpreted the world in a predatory fashion and actively sought to consume other paradigms within itself. 

In some of our initiatives to bring Internet connectivity to remote villages in India for example, we were met with resistance and hostility, rather than an eagerness to get out of their "deprivation" and become integrated into "modernity." In one case, the villagers had welcomed us with a sarcastic song that they had composed specifically for our workshop. The song basically went something like, "Do not try to impress us with your www-dot-com, which is of no use to us. Will your www-dot-com draw water from the well, tend to the fields,.." 

Objectively, one might argue that the "www-dot-com" can indeed help the villagers in drawing water from the well by connecting an IoT based pump water pump, etc. etc. But the main point of their sarcasm was not that. Their main concern was that this integration into the mainstream will deracinate them from their traditional and familiar way of life, in which they had learned to not only survive but also maximise their agency and express themselves in myriad ways. 

An IoT based water pump may increase efficiency in drawing water from wells, but it also gets them into a liability loop where they will need to manage subscriptions and payments, and see their lives increasingly getting controlled from somewhere else. 

This is pretty-much what we see happening today as we try to integrate the world and bring everyone onboard in our attempts at inclusion. Even when the mainstream includes something, it does so by "scooping" the other into its structure, and not by treating it as a peer and establishing a sensible relationship with it to collectively achieve some shared vision. 

In the mainstream worldview today, traditional Indian culture is all about meaningless and "primitive" rituals of expression, and the debates centre around the symbolism of these rituals. But once upon a time, these practices were not mere rituals, with only symbolic value. These practices were deeply ingrained into what was then the mainstream practice and the way of interpreting the universe. 

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For the last few centuries, the "mainstream" culture that is based on the industrial revolution and the factory paradigm, developed in a outlandishly predatory fashion, where it pretty much scooped the entire world into its framework. 

However, by the 1990s the predatory forms of interpretations had run its course with multiple dominant  world-views clashing with one another, and faintly realising that perhaps predation and might need not equate to insight and truth, after all. In these times, we saw a glimmer of hope where technology development focused on decentralisation and open architectures, rather than on ownership and dominance. It is in these times we saw the rapid growth of the Internet and the world wide web. 

But these technologies whose design principles were based on a philosophy of plurality and decentralisation are now once again dominated by few very powerful players who not only control the technology, but also the narrative; and influence how we interpret the world. 

And even in the mainstream universe these days, there are a lot of disillusioned thought leaders who understand the dangers of predation on a very powerful network like the Internet, are now pushing for "re-decentralisation" of our connected world. 

While inclusion is a noble goal to pursue, it is also important for the mainstream to preserve hermeneutic plurality (not just plurality in superficial things like dress sense, food, etc.) and really understand how to build sustainable pluralistic societies. 

The great debate

Indian civilisation is characterised by what might be called "the great debate" that continues to this day. This debate is very relevant to cutting edge science and philosophy today-- but much of science at least, is not looking in this direction. 

This post is a small attempt to introduce this great debate-- from my perspective. 

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Among the top-most scientists and philosophers today, a burning question that is hotly debated is about consciousness. How does consciousness and its complex constructs like identity, desire, morality, etc. develop from material reactions in the brain? 

This question gains even more significance today, with rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over several aspects of our lives. If a human were to act recklessly or irresponsibly, we have several mechanisms to deal with it. We could appeal to their sense of empathy, humanity or conscience to reflect upon their actions; we could "shame" them into regretting their actions; and so on. But when an AI robot acts irresponsibly-- none of these options are available to us. Sure, a form of "shaming" is possible with negative reinforcements, but while this may bring about a behavioural change, it does not lead to self-reflection and a heightened sense of morality in the robot. 

More than 5000 years ago, Indian philosophers had hotly debated about this problem of consciousness, which had resulted in several schools of thought. The Charavakas held on to the currently held notion among scientists-- that consciousness is an emergent property of material interactions in our brains. Just like modern science, for the Charavakas, material reality is all there is. 

However, the Charavakas were just a small minority among the several other schools of thought in this regard. Most other schools of thought argued that consciousness is a "simpliciter" entity-- in that, it exists on its own, and is not derived from any form of material interactions. 

The Samkhya school of thought for instance, proposed a "dualism" model of reality. According to them, reality is made of two kinds of fundamental elements, called the Prakriti and the Purusha. Prakriti refers to material / physical reality and its causal interactions, while Purusha refers to the non-causal realm of reality of the consciousness. Purusha can be interpreted not just as consciousness, but all forms of information objects-- including numbers, concepts, etc. Information objects are not subject to time and space constraints like physical objects. While biological life may exist only on earth, and only since the last few million years, prime numbers for instance, exist everywhere, and have always existed. No physical law can affect the primality (or otherwise) of a number. 

Samkhya was one of the most widely taught subjects in ancient India, along with Vedanta. Buddha is said to have extensively studied Samkhya. 

According to the Samkhya model, there are an infinite numbers of Purusha-Prakriti pairs that make up reality. But, this infinitude of information objects creates several forms of confusion. If the concepts in my head are completely unconnected with the concepts in someone else's head, how is it we can understand one another? It also brings up other strange questions like whether the number 5 on planet Earth is the same number 5 on Mars? And so on. 

The philosophy of Vedanta, which are summarised in this vast body of text called the Upanishads, take another radical step in our understanding of consciousness. The Upanishads heralded such a radical change in human civilisation, that thousands of years later, the American philosopher William Irwing Thompson, who studied the Upanishads extensively, remarked that we ought to divide civilisational epochs as "Before Upanishads" and "After Upanishads" (BU and AU respectively), instead of the current BC and AD: 

“The Upanishads is a watershed in the evolution of consciousness. Instead of being ethnocentric and dividing all global history between B.C. and A.D., we should really divide it between before Upanishads and after Upanishads—B.U. and A.U.—because the sophisticated psychology of consciousness in the Upanishads represents a quantum leap forward in human development.” -- Excerpt from Evan Thompson, "Waking, Dreaming, Being"

The Upanishads argued that there is only one Purusha in the universe! Not only consciousness exists on its own in the universe-- there is only one instance of this universal consciousness! We are not independently conscious-- but we all reflect the same consciousness. 

To give an analogy, consider a set of bowls filled with water kept in the sun outside. Inside each bowl is a reflection of the sun, each of which may be bright enough to offer illumination. But the reflection of each of them is of the same sun up above! 

Similarly, our individualised consciousness is not our own, but our reflection of the universal consciousness. The universal consciousness is called chit, while the individual reflection is called the chidaabhasa. Sentience is defined as our ability to form an image of the universal consciousness. As an analogy, in the daylight, every object reflects light from the sun, but some surfaces like glass, water, etc. also form an image of the sun. Sentience is this ability to form an image of the universal consciousness. Of course, such images can be distorted, or incomplete-- but it is an image nevertheless.

The Vedantic model itself gave rise to several schools of thought-- including some contrarian schools, which rejected the core argument of a single universal consciousness. 

The Advaita or the non-dual school of thought, goes one step further into the Vedantic argument, to not only say that there is just one universal consciousness-- but also that the universal consciousness is all there is! Rather than considering consciousness as a creation of material reality, Advaita argues that material reality is a temporary appearance this universal consciousness! According to Advaita, material reality is basically the universal consciousness trying to look at itself-- somewhat like in the picture below. So, all of the universe-- all our wars, kingdoms, travails, adventures, etc. are essentially about the universal consciousness trying to look at itself from different angles! 

Some other schools of thought-- which are broadly called the Sramanics, of which, Buddhism and Jainism are most well known-- reject the core argument of Vedanta that there is one universal consciousness, and that as individuals, we just sport images of this one, sole consciousness. 

Vedantic thought is so old, that it has gone through multiple phases of degeneration and rejuvenation. During Buddha's time, the orthodox schools of thought had become so degenerate that philosophers and thought leaders spent most of their time trying to realise the oneness of their self with the universal consciousness, when there was rampant suffering all around them. Siddharta Gautama, who later came to be called as the Buddha, argued that it is futile to spend out lives trying to experiences this oneness of reality, when there is so much suffering all around. Instead, it is better to understand how suffering is manifested in our lives and how to remove it. He went on to further argue that the core of our existence is not the universal consciousness, but a void or shunyata. Everything is impermanent, and the core of the universe is just void or nothingness, he argued.

The Buddhists and the Vedantic philosophers are said to have had a thousand-year long debate, during which time, Buddhism spread beyond India to Afghanistan, China and much of south and east Asia. 

The arrival of Adi Shankaracharya around 1200 years ago, heralded a revival of Vedantic thought-- especially Advaita Vedanta. It was once again to become the most dominant worldview in Indian thought for about 700 years. Some very well known Advaita philosophers like Vidyaranya have written several introductory texts about this philosophy that are still taught today. 

But as before, in a few centuries after Shankaracharya, the focus on realising oneness of existence, had started to degenerate into a form of nihilism. When the material reality is considered unreal, with the only reality being the universal consciousness, which is the core of our own being, the motivation to address existential issues like suffering, defending against attacks, etc. is not all that strong. 

By the 12th century CE, foreign invaders had finally managed to enter India. (It is worthwhile to note that several great conquerors like the Greek king Alexander, or the Mongol Genghis Kahn, or the Roman empire, had never been able to conquer Indian kingdoms. While the Kushans are called an Indo-Greek empire, they were not a result of Greek invasion, and there is ample evidence that their kings like Kanishka, were of Indian origin than Greek). 

As foreign conquests started to make its way into India from the north, some kingmakers like Vidyaranya, helped build mighty kingdoms like the Vijayanagar Empire that withstood this onslaught. But a few centuries later, they too crumbled. 

Some philosophers like Madhwacharya, felt that this is due to a fatal flaw in the core of the dominant worldview at that time-- which was Advaita. As a major critic to Advaita philosophy, Madhwa came up with the dualistic Dvaita philosophy. The core of our self, is completely contained in our worldly existence, he argued. No matter how well a bowl of water makes an image of the sun, it can never be the sun itself! Similarly, no matter how well we reflect the universal consciousness, we can never be the universal consciousness itself. We are our limited bodies with our limited existence, and we had better focus on worldly issues that affect our survival. We can at best, practice bhakti or devoted service towards the supreme, in order to reflect the universal consciousness as best as possible. 

Madhwacharya's philosophy also fit in well with the Bhakti movement that was very popular at that time, that advocated devotion, submission and surrender to the divine, as a means for spiritual enlightenment. 

Despite all these philosophical efforts in redefining ourselves, history shows that Indian society succumbed greatly to foreign invasion, followed by colonisation by European powers. 

A few centuries later, during. the freedom struggle against the British, Vedantic thought once again saw a revival through the efforts of Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda is known for his address in the Chicago Congress of Religions, and to have brought authentic Indian thought directly to the West. Until then, the population in the West were exposed to gross misrepresentations and exotic perversions of Indian thought (something which continues to this day). 

Swami Vivekananda criticised too much emphasis on bhakti, devotion and surrender. He argued that too much of an obsequious conduct may rob us of our sense of ownership and assertion of our rights. But he was also aware of the shortcomings of pure Advaita and the criticisms it had received. 

He formulated his own philosophy called Integral Advaita (which I have explained in detail in another post), that strives to bridge between the non-dual and dualist schools. Vivekananda defined religion as the manifestation of the divine that is already within us, not through renunciation, but through active engagement with society and by addressing its problems. 

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Philosophical debates from India are radically different from their counterparts in the West. Western philosophy and science mostly focuses on the object, and tries hard to remove the subject from the picture. While this gives us very useful constructs like stoicism, Socratic methods, Analytic philosophy, etc, it also brings us to the state where we are in today-- where we effortlessly build machines that can easily destroy us several times over, and struggle to understand human societies beyond their power dynamics. 

Indian philosophy and its debates are more relevant today, than ever before, as we stare at a future, where the lines between truth and falsity are getting blurred.

Belief and Identity

Today was one of those rare occasions where I felt completely relieved of all forms of existential crisis for some time, and knew that I was exactly where I should be. As an academic, it is my good fortune to meet some very bright minds-- some of whom have come together to start a Philosophy Club. 

Today's discussion was on the issue of identity. 

I have talked extensively about our cognitive faculty of identity in earlier posts. We all possess an "elastic" sense of self, where we often identify with some elements of our external world, and act in its interest. For instance, we often identify with our family, our religion, culture, country, profession, gender, etc. 

Identity associations are fundamentally different from rational associations. In the latter, we associate with something because we expect to derive a value from that association. Identity associations are different. When we identify with something-- we act as if that something is part of us. We actively work in its interest, regardless of whether it is doing well or not. It is only because parents identify with their children, they stick with them through thick and thin, and work in their children's interest. If parents were to have a rational association with their children, there would be no incentive at all, to bring up kids! 

As we were speaking about identity, a question was posed today by one of the participants. What is the difference between identity and deeply held beliefs (called Samskara in Sanskrit)?

In both cases we are driven by something that is deeply ensconced within us. While trying to unravel the difference between the two, here is what we realised. 

A belief-- whether deeply held or not-- represents an objective construct. It constrains, directs and regulates how we interpret our experiences. For instance, if someone held a deeply held belief saying, "Indians are all unreliable"-- this would influence how they interpret whatever they hear or see an Indian do. Because this belief is deeply held, they may not be aware of this biased interpretation, but it is there. It has somehow entered their psyche and has lodged itself deeply. 

In contrast to deeply held beliefs that affect the way we interpret the external world, identity is a subjective construct affects our self image and who we think we are. Identifying as X, means that we are inherently saying "I am X". 

However, just like beliefs, our identities can be curated by us or from external factors. We can be told or conditioned to identify as X by external factors. 

This brings us to the crucial point in this post. The moment we become aware of our identity, we realise that we are not what we identify with! Since our identity can be curated by both external and internal means, the locus of our self lies beyond our identities! 

Hence, as long as we identify with X, we are implicitly saying "I am X" and acting as if we are X. But the moment we become aware of this, we convert our identity into a belief! We then effectively say, "I believe I am X", and have objectified our identity and thus have also told ourselves that we are not X, and we are only "identifying" with X. 

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This discussion today, helped me understand why I'd been sceptical about this whole hype around gender identities and people putting their preferred pronouns in front of their names. 

Our gender identities may be fluid and our sense of gender may differ from the biological sex assigned at birth. Someone who does not identify with their gender assigned at birth, experiences gender dysphoria. They feel different internally, from how they get treated by the outside world. 

But the moment they say "I identify with this gender"-- if they mean this genuinely-- it means that they have actually gone one epistemological level beyond identification with their gender! This is because, "I identify with this gender" is now an objective statement and their core being is beyond this gender identity. 

If someone just asserts "I identify as X and you need to call me with these pronouns" it means that they possess this statement as a belief and not as their identity! For someone who is identifying as X, they would be acting as X without being aware of it, and not be saying that they are X. If we genuinely mean what we say when we say that we identify as X, then somewhere, we have also identified ourselves as something beyond X. 

This is like the impostor syndrome-- one who has an impostor syndrome does not keep talking about their impostor syndrome or keep bringing it up. They just suffer with a belief that they are impostors and don't deserve what they have. If somebody keeps complaining about their impostor syndrome, then they have either already overcome their impostor syndrome, or didn't have it in the first place.

Similarly, someone who goes about saying that they are right-brained and creative individuals, are most likely left-brained. Because it is the left brain that thinks in terms of categories like left-brain and right-brain. For the right-brain, we either have a brain or no-brain. 

Gender fluidity is one thing. But for someone to proclaim themselves to belong to some gender and demand others to treat them in a particular way-- is not very convincing. Either they have realised their gender fluidity-- for which, they need to identify themselves as something beyond their gender-- in which case, it doesn't matter how others view them and they are happy to be just viewed as humans; or this gender identity is forced, being used more as a mask or a persona, than what they really feel inside. 

Engineering as intervention

Engineering today, is dominated by what may be called "creation science." Much of what we study in engineering is in the form of creating something-- be it a machine, software, structure, etc. Most of our effort goes into designing our creation and implement it in a way that makes it effective. 

But every engineering deployment is actually an intervention into an existing live system. Be it creating a building, a bridge, a car, a software, a gadget, or whatever, we are not only creating something, but this creation is intervening into an existing system and affecting the way it functions. 

Of course, by creating something, we wish to affect the way something functions. Like for example, by creating an automobile, we are affecting the way people commute. But for every creation, there is an intended affect, and many forms of unintended or collateral affects. 

In many cases, our created solutions can be so good that it can become a victim of its own success. For instance, suppose a brand new road is constructed to link two parts of a bustling city. This new road passes through relatively less populated areas, and hence, vehicles can zip through these to reach the other end of the city very fast. The very success of this brand new road, will now cause the land adjacent to the road to go up in value, and attracts many new businesses, residential properties and industries. Each business locating themselves there would use this brand new road as their locational advantage. Soon, this area becomes so crowded that any time advantages obtained earlier is lost. 

When we only focus on the design of our creation and its intended affect, and not really understand how systemic intervention works, we get into situations like these. 

If we want to bring about changes in a sustainable fashion, we need to change our perspective of engineering, from creating a solution, to designing interventions. 

The axiom of sustainability: One of the key things to understand about systemic interventions is the axiom of sustainability. Essentially, this states that any bounded system of being, when perturbed, strives to reach a state of "low energy" or stability. In Indian thought, this has been called the principle of dharma, since several thousands of years 

An atom for instance, is organised into "low energy" configurations, where electrons occupy specific orbits around the nucleus. When we excite an electron by giving it some energy, it may move up to a higher-level orbit. But very soon, it would shed its excess energy and come back to its low energy state. Similarly, if we intervene in an atom and knock out an electron, it becomes ionised and unstable. This causes phenomena like static or lightning, where the system that is the atom is trying to reach back to its low energy configuration. 

Similarly, what we call as solids, are actually intricate and tightly knit patterns of atomic interactions. When we try to deform a solid by pulling it out or pushing it in, it strives to come back to its original low energy configuration. This is what we call elasticity. 

Similarly, all biological creatures settle down into optimal states of being, where it has the maximum health, strength and pleasure that it can afford, given its circumstances. This is called homeostasis. When we perturb homeostasis (like for instance, illness or injury), an elaborate biological system kicks in, to bring the being back to homeostasis. 

This is one of the most fundamental axioms that we need to consider, when we're intervening in an existing system. Be it building a new road, adding a new train track, creating a new web service, building a new car, or bringing a new mobile device into the market, we will need to consider how will this intervention perturb the system and where the system is likely to settle down. 

The engineering solution may provide the intended outcomes soon after its deployment. But over time, the system responds to the intervention, and the state it settles down may be very far from what was intended. 

Intervention science-- dealing with understanding how complex systems respond to engineering interventions, is something that is not taught in engineering curriculum today. There is a dire need to develop this science systematically, and introduce it in our engineering curricula. 

Our sheaths and states of being

In the Ramayana, once Hanuman asks Lord Rama to suggest some reading material for him to learn about the Vedas. In response, Rama suggests to him just one Upanishad-- the Mandukya Upanishad. It is one of the shortest and most dense of the Upanishads, that is said to go directly to its teachings (unlike other Upanishads that take longer routes like story-telling and examples). 

If you cannot understand the Mandukya, Lord Rama tells Hanuman, then here is a list of 108 bigger Upanishads for you to read. 

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The Mandukya talks about our "3+1" states of being which is one of the most fundamental states that define our existence. 

In order to understand this, let us first look into the five-sheaths or the Panchakosha model of us. Our existence is said to be defined in five sheaths or koshas, which are as described below. 

The Annamaya kosha or the gross body, refers to our physical bodies, which subsist on food. The Pranamaya kosha or the "subtle body" refers to all the processes happening in us like breathing, blood circulation, heart beats, digestion, etc. that keep us alive. The third sheath is the Manomaya kosha or the mind, that hosts our thoughts and emotions. The Vijnanamaya kosha or the intellect, forms the fourth sheath, which hosts to our conscious thoughts, knowledge, epistemology, wisdom, etc. 

Beyond these four sheaths is our core being, which is called the Anandamaya kosha or the sheath of bliss. This core sheath is sometimes also called our karana shareera or the "causal body". It is this core being that is said to have given rise to all the four sheaths of our existence. When we are conceived as a human, the first thing that is said to develop is our core being-- from which, all other sheaths emanate. 

Our core being is in turn said to be in "3+1" states of being. Why the 3+1 notation? The first three states of being are something that all of us experience. But the fourth (+1) state of being is much more subtle and requires a lot of practice to experience this state. 

The three states of being are respectively called: Jagrut or waking state, Swapna or dreaming state, and Shushukta or deep sleep state. In each state of being, our personality is so different that these personalities have separate names as well. 

The "person" that is dominant in our waking state is called Vaishnavara, and the "person" that is dominant in our dreaming state is called Taijasa, and in deep sleep, our dominant "person" is called Praajna. 

Vaishnavara is interested in transacting with the external world using logic, expression, conscious thoughts, emotion, etc. The Taijasa is interested in imagination, counterfactual reasoning, and in building alternate hypothetical scenarios. The Taijasa is available in the waking state too, but is dominated by the Vaishnavara. In dreaming state, the Taijasa is dominant and takes over the mind with its vivid imaginations, unconstrained by the physical reality of the Vaishnavara. 

The Praajna is interested in soothing and relaxing our our different sheaths. The Praajna is functional during waking and dreaming states as well, when we often instinctively relax and soothe ourselves. It is dominant in deep sleep where all sheaths are mostly shut down. A state of deep sleep does not represent absence of experience-- it represents an experience of absence! The Praajna is at work during our deep sleep, ensuring that we are well rested-- yet at the same time, listening to input channels like the ears, and waking us up if we hear a loud noise, for example. 

The above three states of being are something that we all experience daily. But, as the Mandukya says, the three states of being can in turn be queried by a fourth state, which is called Turiya (which literally means, "the fourth"). The Turiya is the state of pure awareness or consciousness, unhindered by our physical existence. 

The Turiya is said to be our core, liberated self, that is unhindered by time, space and causality. In this state of being, all the three earlier states, and the five sheaths can appear as objects in our experience-- thus showing us that we are not our body, life forces, mind, intellect or even our physical being. 

In the Turiya state, we can "speak with" each of our persons-- the Vaishnavara, Taijasa and Praajna and curate the way in which we experience our waking, dreaming and deep-sleep states!

The Mandukya itself does not propose any method for reaching the state of Turiya. But several other treatises address this question as to how to reach a state of pure awareness and inquire about and curate the entirety of our physical existence. 

Glimpses of the subject

“We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us. We are not in it; we are outside. We are only spectators. The reason why we believe that we are in it, that we belong to the picture, is that our bodies are in the picture. Our bodies belong to it.” --Erwin Schrodinger

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In the way Science is practiced today, and in Analytic Philosophy that underlies most scientific inquiry, the process of inquiry is predominantly objective. Much of scientific studies and Western philosophy (as practiced today) inquires about stuff that are "out there". Indeed, a study is considered scientific, only when the observer is separated from the system being observed, and the process of observation does not interfere with the functioning of the system. 

Recently, I was watching a lecture on Analytic Philosophy, in which the professor defined philosophical inquiry as comprising of three major dimensions-- "what is out there?", "how do I know?", and "what do I do?" The first dimension comprises of different hermeneutic schools and different conceptual models of reality. The second dimension addresses issues of knowledge, cognition, epistemology, and so on. The third dimension addresses issues like imperatives, norms, morality, ethics, rational choice, etc. 

In contrast to the above, one of the predominant questions addressed by Indian philosophical schools is "who am I?" Unlike Western thought that has predominantly focused on the object of inquiry , the focus in Indian schools has been predominantly on the subject or the inquirer. 

It is not that the inquirer does not feature in Western thought. But the depths to which the inquirer has been inquired, is much more in Indian thought. 

Most scientific models today require us to remove the inquirer from theories of reality. The inquirer needs to be a disinterested observer who does not interfere with the system being observed, and should not feature in the models of reality that is the outcome of the inquiry. 

Such a requirement was found to be inadequate when scientific inquiry was focused on the very small and the very large-- quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, respectively-- where it was seen that we cannot discount the observer in our models of reality. Similarly, in social sciences, there is often an argument that a dispassionate observer cannot understand underlying latent worldview and thoughts that drive observable patterns of behaviour of a population being observed, and a real sociological inquiry comes from a lived experience. It is only when we experience the pains, the joys, the insecurities, etc. of the population being observed, can we really understand why they act the way they do. 

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Why is an inquiry into the inquirer important? 

One of the biggest dreams of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers alike, has been to develop some form of "Grand Unified Theories" of reality. In Western thought, Albert Einstein, David Hilbert, and several others have attempted this immense feat, and have ultimately failed. 

But once we realise that the inquirer is part of reality too, we see that we can never have any form of objective grand unified theory of reality-- without a theory of the inquirer itself!

The inquirer is so fundamental to our experience when we are inquiring about the world out there, that we often completely forget that it exists, and that its existence itself is a mystery! For example, other than on planet Earth, we do not have any evidence of an inquirer or an inquiry happening in any other planet in our solar system or in the known universe! (Of course, notable exceptions are the various satellites, rovers and other gadgets in different parts of the universe that are "inquiring" on our behalf). 

Given that the inquirer is so unique an entity in the universe, it is but an imperative that any unified models of reality should necessarily also address and accommodate the inquirer into such models! 

Once we start inquiring into the inquirer, we see that the usual physical models of reality are inadequate to model the inquirer. The inquirer or the subject, is not only involved in observation of reality, but is also an active, autonomous agent of change! Constructs involving intention, free will, knowledge, belief, reason, morality, ethics, purpose, etc. are all attributed to the inquirer and not the inquired. We cannot meaningfully talk about the "intention" of planet Saturn for sporting rings, nor the "morality" of Jupiter wanting to be the biggest planet in our solar system. But such statements are meaningful when we are talking about subjects. 

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Indian philosophy has predominantly focused on characterising the inquirer rather than the inquired. There are several schools of thought and models about the inquirer-- each, a fascinating journey in itself. 

One of the major questions that is addressed by Indian thought is to "locate" the locus of of the inquirer. When we say that "I am the inquirer" the question then asks, "Who am I?" or where is the locus of this "I" or self? Does the "I" refer to our body? Our mind? Our "ego" (whatever it means)? Our genetic signature? Or is it somewhere else? 

The quest for the locus of "I" has been so elusive, that there are indeed several schools of thought (most notably, Buddhism) that assert that there is no entity called the self or "I" at all! But then, the concept of "I" is so centrally used in our conversations that it is hard to also accept that the core driver of our inquiry is just a void. 

There is a story about a scientist arguing with Sri Ramakrishna-- a well known 19th century Advaita philosopher-- saying that he has conducted several experiments involving both body and mind, and is convinced that there is no entity called "self" or "I" anywhere. To this, Sri Ramakrishna replied, "Who is convinced that there is no entity called self?" 

The 15th century Advaita philosopher Sage Vidyaranya wrote several books proposing different heuristics, to help the reader understand the problem of self. His treatise called the drg-drisyha viveka (or, the theory of the "seer" and the "seen") is based on the postulate that the subject cannot observe its own locus. Or, whatever that the subject can directly observe, cannot be the locus of the subject, since there is a locus that is doing the observing. For instance, our eyes can see everything else but itself. It can only see an image of itself in the mirror or in a photograph. But it cannot directly observe itself. Similarly, a finger cannot touch itself. 

While the eyes cannot "see" themselves, we can become "aware" of our eyes in our inquiry, and question about its state. For instance, we can become aware that our eyes are irritating, relaxed, dry, etc. In this case, the eyes become the observed, and the locus of our inquiry shifts somewhere deeper within us. Hence, if the eye can be the object of inquiry, it cannot be the locus of our subject. Thus, we can now ask, who is inquiring about the eye? If we say that it is our mind that inquires and it is because of our mind that we exist (according to Descartes who said "Cogito. Ergo, sum"), we can see that the mind itself can become an object of our inquiry! The popular field of "mindfulness" is all about observing our mind and our thoughts as they come and go. So if the mind is not the fundamental inquirer, then who is it that is observing the mind? 

The argument proceeds like that to reach a singularity. We can see that no matter what we think is our locus of inquiry that is part of our physical experience-- can easily become an object of our experience! We can observe our thoughts, our emotions, even our "ego" (we can inquire and understand ourselves as a person and our personality), we can inquire about our innate nature-- thus showing that none of this is the locus of our subject! 

The Samkhya school of philosophy which is more than 4000 years old, posits a "simpliciter" entity (a fundamental entity that exists on its own, and not derived from something else), called the "Purusha" that is termed the fundamental inquirer. Physical reality comprising of all objects that can be inquired about, is called Prakriti. One of the axioms of Purusha is that the Purusha cannot observe itself-- it can only "realise" itself, but never observe itself directly. It is the Purusha that is the source of all subjective constructs like free-will, intention, norms, etc. According to Samkhya, the universe is said to be made up of infinite numbers of Purusha objects and an infinite number of Prakriti objects. 

The infinite cardinality of Purusha objects are disputed by other philosophical schools, which point at certain contradictions that such a formulation creates. For instance, we discover "objective" mathematical truths independently, despite that mathematical processing is completely happening within our minds. Also, despite the large diversity in our population on earth, several linguists have noted remarkable similarities in which language is constructed across the world. This has given rise to theories like the "language instinct" that argues that our ability for language is not something that is imbibed-- but something that is innate! 

This brings us to one of the predominant models of Indian philosophy-- called as the Vedantic school-- which argues that there is only one Purusha or subject in the universe! It is this one same subject that is inquiring through a multitude of channels, which appear as different inquirers in physical reality. The locus of all our inquiry is the same, universal consciousness. The world is not just one family-- we are all the same person!

There is another story of Sri Ramakrishna in this regard. Once, someone asked Sri Ramakrishna on what is the basis of ethics on which we can build a theory of how to treat others. Conventionally, we use several bases like reflection (treat others like how you would like to be treated), virtue (uphold certain virtues in the way you treat others, etc.) But, Sri Ramakrishna had a very different answer. He said, "remember that there are no others"!

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Even in the Vedantic approach to understanding the subject, there are several sub-schools of thought-- primarily based on whether the core inquirer and the channel used for inquiry (our physical beings) are different or the same. I have written about this debate in other articles, and will not dwell upon this argument here. 

Practical dharma

One of the most misunderstood concepts these days is the idea of dharma (and other related terms like karma). Dharma is variously translated as "duty", "righteousness", "ethics", "divine law", and even "religion"-- all of which, are incorrect definitions. 

Dharma is the most fundamental of the four "drivers" or purusharthas of human behaviour: dharma, artha, kama, and moksha. The most accurate translation I can give for these terms respectively, are: sustainability, capability, agency, and liberation. 

The term dharma comes from the root dhrt- which means something that sustains or prevails. Dharma refers to the property of a system of being, that remains invariant through the life cycle of the system.  Dharma is what gives us our resilience to prevail across varying, adverse conditions and not be consumed by causal forces. 

Dharma is not just a property of "living" beings-- it is a characteristic of all systems of being. The field of statistical mechanics in physics uses a postulate very centrally in its inquiry, which says that, every bounded system has one or more "stable" states which represent low energy or low stress states in its neighbourhood, into which, it settles down, when left alone. For instance, electrons in an atom settle down into specific orbits. If we excite an electron with some energy, it moves to a higher orbit-- but also becomes unstable. It would quickly discard the excess energy and come back to its stable state of being. 

As complex living beings, these stable states of being are what constitutes our dharma. The principle of dharma holds whether we are talking about human societies, or the formation of crystals, or states of matter, or the climate, or the solar system, etc. 

One of the tests I use to see if someone has understood the concept of dharma, is to ask them whether dharma exists as of now, on Jupiter or Pluto. If their understanding of dharma is only in social terms like duty or religion, they would say that dharma is not applicable on Pluto. 

The most frustrating error of course, is to equate dharma with religion. Recently, I was listening to a talk where the speaker clarified the difference. Religion (or "faith" as understood in the dominant Western narrative today), is something personal and subjective, while dharma is an objective entity. The speaker gave an analogy of toothbrush and toothpaste. While we can share a tube of toothpaste, our toothbrush is personal. Dharma is something that is shared and depends on all of us, while religion or faith, is personal. 

Dharma is not righteousness either. But protecting and upholding dharma helps in righteousness and civility to prevail. Dharma is not our duty as well. But protecting and upholding dharma helps us in performing our duties. Dharma is not ethics either. But protecting and upholding dharma helps empower ethical practices. 

So how do we protect and uphold dharma? To do so, we need to understand the system of being that we are inquiring about and the environment (Vidhi) in which it is operating. As individuals, we are a system of being ourselves; and our family, work, society and even the physical environment around us represents the Vidhi in which we operate. Similarly, an institution could be the system of being whose dharma we are interested in, and its Vidhi represents the economic, cultural, social and physical environment in which it operates. 

We need to then understand what is the set of invariant properties that characterise our system of being. What is it about us that remains constant across time and the various interactions that we perform? Similarly, for institutions, we ask what is it that needs to prevail, that makes the institution what it is. 

Once we understand this, we then need to understand the "game" of interaction between the system and its Vidhi. Our Vidhi places lots of demands on us, for which we need to provide our best response. 

A being operating in its Vidhi (under certain conditions) is guaranteed to have at least one state of equilibrium. This can actually be proven mathematically! The state of equilibrium represents the "mutual best response" function-- meaning, this is the best that the being can do given the demands of its Vidhi, and this is also the best that the Vidhi can demand, given how the being is operating. 

Let us call the state of dharma of the being as 'd' and the state of equilibrium with the Vidhi as 'e'. The difference between 'd' and 'e' is our existential stress-- it is the difference between what sustains us and what is demanded of us. This formulation of existential stress remains the same, regardless of whether we are talking about individuals or institutions or communities or families or countries. 

To uphold our dharma, we can adopt various strategies. We can improve our capabilities (artha) to find a different stable state of being which is closer to 'e'. Or we can change our Vidhi to find a different environment whose equilibrium state 'e' is closer to our state of sustainability 'd'. Or we could change the "game" or the nature of our interaction with our Vidhi so that it forms a game whose equilibrium state 'e' is closer to our 'd'. 

All these are very different from doing our duties, or complying with orders, or upholding righteousness. We can do our duties or uphold righteousness these only after we can uphold our dharma in our Vidhi.