Globalization of Human Mind

Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, makes a significant point in his op-ed ofMarch 12, 2006entitled Defenders of the Faith in the New York Times. His point is about the hollowness of the argument that only religion can humanize humanity. On The contrary, Slavoj Zizek holds religion responsible for the murderous violence around the world today by those who “claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations” just as the “godless” Stalinist Communists to whom everything was permitted. Slavoj Zizek argues that today paradoxically the ethic of righteous action “solely out of the love of God” rather than the carrot and stick logic of religion survives mostly in atheism.

It is preposterous to imagine that values of human caring, love and compassion are the result of theism, atheism or any other system of understanding. Nature must be credited with the origin of these values in humanity. A human baby is a helpless creature. One of its earliest experiences is the warmth of motherly love and caring. Does it not learn to respond to parental love and caring in its infancy? Does it wait till it can learn a doctrine before it begins to treat its siblings and life in general with the love and compassion it learns from its parents? Humanity as it is, the experience of early familial love, caring and compassion may not last a life time without being reinforced by adult intelligibility and meaning, a remarkable system of which was discovered early by prehistoric humanity.

Curiosity is natural to life. We want to know and we want to know the truth. Before the advent of any doctrine, prehistoric humanity discovered that the human senses do not tell the whole story, that there is a supernatural essence underlying all natural beings animate and inanimate, and that all natural beings are one in this deepest essence. They discovered that reality exists at two levels – immediate and apparent of sensual experience, and ultimate and essential of intellectual experience. This prehistoric intelligibility born of empirical experience is today called the Perennial Philosophy. The early philosophers further declared that contemplation of truth has the potential of unveiling our essential oneness and taking it deep into human consciousness.

Religious doctrines tacitly make use of this understanding to connect us with each other to build distinct societies. Likewise, atheistic doctrine uses it to build the ethic of humanism. All such doctrines are alike in their capacity to ‘unite and simultaneously divide’. Piecemeal union is the other face of division. Murderous human violence that we experience today and have historically experienced in the past is just one result of the clouding of the prehistoric intelligibility of the Perennial Philosophy. Irreverence for nature and unchecked greed in its exploitation is another.

Let us examine whether the Perennial Philosophy has any truth in it and whether it is worthy of being taught in the classroom of today. Elementary chemistry teaches us that the infinite diversity of nature is merely an interplay of just a handful of elements on the periodic table. Atomic physics teaches us that atoms, the building blocks, of all these elements are nothing but different arrangements of three subatomic particles - negatively charged electrons flying around in a probabilistic cloud around the nucleus made up of positively charged protons and electrically neutral neutrons. High energy physics further reduces the three subatomic particles to one common source, energy. It is energy that somehow coalesces in the form of the subatomic particles, which are held together by energy again against their mutually repulsive nature in the nuclei and atoms of different elements. Thus, modern science proves without an iota of doubt that underlying all the infinite diversity of matter in nature is an immaterial essence called energy, which is both immanent in the building blocks of matter and transcendent to them, and which incessantly drives the interplay of matter in the realm of nature. That very science which, at one time, ridiculed that idea of an underlying reality outside of human experience comes around to prove that it can and does exist.

Surely the universe is more than mere matter. What is implied here is the principle of an underlying reality. Its existence in the case of matter is a strong pointer to its existence in the case of the universe of all beings, animate as well as inanimate. Because of the infinity of its scope, perspectives about it can differ from spiritual to theistic to material. The important point in our context is its oneness and our oneness through its oneness. All perspectives refer to the same underlying reality whatever it might be. There is no justification whatsoever, clinging to our particular perspectives at the cost of a rejection of our underlying oneness.