A group from the local Hindu temple recently contacted me about jointly celebrating the 150th birthday of Vivekananada, the Hindu priest who took the World Parliament of Religions by storm back in 1893 and introduced Vedanta Hinduism to the Western Hemisphere. Vivekananda spoke at the congregation where I serve as senior minister, the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, not once but twice on his initial US visit.

I enthusiastically accepted the invitation. I was pleased that First Unitarian Society had been thinking so far outside the box back in 1893 and wanted to continue that tradition.

This would not be a lecture. This would be a joint worship service—or, as we call it in my staunchly humanist congregation—Sunday Assembly. I point this out to highlight the fact that our Sunday Assembly does not tend to begin with “prayers to the guru” in the order of service.

The four tenants of Vedanta Hinduism run like this:

Definition of the Eternal Truth:  Consciousness is Brahman.

Statement of Advice: That Thou Art.

Statement of Direct Experience: This Atman is Brahman.

Roar of Realization: I am Brahman!

Yes, this needs some translation. “Brahman” is the ultimate divinity in Hindu thought—all that is. “Atman” is the singular self. The ego, as Freud would say. How might such a view fit into any sort of humanist translation?

Here’s my shot at it:

Definition of the Eternal Truth: Consciousness is the ultimate.

Statement of Advice: That’s you.

Statement of Direct Experience: Your consciousness is identical with all consciousness.

Roar of Realization: The ultimate (“god” or perhaps Heidegger’s dasein, “the being (that is) there”) is all consciousness.

How far off the beam is this? Not so far, I think. Remember that “Hinduism” is what the British called the various practices of the natives of the Indian subcontinent. Indians had never considered themselves Hindu or codified a “Hinduism.” The broad brush of colonialism painted everyone in the subcontinent. “Hinduism” was, and still is, a congeries of very localized practices that are “religious” only in a Western sense. They are, actually, ways of life. Vivekananda’s gift was to take the essence of Hindu practice—developed by his master, Ramakrisna—and present a cogent philosophy that moved Indians toward an understanding of nationalism that led eventually to the overthrow of their colonial rulers. (Vivekananda is celebrated by not one but two national holidays in India.) Then, Vivekananda took the show on the road, as it were, bringing Vedanta to a world that had hitherto-fore viewed Hinduism as barbaric.

We do well to remember that “Hinduism” contains the Carvakas, from the Sixth Century BCE, the first recorded instance of a truly atheist philosophy. Explicitly atheist?  Yep. A skepticism based in a deconstruction of logic. Remember, it took the Western World another 2000 years and more to produce such ideas.

(And, need I mention, that that level of skepticism is still rare in the world?)

But back to Vivekananda, who once said, “He is an atheist who does not believe in himself.” At first glance, that sounds like the rankest new-ageism. But look back at those four points of Vedanta. If the self is Brahman . . .

Sounds a bit like American Transcendentalism, doesn’t it? There’s a reason for that. British philologist (and one of the colonizers) William Jones, better known as “Oriental Jones,” made Hindu thought available to early-Nineteenth Century Americans of a particular intellectual persuasion. People such as the Unitarians inclined toward Transcendentalism—including the Peabody sisters, Thoreau, and Emerson.

Vedanta’s third point is direct experience. The Transcendentalist knew what that meant. They put themselves in the way of lived experience. They lived for those moments.

What Oriental Jones, the colonialists, or even the Transcendentalists, did not know is that “Hinduism” was way ahead of Western thinking. Hindu thinkers had already realized that “religious” breaks down into very different sorts of human activity—what we might nowadays characterize as character or personality types or “intelligences.” This has been categorized in Hindu tradition as the four yogas: devotion, service, meditation, knowledge.

This about covers the waterfront, doesn’t it? For some, devotion to “the holy” is the center of meaning and of religious practice. For others, service to others—what we nowadays call social justice—is the center of meaning. For others, meditative practices calm the mind and center the self. For others, it’s study, study, study and the next theory or book. And some—some practice a combination of these or all four.

Westerners are too often “my way or the highway” sorts of folks. The insistence of belief and belief only as key to Christianity has confused Westerners for some time.

Today? Reflect on the fact that the world’s most populous democracy is not England. Or the United States. It is India. And the children of Vivekananda? They’re fine, thank you. Still multifarious, and now free, despite the broad brushes of colonialism.

And, maybe, just maybe, leading the way into a future few of us yet comprehend. I’m looking forward to celebrating Vivekananda in my congregation. When he came that first time, in 1893, he was a lone voice crying in a Europeanized wilderness. Now . . . Hindus are our neighbors and we are theirs.

And this business about consciousness being the ultimate truth?

It bears some thinking about!

 

We all make a decision every day, consciously or unconsciously: Am I going to cooperate today? Perhaps the question is cooperation with a partner. Or the kids. Or a neighbor. Or the people at school or work. Are we going to “go along to get along,” as the old saying goes? How much of ourselves are we going to give away? Because it feels like that sometimes, doesn’t it?  That cooperation is giving parts of yourself away?

Dr. Joshua D. Greene is a cognitive neuroscientist and philosopher and director of Harvard’s Moral Cognition Laboratory. Greene has been doing some fascinating work that he describes on the website The Edge.com and he has just published a book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them.

I think that Greene succinctly sums up a central aspect of what morality means. Greene says,   “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”

I think Professor Greene is onto something here. This idea clarifies a lot of things that get muddied up when we start reading books on morality and ethics: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.” The thesis of his new book is that there are two types of human interactions that we do: “me versus us” and “us versus them.”

My examples about getting up in the morning and deciding to cooperate with others (or not) focuses on the individual cooperating with a group. But groups cooperate or not as well, and in those cases, too, I think the formula holds: morality is about cooperation.

We saw a failure to cooperate recently in the Washington budget brouhaha. We see it in Egypt. We see it in Syria. We see it in spying on foreign leaders. We see it in drone strikes. Figuring out what’s moral and what’s not moral is not difficult: “Morality is fundamentally about the problem of cooperation.”

Except . . .  Professor Greene does insert that little word “problem.” Greene puts it this way:

Each moral tribe has its own sense of what’s right or wrong—a sense of how people ought to get along with each other and treat each other—but the common senses of the different tribes are different. That’s the fundamental moral problem. http://wisdomresearch.org/Arete/Greene.aspx

It’s hard to cooperate with a group that sees things differently. For example, I don’t like a group that would cut funding for food stamps. I don’t like a group that would spy on foreign allies. I don’t like a group that sees “god” differently from the way I do. The list of groups I don’t like goes on and on! (And it may well be that THEY don’t like me either! Maybe they even want to hurt me!) And the perimeters of the groups expand and contract and shift constantly. I don’t think I want to cooperate at all!

Here’s a novel idea: let’s kill everybody we don’t agree with! Well . . . that’s a problem, isn’t it? That’s not such a novel idea, unfortunately.

Greene likens our moral thinking to a camera with two modes: a point-and-shoot, auto-focus mode and a manual mode, in which all the settings have to be consciously manipulated (you know, focus, f-stops).

“Bomb everybody different from us” is the auto-focus, point-and-shoot mode. It’s automatic. It’s gut. And, it’s immoral. It’s a failure to cooperate. The more remote the other group is from us, the more likely we are to react in the point-and-shoot mode.

A key finding in the research done at the Moral Cognition Laboratory is that we have no specific area of the brain that controls moral decision making. When people are asked moral questions, at least three areas of the brain light up. And they are the same three areas that light up when we are asked questions about buying things. Economic decisions.

Several systems work together, evaluating the probability of success and the diminishing returns we are likely to reap. So it appears that our moral reasoning has something to do with our acquisition of food back in our hunter and gather days.

Imagine you are hiding in a tree. Naked. No weapons. And there’s a dead rabbit right over there and you’re hungry—do you hop down out of the protective environment and take a chance?

One of the basic calculations concerning food for a hunter gatherer is, How dangerous is this to me? What’s the profit and what’s the loss?

(We have to be very careful when we get into explanations based on evolution. Neuroscientists can clearly see brain functions in these experiments, but the “why” is much more difficult to discover.)

We all know that watching someone die in our arms feels different than hearing about a death on the telephone. Or reading about it in the newspaper. Or seeing it on television.

Distant things—and distant groups—are much more difficult to care about. We always knew this; now we know it’s in our wiring. How to get around this flaw in a shrinking world is the challenge humanity will or will not solve. Religions and philosophies have been working on it for a while now . . . like, oh, seven thousand years, at least.

Still, it’s all about hopping down out of that tree and saying, “Hello.”

by Pablo Neruda

(translation by David Breeden)

Now, let’s all count to twelve,
then keep still.

For once on this earth,
let’s speak in no language.
For once let’s stop
and not move our arms so much.

That would be a fragrant moment,
without hurry,
without movement;
we would all be together
in an instantaneous . . . disquiet.

The fisherman in the cold sea
would not hurt the whales,
and the worker in the salt
would look at his broken hands.

Those who prepare garish wars–
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors–
would don clean clothes
and walk around
with their brothers
in the shadows

doing nothing.

Don’t confuse what I want
with true inaction:
life is only what you do–

I don’t want anything to do
with death.

If we can’t be unanimous
as we move our lives so much,
maybe do nothing for once,

so that maybe a great silence could
interrupt this sadness–
this never ever understanding each other,
and threatening each other with death–

maybe then the earth
can teach us

now
when everything seems dead,

then
everything was seen as alive.

I’m counting to twelve,
and you, become
silent!

I’m leaving now.

A.

Thucydides–that Greek

telling his story, human

doings with nary

a nod to the gods–said

the powerful extort

what they can;

the weak pay

what they must.

True enough to

make a bon mot.

The powerful

take,

the weak

give.

Person to person;

city to state; and

the empires

the worse for it.

B.

Nothing golden

in that rule. More

murder and steel,

more grab and run.

More of that little

story, David and his

giant, how the wry

win, by god, by

ignoring rules.

C.

Kant–that German

naming his absolutes

with nary a nod to gods–

said what I do

I must do

as if I give

that freedom to

everyone.

No treating others

as means

to an end

but the end

themselves.

And we’re golden.

(Buy that, David?

Buy that, Goliath?)

There are gifts that

come of breathing,

that come of blood

driving through veins,

no charge. Just being. 

One is the noise of existence. 

Another is when the noise stops.

After the theater 

of the self has closed; 

after the season of the self 

goes to reruns, music 

begins, slow, silent. 

Then, you hear . . .

it was the thought itself

that created the chains,

the blinders. When the 

mis en scene is struck,

gifts come, without 

breath, without blood.