Open up to dialogue with all vulnerability
After Marcus Bussey, the famous thinker and futurist, we may understand sadhana “as a quest, striving, struggle involving tapasya — a sacrificing of one’s veil of certainty — and opening up to dialogue via vulnerability and inner reflection”. Every spiritual quest is such a sadhana. This striving makes our knowledge, including locational knowledge of a standpoint, “not just received and taken for granted but evolving, interpenetrative and emergent”.
Considering the contemporary context, professor Anantha Kumar Giri, Madras Institute of Developmental Studies, pleads for a sadhana of multi-valued logic and living. As elaborated by him in his talk at Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth, Pune, such multi-valued sadhana provides a spiritual transformation of our consciousness and liberates us from clinging “to the absolutism of a singular standpoint”.
Multi-valued logic, as elaborated by the contemporary Indian philosopher J N Mohanty, builds upon multiple traditions of humanity such as the Jain tradition of Anekantavada (many paths to truth), and the Gandhian path of non-violence. It emphasises that “every point of view is partly true, partly false and partly undecidable”. Giri distinguishes such logic from a dualistic logic where each point of view claims absolutism for itself. Its absolutist claim is accepted at face value (or denied) by the observer as well as the participant. Giri cautions us that “the fields of life, history and society compel us to realise the partial nature of our absolutist claims”.
This being the challenging calling of life today, there is “an inescapable pluralisation that calls for cultivation of a multi-valued logic and living where we move beyond our initial standpoints”. This urges us to interact with each other, sometimes, even going inside each other. Such a multi-valued logic and living embodies, according to Giri “an art of autonomy and interpenetration where our autonomy is not fixed but transforms itself in the process of mutual interaction and communication”.
One important aspect of multi-valued logic is overcoming what Sri Aurobindo calls “egoistic standpoint” of subject positions or position of actors. While one’s egoistic standpoint can be more closed, one’s standpoint as a self can be much more open. So, Giri distinguishes between the “closed ego” and the “open self”. Transformational streams in psychology, sociology, philosophy and spiritual traditions urge us to realise the distinction between the ego and the self. Thus, overcoming our standpoint as that of an ego and cultivating the standpoint of the self helps us to move beyond our own initial standpoints and be open to and embrace the standpoints of others. This contributes to “pluralisation of our subject positions”. Thus, we can realise the “subject position of the self in place of the subject position of the ego”. This enables us to overcome positional fixation and to be open to multi-valued logic and living.
In such a collective search, we are open to “aspirations, strivings and struggles to make life and society more beautiful, dignified and dialogical”. Such a quest or sadhana is “striving and struggle in our very existent world”. This forms truly a part of our lived life. As Giri elaborates, “It is a fragile, ambiguous and uncertain quest.” Genuine spirituality or sadhana, nonetheless, challenges us to understand and cultivate this “quest for beauty, dignity, dialogue and pluralisation in the midst of ugliness, violence and monological absolutism of various kinds”.
(The writer is a professor of science and religion)
