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| L to R, Front: The book's co-author Dr. Manogna Sastry, Chief Guest Dr. Karan Singh, Hon. Guest Prof. Kapil Kapur & the book's author Rajiv Malhotra |
Rajiv Malhotra’s ‘The Battle for Consciousness Theory’ book launch and discussions were hosted by ‘Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage’ (INTACH) at Alliance Française, New Delhi with Dr. Karan Singh as the Chief Guest and Prof. Kapil Kapur as the Honorary Guest on 22nd August 2024. The three-hour-long event had a full hall and “some audience members had to stand” according to the report by The Print.
A large part of Indian culture is hidden beneath the surface of the U.S culture
Rajiv Mlahotra has authored "14 major, critically acclaimed path breaking books". "Over the past half century his work has straddled across the USA and India and he is equally at home in both places. He heads the Princeton (USA) based Infinity Foundation."
Malhotra said this book project is a quarter century long that started in the 1990s. “I found a large part of Indian culture hidden beneath the surface of what they thought was their culture, whether it is mathematics, astronomy, Botony, linguistics, you know all sorts of things. Not just the obvious ones like Yoga and so on but many things over time - medicine, spirituality, metallurgy, etc. I saw evidence of this in the United States but they don’t have the history that the origins of America had to do with India. I used to give talks all over the place and found it frustrating they did not understand the extent to which the United States has a debt to India." "I discovered a whole lot of people went through four or five stages which I call the U-turn theory." (See an extract of the theory from his book attached). "It is not that they are bad people or anything. When you see knowledge you want to contextualize it in a way that is familiar to you. It is not a conspiracy theory or anybody’s personhood. This U-turn theory along with Digestion theory is how knowledge gets digested into a new framework and the new host incorporates it as part of its own history, philosophy and so on."
“Important people in Auroville wanted to join Ken Wilber to become global”
Malhotra started many projects on the digestion theory and was looking for allies and friends. He was an avid reader of Sri Aurobindo, particularly his Life Divine and it took him to Pondicherry and Auroville quite a few times and that was when he discovered that Sri Aurobindo’s work was being appropriated by an eminent scholar Ken Wilber. “It is fair for a person to reinterpret something, and equally fair for me to evaluate it and do a comparative study”, he said. When Malhotra was arranging an “Integral Psychology” conference in Pondicherry he got a notice from Ken Wilber that he had already copyrighted the term and so he (Malhotra) shouldn’t use it. To Malhotra’s surprise, a lot of people in Pondicherry and Auroville said, “Wilber had created an Integral Institute in the U.S and invited any organisation to become an affiliate”. The terms of the agreement for the affiliation required an organisation to “surrender the entire intellectual property to them and they would licence it back as per what they think we need”. Malhotra said, “Strangely, important people in Auroville said we should join, then we become global”. Malhotra saw as an inferiority complex the justification that “we are not good enough and he [Wilber] would make us better”. Malhotra didn’t change the name of his conference, questioning how Wilber could claim Integral Psychology as his when already some disciples of Sri Aurobindo had brought out a book with that title.
Ken Wilber’s philosophy is not formulated from his experience
Malhotra said Ken Wilber never claimed to have had the experiences that Sri Aurobindo had. He was an intellectual and scholar but was making his philosophy by copy-pasting from other sources. “If you have not experienced it yourself and you claim to have come up with this great philosophy, it is not a darshan (vision). Philosophy is intellectual, conceptual, you don’t need to have experience any of it. In fact, analytical philosophy does not believe there is a higher state of consciousness.” He explained the important difference between organic/integral and synthetic unities. A chair, microphone etc. assembled with different parts are examples of synthetic unities, he said. “When you take a civilisation’s integral unity apart and map it to some other people and then reassemble into a synthetic unity, you have done violence. That’s the point. It’s not that they don’t have a right to do it but I have a right to sort of point out that the repackaged version is not the integral unity”. He was amused that “Wilber has been called the Einstein of Consciousness”.
Unfair characterisation of Sri Aurobindo as other-worldly, escapist etc.
Malhotra said, “What troubles me is that Sri Aurobindo has often been reduced to a kind of idolatry whereas it is his thoughts is what he is really about and needs to be studied a lot more and made part of schools, colleges, curricula as a living philosophy, not something you just pay homage to.” He said one of the most troubling distortions is the characterisation of Sri Aurobindo as a world-negating, other-worldly mystic, introverted, not practical, not about society, etc., whereas Sri Aurobindo was totally different than that. “He [Sri Aurobindo] would reprimand the Adwaita-Vedantins who were escapists. He wanted this worldly engagement and the evolution to happen in the world, in the collective consciousness. It is an unfair charecterisation to call him other-worldly.”
Wilber appropriated the Indian concepts and Sri Aurobindo’s ideas
Co-author of the book Manogna Sastry in her speech said, “One of the key concepts Wilbur appropriates and distorts is that of immanence and transcendence”. The very first verse of Ishopanishad’s (Isha Upanishad) declares that the highest consciousness pervades all manifested reality. Sri Aurobindo and before him, Swami Vivekananda based their models on this concept. Wilbur credits the idea to Westerners to position himself as the latest in the lineage while using Sri Aurobindo’s ideas. We undertake a systematic critique of Wilber’s model and not only show its origins in Sri Aurobindo’s works but also how Wilber has borrowed from prior Western digesters who in turn had mined the Upanishadic truths for their insights.
Co-author Kundan Singh in his speech said, “He [Wilber] has taken verbatim ideas from Sri Aurobindo without due acknowledgment even.
Wilbers cannot understand this
Prof. Kapil Kapur, Chief Editor of Encyclopaedia of Indian Poetics, a Unesco project currently under publication and is the visiting Professor at the Irish Academy of Cultural Heritage at the University of Ulster, UK, nominated Member of Indian Council of Philosophical Research besides other responsibilities said, “The Westerners define Self also with thought but we say you can watch your thoughts. The observer and the observed cannot be the same. So, there is something beyond that. Beyond the mind is the Chit… Chetana and that is Chaitanya. There is a whole different world-view. I think the Wilbers cannot understand (this).
A full-fledged response to Wilber was overdue: Dr. Karan Singh
Dr. Karan Singh, was the youngest cabinet minister at the age of 36 in 1967, the founding member of INTACH, and was India’s Ambassador to the US in 1989 in addition to being India’s member in the UNESCO Governing Board. He was a 4 time M.P of Rajya Sabha, chaired the Auroville Foundation for 20 years and authored 20 books on a range of subjects.
While praising Malhotra’s book as his magnum opus, the Chief Guest said, “It is not an easy book to read. I was struggling through the introduction and it took me a long time to do that.” He said, “A full-fledged response to Wilber was overdue and there is only one man who could do that and that is Rajiv Malhotra.” He said it would take years to read the book (530 pages). Calling it a dense and difficult book he said, “If there is anybody who is really interested in the subject, this is the book to read”.
He said his own view of Yoga is that the four ways of Yoga (Gnana, Bhakti, Karma, and Raja Yogas) are to be integrated and “Sri Aurobindo has done that to a great extent”. Dr. Karan Singh, like Wilber, didn’t acknowledge Sri Aurobindo as the first proponent of Integral Yoga. Dr. Karan Singh was born a decade, and Ken Wilber nearly 3 decades, after Sri Aurobindo wrote the Synthesis of Yoga in which the term “integral yoga” appeared 126 times.
Vedantic philosophy is the one to meet the challenge of Artifical Intelligence
Dr. Karan Singh said, “My own interest is not in the battle between Wilber and Sri Aurobindo but between Science and Philosophy”. He said, “James Lovelock wrote in his last book ‘Novacene’ Beings will emerge from distinct technologies who will treat us like plants and animals”. “Why do (Elon) Musk and other says AI is the greatest challenge to human civilisation?” He thinks if there is any philosophy that can meet this challenge it is the Vedantic philosophy.
Dr. Singh then shifted focus to evolution and wars. "We are wedged precariously between a disappearing past and indescribable future. More weapons are being produced, billions of dollars are being made by arms manufacturers. The longer the wars last the more money they make. Pointing at the “terrible wars” going on in four continents he asked, “What is happening to the human consciousness? Individuals may be evolving into higher consciousness but humanity does not seem to me to be evolving into higher consciousness.”
"Are we living in an artificial world of ideas and thoughts and not dealing with humanity? Thousands of people are dying every day. Does anybody feel the pain? Is anybody shaken? The Palestinians are being massacred. Ukraine and Russia which are supposed to have the same religion, language and culture are at each other’s throat.” He told Malhotra, “Now you have a new challenge. How does the Indic philosophy (Vedanta is an Indic philosophy) deal with the present negative and Asuric forces that seem to be sweeping across the world?” He concluded, “So, we cannot avoid dealing with the philosophical implications of humanity as it is at present”.
Dr. Shruti Poddar, Member of the Governing Council of INTACH and Convenor of INTACH Shekhawati Chapter moderated. At the request of Dr. Singh who looked forward to her invocation at the end but wished she would advance it, she sang a song of Shankaracharya on Sachchidananda in which she claimed he described every plane and part of the being. Dr. Singh left after that skipping a brief question and answer session at the end for which he had said earlier that he might not have the answers and also felt the session was not necessary as Malhotra had already answered everything.
The book is priced at Rs. 200/- in eBook format for downloading and reading through the free 'Kindle' software.
Ayurveda to Aurobindo, book launch uses ‘U-turn theory’ to critique Western appropriation: The Print
Launching new game-changing book: The Battle for Consciousness Theory (Video, Infinity Foundation, 1 hr: 59 minutes)
The U-Turn Theory (Excerpt from the book The Battle for Consciousness Theory)