The yogic state or ‘yoga aarud’ in Hindu philosophy epitomizes ‘samabhava’ (equanimity) which is hypercognated in the cultural context of Hindu society, especially in Bhagavad Gita. It is credence to a cultural belief in transhumanism and transcendence. Samabhava is usually misconstrued as inaction and detachment by western thinkers but essentially a person in ‘samabhava’ behaves with equanimity in all his social roles and thick and thin of human life. This alleviates the experiences of grief and moderates the exuberance of joy. This is finely captured in Chapter-5, Verse 20, which proclaims “A person who neither rejoices upon achieving something pleasant nor laments upon obtaining something unpleasant, who is self-intelligent, unbewildered,  and who knows the science of God, is to be understood as already situated in Transcendence.”

It may appear paradoxical to a western thinker (provided he is not acquainted with Jacques Derrida’s ‘Deconstruction’ theory) and he may question the importance of such an emotional state. Essentially in Gita, human emotional states or stages in human life are not seen and explained as binaries, one preferred over the other. Reflecting the core Hindu tradition, it rejects the idea of a master-discourse (or meta-narrative) that is seen as ideal for basing judgment in all situations. The most prolific visual manifestation of this philosophy (i.e. absence of meta-narrative) in the Hindu way of life is the multitudes of Gods and belief in them. The non-oriental / western thinking took more than millennia to discover the structural parasitism between ideas and practices.

Hinduism and other pagan traditions that inspired French Thinker, Jean-François Lyotard to introduce the concept of post-modernism to the Western world rightly argues “that there are irreducible differences in the order of things, and that we must take things on their own terms without attempting (or coercing) to reduce them to universals”.

Gita categorically stated much earlier that emotional states or stages in human life viz. good/bad, pain/pleasure, grief/joy, victory/ loss etc are not binary opposites and mutually exclusive rather one harbour another and each is contaminated by another. Therefore instead of encouraging one to be sattvic among the trinity of gunas (three modes for categorizing behaviour) viz. sattvic (qualities of truth, serene, virtuous etc), rajasic (qualities of passion, egoism etc) and tamasic (qualities of imbalance, dullness, inertia), Gita encourages a person to be ‘gunaatit’ or one who is liberated from the modes of nature.

In western philosophy, this structural parasitism between binary terms in human life was discovered by Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), a French philosopher in his theory of deconstruction. He attempted to find the structural link between binary opposites through tools of double reading and de-sedimentation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

DISCLAIMER: The author is solely responsible for the views expressed in this article. The author carries the responsibility for citing and/or licensing of images utilized within the text.