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WHAT IS HINDUISM? WHAT IS HINDUISM? Radical new perspectives on the most ancient of religions Acharya Peter Wilberg 2009 Peter Wilberg © Copyright 2009 All rights reserved No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Published by New Yoga Publications 2009 Printed and bound in the United States of America by CreateSpace.com ISBN 978-1-904519-15-7 CONTENTS Preface.....................................................................................................................9 On the profound Relevance of Hinduism.........................................................15 Sayings from the Hindu Kashmiri Sages..........................................................24 From Atheism to ‘Nootheism’............................................................................28 Hinduism in Distinction to the Abrahamic Faiths..........................................30 What has ‘Hinduism’ to say today?....................................................................36 On the Wonders of Hindu ‘Idol Worship’.........................................................48 Experiences of Hindu Worship..........................................................................58 The meditative Life of the true Hindu...............................................................64 The Tenets of Tantric Hinduism.......................................................................66 The Ocean of Awareness.....................................................................................67 The Co-Creation of God and Man.....................................................................68 Religion as unified Field Awareness..................................................................73 The historical Evolution of Human Awareness...............................................79 Hinduism, Globalisation and ‘Yoga’.................................................................86 A global Revolution in Awareness......................................................................88 The subversive Nature of Awareness................................................................90 The social Dimension of Tantric Hinduism....................................................92 ‘The New Yoga’ as a new Hinduism................................................................94 Revolution as ‘Kaliyoga’ – the new Yoga of Time............................................95 Beyond the Monotheism of Money...................................................................99 Rudra’s red Banner – Marxism and Moksha..................................................119 Hinduism and ‘Scientific Socialism’................................................................176 Hinduism and Theocratic Socialism...............................................................186 Marxism, Hinduism and Indian History........................................................199 Hinduism, Nazism and the Indo-Germanic Connection.............................213 Hinduism, Non-Violence and the Bhagavatgita...........................................229 About Acharya Peter Wilberg............................................................................241 Bibliography 1.....................................................................................................249 Internet Resources.............................................................................................250 Bibliography 2.....................................................................................................251 NOTE TO THE READER This book, like all other New Yoga Publications, not only adds to but also draws from Acharya Peter Wilberg’s entire corpus of essays and books on ‘The Awareness Principle’ and its practice – ‘The New Yoga of Awareness’. Each book being a compendium of selected essays from this corpus, the reader is asked to bear in mind that some repetition of textual content - both within and across different books - has been unavoidable. It is hoped that this element of repetition will not be an annoyance to the reader but instead serve to reinforce his or her understanding of the many different threads and dimensions of Acharya’s thought – theological, philosophical, psychological and political – weaving them together in the context of a new thematic focus and thus revealing their interconnections in a new light. PREFACE In this book I bring together a diverse selection of essays and citations aimed at offering new answers to the question ‘What is Hinduism?’ In doing so, I also offer an introduction to Hinduism from a number of radically new perspectives – historical and philosophical, economic and political, socialist and Marxist. Their common aim is to overcome the whole idea of Hinduism as just one major world ‘faith’ or ethnic-cultural ‘identity’ among others - but instead to reveal anew the universal truth and essence of Hinduism as the ‘Eternal Truth’ or Sanatana Dharma1. Drawing on the most refined and sophisticated expression of Hindu religious philosophy2, I argue that at its heart is an understanding of the divine unlike that of all other religions – whether ‘monotheistic’, ‘polytheistic’ or ‘pantheistic’. This is the understanding that God is not a being – either in the form of a single ‘supreme being’, a multiplicity of natural or divine beings, or a philosophical abstraction of ‘pure being’ - ‘Being’ with a capital ‘B’. More to the point, God is not a being that happens to have or possess ‘consciousness’. God is not a being ‘with’ consciousness. God is consciousness. This is not a consciousness that is ‘yours’ or ‘mine’, but one that constitutes the very essence of the divine - being the ultimate or divine source of all beings – of everything that ‘is’. I term this consciousness ‘pure 9 WHAT IS HINDUISM? awareness’ – meaning subjectivity or awareness as such in contrast to anything we are aware of. This distinction is central to what I call ‘The Awareness Principle’, a radical neo-Hindu approach to religion, life and science whose first principle is that awareness as such (Sanskrit chit) cannot, in principle, be reduced to the property or product of any thing or being that we are conscious or aware ‘of’ - including the human body or brain. Understanding the divine as a universal, absolute and supreme awareness - transcending and yet also immanent in all beings – has implications that transcend theology and subvert our current understanding of both ‘science’ and ‘religion’. At the same time they are wholly congruent with the Marxist understanding that religious concepts of God as a supreme, all-ruling being or group of beings arose with the development of class society and its rulers. Similarly, modern scientific concepts of consciousness as a mysterious by-product of ‘matter’ arose with the development of an industrial society oriented to the production of material commodities ‘possessing’ a mysteriously invisible and immaterial property – an ‘exchange value’ or ‘market value’ quite independent of their tangible, material nature and ‘use value’. By recognising the inner unity of Hindu and Marxist perspectives we can see that the ‘supreme being’ worshipped as the ‘God’ of the Abrahamic faiths is in effect a divinisation of the human ego – seen at the same 10