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| Contemporary Hindu Identity |
Aprameya Mysore
08/03/2010
Contemporary Hindu Identity
As I grew older and put away the GameBoy I opened my eyes to a more expansive and complicated reality. Grades, friends, responsibility, curfew, and eventually politics, knowledge, and all that messy stuff: as with many of my peers I was forced to reconcile my religious values with the personal, intellectual, and spiritual questions arising from my every day life. Once again, retrospectively my decision to undergo Upanayanam and the urge i felt to stand up to ignorance in the history classroom, i feel, are products of a Hindu upbringing seeping through personal proclivities and clashing with disbelief and uncertainty. As with any teenager I had heated disagreements with my parents and questioned certain values, and on some long sleepless nights I was highly skeptical of what I had been taught as a child. I don't see these struggles as outside my identity as a Hindu, but rather constitutive of that very identity. Ultimately for me, a separation between the the altar of institutionalized symbolic "Hinduism" and every day life is just contrived, and probably why many of my peers have avoided religion. Hindu identity isn't having some esoteric Sanskrit text on your bookshelf, or going to the temple every Sunday out of habit, or keeping a Ganesha above your dashboard. It's the understanding of how and why any of those things would ever be useful for a meaningful life experience.
Sankaracarya spoke of the Nirguna Brahman--the eternal truth which is formless, yet the essence of all form. Hindus in the contemporary world should remember that this truth is the very essence of our culture--the nameless "Sanatana Dharma" that preceded any notion of religious identity detached from every day human experience. In other words, to compartmentalize Hinduism to a certain rituals and then go about business as usual defeats the whole purpose of this Dharma. I don't mean to imply that a Hindu identity should necessitate a paranoid slave-morality in which we are always pressured to "do the right thing" or we'll end up in hell; in fact I'd suggest the opposite. I was conversing with my mother the other day over dinner about religion and politics, and asked her what the Hindu perspective on the Middle East or other political conflicts might be. She replied by reminding me that Hinduism would maintain a critical stance towards a "right versus wrong" method of political inquiry--all things good, bad, ordered, chaotic, familiar, and strange are components of the very Brahman or cosmic symphony that implicates us all, many times in ways of which we are unaware.
My Hindu identity, then, lies not in the fact that I meditate or pray, but in that I hope to use these techniques to achieve mental clarity, to appreciate the texture of this intricate and elaborate order as it applies to my life, and to live accordingly. It's not just that I am a vegetarian, but that I believe strongly in the harmony of all life and understand, as Krishna spoke to Arjuna in the Gita, that such values do not indicate what is categorically good or bad but rather must be negotiated amidst Maya, where answers may not be clear and consequences may be obscured. Are we really aware of the big picture as we double-click our way through the day, and sign the dotted line? It's not that I believe in Karma or what others may call mystical superstition, but that I understand that within the grand scope of a complex universe in perpetual flux, with which even the most brash proponents of Enlightenment based science must gaze upon with awe, the self-aware ego may not always be in control of its surroundings.
I am a Hindu when behind my turntables, as the nature of rhythm and sound are themselves testaments to the aesthetic beauty of Brahman. I am Hindu with a paintbrush or pencil in my hand--the simultaneous subtlety and force of artistic inspiration, tempered by it's irreverence for my will to create art "when I feel like it" are enough for me to prostrate before Saraswati. Moreover, I am Hindu when things don't work out, when I struggle to make up my mind, and when I learn by trial and error. As a Hindu, I thank my parents for teaching me the value of compassion, patience, and a spiritual connection to the world as an extension of the Atman; through their parenting and persistent love for me despite rash decisions I have made, and as adults responsible for raising a child in a radically different culture, I believe they have expressed their Hindu identity. I believe looking to the technological and socio-cultural artifacts that dominate one generation or another for a "Hindu identity" in fact misses the whole point of Vedanta--what is important is how we holistically approach this environment, and the decisions we are faced with every day, with an open mind and a pure heart. Such an identity truly transcends generations, and is timeless.
Aprameya's Biography
Aprameya Mysore just completed his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. His interests include taekwondo, DJing, art (both digital and by hand), and philosophy. Through his experience with policy debate for four years in high school, he was introduced to a lot of philosophical and theoretical literature—this bolstered his inquisitiveness about Vedanta that continues to this day. He was born and raised in Houston, Texas, and is 18 years old.
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