Of Attitudes to Arachnids And Indic Education: What Spiders Can Teach Us About Reality
What spiders can teach us about consciousness and reality and why we should encourage our children to be amazed by natural organisms.
In his lecture, ‘Science and sensibility’ delivered in 1998, Richard Dawkins criticised an event meant for popularising science, where one of the ‘best prizes’ for science went to ‘a book about insects and other so-called ‘ugly bugs’.’ Dawkins rightly pointed out that ‘such language is not best calculated to arouse the poetic sense of wonder’. He took even more offence at the ‘antics of the chair of the judges,’ who he said ‘incited the audience to join her in repeated choruses of audible grimaces at the contemplation of the horrible ‘ugly bugs’.’ ‘That kind of vulgarity demeans the wonder of science, and risks ‘turning off’ the very people best qualified to appreciate it and inspire others: real poets and true scholars of literature.’ the biologist concluded.
Now compare the above event with the following passage:
There is a whole class of animals that it would be good for us to know. Amongst these are spider, mosquito, dragon-fly, butterfly, snail, prawn, worm, centipede etc. There ought to be no such thing as disgust or horror in our minds of any living things, and to overcome this we ought to create in the very young a warm love and feeling of being a playmate. In a somewhat later stage, say, the second term of the school year, we may take details or parts of the organisms which we first approached as a whole.
The above is a passage from an article written by Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble, 1867-1911), the Irish disciple of Swami Vivekananda. Titled ‘Hints on Practical Education’, it talks about kindergarten education. Despite her implementing such novel ways of teaching nature to children, even those who pay lip service to her ideals tend not to promulgate her methods in their educational institutions. Rather, India as a whole teaches their kindergarten kids English rhymes about how ‘little Miss Muffet’ was ‘frightened away’ by the spider. This is not only a wrong approach to nature but also stereotypes gender behaviour.
Spiders are wonderful results of evolution. The oldest fossil record of spiders comes from 380 million years ago. Spiders are not insects as commonly believed, though both are invertebrates. Insects have three pairs of legs and have their body divided into three well defined parts, head, thorax and abdomen. Spiders have four pairs of legs and the body part is divided into two compartments, cephalothorax and abdomen. In evolutionary timescale insects appeared later. Then, for the next 340 million years, insects and spiders have been intertwined in the dance of evolution.
Insects evolved flight. Spiders evolved into spinners of aerial webs, catching the insects in flight in these webs. Webs themselves diversified. Apart from the orb webs which have come to be associated dominantly with spider webs, there are tube webs and ladder webs. They also evolved a variety of venoms.
Venoms are chains of proteins. They are made of what are called peptide chains. A peptide is a chain of amino-acids, which in turn are the building blocks of proteins. Scientists estimate that a typical spider venom is actually a chain consisting of 250 peptides. The number of species of spiders inhabiting our planet is a staggering 44,500. So, this means that there is a rich variety of more than 10 million bio-active peptides which we can get from spiders. How beneficial this can be for both medicine and agriculture is obvious.
Teachings of a ‘Spider Woman’
Eminent zoologist, Dr Vijayalakshmi of Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS), Chennai, has been researching on spiders and has also written a book on them. In her circles, she is known as the ‘spider woman’. CIKS literature explains the need for studying spiders in an Indian context:
Spiders have always been known to be effective predators, though their potential as biocontrol agents has not been exploited to its fullest, at least in India. By detailed research in this field, and a series of awareness and training programmes, we aim to propogate the use of spiders as a feasible method of pest control.
And studying spiders can be very productively integrated with the school curriculum. Rahul Alvares, a student who decided to spend one year outside school after his 10th standard examination, visited CIKS and stayed there. CIKS was then housed in a one-storey building. Dr. Vijayalakshmi and her husband had converted their garage into the ‘spider room’. Here are three sample diary entries from Rahul Alvares about what he learnt in CIKS during his stay.
27th November: Watched how Selvan separated baby spiders from their mother, placing each baby in a separate container. There were about 110 babies. Then we fed about 200 older spider babies. Selvan showed me how to check their moulting.
28th November: Today I did feeding of the spider babies on my own. Then transferred adults from one container to another and then fed them.
1st December: Madam (Dr.Vijayalakshmi) came to the office today and showed me how to collect spiders which were in the compound of the office. She also gave me some more material to read on spiders and told me to start preparing my essay on spiders. After doing a little bit of feeding as usual, I went out on my own and collected a few species of spiders. Then Madam helped me identify them and also some other species of spider that they had caught. Spent the afternoon catching flies to feed some of the older spiders.Rahul Alvares, <i>Free from School</i>, First World Library, 2004
This is exactly what Sister Nivedita would have envisioned. Such an education is not capital-intensive. It is only care-intensive and intelligence-intensive. The teacher should love the subject and the curriculum should be flexible for the local variety while rigorous in imparting scientific methodology.
In the West, educationists are also using spider webs for teaching children mathematics and also to make them learn how to observe nature. Children are asked to observe the different web architectures and also to ‘spin’ their own webs as activity. Note that such an activity needs no capital intensive infrastructure and it can stimulate the skills of observation, mathematical talents and artistic capabilities in the students.
It is not just science. The spiders can also become tools to ignite in the young generation some fundamental questions in philosophy. Indian literature, with its linguistic diversity, retains spider as one of the common factors in some of the most profound poetic expressions and with a remarkable consistency through ages at that.
Web-spinner versus Watch-maker
In Indian context, the process of spiders weaving and eating their own webs has been a time-honoured symbol for the ultimate mystery. So, the spider spinning the web from its own being and then eating its own web became the symbol of a primordial organic process that human consciousness felt when it viewed the universe with awe and wonder. In Mundaka, Brihadaranyaka and Svetasvatara Upanishads the emergence, sustenance and dissolution of the universe is likened to the process of spider creating her web from herself and consuming it again. All the three analogies that Mundaka Upanishad mentions are organic processes: the spider and the web, the emergence of herbs from the earth and the growth of hair out of the human body. Out of these three, It is the spider and her web which gets repeated. In the Shrimad Bhagavata, Shiva, as Rudra, is extolled as 'the undivided Brahman beyond Shiva and Shakti' who, also 'like a spider with its web, playfully create, maintain and destroy the universe in the forms of Shiva and Shakti' (IV.6.42-3) Devi Bhagvata also uses the spider analogy for the Goddess: 'As the web comes out of a spider and sparks come out of fire, so this whole Universe comes out of that Goddess.' (4.19.10).
According to Indologist R C Zaehner, the analogy of the spider is also implicit in Bhagavad Gita. He also brings out a fundamental difference between the creator-God of Christianity and Islam and the impersonal-process Godhead of Indic Darshanas:
<i>yena sarvam idam tatam</i>, ‘by which the whole universe was spun’. A favourite refrain in the <i>Gita</i>. <i>Tatam</i> literally means ‘spun’ or ‘spread out’ (so D.: cf. <i>tantu</i>, ‘thread’). The idea is that the universe emerges from the First Principle as a spider’s web emerges from a spider. We find this idea twice in the classical Upanishads... As always in traditional Hinduism creation is not <i>ex nihilo</i>. <i>Brahman</i> is the material as well as efficient cause of the world. It is both the weaver as here and the warp and woof across which all phenomenal existence is woven.R.C.Zaehner, ‘<i>The Bhagavad Gita: With a commentary based on the original sources</i>’, OUP, 1969
Tamil poetic-philosophical treatise Thirumanthiram (dated varied between 6th and 7th century CE) also uses the spider simile. Here, the centrality of the cognitive principle with relation to the sense organs and the experiences is likened to the centrality of the spider in the web as well as the dynamic relation the spider has to the web (verse 2170). Siddhanta would further consider the individual cognitive principle as having the dual nature as to collapse into phenomenal universe or expand into universal consciousness through the experiences of the phenomenal universe. Hence, Saivites consider the Shiva as the metacognitive principle in the cognitive core in the dance of individual life. (Pandit Ramanatha Pillai, 1957).
In 12th century, the Veerashaiva movement in Karnataka movement was taking shape. Oblivious to the fact that eight hundred and odd years later some of his followers would ignorantly position themselves as non-Hindus cut off from the Vedic tradition, Channabasavanna incorporated the Upanishadic spider into the worldview of Veerashaiva path through his vachanas:
From where did the spider bring the thread
To weave a web around?
No spinning-wheel, no cotton ball.
Just as the spider sports and departs,
Shrouding himself in the self-spun yarn,
Which he finally swallows himself,
Merging into Himself the cosmos
Created by Himself for His own sport,
Lord Kudala Channasagna
Became one with the absolute.
(Source)
The famous Kambar, one of the greatest poets of Tamil language, who lived in the 13th century, reinforced the spider imagery too.
You are that One the Highest Being
Imminent in and transcendent to
all life forms and universes varied
Ingesting, emanating,
measuring and speciating
the spider weaving its orb
through delicate threads
emanating from the Self
beginning from the days yore to this day
Holding, Sustaining all existence.
When Jawaharlal Nehru spoke of India’s ‘cultural unity amidst diversity… held together by strong but invisible threads’, one wonders if he ever thought of the strands of spider web becoming part of those ‘invisible threads’, uniting the heartbeats of Upanishadic seers to Basavanna , Kambar and beyond.
And this is not a faith-based invocation to a deity –definitely not a personal deity. The cosmic vision which the lines of melodious poetry of Kambar and Vachanas of Channabasavanna unveil, is Vedantic. David Chalmers can perhaps empathise with it. This poem which can be set to melodious tunes for a Tamil child can fill the child with wonder and questions, not faith. After all, the process-Godhead here is no personal God but the God of Spinoza.
Unlike the failed analogy of the watchmaker to explain the creation, the spider-spinning and consuming its own web provides a deeper analogy. And it correlates not only with Vedanta but also in a way with the philosophical school of panpsychism, which has reemerged as one of the major frameworks in the consciousness research. Professor Ellen Goldberg in an insightful paper points out the possibilities:
David Chalmers’s theory of ‘panpsychism’ ... resonates broadly with Hindu thought. For Chalmers and Hinduism, consciousness is an integral part of the evolutionary process that reaches its most complex expression (as far as we know) with the human nervous system. For many cognitive theorists, empirical evidence that consciousness is a by-product of the brain does not necessarily imply that consciousness is nothing but the brain. This argument does not deny the biological roots of mind; rather, as John Searle states, it acknowledges “the validity of higher orders of human experience as having a reality of their own” (2002: xx). By the same token, one-sided materialist theories of Hinduism would also fail to adequately capture Hindu insights into the nature of consciousness (e.g., Śiva, puruṣa) if “reality” is conceived in terms of matter (śakti, prakṛti) only. Briefly, cognitive scientists propose a new way of thinking about religion. The basic premise, according to James Ashbrook, is the idea that “mind and matter meet in the brain” (1993: 4). Hindu religion with its repeated references to the brain as the “thousand petalled lotus” (sahasrāra), its emphasis on yoga, its penchant for ritual, and its stress on cognition and citta, to give just a few brief examples, can provide extraordinary data for a cognitive science of religion, and it can also help to redefine our cross-cultural understanding of “religion” as profoundly embodied and natural. Also, further research into the living traditions of Hindu religion would enhance empirical content that can assist in providing evidence of specialized methodologies and techniques for accessing and understanding the nature of human consciousness.<i>Cognitive Science: Cognitive Theories of Religion: Concluding Reflections</i>,in ’<i>Studying Hinduism:Key Concepts and Methods</i>’, Ed. Sushil Mittal & Gene Thursby, Routledge, 2008
It will not take much to see that the passage is aimed at Western academia. What about Indian academia?
It should be remembered again that panpsychism need not necessarily be right. Nor emergence nor autopoiesis. Nevertheless they all can be gateways through which we can enter, explore and experience reality. It is essential that the young minds get fascinated by these worldviews in a way they can relate to. We, Indians, have in this a unique advantage which our curriculums have criminally ignored. We have a cultural heritage which provides tools, to introduce our children to some of the profoundest mysteries through poetry, traditional metaphors, analogies and similes in a way they can relate to.
So a spider in your backyard awaits to awaken the scientist, philosopher and poet in your child. But is your school curriculum equipped to trigger the needed wonder and questions in your child which can later make her blossom into a Darwin, Einstein, Kambar, Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, Vijaya Lakshmi, Bharathi, Nivedita or Sri Aurobindo? As an Indian, each and every one of us has a right to demand such a curriculum, which when put in place, will be unique and be a model to world education and which will make India the light of the nations that it was.
Or we can continue to produce nice pious little Miss Muffets who will always scream and scat before the marvels of the universe.