Of Windows, ‘World Knots’, And The View Of Life

“Stop,” said Sudhakar Kasturi. I paused the slideshow of pictures of the Darasuram Temple and looked at the face of the author of science-fiction (sci-fi) novels that have become quite a phenomenal success in Tamil. Kasturi’s novel 6174 (2012), a sci-fi fantasy thriller, has mathematical concepts running throughout its pages, connecting the architectural marvels and poetic wonders of ancient India.

“Do you recognise what this is?” Kasturi asked me. Seeing me draw a blank, he asked, “Do you remember that passage in my novel where they discuss in a seminar rectangular Fibonacci kolams?” Right in front of me, filtering sunlight, digitally frozen, was throwing up silhouette patterns in that old temple. Now, I remembered. Dr Naranan, a real-life physicist living in Chennai, has been studying the mathematical patterns in them for years, if not decades. And he had discovered in them rectangular Hemachandra-Fibonacci kolams. Kasturi had brought into this real mathematics of kolams – specifically these kolams in his novel, and, right in front of our eyes, he showed the same patterns appearing in the window sculpture of the Chola temple built eight centuries earlier.

The windows of ancient temples in South India are fascinating. Through patterns embedded in them, they shape our view of reality. They are the interface between the observer and the observed. The astonishing varieties of windows we encounter in those ancient temples, whether those built by Pallavas, Chalukyas, or Cholas, to name a few, perhaps also reflect the astonishing epistemological pluralism available to us in our Hindu culture to view and experience reality.

Maya is one such window, or perhaps, the window of windows. She is at once both the interface and the co-creator of reality as we perceive it. Then she allows us to understand the reality between the apparent binaries. While maya has often been portrayed as a kind of illusion and even an obstruction to realising the reality, Adi Sankara clearly points to her being essential for the ultimate realisation. He speaks of maya thus:

Of primary importance is the use of the term Avyakta. In the Saptabhangi or Syadvada of the Jains, Avyakta becomes an important component. Of the seven states, four have Avyakta in them. Sri Lalita Sahasranama makes each of the defining names given by Adi Sankara to Maya, the name of the goddess Herself. Thus, she is Avyakta; she is Trigunaatmika; she is para; she is Avidya.

In the sequence of names, while Avyakta is a separate name for the goddess, its opposite state, Vyakta, is not so. Instead, it is Vyakta-Avyakta – there is no manifest system that does not have undefinedness or Avyakta in it.

What kind of visions can such a window help us see?

In a recent article, neurobiologists Todd E Feinberg and Jon Mallatt outline a crucial problem in the study of consciousness – ‘an epistemic barrier’ called ‘auto-irreducibility’.

The authors have already seen this as an evolutionary development. According to them, subjectivity itself “evolved such that it cannot be objectively ‘experienced’” (The Ancient Origins of Consciousness, MIT Press, 2016). Gordon Globus himself has pointed out, in his original paper, ‘The nervous system has no sensory apparatus directed to its own structure’.

Dr Globus, now a professor of psychiatry and philosophy, had put forth this problem that consciousness studies face, in his 1973 paper:

He formulated two identities – one is the subjective (S) perspective of a mental event that he called psychoevent identity, and another, the perspective of observer (O) in which the “S's mental events are strictly identical with S's neural events (psychoneural identity).” These two perspectives should be treated using Niels Bohr’s principle of complementarity to move forward, Gordon asserted:

Indian physicist and educationist D S Kothari (1906-1993), too, had pointed out in his last paper how Bohr’s complementarity principle is a larger darshana (big picture) that can be applied in many domains of science. He also pointed out how this resonates with traditional Vedantic and Jain approaches to seemingly opposite perspectives:

Then, he quotes Sri Aurobindo’s commentary on Isa Upanishad, where the seer lists binary pairs starting from the conscious Purusha and phenomenal Prakriti and, among others, the one stable Brahman and the multiple Movement, being and becoming, the Active Lord, and the indifferent Akshara Brahman, Vidya and Avidya, etc. Particular emphasis on Kothari’s paper is on Avyakta in the fourth predication of reality in Syadvada, which he applied to wave-particle duality.

As seen already, Adi Sankara identifies Avyakta as Maya. Now we shall see how Globus moves progressively towards embracing maya in formulating a system for studying and understanding consciousness.

In 1986-87, Globus published his study of the phenomenon of dreaming – his “strategy for discovering” being “an investigation of dreaming might illuminate waking”. And he discovered himself getting “much closer ontologically to ancient Indian philosophy, to the doctrine of maya”.

However, there are certain differences. Because, after all, Hinduism also has the divine craftsman Viswakarma and, hence, maya is still a mechanism for the world as “a God operating the machine”. Then, with remarkable insight, Dr Globus cautions that the Hindu “All-maker as artisan” should not be taken literally as “there are deeper currents to Hindu philosophy”. Here, he points to maya being the “‘art of the god Rudra, who sketches images in our dreaming minds” and who is also “formatively creative”. He concludes:

In other words, maya encountered what Adi Sankara calls ‘Paramesa Sakthi’.

In 1995, Globus, studying brain and consciousness, stated that the primacy should not be given to either “subject (as it is in idealism) or object (as in materialism) but a dynamical process in which subject/object and all the other metaphysical dualities are derived”. This process is the maya, which he discerned as “a dynamical self-organizing, nondual, holonomic movement, during both waking and dreaming” (The Postmodern Brain).

By 2003, quantum mechanics has emerged as a serious contending position in the study of consciousness and brain processes. Globus points out:

Again, in a paper discussing quantum brain dynamics, he elaborated a view that resonates with the conception of maya in Saiva Siddhanta:

Then, in 2009, Globus tries “to give transparent worldthrownness a quantum neurophilosophical interpretation coherent with process philosophy”. Though the West does have a long tradition of process philosophers, from Heraclitus to Alfred North Whitehead, it has been relegated to the sidelines. Whereas in Hinduism, not only does it predate the West, but as a darshana is well-enshrined in the culture itself, as depicted in the Dance of Siva. In this work, Globus calls Maya Goddess when discussing the philosophical issues central to quantum brain dynamics:

And again:

Coming back to the windows, it is not about Globus and his approach to reality being right or wrong; although, he definitely provides an instance of how the Hindu Darshanas can provide impetus to do and experience science. Each Darshana and concept can thus become a window. In fact, in formulating the concept of ‘world knot’, Arthur Schopenhauer showed a very strong influence of Hindu thought. Instead of getting into the usual Western mind-body duality, Schopenhauer moves into the problem of the knower-knowing and the known:

Bohr, whose complementarity principle, which Globus and Kothari see as offering a solution to the ‘world knot’, which is identified as a fundamental problem in studying consciousness, also was influenced by the Upanishads. Physicist John Wheeler acknowledged this in a letter dated 10 June 1999 to Swami Jitatmananda of Sri Ramakrishna Mission:

This is not to say that we know everything already; rather, this is to say that we have a unique opportunity of windows, a variety of them, through which we can shape our personal lives, our intellectual quests, our explorations into nature, and our experience of the universe. Hindu culture in its entirety is then the grand temple of ages, and what beautiful windows they have – ones worthy of being guarded by gods themselves!