Tatvam Asi and some geopolitics

Image from Times of India

We are all one and the same reality, parts of the eternal Brahman. That is one of the fundamental teachings of the Advaita philosophy of Hinduism. While I referred to that rather casually the other day, one of my acquaintances expressed horror and said, “Just imagine me being the same stuff as Narendra Modi and Amit Shah!”

The inmost essence of all beings is the same, asserts Chandogya Upanishad (6.9). The whole world is one truth, one reality, one soul. The Upanishad compares us creatures to rivers that arise in the mountains. Some rivers flow to the east and some to the west, yet they all end in the ocean, become the ocean itself, and realise that they are all the same. In fact, they just merge into the one big ocean and lose their identity altogether.

My friend’s horror sent a shiver down my spine too. I stood trying to imagine Narendra Modi’s and Amit Shah’s souls merging with mine and my gentle kitten’s souls and becoming one. O my God! I uttered a helpless cry.

Take your imagination beyond the Himalayas, suggested my friend. Imagine now your self is a river that flows through Beijing. Imagine you are the Yongding and that Xi Jinping is the Chaobai and that Mao Zedong was the Hai River and you all end up in the vast ocean of Vedantic advaita.

That really got me contemplating deep, as deep as the Pacific. Well, I asked my acquaintance, Won’t the Mississippi bring Donald Trump and the Yalu carry Kim Jong-un also to the same Brahmanic ocean?

Undoubtedly, affirmed my acquaintance. The only problem may be that instead of saying Aham Brahmasmi, Trump may say Aham Trumpasmi and Xi will insist on expanding the Mandarin territories and Kim will be looking for a place to plant a bomb in the heart of the cosmic ocean.  

But aren’t they all supposed to lose their individual idiosyncrasies there in the Brahmanic Ocean? My Pacific contemplation raised a doubt.

Of course. But aren’t they all supposed to lose them here as well? Aren’t Modi and Shah adherents of Hindu teachings? And if they genuinely believed in those teachings would they have divided the citizens into so many groups and communities and what not? Similar is the case with the others too, isn’t it? Didn’t Augustine, the Patron of Christianity, as well as every Christian mystic, teach that all that exists is holy? Is that any different from Tatvam Asi? Didn’t Taoism teach the same thing? Only Kim Jong-un has a valid excuse. He believes in the bomb here and he will continue to hold on to it in the cosmic ocean. No conflict of interest, at least.

That was an enlightenment for me. An epiphany. My acquaintance had just taught me that our heavens are our creations as well as our hells, here on earth. There is no other heaven, man, she said. No other hell too. Tatvam Asi means just that in the final analysis, she said. It means, Get lost in the vast ocean of rhetoric or get up and shout louder than the others.

I wished to hug her and merge into her and experience the oneness of all reality.

Get lost, she shouted at me. She then looked like the bomb that Kim Jong-un had placed at the heart of the cosmic ocean.