by GIRISH SHAHANE
He has perfected a dish that is a mix of religious politics and blind faith and yet tastes surprisingly like a blend of rationality and ecumenism.
Jaggi Vasudev aka Sadhguru has occupied my Facebook timeline for weeks. It started with a couple of friends posting videos which I happened to view. Then, the algorithm took over, serving up a string of sponsored sermons. Whether from masochism or a desire to break habit, I watched the videos instead of ignoring or blocking them, and sought out further material on YouTube and Vasudev’s Isha Foundation website.
I expected a few green shoots of insight amidst a desert of tiresome platitudes. I got those, but also irrationalism, superstition, and Hindutva philosophy hiding under a cloak of reasonableness.
Charles Darwin
Vasudev constantly invokes science, but displays little knowledge of its fundamentals. His paraphrase of Charles Darwin’s ideas (after the obligatory monkey jokes) goes like this: “Nature is catering for a chimpanzee to become a human being. I am just catering to the human longing to evolve into something else. It is life’s idea that everything should evolve… Darwin tried to explain it in his own way, which became the theory of evolution, but essentially what he is telling you is if you look at the whole thing – from a single-celled animal to yourself – as one large life process, it is longing to get somewhere.”
Vasudev’s description fits evolution as understood by Charles Darwin’s precursors, his grandfather Erasmus and the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin himself emphasised the purposelessness of the process, and took pains to undermine the notion that life was driven by “a longing to get somewhere”. To misinterpret Darwin as Vasudev does is to misconstrue the foundational concept of modern biology.
The Darwin story has a Hindutva twist as well. Adopting the dogma established by Dayanand Saraswati that India’s ancient civilisation mastered every technology and comprehended every scientific idea, the guru declares, “The evolutionary theory is not Darwin’s, Adiyogi propounded this fifteen thousand years ago.”
Life after death
Vasudev tends to regurgitate popular myths and urban legends in explicating Hindu religious practices. He holds that rites related to death last as long as they do because the body is actually partly alive throughout that period. In his words, “After a person dies, up to 11 days for sure, most of the time up to 14 days, fingernails grow, hair grows… Because death is happening slowly.”
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