Kapila Vatsayan (Speech at the Doors of Perception 3 Conference)

Table of Contents:
Summary
Introduction
Emotion
Fundamental Issues
Attitudes toward Matter
Individualism
Fractured Mind
Lessons
Pilgrimages

* * *
Summary
Kapila Vatsyayan, director of the Indira Ghandi Centre for the Arts in New Delhi, made a powerful and memorable intervention at the conference. She articulates here a nonÐWestern perspective on the fundamental issues of Doors 3. Dr. Vatsyayan comparesancient and modern visions of embodiment, sense perception, matter and energy. According to Vatsyayan, a fracture occurred after the Renaissance, causing human beings to see themselves not as an integral part, but rather as the organizers, of nature. This 'species-ist' position has endured until today: it is among other things in the division into 'developed' and 'developing' countries. If humanity's collective intelligence is to engage effectively with issues of ecology, the technologically empowered minority of nations must decide they are willing to learn from cultures with a more unified vision of humanity and nature.

* * *
Introduction
I am grateful to have been invited as someone who represents not individually, but as a symbol, the other side of the coin Ñ the flip side. As I listened to the presentations here about this energy which has been referred to as collective intelligence of individuals, several images came to my mind. I would like to share them with you.

* * *
Emotion
You may be aware of the great drama by Czech writer Karel Capek entitled RUR. It is about human beings' ability to create machines - to recreate themselves. A great civilisation is made, of man interacting with man, and with something that is called a woman during a preÐrobotic period in which he did not know about robotics. Then the time comes when some wires get mixed up, and gradually, each of the powers possessed by these men and the machines that they have made, begin to disintegrate. They disintegrate to a point where they do not know how they would be able to make that mind which made themselves. Everything disintegrates until only two people are left. And after all this paraphernalia they had created, this immense thing in which they were communicating, and everything that happens, comes emotion.

These two have been left on the planet. At one point, the man looks at whoever this machineÐmade woman was, and something that they had not engineered and had not programmed came through: love. End of story.

* * *
Fundamental Issues
Collective intelligence and collective memory have been spoken of here; the collective and residual consciousness of man. In contrast to or perhaps complementary to what my colleagues have said here, in terms of both individual and collective intelligence, and what cyberspace and its communication systems can do, I want to take the liberty to return to some of the fundamental issues that have been raised.

To ecology, first and foremost - this brings one to the whole relationship of man to his power of reflection and articulation, first in speech and then in the other communication systems that he has evolved. How is man different from all that has been described in terms of animals and objects? What is this relationship? Who is this man that is organising nature weÕve been speaking about? Has he ever thought about the infinitesimally small place he occupies in the universe? And his own great arrogance? What he has appropriated to himself? That he believes that he can really organise the universe? Reflect on it for a minute. It sounds terrible - horrible, in fact, but this is what the mythical world is all about. This is what it means in terms of the earth's position in the whole galaxy, in and outside the solar system, and manÕs position in relation to all we have been speaking about: matter and energy.

Pierre Lévy referred to myths and symbols, and the significance that we accord these things in our conferences and our lives, and all those wonderful future scenarios. He referred to funerals. May I go one step further and speak of death?

Our attitude to life is determined by our attitude to death. If we assume that death is not our final dissolution, but only a mutation into another form of matter or non-matter, does our perspective on life change or doesn't it?

* * *
Attitudes toward Matter
These are some of the questions that came to my mind as I listened to the presentations, and also questions raised here about this business of dissociation of man from what he considers to be the world of matter Ñ even if he is only matter himself in certain ways. I also recalled the attitudes in various civilisations, both here and what you have called mine, and of preÐRenaissance civilisations, in which man was constantly conscious of the fact that he was one among all matter, inorganic and organic, and that at any given moment the inorganic could become organic, and the organic could return to the inorganic.

This in turn brings us to the concept of breath, consciousness, life, the nature of that life and how transmutation might take place. Interconnectivity, or interdependence and interrelationship, begin here where these cultures have known the principle of the transmutation of matter and energy.

This brings me to the other thing that we have been talking about here: sense perceptions and the elements. Matter and the primal elements constitute this whole universe, the microÐmanifestation of which is man and the macroÐmanifestation of which is the universe as a whole: water, earth, fire, space and the interconnectivity of all this. Hymn after hymn of the Rig-Veda speaks about how fire was born from water; how vegetation came from the earth, and so on. In the Upanishads is a very beautiful dialogue of these five elements, each one of them stressing their dominance, saying: "I'm primary". Ultimately, however, no single one is primary, because they are all important.

This brings us to the microÐmanifestation in man, and the whole question of embodiment and sense perceptions we have been discussing here. Because these very elements then enter into the body of man: fire becomes vision and sight; the air becomes the ears; taste is the water, and so forth. A whole system or grid is thus created of correspondences of the macro and the micro (the sense perceptions). Once again, there is a dialogue about which of the senses is primary. (This represents a convergence between ancient thought and what we have been discussing today.) The answer is ultimately that breathing is primary, meaning prana, which is also soul - breathing in terms of the micro and macro time it takes as movement.

* * *
Individualism
These discussions take us to another very important discussion point in our conference: the role of individualism. And this brings us to what we are discussing today, namely, collectivity. We have heard a cogent, lucid description of the tremendous activity of the neurones in the brain of man. But besides those five sense perceptions, there is a sixth and this is the nucleus of a debate in a discourse which has been going on for more than 2000 years: does the mind constitute a sense or is it separate?

The first technology of man is mind, followed by thought. If there wasn't a thought, there would be no machines. If there was not a mind operating in terms of the collectiveness and interdependence of sense perceptions and the interdisciplinary nature of our work, there would not be an object Ñ a machine, football, church, temple, or anything. And I am surprised that the word mind did not turn up in our discourse at all here.

* * *
Fractured Mind
Has mind disappeared? Have we put it to rest? It is this mind that creates the consciousness of individualism. A consciousness which came to this part of the world in the post and not preÐRenaissance period. Ironically enough, this Renaissance flourishing came about because of everything that came from the East after the fall of Constantinople - Arabic mathematics and everything else Ñ which led to man's establishment of himself as the master of the universe, and to individualism.

At that moment, a fracture that took place in the mind of man. He got away from earth and the universe and considered himself as separate from all that he considered to be other matter, including organic matter, vegetation and life. Man began to observe and organise nature, and someone gave us all these wonderful ideas of making gardens of nature. However, he did not consider himself dependent on nature.

The question arises, then, of how this individualism differs from people as multi-representations in human form, that is, from a more unified, integral vision. These are two different things. To my mind, much of what we have been discussing relates to our fragmented world. We are individuals in separated souls who are now trying to interconnect ourselves, whether through cyberspace, machinery or something else. But there was another world with a unified vision. That vision was intangible and unmanifest, but manifested itself in a plurality of forms. This gave us today's dictum or cliché of unity in diversity. That means plurality, bio-diversity, organic and human diversity on the one hand and on the other, a cohesiveness that evidenced itself in a commitment to a unified vision of the entire world.

Starting to think from this point of view, one arrives at a very different type of collective psyche or collective memory than what we have been talking about. This is perhaps what Jung was seeking when he was talking about the collective psyche. Thanks to postÐindustrialism, colonialism, even post-colonialism, we have divided this world into the developed and developing world; first, second and third world; into North and South. This is the division made by the mind of man, with aims of appropriation and the paradigm of dominance.

* * *
Lessons
That is where equity enters the picture. Because it must be realised that there are cohesive communities from Meso-America to the Southeast Pacific, not the exotica of tourism, but communities which tell you that there is still sacred space, sacred waters and forests and that they know how to live as part of nature. This is what sustainability is all about. It is about value in terms of the principles of interdependence, interconnectedness, even the reversals which take place within a certain geosphere.

If we (including the few technologically empowered who may be many in number today, but still represent a small percentage in the world at large) can learn some lessons from them, we can have a real dialogue on factor 20, the consumption of 80% of the energy used globally and other issues. But if discussion means that everything filters down to one party from another and there is the sense of either charity or austerity instead of the sense of the evolution of alternate paradigms of living, there will be no real dialogue. High technology has as much a place in this dialogue as other systems of communication.

* * *
Pilgrimages
The other systems of communication were once pilgrimages. They were not tourism in the sense that we understand it now, because they were focused around a transcendental centre at which all came together and left as equals. This transÐego mind is something that we still have to cope with in whatever we call modern civilisation. The entire earth is marked by these events where all identities are submerged in order to be purified. This can happen in silence, in congregations, or simply in the awareness of every moment of flux which is the moment of eternity: here and now.

The Indira Ghandi Centre for the Arts has done some work that might be called massive archival work, but the aim of which is to conserve and restore the collective memory. The extent of those documents which technology today helps us to both store and to retrieve is thirty million manuscripts. These do not just deal with religion or some kind of mystical 'hokus pokus', but with technology - from iron and the making of alloys, to temples, architecture and habitats - that spread all over the world. One of the things we are also trying to restore in virtual form is the body of works taken by great travellers, who were also colonisers of a kind. They went to China and Central Asia, picked up walls and walls of paintings, returned to Europe and divided them up among various countries. We cannot get all that back now, but technology helps us to put it all together with the co-operation of museums. Museums are born when cultures are dead. These millions of manuscripts in different languages also contain a kind of collective intelligence in the form of oral traditions. This tradition itself was multimedia.

For one of our projects, it has taken me thirty years to collect three thousand manuscripts of a single poem which Edwin Arnold translated as the Love of the Divine Lord, which has been compared to the Song of Solomon. This can teach us something about interpretation. This is a small love poem in which a man and a woman find each other and are separated. There are three thousand manuscripts of this small poem, as well as sixty commentaries, each interpreting it as anything from an erotic text to a mystical text; a text on colour or music; a text on dance; on seasons; on hero and heroine types. The poem is also represented in four thousand paintings. I have three hundred hours of recordings from temple servers, scavengers, temple priests, esoterics and others. The questions we are asking are: What is the relationship between what is called the sacred and the profane? What is this relationship in terms of how love becomes a major central focus (you may call it an object)? How did the diffusion of the poem take place? A poem written in the 12th century travelled in thirty years to the West of India and was already installed as a temple. It travelled to Kathmandu and many other places. We are doing a fourÐhundredÐyear study of how this happened and of the communication systems involved.

One last paradigm. We talk about trees. In my culture, we know trees to come from seeds. Trees make thorns and thorns make mountains, which are the centre of the earth. But the other image we may want to examine and reflect on is the image of the inverted tree, which has its roots in heaven and only branches on earth.