Smash Samsara

Hinduism and the Coming Clash of Worldviews

The power of a religion derives from its worldview. A term more abused than not, weltanschauung refers to the pre-critical dimensions of thought, the basic orientation that a particular people have in relation to time and space, Heaven and Earth, profane and divine. Cult and culture are etymologically intertwined, playing off the depth of symbolism in the soil. Revolutions may pertain to the cycles of the stars, but radicalism is to understand the roots, what is buried beneath, the life-giving source that is hidden from the phenomena of stems and stalks and flowery glory. The worldview is the root and a plant without a root is dead. Christianity is a worldview, but one that has lost its grip on nearly all of the West but America. The replacement, what may be provisionally termed “non-secular Humanism,” is growing and will likely receive greater energy from foreign imports. Hinduism will likely prove decisive for the formation of the future West.

The pull of India on the imagination of the West has had a long trajectory. The ancient Kingdom of Bactria, a product of Alexander’s conquests, forged a unique Indo-Hellenic culture of Macedonian rule with Buddhist characteristics. Medievals believed the legendary Prester John was perhaps in India, a land that supposedly received evangelism from the Apostle Thomas. Enlighteners, such as Leibniz, believed that India (and China) would offer the solutions to save Europe from its intractable confessional problems. But India really grabbed hold of Europe through the accidental British conquest of the sub-continent. The East India Company’s self defense led to the overthrow of the Islamic Mughals and, ultimately, the replacement with the British Raj. European interest was unleashed with a flurry of translating ancient Sanskrit texts (e.g. Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads) and cultural fascination. The British may have invented “Hindu-ism” in a bid to categorize the divergent practices and beliefs, but these reflected a unified worldview that echoed through millennia of texts and traditions.

The fascination with India was a desire to discover the prisca theologia, the deepest and most natural truth of Heaven and Earth, which could alone to a rejuvenation of Europe’s soul. The mechanical beliefs that had coalesced into liberal political theory appeared stilted and stultifying, creating waves of alienation among Europe’s genii and chattering classes. India appeared to be the axis Mundi, out of which derived something of the ur-culture of mankind. Modern Protestantism, abandoning “Calvinism” and embracing rationalism-romanticism, had accepted development as a principle. Indian theology could thus refine and reform the ideal cult of Man. Catholicism, in distinction, had walled up in defense against Revolution and offered a strong, though inflexible, counter. Not all were in favor of this turn towards flinty reaction and a new way was possible through the greatest and deepest wells of antiquity. Theories of European origin tied to the ancient Aryans, the marauding steppe warriors that conquered the Indus river valley millennia past and gave it the cult and culture that defined the sub-continent ever since. A return to India, then, may provide the missing answers to Europe’s woes.

The love, and the loathing, was in the irrational. For some, the sensuality of India provided a necessary balm, the mind-body synthesis of yogis and gurus to replace the mechanization of both liberalism and socialism. India’s caste-system offered an ancient established justification for aristocracy and priestcraft. But there was also terror that lurked in the malarial jungles, with cults and creatures beyond Human understanding. British efforts to suppress the Kali cult of the Thuggees sparked fear of darkness in the heart of man, a savagery to spill blood for the gods. This fanned interest to dabble into the occult mysteries, whether borrowed or invented, forming the basis of expansions out of previous secret societies. Theosophy sought to find the true spiritual basis of man, and many hucksters took the name guru to win disaffected European elites abroad to a new way of life.

All of this continued into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, taking different directions but offering a unified worldview of Hindu philosophia perennis to restore the soul of the West. In leftist dimensions, India became the bastion of revitalization against Imperialism and Capitalism. Mahatma Gandhi became a new Jesus Christ figure for adoring leftists who sought a politics of the spirit beyond Marxist atheism. Spirituality involving free love, vegetarianism, and yoga would become a mainstay in some fringe leftist communes. But this also had an imprint on the fringe, esoteric, right. Baron Evola, among others, revived interest in a primeval aristocratic ethos, a deeper traditionalism to help the dispossessed rightists to ride the tiger through the Kali Yuga, that age of collapse and despair. It is in this way that Hinduism offers a worldview, one that subsumes political division. Yoga and chakras could be used to fight Fascism or Communism. Hollyweird celebrities seek gurus and bathe in the Ganges, but also Hitler’s “Priestess” contended that the Fuhrer was an avatar of Vishnu. Christianity, either as a sign of patriarchal oppression or semitic repression, is marked for rejection as an aberration in the spirit of man.

This long arc of Western fascination with India has intensified in recent decades with substantive spiritual decay and demographic transformation. In the latter case, the explosion of immigration from the sub-continent has made Hindu ideas more present than ever. The British Empire brought some of the ideas home, but not the people who are wound up with these ideas. Indians have become not only a growing core ethnic group in many Western countries, they have made themselves visible. Utilizing social kinship for advancement and wealth, Indians have stepped forward as major figures in politics and business. Canada’s leftwing party is headed by a Punjabi, Britain’s former Prime Minister was an unabashed Hindu, and the most popular GOP candidate behind Trump in 2016 was Vivek (not “Vic”) Ramaswamy, who will co-head DOGE to cut government waste. The other primary contender was Nimrata “Nikki” “Nimbra” Haley, who raises her children as both “Christian” and Sikh. And while the Vice President Elect is American, his wife is Indian, a practicing Hindu, and they have given their children Indian names.

While this demographic change could simply result in assimilation, it seems more clear that Indian ideas (or loyalty to family/tradition) persist. Assimilated Nikki Haley may have changed her name, but not her faith (at least out of professed respect for her parents). There seems no reason why Indians would abandon the faith of their fathers and homeland to embrace the lukewarm soup of mainstream religious opinion. Even Vance’s very online Traditional Catholicism has little to offer except as “Religion” in the abstract, something his wife publicly claims to respect but does not follow. The current intra-MAGA skirmish, between those who want to keep the H1b flow of semi-professional immigrants (who are overwhelmingly Indian) and those who do not, reflects only a great pressure of how India will more fully transform the Anglophone West, if not the West more generally. Yoga is increasingly normative, having a personal guru is on the same spectrum as having a pastor, and celebrations like Holi will likely become more common (especially because they involve public displays of fun). It will not be too far off when idols of gods like Rama or Krishna will mark Western halls of government.

In terms of spiritual decay, the West (outside of America and its Evangelical-Pentecostal church growth) has rapidly de-Christianized. As stated above, Roman Catholicism’s recrudescent neo-scholasticism offered little, and its post-Vatican II reforms have only made it the same ecumenical vehicle that Liberal Protestantism became over a century ago. To be Christian, in this modern gutting/reworking, is to be tolerant. Offering little besides the trappings for public holidays like Christmas (which is more about Santa Claus and drunken consumption than the Nativity of Jesus), Christianity is dull and dead. The weak and impotent God of all answers no questions, so a turn to astrology, angel numbers, and Wicca provides better answers and better practices. A pastor or priest might marry you according to tradition, but real help comes from experts in the Zodiac, Tarot, and auras. It is in this vacuum that practices like yoga, which offer a spirituality as well as physical health, step in. While Hindu-ism itself is mostly tethered to race, various sects and cults take on more universal aspects. Anyone can practice yoga or chant Hare Krishna. If Buddhism is considered as part of the Hindu worldview, then the influence is even wider on a voluntary basis.

What is the appeal of Hinduism? Why do Indian ideas seem to have a power to make these kinds of advances? Hinduism is the last surviving great pagan Tradition and it is extremely ecumenical. The problem with Hinduism is not what it denies, but the extent of its affirmations. A Hindu has no problem affirming the divinity of Jesus Christ, as long as it is refit out of its biblical context into a Hindu one (where Jesus may be a manifestation of Krishna or an avatar of one of the gods). Hinduism has space for all kinds of gods, angels, and saints, including the Biblical one. It can be simultaneously polytheistic and monotheistic in its pan(en)theism that encompasses total reality. It is the ultimate ecumenical creed that can absorb, without devaluations, the varieties of pieties that exist and give them a new interpretation.

The fundamentals of the Hindu worldview derive from the conflict between the true-soul (atman) and the phenomenal world, an illusion (maya) that produces attachment. While this world is an illusion, and salvation is through ultimate detachment (moksha), one can only overcome it through duty (dharma). In the modern and modernizing world, without caste, duty might be boiled down to doing your best and taking care of your own. All these actions (karma) receive recompense in death, leading upwards or downwards in a further reincarnation, with the ultimate goal of escaping this cycle altogether. In a modern world with electricity and air conditioning, reincarnation may be a hopeful belief for dead loved ones (rather than the endless misery as it has traditionally been understood). Nevertheless, the goal is an inner transformation to let go of attachments, to let go of “ego” (jiva) as is commonly understood in therapy-speak, and to do the right thing. But because there are many stages of this process, with nearly infinite worlds and ages, there is flexibility for all. The warm aesthetics of idol worship and pageantry can hold the simple, while hard asceticism may beckon the more adventurous. It is all encompassing and total.

These core concepts already map onto the current Humanist rejection of Christianity. While Hinduism is inclusive and ecumenical, Christianity is exclusive. The Bible rejects idolatry (and most physical forms of traditional worship), makes hard claims on history (as opposed to myth), and hangs everything on a single solitary life of ultimate significance. Fundamentally, Christianity claims the universe in a very narrow, particular, historic set of claims that clash with the all encompassing dimensions of Hinduism. Christianity, to the modern man, feels unfair, arbitrary, judgemental, and harsh. Reincarnation, as opposed to Final Judgement, seems more sensible and comfortable. Pantheism is easier to feel than transcendental theism (even if God has left incontrovertible proof everywhere), especially when explicitly linked to an exclusive name/character among an elect set of individuals/families/nations. And these concerns spread across the political-cultural divide. Leftists may blame Christianity as a patriarchal white capitalist enterprise, while rightists blame Christianity as Jewish slave morality; but they can both agree it is unnatural and product of Kali Yuga. As some Christians continue to hollow out their own faith, refusing any intrinsic worldview to Christianity from the Bible, it will likely be colonized with Hindu ideas.

The argument is not that Hinduism will become the dominant faith, as if millions of Europeans or Americans will worship a statue of Hanuman the monkey-god. The argument is that they do not have to worship Hindu deities to become Hindus. By sheer fact of its survival, and the complexity of its beliefs in development (Hindu theology is far more interesting and complex than any traditional pagan worldview), Hinduism is apex paganism. While worship of Odin or Jupiter has declined, and its revival is a self-conscious LARP (the antithesis of a weltanschauung), Hindu belief still exists, even if it is outside the Western experience. But accepting these beliefs, in the practice of yoga (let alone conversion to Krishnaism or Sikhism), provides the basis for a radical realignment. Soon (if not already) it will be “common sense” to accept reincarnation, overcoming maya, the reality of karma, and so on. Vegetarianism, already a surrogate religio-philosophy in the West, receives a new shot in the arm. Traditionalists and postliberals will find more living tradition in Hindu cosmology than obedience to the changing, and historically dubious, claims of unchanging historic churches. The panentheism at the root of Hinduism, the unfolding reality (Brahma) that is the source of all (from gods to beasts) along a chain of being, can absorb the totality of the West, a totality already searching for new meaning. We are all gods and gods are all mortals, all in all, all as one.

Christianity, condemned in a litany of abuse as both hateful and shamefully pacifistic, a handmaiden of both fascism and communism, as bigoted and meaningless, and so on, will only stand if it can offer a credible worldview as an alternative. It is not enough to choose to believe something, it must reorient all your senses and judgements until it is a second nature.

In belief, it is choosing exclusive universality and discriminating faith. There is only one God with a particular name given in history. Time is not an endless unfolding, but a crisis that marks each individual life. The ultimate sin is not illusion and false belief, but thanklessness and disobedience. The one transcendental God who claims all glory to his name is opposed to the fecund self-generating void out of which all beings spawn. There is no continuum or spectrum, there is the Creator and the creature, with those latter elevated with the former’s image to live according to an unmerited gift. This total and absolute bond is reflected in social institutions, most especially marriage, which alone bears the weight of a refined sexuality that reveals a deeper eternal love than the cycle of rebirth (with all else outside cast into the fire of destruction). It is an absolute imperial design to subject all things to the will of the one God, to participate in the great creative design as sons, and place even godlike angels beneath the judgement of saints.

In practice, it means the supremacy of prayer and Scripture. To read the Bible, a canon established from books ranging across a millennium for a specific elect people, is to study the very words of God. Prayer is not simply to direct all requests to the source of all, but to form the very core of man to understand where all power descends and where all glory belongs. To train as an athlete, to be an ascetic, is not in starving the body or overcoming agonizing sensory pains. It is in living faithfully, according to the express will of God who man images. It is restraining sexual excess for the Edenic bliss of marriage, it is in restraining wealth and consumption for the sake of waging war against the darkness (what soldier gluts himself before a battle?), it is in restraining all desires to worship the divine according to the creation instead of the Creator. Early Christianity in the Roman Empire understood itself originally as a “sect” or school, as a philosophy that was a total way of life. It was not a civic cult, an altar in the city which regulated civic life (without requiring any distinct ethics, let alone personal conduct). It was a demand to be holy as the Sovereign Lord is holy.

All these things flow from the clear awareness of man’s final end: resurrection. A folly to Greeks, the integrity of the individual was constituted as his choices and character in the flesh. That very same flesh would live once more, somehow and someway, to receive a final verdict. There was no wispy ultimate-soul, one that subsumed all individual lived personalities, but the vast multitudes who would enter either into the New Jerusalem as princes or be cast into the fires of doom. The Christ, the ultimate priest-king who was none other than the very Word of God, was the first to rise and now reigns with a rod of iron to conquer the nations and subject them to his rule. History, then, is loaded with a total and ultimate significance, that every life (even the most worthless and depraved) is on the grand stage. Sins had been overlooked in ignorance, but now is the time that the Christ be known and receive obeisance as the Lord of the living and the dead. Ultimate reality is a voice that command for light to shine in the unformed dark that he created as clay to form into a pot.

The power in Hinduism is the power of an apex paganism, one that ranges from village festivals to the rich theology of the scholar. Unlike Islam, often misdiagnosed as a threat, it is dynamic in a competitive environment because it can simply absorb alternatives or filter into every aspect of life. Like Roman paganism, it is tolerant and inclusive, a pantheon for all the gods. What it cannot abide, as modern Western Humanism cannot abide, is exclusivity and intolerance. Many forms of Christianity have already abandoned a Christian worldview, they have accepted the pre-critical dispositions of the current age and thus entirely susceptible to becoming something else altogether. Those who have not are often too weak and frail to fight back, impotent with corrupted practices and bad arguments. The combination of intellectual incompetence, social pressure, and individual desires (particularly sexual desires) will likely reek havoc among the self-professed traditionalists, who will likely slink away into the quasi-paganism of horoscopes, magic, and myth. A darkness is setting that would deceive even the elect if that were possible.

Nevertheless, there are still seven thousand who have not bent the knee in their war against the gods.