Beyond Ego’s Domain: Being and Order in the Veda

The book explores the source of order at three different planes: the cosmic, the individual and the socio-political unit. The frame of reference for this exploration is the Veda, The Veda, Beyond Ego’s Domain argues, is the pre-eminent source of articulating and understanding the phenomenon of order. In establishing this, the book rejects as inadequate and misleading Vedic interpretations inspired by naturalistic, ritualistic and ideological predilections. Demonstrating the hollowness of the claim of elenchus or platonic dialectic or abhijnana as the sole method of apprehending the unknown, it affirms the significance of mythopoesis in articulating and communicating the deeper experiences of the divine ground of being. Order in the Vedic perspective is the consequence of the linkage between the finite world of meaning and the absolute as the source of meaning. The book explores this linkage as reflected in the Vedic literature. Finding Plato’s cosmogony as inadequate, it discusses Vedic bhavavritta (cosmogony) in terms of the one becoming many through a process of transformation in which Brahma becomes vishwa (cosmos), a process of transformation symbolized as yajna. It is this yajna that creates the cosmic order characterized, on the one hand, by homology between adhidaivika, adhyatmika, and adhibhautiak dimensions of reality and, on the other, by a process of inter-dependence and exchange between them. The Veda projects a cosmic order, Rita, operating without deviations at the comic level. Its operation at the individual level, the book argues, is consequent upon the individual becoming Swarat (self-sovereign) in Chhandogya Upanishad’s sense by attuning his soul to the divine ground of being. It is this attunement that provides a reliable and firm basis for order in the socio-political realm.