Archives
Contribute
| Lokvani Talks To Kumar S. Sharma |
Ranjani Saigal
01/18/2012
After a transformative experience during the Maha Kumbha Mela in Prayag, India, in January 2001, Kumar gradually withdrew from external interests to focus his attention on spiritual knowledge. Realizing early on that consciousness was the key to an integral synthesis of spirituality, evolution, and science, he followed this intuition diligently, with meditation, mantra, and other practices, to receive and transcribe the tidings of The Age of Ananda.
As a student in Bombay in the 1970s, I discovered Vedanta when I was in high school, and then the Vedas during my MBA days. That interest continued over the years, but it wasn’t until much later that I started pursuing the inner meaning of the Vedas, because the scholarly translations and their incoherent ritual interpretations seemed to be missing the essence of the mantras. I hit the jackpot when I discovered Sri Aurobindo’s The Secret of the Veda. It opened my eyes to the esoteric knowledge of the rishis and the urgent relevance of the Vedic vision to our survival and evolution. From there I went on to study his treatise on human evolution called The Life Divine, and other works on Integral Yoga, as also the yoga of the Mother on the transmutation of the human body at the cellular level.
What motivated you to write The Age of Ananda?
I was blessed to be able to pursue different traditions of higher knowledge, ranging from Veda and Vedanta to Tantra and Tamil Siddha, with guidance from gurus as and when needed. Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga allowed me to see how they relate to each other. The sciences – especially physics and cosmology – also greatly appealed to me. I had done physics at the graduate level before switching to management. The riddle of consciousness was another early strange attractor for me. So I had all these strands running in my mind, even while I was developing software or running innovation workshops or running around with the usual family circus.
The Upanishads have taught us, and shown us how to realize and validate by our own direct experience, that consciousness is the eternal and unchanging reality that is the basis of everything in the universe. And yet, the current dominant dogma of Western science and philosophy shrugs off consciousness as an epi-phenomenon at the tail end of the evolution of the brain. From Vedanta and Tantra we know that the universe itself is an epiphenomenon of consciousness, and not the other way around! To me it was obvious from the outset that consciousness is therefore the key to the Ultimate Theory of Everything, something long sought by physicists and yet missed by them due to their exclusive obsession with the energy end of the cosmic spectrum. I wanted to tell the story of consciousness from the inside out, to reverse the Western external gaze on consciousness as an external object, and reveal instead its reality from within, as the eternal subject, in the way of the rishis and siddhas.
I have tried to capture all these concepts in The Age of Ananda in a semi-fictional setting in the utopian city of SiddhaPuri in the remote Himalayas. The main character in the book is not the Rishi of Ananda or any of the other SiddhaPurians, but consciousness itself, but it uses their voices to tell its story. And the fundamental nature of this consciousness is ananda or bliss. This is what I wanted to share in The Age of Ananda. The sub-title of the book -- Conscious Evolution to the Life Divine -- refers to the yoga and vision of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother for bringing down the power of spiritual realization to transform our bodies physically at the cellular level, leading us to a higher level of conscious being. The time has come for us to live joyously and evolve consciously to a greater status of being, both spiritually and physically.
I wanted to bring this message to the attention of the world so that we may engineer a spiritual course correction to our overly materialistic trajectory at this point.
How would you describe your current state in your spiritual journey?
I was fortunate to be born in a family and culture which gave me a head-start on the paths of spiritual knowledge. I got initiations and guidance on a timely basis from gurus or teachers of various schools. Then I had to figure out how to integrate these teachings into a personal practice which pays attention to both the ascent and the descent of consciousness, as per the Integral Yoga of Sri Aurobindo. So my journey goes beyond spirituality in the traditional sense, which is concerned only with our ascent to a higher state.
A key aspect of this yoga, an insight given to us by Vedanta, in the words of Sri Aurobindo, is to “conceive of ourselves… as one continuous existence with a double phase of consciousness.†One phase is the Self, the detached witness, which is nothing but the pure universal consciousness I spoke of earlier; the other is the phase of experiencing the world with the awareness that we are joy-embodied agents of that higher Self, and not soulless automatons. To realize this dual phase sporadically is one thing, to hold it at all times is what I am working on.
What is the essential message of your book?
Ananda, the bliss of pure consciousness, is our source and our birthright, and it can be realized in this body, on this planet earth, when we attain a certain level of spiritual knowledge. This is the glorious declaration of the Vedas. We do not realize this bliss because we are ignorant of our essential nature and our existential purpose. Sri Aurobindo noted famously that “Man is a transitional being.†The human race, such as it is, cannot be the pinnacle of evolution. We have to consciously evolve beyond the stages of our body-focused ignorance and materially-driven exuberance to become truly spiritual beings, and as a part of that process also transform our bodies to a higher state of evolution. This is the manifesto of conscious evolution announced in the book. This might take a few hundred years, but we have to start now. We face a golden opportunity, at this time of violence and corruption, global warming and economic depression, to transform ourselves spiritually and transmute our bodies physically. Or else, we will become footnotes in the annals of evolution as a failed, self-destructive species.
In terms of timing, the Winter Solstice of 2012, the so-called end-time of the Mayan Calendar, marks the onset of a new age, this joyous age of conscious evolution. The reason why this particular time is so transformative has to do with the neutrino flux through us during this passage. As to the question of what the neutrino has to do with our evolution, you will have to read the book!
So the essential message of The Age of Ananda is that the human race is now ready to take off into the helical orbits of conscious evolution, in the light of its birthright status of ananda. If you want it in one line, it is simply to live joyously and evolve consciously.
What do you hope people will gain from reading the book?
I hope that The Age of Ananda will make people interested in exploring spirituality and meditation. I would like them to discover the true nature of the Self, and to catch glimpses of ananda during this quest. This will truly change their world vision and help them deal with the daily stresses of life. They will never feel lonely or unloved or unhappy, no matter how difficult the circumstances around them are.
I also want readers to become aware of the possibilities for human evolution to the next level. At a minimum, I hope they will find the bliss that is always within us in every moment, even if they don’t do the yoga to transmute their bodies!
Any special advice to our readers? (What advice do you have for those who may be depressed for lack of a job or may be struggling in other financial areas?)
Living our lives just to satisfy our seemingly endless demand for things and pleasures will not only make us not happy, such pursuits will also degrade society and destroy the planet, as we see happening all around us today. Without being dramatic, let me open you to the possibilities for humankind if more of us focus less on making money, and instead get on the spiritual path and work for the welfare of our society and our planet. Each of us should consider how we can align our work with the common good of our fellow-beings, and opt out of jobs and professions that feed dark forces such as fear, violence, and greed. Lokvani readers, and readers of all kinds, who are retired, or are in a comfortable situation materially and financially, should consider devoting more and more time to spiritual knowledge, and to rejuvenative social or earth service in the light of that knowledge. These are the first steps toward finding real happiness and fulfillment. The current hard times are invitations and opportunities to reexamine the core tenets of our life and develop a spiritual point of view to deal with a world that is molting out of our pupas the butterfly version of the human race. So my advice is: Realize your inner Self and fly free as butterflies in the morning sun!
You were a management consultant before you wrote the book. What made you change fields from business to spirituality and human evolution?
The short answer is that I experienced a transformative vision during the Maha Kumbha Mela in 2001 in Prayag. Without getting into the details of that for now, after that incident my interest in pursuing the secrets of the Vedas and other wisdom traditions increased. My work as an innovation consultant and educator was going well, but I had realized that I was working with companies who were innovating things that were not necessarily in the long term best interests of the planet and its people. I started talking of sustainable innovation, even though that was not what my clients were calling me in for! People were responsive to this call, but felt that the corporate culture did not value sustainability and other such higher principles. That is beginning to change now, but about ten years ago I phased out of such work and devoted my time to spiritual discoveries. Through meditation and other such means, I was able to realize certain truths and the urge grew to share this knowledge in the form of a narrative of some sort. Five years later, this project led to The Age of Ananda.
Where can people buy the book?
More information about The Age of Ananda, and also reviews and free excerpts, are at the book website www.ageofananda.net. There is a link there to purchase the book. The direct link to the ordering site is www.createspace.com/3670967. I invite Lokvani readers to send me their comments on the book at kumar@ageofananda.net.
|
You may also access this article through our web-site http://www.lokvani.com/
