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Arvind Pal Singh Mandair - "Religion & The Specter of The West" Part XVII

Q & A with Author by SIKHCHIC.COM

Continued from last week …





Part XVII





Q There’s one allegation, I recall, in which you are accused of giving a “ruthless interpretation of gurmat”. That’s odd -- no, actually bizarre -- terminology, given the subject matter. Could you please address that one, before we move on?



A Well, here is the actual allegation. I‘ve translated it from the original:



Mandair believes that the Sikh quom’s political issues can be resolved using the kind of materialist approach that is common in Western universities. [For example] in his commentary on naam simran, Mandair says that the word ’simran’ has a Sanskrit derivation and then he connects its meaning to death. Basically he is trying to show that simran firstly reminds us of death and only after that connects to God …



Here’s my rebuttal:



What a load of complete nonsense!



This is quite a maliciously motivated -- and off the mark! -- construal of what I am actually saying. As far as the interpretation of ‘naam simran’ goes I am working almost entirely within the traditional meaning of naam simran (which is the repetition or remembrance of the Name) but I try to deepen the conventional meaning by alluding to point to its more spiritual meaning.



For me, the spiritual is not the metaphysical.



As I explained in several of our earlier exchanges, the metaphysical is a negation of the physical or material. It is a negation of everything that exists in time that we live in. The spiritual on the other hand (in my interpretation) is anti-metaphysical in the sense that I connect it to the ‘material’ which means the time of lived experience.



So what is my spiritual / material reading of naam simran?



It is quite simply one that connects it to the interplay of ego and ego-loss. My premise is based on gurbani where it is stated that naam and ego (haumai) are opposed to each other and cannot be in the same place at the same time (“haumai navai naal virodh hai / doi na vasai ek thaai – GGS:560).



Basically, the ego has to die if naam is to become pervasive in the mind. The human ego operates by self-naming.



The name of this self-naming is ‘I’ which becomes the index of self-appropriation.



However, naam (or God’s Name, if you want to interpret it as such) brings the death of this ego because the ego now begins to say: “I am not”.



So it is not a physical death that I refer to, but the death of ego.



As for the reference to the connection between Sanskrit, all I said was that within the word simran it is possible to trace an Indo-European root: ‘smer’ which alludes to both remembrance and to death.



Most importantly, I am trying to get the reader to understand that the resultant effect of naam simran must happen in the time of the world that we live – not in another world, or beyond time.



It is real and it has material effects on human well being. If this were not the case, why would so many Sikhs attest to the power of naam simran for curing depressive states of mind, to alleviate forms of suffering by helping the devotee to adopt a more focused attention to the contents of this world?



Unless I am mistaken, all the Sikh Gurus stress that naam simran is a way of attending to our finitude, to the fact that each moment of our lives, each breath is precious. Each moment is passing by, so repeat the Name – don’t be fixated on the egotistical practice of self-naming where one says: “I am, I am, I am ...”.



Here is what I actually said on page 377 of my book:



“Stated differently, simran is first of all remembrance of one’s own mortality, of the ego’s death, remembering which one awakens to the Name. Naam simran is therefore the experience of finitude. Alternatively, finitude is the condition for the experience of naam”.



What is so ‘ruthless’ about this?





Continued next week …



May 13, 2014



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