Blackholes, Kali, Bhagawad Gita : Connecting some dots.

This entire post is trying to connect some unconnected dots from our scriptures, our culture, epics and today’s science as we know it. All that I am doing is posing some questions which you might want to examine. I am not an academic, so my thoughts are scattered as well. These stream of thoughts were triggered by a particular type of Facebook posts that I have read which speak about how deep into the Bhagawad Oppenheimer was.

Dot 1: कालोSस्मि

I am referring to J Robert Oppenheimer, of the Manhattan Project, of course and his philosophical quandry which was (evidently) resolved by the Bhagawad. After the atom bomb came to being, Oppenheimer very famously said “Death, I am become” loosely translating “कालोSस्मि” from the Bhagawad. That is where this thread started for me.

कालोSस्मि appears in Chapter 11, verse 32.

श्रीभगवानुवाच |
कालोऽस्मि लोकक्षयकृत्प्रवृद्धो
लोकान्समाहर्तुमिह प्रवृत्त: |
ऋतेऽपि त्वां न भविष्यन्ति सर्वे
येऽवस्थिता: प्रत्यनीकेषु योधा: |

You will notice that कालोSस्मि here does not translate the way Oppenheimer saw it. More so, because of the event that precedes Chapter 11. Krishna shows Arjuna his Vishwaroopam to get the latter to get up and fight, on the Kurukshetra battlefield. This is the third time, in the epic, that Krishna does this. The usual imagery mentioned, something that only the subject is able to see, is a super large innumerable forms with thousands of arms, eyes, mouths etc. The text, of course, refers metaphorically to the multiverse, the cosmology that is within Krishna’s being. Obviously seeing a being with a thousand arms, eyes etc. would not have perturbed Arjuna that much. What he got to see is something else. The word काल (Kāla) has many more meanings and interpretations. Only two of those are death, and time. One meaning also encompasses all of creation. You would find the same interpretation in the Buddhist “kālachakra” . This word, again, does not translate to something as simplistic as “wheel of time”, and is at a level quite different from “time”. Krishna then, is telling Arjuna that he (Krishna) is काल, in the form of universality, and that he will wipe the Kouravas out even without Arjuna’s effort and that the latter doesn’t really matter in the larger realm of काल. This level of cosmic universality, perhaps, is what yogis have tried to understand and only some Siddhas have managed to.

Dot 2: Durgā

Durgā is known in our scriptures to have been created to slay Mahishāsura, by collecting supreme energy from Brahma, Vishnu, Mahesh and many other lesser gods. Durga thus is this tremendous embodiment of true source of divine powers of the “male gods”. She is known to have expressed herself as a blinding source and beam of light during her battle with Mahishāshura, on Chāmundi Hills in the outskirts of Mysuru. The original name of Mysuru, you might be aware, is “Mahishur“.

Dot 3: Dasha Mahavidya

Many of our Goddesses, have vividly violent form too. Tantrism, worships these 10 Goddesses (all manifestations of Pārvati), as Dasha Mahāvidyā. Meaning Ten Great Learnings (or Wisdoms). Of the ten counterparts, Durgā’s is Kāli, Lakshmi’s is Kamalā and Saraswati’s is Mātangi and so on. You will find these same 10 being worshipped in Tibetan Buddhism today, in Tibet, Ladakh, and in our eastern states. This form of Buddhism, Vajrayāna, loosely defined, is the Buddhist form of Tantric Shaivism from where the understanding of the Dasha Mahāvidyā arrive from.

Dot 4: Kāli

Kali – By Raja Ravi Varma – https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/goddess-kali-ravi-varma-press-karla-lonavala/iAHNImEWSOYQeg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21792915

Now, if Kāli is the antimatter to Durgā‘s matter, then she must be dark as opposed to Durga‘s blinding white light energy. She is. Let us consider her form. She is described as large, darker than the darkest night, long untied and disheveled hair, not a thread on her body, scimitar in hand, wearing a necklace of severed heads, and blood smeared on her body and hair. A rather fearsome imagery. This pagan imagery, since, has been “civilized” a bit to work with different weaker sentiments. She, undoubtedly, is the most powerful, and most violent of the Dasha Mahāvidyas, and her pujā is done timebound, for a short while with utmost respect.

The thread

What could Kāli be metaphorically representing, something that we are today aware of? Her name signifies two of her attributes – one who is dark, and the other epithet is “devourer of time”. She has the severed head necklace, and is unstoppable. Clearly, she destroys, rather violently. To me, that reminds of a cosmological feature – a blackhole. It’s gravity dilates time infinitely and devours light, is super large and ever growing, is completely bare (but not empty) and totally unstoppable. It pulls other celestial bodies (most of which are spherical in shape, at the unit level) in and destroys them. Is Kāli then an earthly representation of a black hole?

Now connecting all the way back. Could Krishna have been showing Arjuna a representation of time-space continuum and the fundamentals of Kāl and creation?

Millennials aren’t the problem…

All my readers who do not agree with my title line, likely will start flaming me by the time they finish reading this post. But, that is alright.

HR types who aren’t able to manage a young workforce or even provide inspiration to the line managers keep saying that the millennial workforce is different, as an excuse for attrition. I have a gripe about the way HR has become in the services industry, but that reason to get flamed, I will save for later. We keep hearing different ‘negative’ attributes, though contradictory among themselves, assigned to the millennials. Some of these are:

Sense of Entitlement

We keep hearing, millennials feel very entitled, expect promotions quick, get bored quick and do not like to be tied by corporate conventions from the 20th century. Well, way back in 2001, I remember the first sentence the newly recruited network manager uttered as he walked into this open plan office. Went something like – “Where is my cabin?”. That sure sounded like entitlement to me.

Irreverence / Arrogance

Weren’t you irreverent / arrogant, when you were in your 20s? I was. Actually, I still am. What do these attributes have to do with a specific generation? In fact, the millennials are way more tuned to the way technology is moving today, they are walking lock-step with advancement and easily are able to filter away extraneous noise effortlessly. If they are more technology aware, or sharper than others, then they can choose to have a bit of a swag, I think.

Not being able to use their education

Oh, c’mon. Who provided them the education or designed the curriculum in the first place. IT / ITES services companies in India, driven by the KPI of billability, have practically destroyed engineering education by abdicating from their responsibility and pushing training into the colleges. The bellwether company was singularly responsible for starting this, and the rest of the sheep followed. Making a student usable is the employers’ responsibility, not the college’s. Now, you can’t come back and say colleges are producing unemployable youth.

Distracted

As opposed to what? Just because they don’t want to have a collar around the neck and be in the office every day? Maybe, your place of employment offers nothing to keep them mentally engaged. The employee engagement index survey thingy is rubbish, bin it and save some money. Seen enough places with high engagement scores, and high attrition.

Oh, they are so stuck to their electronic devices.

We weren’t because we didn’t have our lives proliferated with these devices, remember? Aren’t gen-x and gen-y folk glued to their smart phones as well? Seen many, including this MNC CEO friend, who goes on vacation with a laptop, a tablet, two phones and a smart watch and get completely restive without an internet connection.

…and I could go on with other examples and attributes.

There is this Simon Sinek interview (on youtube), where her passionately talks about millennials, their sense of entitlement (and why it came about), their lack of social connects etc. Blames parents, but also the millennials … and I do not agree. The millennials aren’t really very different from what we were at their age. Just that the social context is different today, and thus the millennial reaction seems to be contrary to what we have grown up with. The problem lies with us, not with the millennials.

Allow me to end with an anecdote. On a flight home from Mumbai (earlier this year), I had a millennial sitting next to me. We got chatting. Figured from what she disclosed, she was maybe 25 – 26 and was already on her fourth job. She had already worked as an assistant arranger for a fashion choreographer, had worked in a call centre, in some start up as a merchandiser and was now an interning in a school learning to act. OMG, What an irresponsible person, with no longevity at work, right? When I asked her why did she change so often, and went on to completely different areas… her answer was “I am trying to find myself”. Internally, I mocked this ‘airhead’, while pretending to be stoic. Her remark, however, stayed with me. Much later, the profundity of her statement (even if that is not what she really meant) dawned upon me. What we, ‘the know-alls’ have lost is exactly that desire to find ourselves and have trained ourselves to be a service and talentless labour force.

Something tells me, folk who keep blaming the millennials, likely have something to gain by constantly blaming them.

Now, got that flamethrower ready?

Passion is over rated and useless

Allow me to start with being a nay-sayer, in a way, to Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement address at Stanford. At least to how we interpret that speech. You might have watched it on YouTube. That “Stay Hungry” video. The Follow Your Passion, or Be Passionate about work speech. That isn’t “really” what Jobs said, and nor does his source material. And, I am saying being passionate about work is a waste of time or energy.

That bothers you, doesn’t it? That is what we have been taught and is often repeated to us at work. That is what HR keeps telling you, and keeps stretching passion at work to engagement with the organization and hopes for reduction in attrition. Allow me to just point out that there is plenty attrition happening in organizations showing high engagement scores. One should question – what happens to all the passion, the energy and the emotion that people seem to display? There, obviously, must be a disconnect somewhere.

You may ask, how can one possibly work without any passion? How does one achieve without passion? The thing is, passion towards your organization or leadership is very different from that towards work at hand. You have noticed, surely, that you do better when you are calm, when you do not get influenced by anxiousness or are able to be unmoved by pressure. Have you not felt, being in the zone? That would be the state of स्थितप्रज्ञता  (state of being sthitaprajna, loosely defined as ‘unperturbedness’ ).

The virtuous circle driven by self awareness

In short, less passion there is, better we work. “When we let loose our feelings, we waste so much energy, shatter our nerves, disturb our minds, and accomplish very little work. The energy which ought to have gone out as work is spent as mere feeling, which counts for nothing. It is only when the mind is very calm and collected that the whole of its energy is spent in doing good work …”. You get the general idea. Being calm is however, not the same as being inactive. The idea is to focus on the work rather than expending your inner qi on just being passionate. The next question, then, is how does one redirect the energy to work while being dispassionate?

There are different ways of looking at this, using different terminology. While the nuggets are about the same, some arrange it linearly and some circular; I postulate, it is a virtuous spiral in six simple steps which deserves your attention and effort.

1. Intent

Start with the basics, figuring the purpose or the intent behind the action, effort or task at hand. What is the outcome expected, from the task? Are the task at hand and the outcome aligned to each other? This ‘intent’ is different from what your personal goal might be, and thus highlighting the first possible place of disconnect.

2. Empathy

Be aware of the environment you are operating in, the environment in which the task needs to be executed. Does the environment support the execution of the task? The other key element is the inclusion of stakeholders, and empathizing with what their expectations of the outcome might be. Should their expectations not be aligned to the outcome that you foresee, then (obviously) you have trouble looming ahead.

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“…as I read of persons who become frozen in snow; all such, they say, want to go to sleep, and if you try to drag them up, they say, “Let me sleep; it is so beautiful to sleep in the snow”, and they die there in that sleep. So is our nature. That is what we are doing all our life, getting frozen from the feet upwards, and yet wanting to sleep.”

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3. Planning

What do you include, what do you exclude? Don’t get driven just by passion.  Just hope, desire, passion may disconnect you from the present, and are unlikely to get you the required outcome. Planning, likely will. Slow down, weigh, evaluate to arrive at the choices. Planning involves looking at data and connecting the dots, meticulously, making the right choices and arranging them in the right temporal order.

4. Elasticity

When one plans, does one go as far as one is capable? How about looking at stretch goals, beyond what one has done in the past? We often succumb to “good” and neglect the option of “better”. Take the risk, look beyond personal limitations, accept the vulnerability, tap into your creativity and be curious.

5. Perseverance

Ensuring outcome, with something new isn’t easy. I should know. I have been an entrepreneur four times (like many of you); have succeeded and failed. But, one would never succeed if one did not persevere. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Keep at it.

6. Letting Go

The silicon valley mantra “Fail Fast” is the first half of this desired behavior. This doesn’t mean giving up, but moving on – emotionally unencumbered by learning from the failure, and not repeating the same mistakes. Habits are difficult to let go, but we succeed when we practice enough. This is as much about flexibility, as about judgement about when to let go.

… finally

The diagram above shows a spiral, because the steps do not necessarily feed each other repetitively; the last step of letting go helps pivot into a larger realm. Hope the above provided a different view point to Job’s commencement address.

Of course, getting to this level of practicality will take effort and practice. How about giving it a dispassionate go?

References:

1. Practical Vedanta : Swami Vivekananda : Advaita Ashram
2. Chandogya Upanishad : Divine Life Society
3. An Interface between VEDANTA and Management- an Empirical Analysis : Information and Library Network Centre: B .Chandra Mohan Patnaik and Ipseeta Satpathy
4. Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005 : Stanford University
5. The Art of Accomplishment: Six Principles from Vedanta : Prasad Kaipa, Ph. D., The Mithya Institute for Learning