Vitalizing the Human Spirit

In 1888, Swami Vivekananda took up the life of a wandering monk. His only possessions were his saffron robe, a water pot, a staff and two books. For five years, he traveled the length and breadth of India, having contact with Indians of all religious traditions and all walks of life. He was profoundly moved by the impoverished and oppressed condition of the common people under British imperial rule. During his travels, he made contact with arms manufacturers and with independent rajas, assessing the possibility of initiating a mass struggle for independence. But he abandoned this idea, realizing that the Indian people didn’t have the spirit of struggle that would be required.

Vivekananda eventually reached Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of India. There, he swam out to a rock off the coast where he meditated day and night for three days. This culminated in his having the epiphany that the path to awakening the spirit of the Indian people would be for them to overcome their cultural inferiority.

If the Indian people could see people in the West respecting the profound wisdom of India’s spiritual culture this would arouse pride in their Indian identity. They would then shake off the inferiority that depleted their spirit and inhibited their ability to struggle.

The story of Vivekananda’s subsequent journey to the World Parliament of Religions and his subsequent years of introducing Eastern spirituality to America is the stuff of myth. He was immensely successful, and this had a galvanizing impact on the Indian people. It awakened their vitality of spirit. Their oppression of mind was broken, and from there the Indian independence struggle emerged.

Prana Dharma

It seems to me that Vivekananda’s approach has an important lesson for us as we face the polycrisis. If we are to turn toward a life-centered civilization, our spirits will need vitalizing; our minds cannot remain passive, resigned, complaisant.

To fully appreciate Vivekananda’s approach, it will be helpful to introduce the concept of “prana dharma”. (Prana dharma is a Sanskrit term. I use it because it conveys a desired meaning more economically and accurately than can English.)

“Prana” roughly means life force, or vital energy. The term “dharma” signifies the fundamental characteristic of an entity, the essential nature of a thing. The dharma of an eagle is to soar, of an athlete to compete, of a mother to nurture their young.

So prana dharma is that which gives vitality to our mental existence. For individuals, this comes from expressing their authentic self and their calling or personal mission in life. The lack of a proper sense of identity and purpose diminishes the force of personality individuals need to function in a healthy manner in their social life.

People lacking in prana dharma do not have a clear purpose and are without a firm identity. They are not aligned with their inner being and are detached from authentic social purpose and so lack mental vitality.

The need for a strong prana dharma is the basis for Shakespeare’s advice, “To thine own self be true.” Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, was even more emphatic, telling Arjuna, “It is better to die following one’s own dharma than live following another’s dharma.”

Collective Prana Dharma

Prana dharma also functions at a collective level. A society’s dynamism depends upon the mental vitality of its members — on its collective expression of prana dharma.

Collective prana dharma arises from the distinguishing traits, values, and sentiments possessed by a nationality, ethnic group, or subculture.

The prana dharma of traditional Native Americans included their valuing bravery in battle, their reverence for nature, and their tribal living. The prana dharma of the Japanese includes being industrious, refined in manners, socially disciplined, and respectful towards elders.

A social identity and outlook get imparted to a society’s members through socialization and education – through myths, media, family influences, social customs, ceremonies, religion, etc. It then shapes their particular mental outlook, determines their ways of social behavior, and imbues in them values and worldview.

Deprivation of Prana Dharma

Just as the lack of individual prana dharma devitalizes individual expression, so the suppression of collective prana dharma, of cultural identity, devitalizes social expression.

Suppression of a people’s culture can be even more destructive than their being militarily conquered. Where there is only the military enforcement of a people’s oppression, at least their vital force remains intact and struggle for liberation remains a possibility. But a people deprived of their collective prana dharma will acquiesce to their subjugation.

Thus it is that revitalizing the collective prana dharma of an oppressed people has played an important role in many liberation struggles.

India was conquered by the Aryans from Central Asia, the Greeks under Alexander the Great, the Moghuls out of Asia Minor, and finally by the British. Of all these conquests, the imperial rule by the British was the most difficult to overcome, in large part because the British so effectively eroded the Indian prana dharma.

Among other tactics, they educated the Indian elite in the British schooling system where they imbued them with a Western outlook. This outlook was analytical, rational, and material in nature, which was incompatible with the intuitive, subjective, and spiritual outlook of the Indian prana dharma. Many of India’s brightest came to emulate the mental approach of the West, rejecting their own ways — their own prana dharma.

This was Swami Vivekananda’s realization. So his mission became to revive the India prana dharma. Following Vivekananda, personalities such as Ram Mohan Roy and Rabindranath Tagore also worked to strengthen the Indian people’s pride in their spiritual and cultural heritage. Once strengthened, the Indian people’s struggle for independence could be taken up in earnest.

North America’s indigenous peoples’ prana dharma was destroyed in a manner similar to that of the British in India. Native peoples were forced off their homelands and onto reservations, and their children were forced to attend government schools, to be socialized into a foreign culture and to speak only English. It was this cultural genocide, more than the military massacres and disease, which broke their proud, energetic spirit.

But a subterranean current of their heritage survived through their ceremonies and the stories of their elders, enabling Native American prana dharma to reemerge in the 1960s as a new generation re-identified with their traditional ways, empowering their struggle for sovereignty and dignity.

Has not the psychic dynamism of exploited workers been eroded by their immersion in a commercially driven culture? Their minds are not sustained by deep cultural traditions. Their mental vigor gets devitalized by commercialism, making it difficult for them to envision and struggle for an exploitation-free society.

Their position is not so different from that of the passive Indian masses under British rule that Vivekananda sought to awaken. How can they forcefully challenge the exploitation, corruption and environmental destructiveness of corporate capitalism without a strengthened prana dharma giving them vitality of spirit?

Importance of Nurturing Prana Dharma

Those who engage in freeing humanity must recognize that a healthy collective prana dharma is essential for a people’s dynamic social expression.

Communists proclaimed themselves a vanguard force for championing oppressed people’s aspirations. But their approach towards ethnic identity and autonomy undermined their claim to being liberators. They may have succeeded in overthrowing oppressive regimes, but the new regimes they established suppressed people’s religious, ethnic and cultural sovereignty. Their promises of a humanistic social order were drowned in the blood and tears of the countless Armenians, Lithuanians, Tibetans, Slovenians, and Jews who dared assert their cultural identities.

A principal objective of any progressive movement should be to nurture the development of well-integrated and vital human personalities. For this, the diverse expressions of human culture must be valued; indigenous cultures must have full scope for expression.

Of course, the right to cultural expression cannot be absolute. Any harmful expressions of a people’s culture, such as practices that support bigotry, patriarchy, or ecological destruction must be replaced with new ones guided by humanistic values. If this is done, their prana dharma will only be strengthened.

Spirituality and Prana Dharma

In shifting the expression of a people’s collective prana dharma, forced change should be avoided. Forced change will be resisted. The better approach is to encourage people to develop spiritually. Pursuit of spiritual truth will dislodge narrow, dogmatic outlooks and replace them with magnanimous and universal views.

When a people’s prana dharma is compatible with their spiritual experience, it will be natural for them to express a powerful, dynamic collective identity, one that can sustain and nurture their deepest human longings.

This was the deeper project undertaken by Swami Vivekananda. And it is one that remains a work in progress.

There is so much latent potential in the human mind. We need the proper personal and collective prana dharma to bring forth this potential. Our collective survival depends on it.

It will not come from immersion in capitalism’s consumerist culture; this only devitalizes the human spirit. And it will not come from Christian Nationalism or MAGAism. Identities based on these sentiments may foster a sense of vitalizing purpose for many. But any approach that is not inclusive of all people is a dead end.

The true greatness of the human spirit can only manifest where people affirm that humanity is one and indivisible. Nothing less can get us through the polycrisis to a bright future.