3 Foundational Ideas of Indian Civilisation
There are three foundational ideas, the soul ideas, of Indian civilisation that remained unchanged over at least five thousand years of Indian history. They were always there expressed in many different ways across millennia using different words giving the central orientation to India’s evolution. These ideas are Oneness, Rebirth and Yoga and they are closely woven into each other providing the central anchor and stability to the idea of India.
Oneness
The sense of oneness was always near and dear to the Indian civilization regardless of all the schools of thought and yoga, philosophy and religions that flourished in the subcontinent. If there is one idea that everyone agreed on it was the idea of oneness; their bone of contention was never about oneness but about the qualitative nature of the oneness, and the many different experiences of duality and multiplicity. It was the way the Indian looked upon the cosmos.
Behind the apparent complexity of the cosmos and the multiplicity of forms, they saw that there is one consciousness, one being, one existence as a foundation upon which everything is unfolding. This idea never changed and provided the bedrock for the continuous replenishment of the civilisational cycles in India. In every historic cycle of India’s evolution, this idea of oneness found expression in many ways, from the formless unknowable to the intimate divine being, there was always the acknowledgement that the entire cosmos and life forms in it, including the animate and innate forms, are all arising from a fundamental reality of oneness, one consciousness, one indivisible existence.
This idea is not specific to Indian civilisation, practically all ancient civilisations have acknowledged the presence of all-permeating Spirit behind the world of forms, and they have expressed this perception in varying degree of sophistication. In India, this idea took on an incredibly rich variety of intellectual, poetic, artistic, musical, architectural and mythological expressions including the way society was organised.
Rebirth
While the idea of oneness is rather common across the ancient world, the idea of rebirth stands out as an astonishing discovery of Indian civilization. In other civilisations, the idea of rebirth exists only in some rudimentary form if at all. There was the idea of life after death but not of cycles of rebirth.
If oneness was recognised as the fundamental nature of reality, life on earth was seen as a process of spiritual evolution going through series of rebirths from lower life forms to more complex ones till the evolution reaches human form and become self-aware. Even as an individual human being, it was understood that the soul goes through many cycles of death and rebirth. There is an underlying process of spiritual evolution into higher states of consciousness. This spiritual evolution has a direction, it is evolving towards the consciousness of oneness. Such a radical and revolutionary discovery is not visible to the surface view of life at all. This is not something that can be discovered in the material domain. Matter itself is a veil and behind this veil are the other dimensions of existence. They knew it over thousands of years.
This discovery provided a profound sense of meaning and purpose to life on earth and a very different sense of time and reality.
Yoga
The third idea was built on the first two; not only there is oneness behind the multiplicity of forms and there is a natural spiritual evolution through the process of rebirth, but also there is the possibility to voluntarily accelerate the process of spiritual evolution and realise oneness rapidly in a given life cycle. They saw that they can take charge of their psychological evolution and transform their whole nature and evolve into higher states of consciousness that are way beyond the normal human being is capable of.
The process was called by different names during different periods. During the Vedic cycle, they called it yajna, later it was called Dharma and then it became Yoga. But all pointed towards the same possibility of voluntary acceleration of evolution. People like Buddha became most admired as proof of the concept and a large number of people in every generation did it and the idea became imprinted in the collective life of India. While there are a large number of schools of yoga and methods of evolution experimented and developed in India, the core ideas remain the same — oneness, rebirth and yoga.
These are the three soul ideas of India that guided Indian civilisation throughout the last five thousand years regardless of religions and philosophies that emerged in the subcontinent. From these foundational ideas emerged an endless variety of ideas and approaches and systems and processes. Vocabulary varies depending on the school of yoga, but all of them go back to the same foundational ideas.
This is what made Indian civilisation what it was in the past and will determine what it will be in the future. Because just like individuals go through rebirth, the soul idea of a civilisation, when it is sufficiently developed and self-aware, can always reboot and rebirth itself into a new cycle of creation.
