WHAT IS HINDUISM?
The failure to acknowledge the emphasis that Marx
places on human sensuous activity as the subjective basis of
human social life led to a false equation of Marxism with
crude materialism and objectivism. What came to be called
‘scientific socialism’ was misinterpreted through the lens of
capitalist science – which like capitalism itself, was based
on the objectification of human beings and their alienation
from their own subjective essence. Just as the concept of
‘subjective science’ is one totally absent in the vocabulary
of so-called ‘Marxists’, so is the concept of ‘Hindu
Socialism’ one totally lacking in the vocabulary of both
secular Indian socialists and religious Indian Hindus.
What I call ‘The New Socialism’ is in effect a previously
unarticulated ‘Hindu Socialism’ – for it conceives the
individual ‘soul’ in a Hindu way – not as the localised
product or private property of a skin-encapsulated self but
as the expression of an infinite, universal and ‘field’
dimension of awareness – what Hinduism recognises as a
divine dimension, indeed as the essence of the divine.
Only by distinguishing this pure, field dimension of
awareness from each and every thing we experience within it
- from all so-called contents or objects of consciousness –
can we transcend and free ourselves from all those
restrictive patterns of experience, thought and action that
arise from a purely ‘focal’ awareness – one centred in a