WHAT IS HINDUISM?
of all apparent contradictions or ‘dualities’ of both thought
and lived experience. It is attainable only through yoking
oneself to specific mental and bodily disciplines or ‘yogas’
under the guidance of a guru, whereby the individual comes
to a direct and sustained experience of the fundamental
non-duality, non-separation or ‘non-alienation’ of the self
from the divine – understood as a transcendent yet all-
pervasive and universal reality immanent in all beings and
manifesting itself at all times and in all epochs and life
episodes – including whole historic epochs of conflict and
conflagration, war and destruction, as well as individual
lifetimes or episodes of suffering and violence.
Having thus set out in summary brevity, but I hope
also sufficiently, the seemingly clear contradictions or
‘duality’ dividing and mutually opposing the secular and
religious world-views condensed by the terms ‘Marxism’
and ‘Moksha’ respectively, the question immediately raises
itself as to how this very duality is or might be understood
within and from the perspective of each of these world-
views. The question is a significant one precisely because
both world-views are, in the most specific of ways,
philosophies which, each in their own way, give immense
prominence to the nature and relation of ‘duality’ and ‘non-
duality’. In the Marxist tradition, derived from Hegel, the
key signifier of this thematic is the Greek-based term
‘dialectics’, and the notion of an immanent movement and
evolution not only of thought but of reality itself, which