Terrorism – The Extreme Expression of a Culture of Ignorance

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
We’ll add it in all videos thereafter. Hare Krishna.
Terrorism, a Vedic perspective. Terror caused by terrorism is pervading the world more and more, especially as original forms of terrorism are getting born and are spreading. There’s Al Qaeda and Taliban, which have been existing for decades, but now there’s Boko Haram and there’s ISIS, which are indescribably brutal in their attacks on their victims.
So this threat of terror is spreading more and more. How do we make sense of it? And how do we respond to it? What do the main scriptures of ancient India have to say on this? Firstly, the scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita, if you consider, the Bhagavad Gita talks about, analyzes material nature into three modes, goodness, passion and ignorance. Just like any scene that we see on a movie screen or on a computer screen.
Essentially, there are three fundamental colors, RGB or IYB, whichever they are, but those three colors combine to create various images. So like that, these three modes combine to create all kinds of mentalities and activities in the material nature. So these are Sattva, Raja and Tama, illumination, passion and illusion or goodness, passion, ignorance, as they’re sometimes called.
So now, in these modes, basically, when people are influenced by certain modes, they tend to act in certain ways. So, in goodness, in Sattva Guna, people want to share the overall mentality that whatever they have it, share and have it. In passion, it is, yes, I want the best.
And in ignorance, I want everything. I’ll destroy everyone else who comes in my way. That is Arya.
So now, these are, if we see this sort of analytical framework, which the Bhagavad Gita offers, it’s a psychological framework, which is completely non-sectarian. The Bhagavad Gita doesn’t say that, you know, Hindus are in goodness and Muslims are in ignorance. No, it says that these three modes pervade all living beings, pervade all of existence.
And people are in different modes, in whichever place they may be, whichever religion they may belong to, whichever nationality they may belong to. So, depending, so these are non-sectarian modes of analytical, modes for analysis. It’s a non-sectarian framework for analysis.
And this, we see, is vindicated in the fact that, actually, the violence that is done in terrorism, that is not done, that kind of violence is not done only by religion. Nowadays, there is the tendency to brand one particular religion as the source of terrorism, as the cause of terrorism. And some people go further and they say, oh, it’s not that religion that is the problem.
So, all religions are that kind of statement. So, all religions have that kind of violence. And therefore, all religions themselves are a problem.
And therefore, what we should do is, we should have, just give up all religion, and then we will be free from this threat of terrorism. Now, this is a very simplistic analysis. For example, now, one of the biggest sources of terrorism, especially in places where terrorists, places that are insecure and safe, sometimes the terrorists come in and do suicide bombings.
Now, suicide bombings are associated with terrorists, and some thinkers say that suicide bombing was done because these people believe that if they die in jihad, then they will go to jannat, then go to heaven, and they will enjoy over there. And that’s what makes them do suicide like this. So, that’s what makes them suicide bombers.
However, if you look at history itself, the practice of suicide bombing was started not by some religious terrorists, it was by secular terrorists. LTT, the Sri Lankan terrorist which is more or less defunct now, that was the first in starting suicide bombing. They used it again in their war against the Sri Lankan government.
And the suicide bombers used to kill the former Indian Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi also. So, the point is that if you look at history, then Hitler was more or less an atheist. Stalin and Lenin, they were atheists, and they killed millions of people.
And when we have to look at terrorism, how do we define terrorism? Today, terrorism may have become associated with certain stereotypes, a certain kind of people, killing certain people. But the point is that in terrorism, terrorism itself knows no religion, it is an act of the mode of ignorance. And this is an important point to recognize that there can be people in the mode of ignorance, in tamoguna, in whatever religious denomination they profess to be.
And still they can go about killing. And to equate that with the religion per se, that means there are tamasic people in a particular religion, but to equate that with the all religions, that both are actually brands of ignorance. They are misconceptions, they are unwarranted extrapolations.
Why? Because within our religions, there are people in goodness, there are people in passion, there are people in ignorance. And some people in ignorance become extremely violent. So, for example, if we see, yes, all the religions in this world do talk about violence and they talk about religious violence to some extent, because violence is simply a fact of life.
We can’t avoid violence because there are people who are not ready to learn by nonviolent means. And for the sake of law and order, violence sometimes has to be used. So even the United Nations wants to keep peace and then it deploys a peacekeeping force.
So again, what is being used is force. So for peacekeeping, a force is used. So peace is what we want, but force essentially means violence.
So violence is often to be used to keep peace. So violence is simply a fact of life. And there is injunction within religions for violence.
But if we look at the injunctions for violence, there is also the concept of how that violence is to be done. So for example, if we look at what terrorists do and we consider what is the code of war that is talked about in the Mahabharata or the Ramayana. So it is said that when war is to be fought, the enemy should be equal, the enemy should be equipped, and the enemy should be alert.
So these are the codes which with Kshatriyas, the Martian guardians of society would fight wars. So in the Ramayana, on the penultimate day of the war, Ravana had fought against various warriors, various Vanara warriors he had fought and he had bested all of them. And finally he came in front of Ram and then a fierce fight and Ram overpowered him.
Ram knocked off his bow, knocked off his arrow, and then he could have just shot and killed him. And then Ram told him, oh Ravana, now you are exhausted and now you go back, take rest, come tomorrow, tomorrow I’ll fight you, tomorrow I’ll kill you. And Ravana could do nothing except turn on his heels and flee.
So the point is that if the war codes are such that there is to be enemy who is equal, that means that that enemy should also be equal, equipped and alert, then there is proper fighting. Otherwise, it is a violation of law codes. Now if you see, if we analyze with respect to terrorists, terrorists follow none of these.
There is no equality. These terrorists may be trained for sometimes years or decades as machines of war and they attack civilians. So there is no equality and most of the time the civilians are not equipped and further they are not alert.
Civilians are just going around maybe in a shopping mall or in a sports match or just going around on a road, going about their business of life and suddenly a suicide bomb will explode a bomb over there. So terrorism is the antithesis of religious violence that is talked about, whenever it is talked about in righteous sense in say in the Vedic scriptures. And similarly, if you look in the Christian tradition also, there is the tradition of righteous war which is talked about, the holy war.
Now it is of course true that there are people who within these religious traditions also may not follow this, but there is a principle and there is a fallacy in practicing it. But versus where it is not that there are failures in practicing the principle, but rather there is an intentional violation of the principle and there is expertise in rejection of the principle. So it’s one thing that we know the codes and if I follow the codes, I will be defeated.
So they neglect the codes because of the rush of the moment or because of the fear of the moment. But it’s another, what terrorists do is, they as a matter of cold-blooded planning, they find out the softest victims and they hit those victims and they kill those victims. So that is brutal.
That is brutal. And this is the antithesis of the kind of violence which is necessary for bringing about peace and order. So this is tamasic violence.
And this sort of tamasic violence is reprehensible and it needs to be condemned and it needs to be crushed. Now there is something of this sort that comes in Mahabharata when after the war gets over on the 18th day, all the Kaurava generals have been defeated and more or less killed. At that time, Ashwatthama, who is one of the generals from the Kaurava army, he goes to the Pandava camp at night and while the enemies are sleeping, then the Pandava sons and the other soldiers, while they’re sleeping, he ruthlessly slaughters them.
So there also, they are not equal, they are not equipped, they are not alert and Ashwatthama slaughters all of them and that’s considered his crime. And the retribution for that that is administered by Krishna and the Pandavas is swift and total. They ensure that Ashwatthama can no longer have any power by which he can do anything like this again.
So similarly, with respect to terrorism, there has to be at one level, especially those which are extremist organizations which are engaging in brutal violence, they have to be stopped by military means and swift and strong force has to be used so that their atrocities and perversities are curbed and stopped. But along with that also, we have to recognize that this is a problem which is an ugly expression of what has been an overall deterioration. As our culture moves more and more towards passion and more than passion towards ignorance, this sort of activities start becoming attractive to people and that’s why, let’s say, organizations like ISIS are able to attract people, young people from all over the world and to some extent, these ISIS people, what mystifies many intelligent, observant, thoughtful people is that ISIS seems to be attracting intelligent people, that these people are educated, these people are tech-savvy and that’s how ISIS sometimes hacks US defense networks, it places its propaganda reviews or execution on other things on social media and ensures that they become viral.
So ISIS seem to have an active media presence and that means at least that it has a good number of followers or tech-savvy. So if these people are intelligent enough to understand technology and use technology expertly, then aren’t they intelligent enough to understand the brutality of what ISIS is doing? So how is it that such people are succumbing to the temptation of organizations which do this kind of barbaric, heinous violence? If this happens, people become attracted to such things because overall in the society, there is increasing prevalence of the mode of ignorance. We see in movies that more and more brutal violence is being depicted and people enjoy this brutal violence quite often.
There are entertainment movies which become more and more violent wherein gory and bloody and ghastly scenes are depicted and people enjoy them. Even pornographic movies become violent where the victims of the pornography are often killed and their blood trickles out, people enjoy that. And even horror movies become more and more ghastly.
So the entertainment industry is to a large extent a reflection as well as it reflects the overall culture’s ethos and it creates that cultural ethos. So overall the mode of ignorance is increasing more and more in society and in ignorance, people can’t think deeply and can’t think in multiple aspects. People think only according to one track and by thinking only one track, okay, this is the problem, do this, this will be the solution.
So when people are in ignorance, they want, they have their intelligence in the sense that they have expertise in some particular domains but they don’t, they just don’t have the capacity or the patience or the guts to think issues through in their broad framework. So it’s very tempting to dub a particular thing as the problem and do everything to solve it. So for example, say Muslims in Pakistan are poor, uneducated Muslims.
In Pakistan, they are brainwashed into believing that India is the problem. Just destroy India and our problems will go away. Muslims in the Middle East are brainwashed into believing America is the demon.
Just destroy America and our problems will be solved. And this sort of Tamasic, this is actually this dumping the responsibility for all our problems on someone else. Now this is actually the Tamasic way of solving problems because it’s basically not taking responsibility oneself.
The only responsibility that one takes is to destroy the other. And they imagine that if we can just destroy the other, then our problems will be solved. But this is never going to solve problems.
It’s only going to aggravate problems. So unfortunately, why people are attracted, even people who seem to have technological expertise are attracted is because it seems, because this, as the culture of Tamoguna is spreading more and more, and Tamasic solutions means blow up whatever is having the problem. Just destroy the whole thing and the whole problem will be solved.
Now, yes, sometimes violence and destruction is required, but it also has to be balanced too. It has to be done after deep thought and deliberation. But here, what happens is that people just say, let’s destroy.
And the softer the targets, the greater will be the visibility. So for example, in Pakistan, when the Taliban actually attacked children in school and shot them brutally and heartlessly, so that was, you know, it’s one thing to kill people and it’s quite another thing to kill children. So Allah Shukthama is said to have killed children.
But Pandavas’ children were not children in the sense of small school-going children. They were in their youth and they were quite capable of fighting and they had fought in the Kurukshetra war. But here, what is happening is much, much worse.
Children who are in school, often they are toddlers and they were ruthlessly slaughtered. So what is the rationale? Actually, there is no rationale except that by destroying you, our problems will be solved. But those who have this mentality, they want a simple one-track solution to problems.
Often, if you see, now to some extent, it is within Islam, there are many extremist groups who have hijacked the ideology of Islam for their own purposes. And the atheists will argue that there are sections in all religious scriptures which talk about violence. And that is true.
But there are differences. In all religious scriptures, there will be sections which talk about violence. But more importantly, in those religious scriptures, we also have to look at the overall thrust of the teaching.
And more importantly, we have to look at the overall level of the people who are the leaders of that religious community. So the leaders of the religious community and leaders not in the sense of the official leaders, just like in Pakistan, the official head is the particular elected head. But the elected head does not have much power.
The real power there lies with the military. And that’s why having discussions with the elected head doesn’t help much because even if they have some discussion with the elected head, if the military decides to do something else, then the military just does it and the elected head can’t do much. And that’s what India experienced in Kargil.
We have very cordial relations with the elected head, but the military decided to do a escapade on its own. And the Prime Minister himself couldn’t do much about it. And the Pakistani head of state, the official head of state couldn’t do much about it.
So the point which I’m making here is that in every community, there are figureheads and there are actual sources of influence and power, actual holders of power. So what is the level of consciousness of the actual holders of power? That is important. And they will select sections from the scriptures and they will often select them out of context and emphasize them more and more.
And in that way, they will abuse. So to the extent if the influential leaders in a particular community are tamasik, they have this simplistic one-track mentality, just destroy the other, our problems will be solved. The result of this kind of mentality is, of course, that after people get power, then they start fighting among themselves.
Because is your version right or my version right? And if you disagree with me, then you become the problem. Just as that other was the problem whom we destroyed, now you become the other whom I destroy. And in that way, people who are in ignorance, they just keep fighting.
So the scripture can quite often get abused for this. And that is what is unfortunately happening. So when we label any particular whole group as responsible for terrorism, now there is one temptation to label religion as the cause of terrorism.
Another temptation could be that religious can turn around and say atheism is the cause of terrorism. Just see what atheists have done. Lenin killed so many people.
Stalin killed so many people. Pol Pot killed so many people. Hitler killed so many people.
And they were all practically atheists. But the point is that this sort of simplistic labeling doesn’t solve the problem. The Bhagavad Gita offers us a classification which is based not on one’s religious and non-religious beliefs, but it is based on one’s functional values.
So the classification in terms of goodness, passion and ignorance is based on functional values. You know, how does one behave? There can be atheists who can be in goodness and who will calmly discuss things. And there are atheists who discuss and sometimes there are atheists who turn over and become theists.
After lifelong deliberation, they understand, okay, my theology was not right, they will become theists. And they may stay, sometimes atheists may stay atheists, but by discussion, they may understand, oh, theism also has its validity, but I don’t accept it. So my point is that the solution to the problem of terrorism is not labeling one particular religion or religion in general as the cause of problem.
It is to recognize that people’s functional values, if they are karmasik, then whether they are religious or they are atheistic, they will become brutal whenever they are faced with problems. They’ll want to eliminate whoever is in their way and then destroy that person. And brutally, monstrously in fact.
So overall, there needs to be a cultivation of the mode of goodness. The more the world moves towards goodness, the more sanity will prevail. The more the world moves towards ignorance, the more insanity will prevail.
And the process of spirituality helps us ultimately to move towards transcendence beyond matter and material existence. But intermittently, it increases the mode of goodness. It increases, it facilitates, it cultivates higher levels of consciousness.
So while at a political and military level, the threat of extremist terrorist organization needs to be firmly countered, but at an individual level, each of us, we may, if we are in vulnerable areas, we need to have additional alertness, additional security, but each of us can contribute by actually cultivating the mode of goodness, by cultivating a more spiritual worldview, not in the sense of merely affiliating with a particular religious denomination, but by cultivating a worldview that centers more on selflessness and less on selfishness or self-aggrandizement as a cause of destruction of others. The more we cultivate this, and the spiritual, the spiritual, the advantage of spiritual worldview is that spiritual happiness is internal. The disadvantage with respect to even solving material problems in this world of the materialistic worldview is that materialistic worldview assumes that happiness lies in material things.
And because material things are limited, so naturally it promotes conflicts, and if people are in ignorance, those conflicts become violent, brutally violent. So if there is, at one level, at an individual level, there is more a cultivation of goodness, and the easiest way to do it is the practice of spirituality, but more than that, there’s also a spiritual understanding of life, and there’s an experience of spiritual happiness. Then, when there is inner happiness, then ultimately terrorism, it’s a matter of wanting power and position and prestige and money, and by that thinking that we will dominate others, and we will be happy.
So that fundamental notion, that itself has to be curbed, that has to be eliminated, and that comes through spiritual practice, which gives us the experience of spiritual happiness, and by that, the materialism, which is the, no matter if people are religious or atheistic, if they claim to be religious or atheistic, but the terrorists are doggedly materialistic. They are completely materialistic. Even if they believe in heaven, their conception of heaven is also materialistic.
They’re thinking that if we die in jihad, we’ll go to heaven, and what will we do over there? We’ll enjoy with 73 virgins over there. That’s what they are brainwashed into believing by their heads, and they are basically materialistic. So essentially, the cultivation of the goodness individually and promoting a spiritual worldview, which offers non-material inner happiness, that is something which we can do to overall change the atmosphere of the world.
Now, most of us may not be involved in military efforts to counter terrorism, but that doesn’t mean we have to be helpless. As I said, the terrorist attacks, and which are there in particular pockets of the world today, they are the extreme expressions of an overall process of deterioration that has been happening all over the world in terms of the increasing prevalence of the mode of ignorance. And individually, each of us can, by spiritual practice, by coming to the mode of goodness, by seeking happiness in spiritual, non-material things, we can do our part in countering this degeneration towards ignorance, and we can cultivate, we can facilitate, we can participate, we can accelerate the regeneration of goodness.
Thank you.