Abstract
This chapter argues that man does not live by bread alone (bread being the metaphor for material wealth). When man tries to live by bread alone, he leads an unsustainable, exploitative, contentious life, with the only limiting principle being entropy. We have plenty of bread in the world, but we have just as much hunger and we do not seem to know what to do about it. In other words, understanding of the behavior of matter does not seem to necessarily produce corresponding benefits in psycho-social well-being in general. This chapter provides some interesting field-based narratives to show how peripheral human beings cling to non-material understandings to lighten their suffering in a blatantly materialist world.
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Notes
- 1.
See Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
- 2.
It is a categorical error to use examples of individual cases (no matter how many), say of medical patients and the remission of disease due to modern medical care, and imagine that human suffering has ameliorated.
- 3.
The dhenki is a wooden instrument, a large hand-operated tool for the milling of rice that was in use throughout India and owned almost by every farming household. It was also an auspicious symbol and a sign of prosperity. The advent of the rice mills made the dhenki superfluous and many households had to give it up, one way or another.
- 4.
See Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 2002).
- 5.
“Party” refers to the Communist Party Marxist Leninist which was behind a peasant movement in rural Bengal.
- 6.
See W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960).
- 7.
Carl Jung, Collected Works, vol. 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), paragraph 815.
- 8.
Carl Jung, Collected Works, Vol 9, Part 1: Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), para 454–455.
- 9.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 361–62.
- 10.
Ibid., 373.
- 11.
G. N. Das, Ed. and Trans., Couplets from Kabir (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2002), 57.
- 12.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 341.
- 13.
Ibid., 374.
- 14.
Ibid., 381.
- 15.
The continual and endless struggles over social stratifications such as caste, class, gender are familiar ground without resolution.
- 16.
Mohan Singh Karki, Kabir: Selected Couplets from the Sakhi in Transversion (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 2001).
- 17.
Translation mine.
- 18.
Karki, op.cit.
- 19.
Ibid.
- 20.
Das, op.cit., 15.
- 21.
The implication here is that wisdom-love is implicit when the two (secular and sacred) move as one.
- 22.
Gospel of Thomas, saying 22, The Bible.
- 23.
There is in the Hindu tradition the concept of the Ardhanari, a being neither male nor female, an androgyne, in whom there is the reconciliation of the opposites. Some consider Gandhi’s personality and his view of Swaraj as the operationalization of such a reconciliation.
- 24.
Gospel of Thomas, saying 20, The Bible.
- 25.
Karki, op.cit., 26. Translation mine.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Das, op.cit., 98.
- 28.
Ibid., 14.
- 29.
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), 168.
- 30.
C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 232.
- 31.
Ibid., 217–220.
- 32.
Such a conversation between the scientific spirit and the religio-mythical spirit is key to my argument here.
- 33.
R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), 150–155.
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Roy, K. (2017). Not by Bread Alone. In: Limits of the Secular. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48698-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-48698-7_5
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