A man once bought an ornate antique birdcage to decorate his home. He carefully restored it through spending an entire day cleaning and polishing it. Inside the cage was a bird, but he took no notice of that, not even bothering to feed it. When he proudly displayed his birdcage to his friends, they were shocked to see that despite the beauty of the cage the poor bird inside was dying of hunger.
Arjuna's position has obvious parallels with today's overwhelming environmental and social problems. Like Arjuna, we find ourselves in a position of danger where confusion obscures our path and our duty is not clear. We have created a civilization of great complexity in which our economic and social needs are intricately woven into a global web of cause and effect over which we have less and less control. The whole edifice, being based upon the principle of trying to replace the natural order with an artificial one aimed at satisfying material desires, is highly insecure. We are trying to solve our problems by making constant adjustments to the balance of life, without any clear knowledge of what the consequences may be. We stumble on without knowing where we are going.
Western culture has effectively built a very elaborate cage in which the human spirit is now languishing, imprisoned by its own material excesses. Despite its sophistication, this civilization has failed to see the inner meaning of life, and the human-'bird in the cage' is dying.
In the great cycle of the Mahabharata, the epic history of old India, spiritual teachings are set in the classic tradition of the teacher showing the disciple the path to true wisdom. At the heart of the epic is the Bhagavad Gita, the 'Song of God', in which Krishna teaches his warrior friend, Arjuna, who is presented with an awful dilemma: whether to fight in battle against his own relatives and dear friends, or to allow the forces of evil to over-run his kingdom. Taking this as a metaphor, Arjuna finds himself. He says to Krishna, "I'm confused; I'm frightened; I don't know what to do or who I can trust. Please advise me."
The further we progress along this path, the deeper our disillusion becomes. In a survey of public opinion in Britain conducted by the Daily Telegraph in August 1991, 42% of people asked said that they would be prepared to give up all the benefits of modern science and technology in order to have a natural way of life in a world that is free from pollution. We think that we are making progress, but our progress is like that of the deer in the desert, who chases after a mirage. The poor animal runs deeper and deeper into the desert until it can go no further. Led on by its burning thirst, trapped by its blindness and misjudgment, it eventually lies down to die in the wilderness.
Western civilization needs to rediscover the balance and harmony which it has lost. We must take advantage of the fact that we are now a global community and are no longer limited to learning from only one tradition. There are many sources of wisdom left to us all over the world. The West has much to learn from the wisdom traditions of India. Having exposed most of the rest of the world to our own traditions, and having largely abandoned them ourselves, we now need to learn from others; to put aside our swords and guns, our computers and microscopes, our cars and televisions, and have the courage and the vision to journey in new territory where these seemingly indispensable aids may be of little value.
Reincarnation is a good example of a teaching which has been largely ignored by Western civilization, despite the fact that it has always existed in one form or another in the unofficial religions of our countries. It is important because it stresses the equality of all life forms and their transience too. It does not support the human-centered culture of the West which permits human society to terrorise the animal kingdom and dominate the cycles of nature for its own convenience. Nor does it support the empire-building mania of the European societies, who wanted to possess as much of the world as they could, believing that they only had one life in which to do it all. It is these attitudes that have encouraged us in our present path of industrial and technological war upon nature and the world.