Wholeness Unfolding

1 D. Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, New York, Columbia University Pres s, 1995, p. 24. 2 Ibid. p. 25. 3 B. Heiman, Facets of Indian Thought, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1964, cited in D. Eck, Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 25. 4 D. Eck, p. 10. Hinduism is sometimes described as the world’s oldest religion. But it is, rather than one coherent religion, a synthesis of various cultures and traditions with very diverse roots, and is colored by a radical multiplicity. These traditions were termed Hinduism by British colonials and were later adopted by the Indian society. Its broad range of philosophies, no matter how different in their way of approaching spiritual realization, share some common cosmological concepts. One of them is the Divine presence in the physical world inherent to the notion of Brahman, the undivided whole.1

One of the ways multiplicity is expressed in Hinduism is through its polytheism. The rich variety of Hindu deities is visible everywhere in India, and each God is elaborately praised in their own individual hymns, as the creator and sustainer of all. The ostensibly kaleidoscopic picture drawn by this pluralism, should, however, not be seen as a representation of a fragmentized cosmology. The German indologist Betty Heiman uses the image of a crystal to describe the multiplex whole common to Hindu cosmology, through which diversity is acting as a uniting factor, rather than a dividing one.2

Whatever Man sees, has seen or will see, is just one facet only of a crystal. Each of these facets from its due angle provides a correct viewpoint, but none of them alone gives an accurate all-comprehensive picture. Each serves in its proper place to grasp the Whole, and all of them combined come nearer to its full grasp. However, even the sum of them all does not exhaust all hidden possibilities of approach.3

The notion of “Wholeness” in Hinduism is represented by Brahman, the unified and unbroken whole, or the world soul. According to Hindu philosophy, Brahman is expressed in various ways through every manifestation of life - in nature, people, birth, growth, and death. Thus every fragment of the universe is believed to, in itself, carry Wholeness and contain all of the information of the whole.4 In the well-known mantra from Isha Upanishad this notion is expressed as follows:

Om That is whole This is whole From Wholeness emerges Wholeness

Wholeness subtracted from Wholeness Wholeness still remains5

Everything that exists in the world are exuberant transformations of the One Brahman. As everything is indeed believed to exist in everything, a quite fractal notion, the idea of the Divine as something invisible or intangible would be a foreign notion for a lot of Hindus.6

The connection between the inner, true nature of everything, and the world soul, is bound up with the notion of an all-containing unity (known as the cosmic egg) as the source of creation.7 The coming into being is understood as taking place through the sequential emergence, or successive bursting forth, from one form to another, everything inseparable from everything else.

5 Isha Upanishad, invocation 6 D. Eck, p. 10. 7 A. Hardy, The Temple Architecture of India, Hoboken, Wiley, 2017, p. 46.