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Mortal life seemed little more than a flame struck over the open ocean at night our minds shine but a brief, faint spotlight on the immensity of the world before sputtering into darkness again.Īs their frustration grew, India’s ancient inhabitants became obsessed with a new goal: changing our minds so as to alter the very nature of life and improve it from the bottom up. The answer lay in the public’s growing worry about existential problems.

Experts in the old Vedic ritual boasted skills in linguistics, geometry, anatomy, astronomy and poetry, and they had been observing the forces of nature for centuries – but to what end? How could they earn their keep in the new climate? Atheists, gnostics and sceptics were increasingly vocal in the kingdoms further east. But by around 600 BCE, the ability to perform rituals was no longer enough to win favour at the royal courts of the Gangetic Plain. Theirs were precisely the prayers we would expect of any early community struggling to survive. Why this high opinion of metaphysics – surely one of civilisation’s most impractical pursuits?Įarly Indians had pleaded with the gods for rain and cattle, sons and warriors, health and wealth we still have their words in the Vedas, some of the world’s oldest texts. In short, philosophy – metaphysical truths based on inference – was the key to humanity’s highest possibility and its greatest happiness. Far from being supernatural, this knowledge came from rigorous extrapolation to universal features of the cosmos using rational generalisation based on patterns in the visible world. The cosmos was an object of wonder that fascinated Indian thinkers.īut one group of thinkers took a uniquely rational approach, focusing on knowledge of the whole and how it affects us psychologically.

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To modern ears, these promises sound like esoteric mysticism, and it is true that the Sanskrit writings that have reached us from India in the 1st millennium BCE were full of rituals to harness the universe, hymns to ‘the whole’, and praises of the divine as ‘all of this’.

Thus, comprehending the widest reaches, he is able to ‘conquer the whole universe’. He ‘thinks of what has not been thought of before, and perceives what has not been perceived before’. When one knows that which is ‘woven upon the Whole – he becomes the Whole’.

Nearly 3,000 years ago, the ancient Indian authors of certain Upanishads (‘special teachings’) exhorted readers to find a fabled knowledge. Some of the world’s earliest writings suggest an unexpected goal for ambitious minds.