Dreams slip away

Dreams slip away. Not just the nightdreams, but our projects for the future, our visions for a better world or a better me, all these slip away. But fortunately I can actualize my thoughts and plans with concrete actions day after day, at least some of them if not all. If I dream to be a writer, can I write at least one page today? If I dream to be knowledgeable someday, can I read at least one page of a book today? If I dream to be a musician, can I practise that one part today? If I dream to achieve great things, can I at least do one thing today? If I dream to be a filmmaker, can I script one page today? If I dream to be a vlogger or a blogger someday, can I do just one piece today? If I dream to be a great orator, can I write / practise at least one speech today? If I dream to be a poet, can I write one verse, one stanza today? If I dream to be a teacher, can I be a good student today? If I dream to be a leader, can I do some good for the other today? If I dream to be someone tomorrow, can I take one step today? If I dream to be a religious one day, can I start praying today? If I dream to be a preacher someday, can I read one chapter of the Bible today? If I dream to be someone compassionate, can I lend my helping hand to someone today? Otherwise, dreams slip away. Lest my dreams become a nightmare… Perhaps in my dreams, I discern God’s call. Perhaps in my dreams, I realise God’s great dream for me.

Grace is not given, but poured out

The generosity of God can never be matched. He pours His love into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. Grace is poured into our hearts, not given according to the measure we deserve. Grace is gratuitous. God makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. His mercy is unfathomable.

Completing 49!

I'm completing 49 today. I remember Fr VV Paul writing about this... while completing his 49. I remember him writing that some saints passed away at this age of 49. They had accomplished much. 49 years was enough, or for some others, even less was enough to be a saint. Am I ready to go to the Father's house today? Holiness and death seem to be a distant reality, even today, even as I complete 49.

Diocese of Kohima - Golden Jubilee Prayer

 

DIOCESE OF KOHIMA – GOLDEN JUBILEE YEAR

(16 October 2022 - 29 October 2023)

 

Jubilee Prayer

 

O Most Holy Trinity—Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, we adore and thank you for the gift of life and faith, by which we are your children and disciples. We thank you and praise you for the love you manifested in a special way to the people of Nagaland through the creation of the diocese of Kohima-Imphal fifty years ago, that the joy of the Gospel and true faith in your Son may be proclaimed to everyone. We thank you for the gift of valiant missionaries – men and women.

As we prepare to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the diocese of Kohima empower us to be your true witnesses and proclaimers of the Gospel through our life and witness so that we may live for Christ and His Church. Give eternal happiness to all the bishops, priests, religious and laity who have, in one way or the other, helped the growth of the diocese, and have preceded us.

O Mary, our beloved Mother, Help of Christians and patroness of our diocese, intercede for us that we may open ourselves to the working of the Spirit. Teach us to ponder the Word, to live the Word and to take the Word to the hearts and places still unreached. Dear Mother, walk with us in our pilgrimage with your beloved spouse St Joseph, so that we will together face to face praise, honour and worship the most Holy Trinity, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, who live and reign for ever and ever. Amen.

Mary Help of Christians, Pray for us.

Philosophy of Mind - 502 Notes

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Behaviourism, Functionalism, Artificial Intelligence

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Identity Theory

The identity theory of mind holds that states and processes of the mind are identical to states and processes of the brain. Strictly speaking, it need not hold that the mind is identical to the brain. Idiomatically we do use ‘She has a good mind’ and ‘She has a good brain’ interchangeably but we would hardly say ‘Her mind weighs fifty ounces’. Here I take identifying mind and brain as being a matter of identifying processes and perhaps states of the mind and brain. Consider an experience of pain, or of seeing something, or of having a mental image. The identity theory of mind is to the effect that these experiences just are brain processes, not merely correlated with brain processes.

Some philosophers hold that though experiences are brain processes they nevertheless have fundamentally non-physical, psychical, properties, sometimes called ‘qualia’. Here I shall take the identity theory as denying the existence of such irreducible non-physical properties. Some identity theorists give a behaviouristic analysis of mental states, such as beliefs and desires, but others say that mental states are actual brain states. Identity theorists often describe themselves as ‘materialists’, but ‘physicalists’ may be a better word.

The identity theory (in its various forms) may be considered as an ontological physicalism. A physicalist could say that trees are complicated physical mechanisms.

In other words, the simplest proposal for explaining how the mental is nothing but the physical is the identity theory. In his classic paper “Materialism” (1963), the Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart proposed that every mental state is identical to a physical state in the same way as the episodes of lightning are identical to episodes of electrical discharge, for instance. The primary argument for this view is that it enables a kind of economy in one’s account of the different kinds of things in the world, as well as a unification of causal claims: mental events enter into causal relations with physical ones because in the end they are physical events themselves. This view is also called reductionism, which conveys the suggestion that the mental phenomenon is “made less” or reduced to being physical phenomenon.

In very simplified terms: a mental state M is nothing other than brain state B. The mental state desire for a cup of coffee would thus be nothing more than the firing of certain neurons in certain brain regions. On such a view, it would turn out that any two people with a desire for a cup of coffee would have a similar type of neuronal firing pattern in similar regions of the brain.

Summary of Identity Theory

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Goodnight Talk: Love heals the foundations of suffering

James Finley says, “In the light of eternity, we’re here for a very short time, really. We’re here for one thing, ultimately: to learn how to love, because God is love. Love is our origin, love is our ground, and love is our destiny. From the reciprocity of love, destiny is fulfilled, and the foundations of suffering are healed. Love and love alone has the authority to name who we are.”

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. However we view suffering and pain, it is necessary to accept them. The more we accept them, the better and more mature we will be.

Testimony of James Finley:

We cannot attain spiritual maturity if we are not able to integrate our pains and sufferings with our spiritual life. We must be even able to integrate the trauma and the abuses that we have experienced in our past.

I was raised in a home with a lot of trauma—physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—and I was very fragmented by all of it. I graduated from high school, ran away from home, joined a monastery, and became a monk.

When I entered the monastery, I thought I had left the trauma behind me. I was in this silent cloister, with Thomas Merton for my spiritual director. I was walking around reading the works of St John of the Cross, and I felt like I had reached my goal, really. And then I was sexually abused by one of the monks, my confessor. It completely shattered me. I never thought it was possible. I didn’t see it coming. I was not able to cope with the stress, and was very much disturbed: I was split in two. Now what was left of me were feelings of fear and confusion over which I didn’t have much control. There was no refuge for me. I didn’t tell anyone what had happened. I just left. I started a new life as a way to bury all the pain and move on.

Years later, I found myself in therapy and all hell broke loose. But with prayer and gentle pacing, I learned to see, feel, accept, and find my way through the long-term internalized effects of the trauma I had to endure in my childhood and adolescence. It was in this process that I came upon an intimate experience of who I am. By becoming vulnerable, by re-visiting the pain that I endured, I discovered the loving presence of God. The healing that I received by opening the wounds, was simultaneous with the discovery of God’s intimate presence, loving presence. When we risk sharing what hurts the most in the presence of someone who will not invade us or abandon us, we unexpectedly come upon within ourselves what Jesus calls the pearl of great price: the invincible preciousness of our self.

In the act of admitting what we are so afraid to admit—especially if admitting means admitting it in our body, where we feel it in painful waves—in that scary moment of feeling and sharing what we thought would destroy us, we unexpectedly discover within ourselves this invincible love that sustains us unexplainably in the midst of the painful situation we are in.

As we learn to trust in this paradoxical way God sustains us in our suffering, we are learning to connect our heart to God, who protects us from nothing. He protects us from nothing, rather exposes us to everything. But at the same time, He unexplainably and mysteriously sustains us in all things. As this process of transformation continues, we find within ourselves the gifts of courage, patience, and tenderness to deal with our hurts, pains, abuses, sufferings, trauma. To deal with them with love. To integrate them into love, so that they too become love. In this way, we can become a gift and miracle to the world with our very presence.

Cartesian Dualism

Descartes’ Dualism and the Problem of the Bridge

Dualism, simply put, is the belief that something is composed of two fundamentally different components. Descartes believed that a human person consisted of:

Matter/Body: The physical stuff that walks, talks, and lives a life.

Mind: The non-physical substance (sometimes equated with the soul) that thinks, doubts, and remembers things.

He introduced a division between mind and body in order to refute scepticism, using the method of universal doubt.

Descartes believed in a mechanistic view of the material world—that matter goes about its business and follows its own laws, except when it is interfered with by the mind. Human mind, then, simply makes the body act (like a machine). Exactly how the non-physical mind interacts with the physical body is a point of contention. Descartes believed that the pineal gland in the brain was the locus of interaction between the mind and body because he believed that this gland was the only part of the brain that wasn’t a duplicate.

It’s important to remember that, for Descartes, the brain and the mind are not the same thing. The brain serves, in part, as a connection between the mind and the body, but because it is a physical, changeable thing, it is not the actual mind. Our mind is whole and indivisible, whereas our body can be changed. You can cut your hair, remove your appendix, or even lose a limb, but that loss in no way reduces your mind.

Descartes also believed that human were the only dualistic creatures. He placed animals in the realm of the purely physical, mechanistic world, acting purely on instinct and on the laws of nature.

Descartes was led to his dualistic theories in part from his most famous philosophical endeavour—to place into doubt all that could be doubted in the hope of arriving at a basic, undeniable truth. That resulted in his famous Cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am. Descartes could doubt the existence of the physical world and that even his own body actually existed, but he could not doubt the idea that his mind existed because doubting is a thought process. The very act of doubting one’s existence proves that one actually exists; otherwise, who is doing the doubting?

Through his process of doubting, he recognized that, regardless of what the changeable physical world was really like, his mind was still whole and unchanged, and therefore somehow separate from that physical world.

For Descartes, mind has evident awareness of all its actions. This he calls the perfect transparency of the mind. A thought, for him, in the wide sense is defined as that of which I am immediately aware. He also analysed the content of his mind and discovered it contained certain innate ideas such as self, God, and substance.

Clear and Distinct Ideas

Descartes claimed that one cannot derive the idea of substance from observation precisely because perception can only generate qualities. Hence he had to posit the idea of substance as an innate idea. Such ideas are called innate because they have been implanted in us before our birth.

Moreover, clarity and distinctness are the marks of truth, the distinguishing characteristics by which we can tell the true from the false. Hence whatever is clearly and distinctly conceived is true. An experience or thought is clear and distinct if it is so forceful that we cannot avoid being aware of it.

As regards ideas that are not clear or distinct, we have no guarantee that what we believe is true. The faculty of judgement functions reliably in relation to the clear and distinct ideas that God has implanted in us. We make mistakes when we misuse our faculties. But we cannot make mistakes when we use them as God intends us to do.

The human mind can achieve systematic and certain knowledge by starting with knowing what is self-evident. God wanted us to direct our thoughts in an orderly manner, beginning with the simplest and most easily known objects and ascend little by little, step by step, to knowledge of the most complex.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Descartes held that I can be absolutely certain only of me as a mental substance that thinks. I have a clear and distinct idea about it.

According to him, even in our sleep we can observe that it is because of our thinking that we exist. We may dismiss the many things that come into our mind as dreams or illusions, but one thing is sure and necessary is that I whom am thinking is something. Without my existence, I cannot think. Therefore, observing this truth, we can say: “I am thinking, therefore I exist.” Descartes decided that he could accept this statement without scruple as the first principle of the philosophy that he was seeking.

Descartes finally concluded that the proposition, I am/I exist is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind. I am certain about this because I can clearly and distinctly see or understand what is being said.

Existence of God and World

One of the innate ideas we have is of a perfect being, God. We are merely finite, temporal creatures, and yet we have the idea of a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient and almighty. Descartes concluded that this idea can only be caused by something that possesses these perfections. Hence there must be a God who is perfect has implanted in me the idea of the perfect being. Now Descartes is certain of two truths: that he exists and God exists. He continued to search for further certainties and realized that if God is a perfect being, then He won’t deceive human beings because fraud and deception are imperfections and hence cannot be characteristics of a perfect being. If God is not a deceiver, then a great deal of the information that had earlier been considered suspect can now be considered reliable. All that is needed is to find out what God wants us to believe as true. Since he cannot deceive us we can place complete faith in the knowledge He gives us.

God has given us clear and distinct mathematical ideas like two plus two make four. Since God has forced this belief upon us, and since He cannot be a deceiver it must be true. We have divine guarantee here. “Every clear and distinct conception is certainly something, and therefore cannot come from nothing, but must necessarily come from God who is supremely perfect and cannot be the cause of any error.” Thus he concludes that the entire realm of mathematical knowledge is true.

But mathematical knowledge only gives me truths about concepts in my mind. Is it possible that I can also be certain that there is an external world? We cannot rely on their existence through our senses for they deceive us. However, in general it is quite clear and distinct to us and we have a strong inclination to believe that there is an external world of material bodies. Since the belief in the external world is a natural one, God would be deceiving us unless it is true. As God is not a deceiver there must be an external physical world. The properties that we can safely attribute it are the primary qualities which are clear and distinct; but we cannot know with certainty the indistinct or unclear features of the world, namely secondary qualities.

Critical Appraisal

Descartes’ picture of the world is hopelessly divided into substances that were defined in ways that mutually exclude each other. How could the mental world – a non-spatial, purely spiritual sphere – have any effect on the physical world of crass matter, and vice versa, in this radically dualistic scheme of things? He assigned all perceivable qualities to the mind and left only mathematically measurable quantities to the external world. Descartes replaced the commonsense view of the direct relation between self and the world with a most circuitous route of relating to the world through the mind.

Philosophy of Mind and Psychology

What is Philosophy?

Philosophy, being love of wisdom, is a quest for fundamental and ultimate answers with regard to reality (God, the human person and the world). Its scope is everything, all reality. Philosophy is the result of a personal struggle to understand the mystery of human existence, the endeavour to unravel the secrets of nature, to make sense out of the complicated business of life. The first knowledge of the world gained in childhood and adolescence becomes inadequate as the years go by.

This sets out to a search that is unending, a search that is never satisfied until truth is claimed as our possession. We may never understand fully the riddle of existence, but we can always make an effort to discover, to understand, as much as our human faculties are capable of. And that is what distinguishes a human being from animals. That is why s/he is the crown of creation.

To philosophise is to explore life. It means breaking free to ask questions. It means resisting easy answers. To philosophise is to seek in oneself the courage to ask painful questions.

Philosophy of Mind

Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties and consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body. The mind-body problem, namely, the question of how the mind relates to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind.

Philosophy of mind is specifically concerned with quite general questions about the nature of mental phenomena: for example, What is the nature of thought, feeling, perception, consciousness, and sensory experience?

Philosophy of mind also asks the following questions: Could a computer have a mind? What would it take to create a computer that could have a specific thought, emotion, or experience? Is Artifical Intelligence (AI) the same as human intelligence?

Mind

With the above in mind, let us ask ourselves what we mean by the term mind. We need to contrast it with other terms like matter, form, body, soul and consciousness.

Aristotle says that every physical object is a compound of matter and form. This doctrine is called “hylomorphism”. The terms form and matter describe a basic duality in all existence, between the essence or “whatness” of a thing (form) and the stuff that the thing is made of (matter). The set of soul and body is a special case of form and matter.

Soul is the principle of life in a living thing. It’s everything that makes you alive rather than dead. So if you look at a living body and compare it to a dead body, the difference is the soul. It’s a principle of organization, a principle of function. (Dead body means that body is dead… and soul is absent, though the soul is not dead. The dead body or cadaver is just a bunch of chemicals, waiting to decompose themselves sooner than later.)

And the spirit, in the Thomistic viewpoint, is the aspects of the soul that are not material. And that would be particularly the intellect, the rationality and the will. Loosely speaking, the soul is the principle of life in a body, and the spirit refers more to the immaterial aspects of the soul, which are the ability to understand, the ability to reason, and the ability to make decisions based on reason.

The ability to understand and the ability to reason are the mind. It is the knowing aspect in us. We experience, understand and judge things… this is the process of knowing. The spirit directed towards knowing is called the mind.

Mind is not the physical brain alone; though it has got some connection to the cerebral function. But mind in philosophy is the immaterial aspect of the soul, a dimension/part of the spirit, as directed towards knowing.

The mind colours everything that comes to us. We don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. There is nothing called pure knowledge, or a pure mind. No mind is a tabula rasa. Our mind rather is an active agent that colours, shapes and interprets the world. It is not a passive receptor of its experience. The mind possesses innate powers.

According to Kant, the human mind does not passively receive sense data, but it actively structures them. A human person, therefore, knows objective reality to the extent that reality conforms to the fundamental structures of the mind. All human knowledge of the world is channelled through the mind’s own categories. The mind does not conform to objects; rather, objects conform to the mind.

We will also study dreams, emotions and feelings. They hinder or enhance the workings of the mind; they do colour our dealings with the world.

Consciousness

What is consciousness? Is it the same as mind? Consciousness is a self-presence that accompanies knowing, willing, loving and acting… a self-presence that accompanies every act, thought, reflection and will of the doer. Only when we are in deep sleep or in coma there is no consciousness. Even while we are dreaming, we are conscious, even if our consciousness is fragmentary. Though it is closely related to the mind, consciousness is not the same as mind.

Dreams

Dreams are the expression of our sub-conscious or unconscious mind while we are asleep. They are the royal road to unconscious. Our dreams bring things out of our unconscious. Many things come out: fear, loneliness, loss, repugnance, peace, satisfaction, happiness, emptiness, grandeur, narrow-mindedness, emotions, grief, guilt, etc.

The meaning of the dream is its function. A dream has various functions: digestion of food, digestion of other appetites, digestion of emotions, feelings. It has the effect of catharsis on us, and balances our mind and body. Whatever is unexpressed or suppressed or repressed during our conscious moments, may find expression in a dream.

Philosophy of Mind and Empirical Psychology

The philosophical questions need to be distinguished from purely empirical investigations, like experimental psychology. Empirical psychologists are, by and large, concerned with discovering contingent facts about people and animals. The difference between empirical psychology and philosophy of mind is a difference between their methods: empirical psychology will use an empirical method that is based on observation, experimentation and verification. Philosophy would us a generalized empirical method, involving human consciousness, where its focus would be ultimate and fundamental questions.

What is psychology? It is the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, especially those affecting behaviour in a given context.

Sensations, for instance, seem essentially private and subjective, not open to the kind of public, objective inspection required of the subject matter of serious science. How would it be possible to find out what someone else’s private thoughts and feelings really are?

Could a computer have a mind? What would it take to create a computer that could have a specific thought, emotion, or experience?

Perhaps a computer could have a mind only if it were made up of the same kinds of neurons and chemicals of which human brains are composed. But this suggestion may seem crudely chauvinistic, rather like saying that a human being can have mental states only if his eyes are a certain colour. On the other hand, surely not just any computing device has a mind. Whether or not in the near future machines will be created that come close to being serious candidates for having mental states, focusing on this increasingly serious possibility is a good way to begin to understand the kinds of questions addressed in the philosophy of mind.

Experiencing the Sacred

There is no secret formula to experiencing the sacred in our lives. It just takes practice and practicality. The deep truth of our lives and the fullness we are striving for don’t happen with someone giving us the code to deep knowledge. Meaning and faith are not secret things. Sometimes what we need most is to remind one another of how the divine is all around us, calling us to see and taste it for ourselves. (Becca Stevens)

Presentation - Hermeneutics - MPh

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God is Trinity

Our images of God become more fluid as we grow in spiritual maturity. Imagination is more important than knowledge.—Einstein. We may have to abandon some images that are unhelpful. (stern judge, far-away king, policeman ready to catch us, male, old man with a beard; God is the one who punishes me.)

We will have to accept new images, we will have to discover other helpful images: God is our Mother. God is our Grandmother. God is our Lover. God is our Friend. We may have to change the way we think about God, the way we imagine God, if we have to grow spiritually. Why do I say this? Because: God comes to each of us in unique ways throughout our lives.

Our experience of God is utterly personal. God speaks to our heart. He speaks to the depth of our being. Deep speaks to deep. Heart speaks to heart.

We can give a thousand names and more to God. Today the Church gives us this image: God is Trinity. = God is Love. God is a flow of relationships among the three persons. God is Relationship. (and a perfect relationship is love!) Father. Son. Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is the loving relationship between the Father and the Son. Unconditional Love. Unconditional Forgiveness. Unconditional Presence. God-for-us. God-with-us. God-within-us.

 The Greek church fathers: God is a circle dance. Perichoresis. Flow of relationships… St Augustine: They are each in each and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one. Names are interchangeable.

Let us make the human person in our own image.... Dynamism is seen here already.

In the second reading, Paul tells us: God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us (Rom 5:5).

You see, God is not a concept, not an idea. He is a Person. We need to fall in love with this Person. Who has dynamism*within: eternal flow of love. = Circle dance.

God is the Being whose centre is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.—St Bonaventure.

We have to break through our ideas about God to find out who God really is. All we have to lose are the *false images* of God that do not serve us and are too small.

God loves you 100%. You are mixture of good and bad, light and darkness: but God still totally loves you. You are not perfectly a loving person, but God still totally loves you. God’s loves is given to us freely. We can never merit God’s love. We can never earn God’s love.

The foundational good news is that all of creation and all of humanity have been drawn into this loving flow (no exceptions)! 

There is a fourth person of the Trinity. Do you know who? The Creation. We all. We are not outsiders or spectators but inherently part of the divine dance.

God is a mystery. Mystery is something that can be understood endlessly. God cannot be known with our intellect and mind. But with our heart. He refuses to reveal himself to our mind, to our learnedness… But He can be only known through our love.

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Comforter and Helper to be with you forever, the Spirit of Truth. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides within you, and he will be in you. —Jn 14:16–17.

The pandemic is a portal (Arundhati Roy)

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’

April 3, 2020 by Arundhati Roy

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats, risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’ dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners? Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or how much they’ve suffered.

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health. And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid for the White House, even by his own party.

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists?

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade, Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a great deal of time.

Then there were the Delhi Assembly elections that the Bharatiya Janata Party was slated to lose unless it upped its game, which it did, unleashing a vicious, no-holds-barred Hindu nationalist campaign, replete with threats of physical violence and the shooting of “traitors”.

It lost anyway. So then there was punishment to be meted out to Delhi’s Muslims, who were blamed for the humiliation. Armed mobs of Hindu vigilantes, backed by the police, attacked Muslims in the working-class neighbourhoods of north-east Delhi. Houses, shops, mosques and schools were burnt. Muslims who had been expecting the attack fought back. More than 50 people, Muslims and some Hindus, were killed.

Thousands moved into refugee camps in local graveyards. Mutilated bodies were still being pulled out of the network of filthy, stinking drains when government officials had their first meeting about Covid-19 and most Indians first began to hear about the existence of something called hand sanitizer.

March was busy too. The first two weeks were devoted to toppling the Congress government in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and installing a BJP government in its place. On March 11 the World Health Organization declared that Covid-19 was a pandemic. Two days later, on March 13, the health ministry said that corona “is not a health emergency”.

Finally, on March 19, the Indian prime minister addressed the nation. He hadn’t done much homework. He borrowed the playbook from France and Italy. He told us of the need for “social distancing” (easy to understand for a society so steeped in the practice of caste) and called for a day of “people’s curfew” on March 22. He said nothing about what his government was going to do in the crisis, but he asked people to come out on their balconies, and ring bells and bang their pots and pans to salute health workers.

He didn’t mention that, until that very moment, India had been exporting protective gear and respiratory equipment, instead of keeping it for Indian health workers and hospitals.

Not surprisingly, Narendra Modi’s request was met with great enthusiasm. There were pot-banging marches, community dances and processions. Not much social distancing. In the days that followed, men jumped into barrels of sacred cow dung, and BJP supporters threw cow-urine drinking parties. Not to be outdone, many Muslim organisations declared that the Almighty was the answer to the virus and called for the faithful to gather in mosques in numbers.

On March 24, at 8pm, Modi appeared on TV again to announce that, from midnight onwards, all of India would be under lockdown. Markets would be closed. All transport, public as well as private, would be disallowed.

He said he was taking this decision not just as a prime minister, but as our family elder. Who else can decide, without consulting the state governments that would have to deal with the fallout of this decision, that a nation of 1.38bn people should be locked down with zero preparation and with four hours’ notice? His methods definitely give the impression that India’s prime minister thinks of citizens as a hostile force that needs to be ambushed, taken by surprise, but never trusted.

Locked down we were. Many health professionals and epidemiologists have applauded this move. Perhaps they are right in theory. But surely none of them can support the calamitous lack of planning or preparedness that turned the world’s biggest, most punitive lockdown into the exact opposite of what it was meant to achieve.

The man who loves spectacles created the mother of all spectacles.

As an appalled world watched, India revealed herself in all her shame — her brutal, structural, social and economic inequality, her callous indifference to suffering.

The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly illuminated hidden things. As shops, restaurants, factories and the construction industry shut down, as the wealthy and the middle classes enclosed themselves in gated colonies, our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens — their migrant workers — like so much unwanted accrual.

Many driven out by their employers and landlords, millions of impoverished, hungry, thirsty people, young and old, men, women, children, sick people, blind people, disabled people, with nowhere else to go, with no public transport in sight, began a long march home to their villages. They walked for days, towards Badaun, Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow, Gorakhpur — hundreds of kilometres away. Some died on the way.

Our towns and megacities began to extrude their working-class citizens like so much unwanted accrual

They knew they were going home potentially to slow starvation. Perhaps they even knew they could be carrying the virus with them, and would infect their families, their parents and grandparents back home, but they desperately needed a shred of familiarity, shelter and dignity, as well as food, if not love.

As they walked, some were beaten brutally and humiliated by the police, who were charged with strictly enforcing the curfew. Young men were made to crouch and frog jump down the highway. Outside the town of Bareilly, one group was herded together and hosed down with chemical spray.

A few days later, worried that the fleeing population would spread the virus to villages, the government sealed state borders even for walkers. People who had been walking for days were stopped and forced to return to camps in the cities they had just been forced to leave.

Among older people it evoked memories of the population transfer of 1947, when India was divided and Pakistan was born. Except that this current exodus was driven by class divisions, not religion. Even still, these were not India’s poorest people. These were people who had (at least until now) work in the city and homes to return to. The jobless, the homeless and the despairing remained where they were, in the cities as well as the countryside, where deep distress was growing long before this tragedy occurred. All through these horrible days, the home affairs minister Amit Shah remained absent from public view.

When the walking began in Delhi, I used a press pass from a magazine I frequently write for to drive to Ghazipur, on the border between Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

The scene was biblical. Or perhaps not. The Bible could not have known numbers such as these. The lockdown to enforce physical distancing had resulted in the opposite — physical compression on an unthinkable scale. This is true even within India’s towns and cities. The main roads might be empty, but the poor are sealed into cramped quarters in slums and shanties.

Every one of the walking people I spoke to was worried about the virus. But it was less real, less present in their lives than looming unemployment, starvation and the violence of the police. Of all the people I spoke to that day, including a group of Muslim tailors who had only weeks ago survived the anti-Muslim attacks, one man’s words especially troubled me. He was a carpenter called Ramjeet, who planned to walk all the way to Gorakhpur near the Nepal border.

“Maybe when Modiji decided to do this, nobody told him about us. Maybe he doesn’t know about us”, he said.

“Us” means approximately 460m people.

State governments in India (as in the US) have showed more heart and understanding in the crisis. Trade unions, private citizens and other collectives are distributing food and emergency rations. The central government has been slow to respond to their desperate appeals for funds. It turns out that the prime minister’s National Relief Fund has no ready cash available. Instead, money from well-wishers is pouring into the somewhat mysterious new PM-CARES fund. Pre-packaged meals with Modi’s face on them have begun to appear.

In addition to this, the prime minister has shared his yoga nidra videos, in which a morphed, animated Modi with a dream body demonstrates yoga asanas to help people deal with the stress of self-isolation.

The narcissism is deeply troubling. Perhaps one of the asanas could be a request-asana in which Modi requests the French prime minister to allow us to renege on the very troublesome Rafale fighter jet deal and use that €7.8bn for desperately needed emergency measures to support a few million hungry people. Surely the French will understand.

As the lockdown enters its second week, supply chains have broken, medicines and essential supplies are running low. Thousands of truck drivers are still marooned on the highways, with little food and water. Standing crops, ready to be harvested, are slowly rotting.

The economic crisis is here. The political crisis is ongoing. The mainstream media has incorporated the Covid story into its 24/7 toxic anti-Muslim campaign. An organisation called the Tablighi Jamaat, which held a meeting in Delhi before the lockdown was announced, has turned out to be a “super spreader”. That is being used to stigmatise and demonise Muslims. The overall tone suggests that Muslims invented the virus and have deliberately spread it as a form of jihad.

The Covid crisis is still to come. Or not. We don’t know. If and when it does, we can be sure it will be dealt with, with all the prevailing prejudices of religion, caste and class completely in place.

Today (April 2) in India, there are almost 2,000 confirmed cases and 58 deaths. These are surely unreliable numbers, based on woefully few tests. Expert opinion varies wildly. Some predict millions of cases. Others think the toll will be far less. We may never know the real contours of the crisis, even when it hits us. All we know is that the run on hospitals has not yet begun.

India’s public hospitals and clinics — which are unable to cope with the almost 1m children who die of diarrhoea, malnutrition and other health issues every year, with the hundreds of thousands of tuberculosis patients (a quarter of the world’s cases), with a vast anaemic and malnourished population vulnerable to any number of minor illnesses that prove fatal for them — will not be able to cope with a crisis that is like what Europe and the US are dealing with now.

All healthcare is more or less on hold as hospitals have been turned over to the service of the virus. The trauma centre of the legendary All India Institute of Medical Sciences in Delhi is closed, the hundreds of cancer patients known as cancer refugees who live on the roads outside that huge hospital driven away like cattle.

People will fall sick and die at home. We may never know their stories. They may not even become statistics. We can only hope that the studies that say the virus likes cold weather are correct (though other researchers have cast doubt on this). Never have a people longed so irrationally and so much for a burning, punishing Indian summer.

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

Transvaluation of Values (Keith D'Souza, SJ)

The present crisis has served to transvalue the jaded values of our world:

Personally:

o   We have been compelled to slow down and to change our lifestyles

o   We realize how we have taken our many freedoms for granted

o   In a situation of scarce resources, we become more aware of, and grateful for the otherwise insignificant aspects and graces of life

Domestically:

o   There has never been as much time and opportunity to relate with our loved ones

o   The young have a better chance to express their playfulness and curiosity, and the old to offer their wisdom and care

Intellectually and academically:

o   Home-schooling and domestic value education may soon become the new normal

o   The development of personal skillsets may gradually supersede the need for a long, laborious, and often unfocused formal education

o   Educational and entertainment resources are shared more willingly, calling into question the notion of “intellectual property rights”

Economically:

o   We recognize how we have taken our services for granted: especially the hidden and underpaid services of manual, monotonous, “unskilled” and unorganized labour

o   We live in two intertwined nations: India and Bharat. We have overvalued and overpaid India, while exploiting Bharat to the utmost

Politically:

o   Geo-political boundaries and turf wars don’t make sense anymore: we are more interrelated and co-dependent than we think

o   Power lies at the peripheries, where local leaders and communities are better able to decide how to live life fully and in harmony with others

o   We are better able to distinguish between leaders who unite versus those who thrive on suspicion and division

Organizationally:

o   We can lighten our travel-based carbon footprint enormously, by hosting national and international meetings online

o   We could do more work from home, causing less local pollution and reducing unnecessary intensity, stress and hype related to work

Ethically:

o   Our new heroes are not those who have money, power, fame or educational degrees, but those who are willing to reach out and help

o   Our true character and values emerge in such crises, and are reflected in the choices we make, as persons and as communities

Environmentally:

o   The earth is slowly beginning to heal and rejuvenate itself

o   We are more able to recognize the presence and beauty of other life forms

Existentially:

o   We are obliged to consider the purpose and value of life, without being able to escape into our usual distractions and addictions

o   Perhaps the most important learning of all is our vulnerability: life is fragile and mysterious, and we are not entirely in control of it

We are neither masters of our destiny nor slaves of harsh natural forces: we have before us a chance to co-create a new set of values, lifestyles and relationships, based on our new learnings.