I recently attended a small portion of a Hindu Sangam program held in Cupertino. Didn’t spend as much time there as I originally intended, but I did get to listen to a talk given by Swami Paramahamsa Nithyananda. He was well-recognized by the predominantly Indian crowd who packed the small auditorium to see and listen to this young self-realized master. I had never heard of him until this program, so I was curious as to how he would come across and what message he would present.
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After being respectfully introduced, he walked to the stage without fanfare and sat behind a table to begin his discourse. Throughout the talk he kept repeating the phrase “utility value” which I took to be a quirky translation for “practical value”. I found out later that the term “utility value” actually refers to the personal value received in exchange for the effort. What he emphasized, then, were the benefits received by living according to Hindu principles - even just growing up exposed to Hindu principles, whether devoted to them or not.
At one point in the talk, he described a study that attempted to categorize people’s thoughts in an effort to better understand the human mind. People involved in the study were asked to sit for a period of time (I can’t remember if it was five minutes or fifteen minutes) and write down whatever thoughts came into their head. Those thoughts were then put into various categories such as fear, worry, or self-healing. About 70% of the thoughts from test subjects who grew up in ‘western’ culture fell into the fear and worry categories, while about 70% of the thoughts from test subjects who grew up in the Indian culture fell into the self-healing category. Swami Nithyananda attributed that to such Hindu teachings as that of reincarnation. He emphasized that these weren’t people who meditated for hours a day or who lived in isolation on a mountaintop. These were average people who happened to have grown up in the Indian culture. But the exposure to such teachings as reincarnation affected their outlook on life in a positive way, and instead of their thoughts being filled with worry and fear, their thoughts were of the ’self-healing’ kind designed to make one feel good.
This struck me as very ironic, in that for years I had been exposed to the teaching that it is the belief in the hope of a resurrection to a paradise earth that is of most benefit emotionally and psychologically. The problem is that along with that teaching is the pressure to get it all right in this lifetime. The same pressure exists within any religious teaching of a permanent reward or punishment to be meted out at the end of one’s life. But that pressure is off if you believe that you’ll get other chances. Apparently, even among those who are more scientifically bent and profess not to believe in any religion, their upbringing in an environment where reincarnation is the predominant view of the afterlife - instead of a permanent heaven or hell - has resulted in profound benefits to them.
He concluded his discourse by pointing out that these teachings have been freely available for thousands of years and are not ‘copyrighted’. The teachings serve all who follow them, and for those that do, the primary purpose and benefit is to preserve it for future generations. Speaking for myself, there is indeed much utility value in the Hindu dharma, the perennial philosophy, the eternal way, and it is something that must be experienced in order to be appreciated.
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