Yes it’s probably more effective if people have authenticity in everything they do. Appreciate you saying Hinduism is a word made up by white people, I think the essence of that is that the English speaking so-called elite place an unnatural importance on the value of the word to actually convey things.

One astute person offers a historically sensitive accurate pronunciation of gañ, and additionally the Gaṇapataye would have a retroflexed ‘n’ where the tip of the tongue goes back.

More accurate pronunciation is another import from the guru which would keep the precision of the sounds were you to view them on a spectogram.

Sounds have a “fingerprint”. I must add that the term “mantra” is mostly pronounced inappropriately by most, the ‘a’ is pronounced ‘uh’ (as spelt in many English accents), so probably a better Roman alphabet spelling for this for people with northern accents and usually rounder vowels would be “muhntruh”. Jewish and Celtic people wouldn’t themselves use the term mantra, so why do people on their behalf say mantra for cultures other than South Indian?

This makes important points towards the topic of appropriation.

We must acknowledge our position of privilege and for me personally that means without awareness of my conditions, I may simply appropriate other’s truth in sweeping statements which don’t take ownership that the fact presented is in fact mainly my opinion. Or like these men above, seem to have no idea what the symbology and significant of a particular dress is. This is an obvious and grotesque ignorance but when we discuss cultural ideas it gets more complicated than seeing someone appropriate a material thing, its malformation can be much more hidden.

Until I have learnt to abstractly understand other’s perspective of truth into a way I can at least try to meet in a shared behaviour of ethics, I will likely cause culturally insensitive harm.

When we worry about the technologies and tools of culture’s faiths other than our own, how can we really be sure we are not just seeing the muddied mirror of being conditioned by our society? Which sad to say, for mainstream white culture still seems to be enough unawareness to allow systemic racism to occur.

Parts of our human family are so blocked, numb and uneducated in emotional literacy and cultural intrigue, that cruelty towards peoples cultures and faith too often goes unchecked. We have a palatably inept mass of humanity which really makes the small amount of us switching onto deeper truths look really advanced! But it’s not advanced, it’s natural and borne of a securely attached upbringing and a bare minimum of openness of mind, which many of us are catching up on by offering something of this to ourselves and more so our parents even.

Our ancestral work in Albion has a big old murky graveyard of closets to get through during that mad stretch or near history behind us. I see many getting there and happy for these places and these chats.

Final thing I love about the metaphysical and philosophical discourse of particularly precolonial India; was that of enriching of a shared experience of samadhi and the intellect to hold us through enlightening processes was developed especially because the culture of the place. Outside of the artificially named tribal divisions of say, priests of Vedanta, monks and nuns of Buddha faiths, yogis, renunciates, sages, scholars, tantris and bhaktas, these people lived side by side and would challenge with laser-like wisdom the undulating roots of these people separated by ideas and concepts, but together in ethics of place, learning to not only live but thrive in the rich spiritual “gene pool” of practice and application of ideas.

What makes white supremacy partly what I see is that it thinks it can capture words which define experiences. It doesn’t know how, let alone violent this thinking is and cannot see how one dimensionally it is mutating ideas into its own linear and unconscious presumption, therefore one seeming escape is constantly seeking the exotic.

Rather than simply appreciating the connection which is evident between and amongst us all, convincingly as an individual, but the wise of us understand that they’re unlimited to concepts, let alone a body. So not only religious praxis teaches us to check our conditions but more importantly the culture of ethics, shared discourse and openness to other ways shows us as modern Western cultured people to really check ourselves, regularly.

But let us not foreshadow our responsibilities and agency we already know. In a recent question on the topic, Dave mentioned we reached out to Ifa practitioners and the Dené elder, Woman Stands Shining before singing their traditional songs. But haven’t heard back from her actually. We checked in with dear brother in Yellowstone, Shield of the Feather and his response to singing the Grandmother calling song…”what does your heart say?”. I asked a many Nigerian people about singing Yemoja and the response was never no, it was, guess what, “what does your heart say?” So we must remember in this dip of the toe into an ocean of riches, that our outward object of devotion and concentration are reflecting back our capacity to imagine beyond our ideas of form and limit.

This reminds me of the culturally codified(written) importance placed by sage Patañjāli, “tatra pratyakṣānumānāgamāḥ pramāṇāni” (प्रत्यक्षानुमानागमाः प्रमाणानि), meaning to say the most important source of knowledge for the individualised consciousness is, direct perception. So these ethics show that one cannot know more than or better than another but may simply have an illuminate view, shrouded with less arbitrary interpretation influencing their understandings and intake of new knowledge. This is an important branch of knowledge called epistemic that is the investigation of “how do we know what we know”? 

To me as a conditioned being of the West, unless we’re blessed with these sort of intellectual challenges during our development, many adults come to points where they rarely question their own beliefs or have the capacity to therefore self develop, instead simply reframing the old experience and transplanting onto their immediate assumptions about what they think they really know.

Chance are many people resist the exercise of deeply challenging their own beliefs as a matter of convenience. And then they go into a rude awakening when the truth comes back in perplexing manners of ways.

When I perform Arti on the गणेश (Gaṇesha) and I see the idol of the avatar, do I know deeply that he is a representation of what I can delimit into my own understanding of the benevolent wise, remover of obstacles? Can I see the symbol of that and know it is a reflection of my creator aspect to try to form reason and understanding of the truly mysterious seemingly untamable, unnamable everlasting experience of knowing?

If I look and see an elephant god who I believe is external to me, I will have to be a sar-guna bhatka, one who worships divinity in a specific ‘form’ thereby one external representation of the divine. If like I did, see the symbol before me as an object of devotion and representation of my innate qualities and relationship with the divine in all it’s forms, I may be said to be practicing bhakti in the nir-guna sense, knowing devotion is a call to divine in its many forms, inner and outer, including expression through my heart and cognising the grand symbol of something larger before me, a chance to expand my consciousness through knowledge. But again let us recall these terms and classifications are undoubtedly from scholars of the. traditions and not a fair representative of themselves. That can only be known through direct knowledge, such as entering into a relationship with, that which one seeks to know. One must remain aware the limits of what one can know to avoid the danger of foolhardy assumption.

When we understand the symbols and repeat like Japa, the rituals we can supplant deeper self understanding into the object of our devotion, and with hope allow their divinity to suffuse our heightened taste for deeper meaning.