Will - 4/27 - Ghosh

According to the text I read by Huston Smith, Hinduism acknowledges that people have desires.  The basic desires are for pleasure and material success, which are insufficient goals because they are purely selfish.  Some people move away from these goals to a life of duty (to one's family, community, the Raja, etc.).  Duty fails as an ultimate goal because family, community, and all worldly life is finite and tragic.  One is left with the desire for liberation, which is the goal of Hinduism.  There are limits to liberation like physical and psychological pain, boredom, ignorance, and death, but these can all be overcome.  To be liberated is to be without limits, to transcend the human, to find the true SELF at the core of one's being beneath all the distractions of the world and false egotism.  With liberation comes infinite being (as opposed to death), awareness (knowledge, answers), and joy (as opposed to futility).

In the novel, it seems that all of the characters desire liberation with the exception of Burnham who is content with pleasure and success.  The Smith article describes how there different paths to liberation which correspond with different types of people:  the path through knowledge for reflective people, the path through love for emotional people, the path through works for active people, and the path through psychological exercise for pragmatic/experimental people.  All the paths converge on an identical liberation.  In the novel all the characters travel through different paths that converge on the Ibis.  It's tempting to categorize characters into which path they take:  Neel through knowledge and reflection, Zachary through action, Paulette through experimentation, Deeti through love.  Baboo Nob Kissin (victim of many dick jokes) is harder to categorize though.  Is he achieving liberation through dilligent works?  Through channeling his prodigious love of Taramony toward God?  The other characters become harder to categorize once you start thinking about them more.  They may all be on the path through love, which is described as the most popular path.