Abraham Kenmore
Contributing Writer
For Uma Viswanathan, as for many people, her faith underlies and roots her work in philanthropy and activism.
But as a Hindu, she said, the particular gifts and insights of her faith are often overlooked in America — even in interfaith conversations — ignoring powerful insights in a moment of global crises.
“How often have you been to an interfaith event and heard from a Hindu speaker?” she asked during her lecture Wednesday afternoon in the Hall of Philosophy as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series Week One theme “Potluck Nation: Why We Need Each Other to Thrive,” presented in partnership with Interfaith America. “My being Hindu is a gift in this time of paradox and churn and change, and that’s what I’m here to share with you.”
Viswanathan had a long path to her current work — first studying psychology at Harvard, then becoming a certified meditation and breathwork instructor, then coming to the world of philanthropy, where she has worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and W.K. Kellogg Foundation and most recently the New Pluralists.
Throughout it all, she said, her experience as an American-born Hindu has guided and pushed her.
Born in New York, Viswanathan would fly with her sister to India each summer, learning how to navigate, appreciate and critique two different cultures.
A lifelong vegetarian as “intentional expression of compassion,” Viswanathan was baffled by American friends who cherished their pets while eating hamburgers. She was also disturbed by the treatment of a great aunt in India who was widowed at age 12 and had been forbidden to remarry and have children of her own.
“I found a way to be able to navigate being part of two cultures that had aspects about them that I couldn’t fully accept, and yet at the same time, I didn’t need to reject them altogether,” she said.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, she learned how to code psychological data — tagging and sorting subjects by race, class and gender.
“I remember being so perplexed by this. How is it that we’re supposed to understand people by taking away the things that made us unique?” she said. “It wasn’t my experience of all of these people that I knew — from my time in India, the people that I hung out with in my dorm room — (who) were just full of so much complexity and messiness.”
Viswanathan earned her bachelor’s, then a master’s, then started a doctorate of psychology — maybe, she said, she could earn her Ph.D. and change the system. But she wanted to research the mental health benefits of devotion and surrender; her adviser told her she would need an established career focused on more legitimate issues before tackling something so “esoteric.”
“I remember thinking, wow, so this belief system that my family holds and they have passed down to me, that millions of people, in their own ways, are expressing — that is protecting them, that is giving them comfort, is just not credible?” she said.
Eventually Viswanathan quit her doctorate program. She dove into yoga and meditation, studying under Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. She became a meditation instructor and worked with thousands of people of all different ages and experiences — including people in prisons and leaving gangs.
“I got to experience, by working with thousands of people, that there’s an infinite amount of diversity in who we are and how we experience the world, and at the same time I got to directly experience that we are all family,” she said.
Viswanathan was also able to see first hand the way some people were given far more opportunities than others — even if the opportunities did not necessarily make them happier people. She began running a leadership institute in Oakland and from there found her way into philanthropy, doing work she loved.
Around 2016, however, she felt that something began to “sour” in the progressive spaces she was in.
“I remember actually sitting in a gathering of funders who were all committed to advancing a culture of belonging … and again in the presentations, I kept hearing people say the word ‘they,’ ” Viswanathan said. “‘We have to fight them. They are doing this to us. We have to fight back.’ And this question just kept coming up in my head, like, who’s ‘they’?”
Viswanathan found this us and “they” division too flat, too dismissive, too dehumanizing. She asked the audience to reflect on how they have used this “they” in their own life and explained why she wanted to move beyond it.
“My faith is what makes me capable of being a pluralist, building new futures by moving through tension and conflict and paradox across vast differences,” she said. “So I’d like to invite you in to see the world through my Hindu eyes.”
Seeing this worldview is about more than representation, Viswanathan said. Hinduism is the faith tradition of roughly one-sixth of the world’s population. To not understand it is to miss important insights that can help reach beyond divisions.
For her talk, Viswanathan highlighted three key beliefs that are at the core of this Hindu belief system.
The first is there is no other — no duality between creator and created, just a universal divine consciousness covered by an illusion of separation.
“Non-duality doesn’t mean sameness, doesn’t mean one-ness in a flattened way,” she said. “It means that everything that we experience, the full range of diversity, is an expression of one underlying consciousness, like a wave in the ocean is distinct but inseparable.”
The second key insight is that the self transcends identity. People in this view are made up of seven layers — the body, the breath, the mind, the intellect, the memory, the ego and finally the self. It is not that body and memory and experience are meaningless, but that there is a self beyond them, too.
“Now think about how discourses on diversity are often asking us to identify ourselves according to our physical form, our perceptions, our judgments of experiences, our memories and stories, and yet they are constantly changing,” she said. “Hinduism invites us to see the self as something that is tireless and changeless, that exists beyond all that.”
The third insight is that love is our existence. One way people can grow closer to the divine in Hinduism, in fact, is by cultivating love and relationships, using them as a “training ground for ultimate love.”
Viswanathan ended by sharing how as a young girl she learned how to pray at the family altar, to offer devotion and connect to this tradition of thousands of years, practicing that sense of reverence and surrender that helps to cut through the separations of daily life.
“We don’t have to try to cultivate love,” she said. “We just have to remove the distortions … that are keeping us from recognizing that there is actually love everywhere, and that love is our true nature.”
