A REVIEW: TRANSCRIPT OF A PODCAST ON DHARMA AND DHARMAYUDHA
Transcript of Podcast of 24 October 2021
Good evening everyone. My name is Shantanu Panigrahi. I have been living in the United Kingdom for the past 48 years. I am 65 years of age. I am a Brahmin Hindu born in India in the State of Assam, Shilling city but originally my parents came from the village of Baikunthapur in Odhisha State and that is the place I consider my home to be: home means the native land that I was born in. But I am happy here in the United Kingdom for I am an immigrant who has adjusted to life in the United Kingdom.
I am talking here today about Spirituality for over the past 24 years I have gone up and down the road, with too many failures in material objectives. I had been living a life of near destitution at times as a cleaner, a warehouseman and so forth working in petrol stations and supermarkets. This after having published 35 scientific papers in international journals and becoming one of the top poultry nutritionists in the world. And it all came to a shuddering halt. My career was in doldrums when I was first accused of being blameworthy of gross misconduct in the University of Greenwich at the Natural Resources Institute where I worked. I was charged with the offence but I never attended the Disciplinary Hearing because it was a kangaroo court and the court would not conduct the Hearing on my terms, that is the terms that I needed to have all the truth assembled together for a proper judgment to be made on my conduct.
Having said that, my conduct was Hindu conduct, Dharma conduct, and dharma means something very special to me. Dharma means the very essence of who I am as Hindu. In out Hindu upbringing in India, we said, Please God take me through the path of dharma and truth for that is the only prayer that I ever actually believed in and that is the prayer that I have always made to God over the past course of my life. Andwe believed in God, God who we call Sri Krishna, and so forth. So when I got stuck into the University of Greenwich and faced the false charge of gross misconduct, they just wanted to get rid of me because I was a thorn in the backside. I was doing things in my career independentaly and solitarily that was developing my own ideas on how agricultural development should proceed in the wider interests of humanity. And what the University required me for was to be a cog in the wheel, in the machine and just be a slave to the system. This was unacceptable to me as a human being. I had my own thoughts, my own ideas and my own objectives on how life should proceed, how research should be conducted, how adaptation of research to the resource-poor farmers should be done and so on because I had a Phd from the University of Reading on poultry nutrition and a Post Graduate Diploma on Agricultural Development within Environmental Sciences with Distinction level markings; so I resisted the charge of gross misconduct and never attended the Hearing. I decided not to take the £20,000 that the University was offering me for severance with a reference so that I could get another job. I wanted my job back, to be reinstated back in the job so that I could continue with the same work that I had been doing for the previous 18 years. And this the University would not accept.
So then started a 24 year struggle for material justice in the courts and employment tribunals of the United Kingdom. I consulted 55 odd lawyers, and none of them would come to my assistance for it was all coordinated in a Police State of the United Kingdom such that the courts and the government were part of the same State-apparatus. And this is something that I realised. And I am OK with that for me truth is of the essence. Truth is sacrosanct. One must always adhere to the truth. This is my conviction. Truth must never be covered up.Truth must always be probed out. Truth must always be absorbed and conserved and not accommodated. Truth accommodation is a strategy. It is satya-advaitic strategy to assemble the truth, to discover the truth and that is the yoga that I have performed over the past 24 years. It is called satya-advaita yoga, nobody has ever heard of it. It was a self-discovery mechanism, an experiment, a hypothesis that I have personally developed to understand whether God was instrumental in giving me visions, utterances and prophecies at the very early stages of my struggle to protect my reputation at the University of Greenwich. And I went on a dream chase from that point onwards to find out the truth whether God resided in my psyche dormantly when it suited Him and exposedly when He wished me to get me to do certain things. And I have been under the hands of the State in its Mental Health Institutions such as hospitalisation under Sectioning in 2004 and 2008 and in Care in the Community detention in my house since 2008 on enforced mediation of anti-psychotic, anti-depressant and mood-stabilising agents; all that to quell me to stop me from persevering to discover the truth about the secretive British State, that is a State that is accurately described as a nation of morons in a Police State. And I have engaged in what I stumbled on and described to my sister as dharmayudha, a yudha to preserve my dharma. My dharma means my duties and responsibilities. Duties and responsibilities come to the Community of the global sphere, community of the society that one lives in, the family community and the self community, in that order. And so I set myself targets of various kinds to develop Knowledge for World Conservation and so forth, after I was dismissed by the University of Greenwich without a single penny in compensation and damages.
And the State has decided that I was a mentally deranged person and suffered from persistent delusional disorder and paranoid schizophrenia and even talked about autism and so forth; all kinds of rubbish where in fact it was the State that was causing me the paranoid schizophrenia by threatening me with a third round of incarceration in a mental hospital, or even to send me to prison by conducting a Pre-Trial Hearing for wanting to punch the final nail in the coffin of the British State for being such a satanic British State as I perceived it.
So what does dharma mean. Dharma means intense struggle. Dharma and satya (truth) go hand in hand together. Truth reinforces dharma and dharma reinforces truth. And when you perfect the art of dharmayudha, one is actually conducting sanatan dharma, that is the dharma or duties that God wishes you to conduct. And that has proven to me to be true even today as I prepare my Podcast.
So how does that relate to what I think of Sprituality now. When I was first going to temples in India, bathing in the Ganga (Sangam) and went to a temple complex paying my reverence to God in Hindu temple I first had my first experience of a Higher Power when I bowed my head to the statue of Lord Ganesh and felt a shiver-sensation down my entire body, which alerted me and I said to myself what is happening to me. And so I kept that at the back of my mind and during my Post-Graduate Diploma I developed the dissertation on the basis of Hinduism. And my dissertation was called, Parallels and Differences in Dairy and Poultry Developmental Strategies and Issues Relating to Urbanisation in the Eastern India Region’ in which I talked about the Trimurti Lord Krishna, Vishnu Brahma and Shiva and so forth and I developed all kinds of elements of Hinduism in that. And it was a way of acknowledging that I was a dharmic person, a spiritual person and a believer in God, a strong theist and so forth, but equally it was the start of my quest for the truth for I wanted to test those out as soon as I had visions utterances and prophetic writings that were preminitions of doldrums in my life that was to unfold. IN the latter stages I have tested out all kinds of manner using a digital clock to communicate with God in that when I saw a time amounting to 7 (at first I tried 3,6 and later on 7), it meant that I was receiving a message from God to act in a certain way in fighting my legal battles and medical battles in the United Kingdom; and I discovered the oneness and separateness with God that we Hindus call achintya bhed abheda tatwa. That point led me to a situation where I could go confidently forwards and I surrendered to God totally and utterly until 2013 when He would not have anything further to do with me.
I was very depressed after the first round of incarceration in a mental hospital in 2004 when I thought all my subservience to God led me to nothing but being imprisoned in a mental hospital, and so what was all this all about. All my religionism, all my spirituality went down the drain. I became an atheist for 2 years but kept on studying in Forums (international Forums) in the internet and tried to make sense of it all to rediscover myself and develop my own ideas on as a human being. Suddenly though God reappeared in 2014 to get me to act in certain ways and I resumed my dharmayudha. I continued with my battle by taking Kent Police to court in a litigation for £5 million in damages and compensation for protecting the criminals who had been harassing me for the previous 18 years or so. That fate materialised and I was harassed and terrorised by the Police who had assembled themselves as Victims of Panigrahi Association to have me booted out of the United Kingdom, for I was publishing everything in the internet. I had a Blog called ‘Towards Knowledge for World Conservation’ at Wordpress https://shantanup.wordpress.com and the Psychiatrists who who were supposedly caring for me but trying to denigrate me as a human being would have none of it and they got Wordpress authorities to archive and suspend the Blog. That would not stop me for I reopened other Blogs at SimpleSite and various other places since then to continue with my dharmayudha for that had been the essence of myself. I was a spiritual person. Dharma is inseparable from Spirituality. That is how we Hindus live. Whether other Hindus live in that way or not, it is in the Mahabharatta that dharmayudha must be practiced, and dharmayudha and sanatan dharma are intrinsic part of Hinduism.
And so I had to develop my own ideas on what is Hinduism. And I separated Consciousness on the basis of what is the Trimurti; the Trimurti is the concept that Nature is comprised of sattvic, rajasic and tamasic guna consciousness and I described it all as Brahma-Nature. And there are interactions between these three gunas that reveal everything about how Nature works; sattvic nature being the pious sentimentality, the tamasic nature being evil-predatory activities, and the rajasic nature being routinal preservational approach to life. I discovered Vishista-advaita Vedanta through the process eventually after being through Brahmoadvaita Vedanta where the Brahman Self was the Ultimate way to be. For Brahmoadvaota was not satisfying me in terms of my duties and responsiblilities. And duties and responsibilities come first. So I abandoned Brahmoadvaita Vedantism and developed Vishista-advaita Vendanta. Vishista-advaita Vedanta requires the occupation of the centre of the sphere of Reality in conducting oneself perfectly; but beyond that is the truth that God has created it as sanatan dharma, that being the truth that Vishista-advaita Vedanta is the ultimate way for human beings to conduct their lives. That is the sanatan dharma and when perfected we come to Dharmo Rakshati Rakshita, which means we preserve dharma and protect dharma, then dharma protects and preserves you and your works for all of humanity to read. You yourself are surviving in liberty and in the dignity of liberty and you do not have any discomforts whatsoever. I have a wife, a daughter and we are living happily today in the United Kingdom, all because I maintained my dharmayudha in all kinds of ways; by immersing myself in Creation and I have been living perfectly to have overcome all my obstacles and hurdles that were thrown at me through the process of persecution that I suffered during the past 24 years.
So today I am preparing my first Podcast on my life story that God does exist. He lies dormant in the psyche of human beings and whatever name you call that God, we are not alone in the universe. He has His ways and means of doing things and for us we need to unseat ourselves from Him, not live to surrender to Him, not live in bhakti but live like human beings that we are created to live as. So I have detached myself from God and I keep Vishista-advaita Vedanta pure in that God is there but not to be worshipped. He is there to be acknowledged and one should be reverential towards Him but He is not there for me to offer my flowers and other offerings in rutuals or going to temples again and worshipping Him in the traditional ritualistic manner. He had once asked me to take off my janeo, that is the sacred thread that we Brahmins wear, and I took it off immediately; and while I have since toyed with the idea that I might be denigrated by my family for having taken it off but it has not stopped me from keeping it off. For that was an instruction from God and it has to be taken seriously.
So today I was talking about failures in life: failures are successes in disguised form for they are information. They are knowledge. They are experiences and I was alerted to the phrase by someone today ‘ My life experiences is my classroom’, and that is certainly as true words that one can imagine oneself to possess. And with that I terminate this Podcast. Thank you