Sarah Louise Gates

The emphasis on non-dualism to blend science and spirituality in the contemporary discourse often draws on AdvaitaVedānta concepts. The philosophically hybrid ‘roots of yoga’, are gaining more traction in the academic discourse though rarely discussed are how the AdvaitaVedānta teachings of SwāmīVivekānanda were influenced by his guru, ŚrīRāmakṛṣṇa, who had a remarkable ability to draw parallels between apparently contradictory spiritual systems, as streams toward the one goal. James envisages pragmatism as likely to displace former philosophical authorities by inviting less abstract and more scientific minds into a reformation of the discipline in which “The Earth of things, long thrown into shadow by the upper ether, must resume its rights.” This ecocritical exploration of James’ views on the pragmatism of Vedanta after his contact with SwāmīVivekānanda opens out for discussion complexity previously lost due to pre-emptive generalisation.

Ecological interconnectedness studies are a portal into dual and non-dual frameworks for bioculturally embedded human identity. This field is part of the transdisciplinary, holistic epistemology shift across academia. The discourse is catalysed by concern over injustice, conflict, climate change, ecosystem collapse and extinction. It coincides with an increasingly modernised, interconnected—and vulnerable, “old world order” of pan-global industrial capitalism. Environmental philosophy of the 1990s laid the foundation of deep ecology, ecofeminist and social ecology that inform western eco-justice activism, and the ecocritical theory to which this essay belongs. The discourse of ecocritical literary theory is a fertile ground for intersecting paradigms within contemporary western and medieval Indian philosophy on the liminal boundaries of self and world, and how these permeable systems motivate action through flexible parameters of human and non-human agency.