Hinduism and Science

Thanks to Huffington Post.

Religion comes into conflict with science when it is defined by unprovable claims that can be dismissed as superstitions, and when it treats as historical facts stories that read like legends and myths to non-believers. Other aspects of religion -- what I would consider the deeper and more significant elements -- are not only compatible with science but enrich its findings. The best evidence of this is science's response to the religions of the East over the course of the last 200 years. As the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland said early in the 20th century, "Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run counter to scientific laws." The same can be said for Buddhism, which derives from the same Vedic roots.

Most of the Hindu gurus, Yoga masters, Buddhist monks and other Asian teachers who came to the West framed their traditions in a science-friendly way. Emphasizing the experiential dimension of spirituality, with its demonstrable influence on individual lives, they presented their teachings as a science of consciousness with a theoretical component and a set of practical applications for applying and testing those theories. Most of the teachers were educated in both their own traditions and the Western canon; they respected science, had actively studied it, and dialogued with Western scientists, many of whom were inspired to study Eastern concepts for both personal and professional reasons.

As early as the 1890s, Swami Vivekananda spent time with scientific luminaries such as Lord Kelvin, Hermann von Helmholtz, and Nikola Tesla. "Mr. Tesla thinks he can demonstrate mathematically that force and matter are reducible to potential energy," the swami wrote in a letter to a friend. "I am working a good deal now upon the cosmology and eschatology of Vedanta. I clearly see their perfect unison with modern science." Had Vivekananda lived three years longer, he would have rejoiced in Einstein's discovery of E = mc², which united matter and energy forever.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the great sage and Indian independence leader Sri Aurobindo, who had studied in England, blended East and West by extending Darwinian concepts to the evolution of consciousness and the cosmos. In 1920, Paramahansa Yogananda set a precedent by calling his first lecture in the West "The Science of Religion." He befriended a number of scientists, growing so close to the great botanist Luther Burbank that he dedicated hisAutobiography of a Yogi to him. Later, Swami Satchidananda, whose own teacher, Swami Sivananda, had been a successful physician before becoming a monk, encouraged the scientific study of Yoga; one of his early students was Dr. Dean Ornish, whose groundbreaking research sprang directly from Satchidananda's teachings. And Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, even before he became famous as the Beatles' guru, prodded scientists into studying the physiology of meditation, setting in motion an enterprise that has now produced over a thousand studies.

The interaction of Eastern spirituality and Western science has expanded methods of stress reduction, treatment of chronic disease, psychotherapy and other areas. But that is only part of the story. Hindu and Buddhist descriptions of higher stages of consciousness have expanded psychology's understanding of human development and inspired the formation of provocative new theories of consciousness itself. Their ancient philosophies have also influenced physicists, among them Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who read from the Bhagavad Gita at a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his landmark TV seriesCosmos, Carl Sagan called Hinduism the only religion whose time-scale for the universe matches the billions of years documented by modern science. Sagan filmed that segment in a Hindu temple featuring a statue of the god Shiva as the cosmic dancer, an image that now stands in the plaza of the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

The relationship between science and Eastern spiritual traditions -- which many prefer to think of as psychologies -- is still in its infancy. In recent years, the Dalai Lama has carried the ball forward, hosting conferences and encouraging research. Western religions would do well to emulate this history. Their historical and faith-based claims conflict with empirical science and probably always will; but to the extent that their practices directly impact human life, they can be treated as testable hypotheses.

Kill the Brahmin - 1

After a really long time, I saw that Krish Ashok and Hawkeye had had a tete-a-tete, albeit of less friendly nature. Its a subject that has been argued ad nauseum and I hope this post does not end up being one more to the heap. 

Tamizh Nadu has been the recipient of lousy atheist propaganda ever since I could remember. Those calling out against the caste system calling out a section of the population as "Paarpan", a tamil scholar explaining that the meaning of the word Hindu in Sanskrit is 'Thirudan' when sitting and having soup for Ramadan with a group of Islam following folks, bad mouthing the saint of kanchi as a hoax, but not having the nerve to call out that 90 percent of terrorism in India spawns from the faulty interpretation of Islam. But we (Tamizh makkal) of course are 'sotraal aditha pindangal' and so conveniently forget that such hypocritical guys are being called as statesman, pagutharivaali etc.

From what I have noticed recently is that all this 'sick'ularism that we have been force fed from our childhood has made people get confused and more often than not self-deprecating. I have met countless tam-brahm friends of mine who speak about how Brahmins encouraged slavery, how reciting the vedas is a trait of atavism and how we, mankind, is at its technological peak. What I'm trying to do here is to just ask a few questions to this section of the population which says vedas are humbug, trying to pass off as 'modern, sophisticated, educated' folks who will bad mouth brahmins, hinduism at every easy opportunity.

1. Stories based on Vedas are Bullshit - they are not believable.

The most consistent argument I have seen from people who do not want to believe in the Vedas is that how they came about to be. They say how can saints/scholars listen to the wind and write down the vedas? They argue that the cell phone technology is so advanced only now and all the yada yada. The best thing about our current generation/mankind is the kind of arrogance that leads them to say that we are at the technological peak that was never seen before. But there is historical proof that humans from BC era were able to predict movement of stars, the lunar and solar cycle and of course the Vedas, much before Galileo or Kepler, very correctly assumed a heliocentric model. But the yuppie puppies will say that but for Galileo we will be still believing that the Earth is flat. And on the same vein, the same populace do not want to acknowledge the fact that while elsewhere people were nomads, during the reign of Karikal Chozhan, a stone dam was built across the Kollidam river, an engineering feat of no small scale. So the basic assumption that our forefathers were technologically backward though propagated, it is not completely proven. While I don't want to appear puerile or a fantasy lover and say that people in the BC time period had a nuclear reactor or some such stuff, I'd like to just say that we do not know - there is always a chance that mankind lost some technology and we are now discovering them, rather than inventing them. While all pagutharivaalis pounce on me, by your own definition of pagutharivu, kindly prove that such technology did not exist before we go further.

2. Brahmins practiced Untouchability - So they must now be subjugated/submissive

This is a really curious thought that has been drilled into our heads. While no one is going to dispute the fact that Brahmins exploited social conditions and practiced untouchability and other social evils, this tit-for-tat logic seems to be applied to only certain section of the people. India as a country did not have any people following Islam till there was the Mughal invasion. And we all were made well aware of how gruesome the invasion was, how come the same logic being applied to Brahmins not being applied to Muslims, the section of the population who owe their origins to the invaders who raped and plundered India? When the Babri Masjid was demolished by Ram Sevaks, the so called Secularist Flag bearers fondly recalled logic such as "Eye for an eye makes the world blind" but then conveniently bury that logic when it comes to discriminating against Brahmins. While quacks such as Nityananda and other fakesters get their due, Hinduism is portrayed as a barbaric and retarded religion, all the while, conveniently, the secular media in India forgets that the Christian church is being plagued by child molesters and sex offenders who masquerade as men of the faith. Why this double standards? I have no particular love or hate for any religion or community. But why do the so called rational/pagutharivu pazhams not apply the same logic to everyone?

There are a few more thoughts - which shall come later.

(Contd.)