It's now 21st century,The world is seeing itself as the new technological era.people genarally talk about the developemnet related with different areas.India as the source of Indian civilization has given a lot of things in form of knowledge,inventions and technological things.It is not worthy to say ,many of the personalities accept the ancient vedas,theology and the principles (BHAGWAT GITA ans ALL) are the source of modern civilization and changes.Some of speeches I am pointing below:
When I read the Bhagavad-Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.
- Albert Einstein
The Indian teaching, through its clouds of legends, has yet a simple and grand religion, like a queenly countenance seen through a rich veil. It teaches to speak truth, love others, and to dispose trifles. The East is grand -- and makes Europe appear the land of trifles. All is soul and the soul is Vishnu ...cheerful and noble is the genius of this cosmogony. Hari is always gentle and serene - he translates to heaven the hunter who has accidentally shot him in his human form, he pursues his sport with boors and milkmaids at the cow pens; all his games are benevolent and he enters into flesh to relieve the burdens of the world.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the great teaching of the Vedas, there is no touch of sectarianism. It is of all ages, climes and nationalities and is the royal road for the attainment of the Great Knowledge.
- Henry David Thoreau
It is already becoming clear that a chapter which had a Western beginning will have to have an Indian ending if it is not to end in self-destruction of the human race. At this supremely dangerous moment in human history, the only way of salvation is the ancient Hindu way. Here we have the attitude and spirit that can make it possible for the human race to grow together in to a single family.
- Arnold Joseph Toynbee
For many Indians and Indophiles, Vedas, in revelation of the above observations of scientists, actually appear to be a compendium of the ultimate results that Modern Science obtained after a rigorous and methodical search spanning thousands of years. It’s as if, to get to the same conclusions, scientists and Indian mystics have taken different paths. If that is the case, the mystics seem to have come to the same conclusion almost two thousand years ahead of the scientists. Wow! This is so nice and convenient. It makes many Indians proud of their own ancestry. Its as if, for all that we missed during scientific and industrial revolutions of Europe and US between 16th and 19th century we already made up thousands of years ago - and it is all well documented in our Vedas. It is not longer a division of our beautiful earth as East and West. Both the hemispheres have quotas of the same kinds of people, taking or opposing sides of a basic premise. Thus, in the West, there is an increasing number of people with a conviction of spirituality, and a vastly superior though imperceptibly declining number of those who do not have use for spirituality. The truth is, the whole world was all the time like this, and so it will be. The reason, man may not be the ultimate product of all evolution, or, if you will, of God. I may sound magisterial in saying so, but upon reflection it will appear so, to anyone who cares to reflect. The debate, or rather, its opposing two sides, prove that we are men, conscious beings. And taking CONSCIOUSNESS, the physical and biological scientists only now have considered it necessary not to totally ignore this aspect. Deepak Chopra says that even now there are very many physical and biological scientists consider consciousness as an epi-phenomenon of all the phenomena that they are dealing with in their research investigations based on counting and measuring. But, Deepak says, consciousness IS THE PHENOMENON, and all else that appeal so easily to the scientists is EPIPHENOMENA. [ epi = upa, cognate in Indo-European languages]. In the Bhagavad-gita, which is trusted since times immemorial as the essence of all the Vedas, not only in the East among large sections, but also by a growing no. of philosophers of the West, the science of spirituality [ adhyaatma-vidyaa] is the epitome of all sciences. To my mind, this statement implies that as mankind increases the feebleness and inability of the natural sciences [physical plus biological] to explain with any certainty and usefulness, ever so many mysterious phenomena like mother in all species exhibiting an inexplicable attachment to its sibling upto a certain stage of growth; telepathy, telekinesis, etc. which are NOT amenable to experimental verification despite their being manifest through actual experience; and so on. There is an all-pervading and absolute truth which transcends whatever we can comprehend and arrive a consensus at, with our sensory organs of perception of ears, nose, skin, eyes and tongue whose outputs are inputs for the central nervous system, the brain. Now, the terms, brain, mind, spirit, soul, consciousness are being given specialized meanings by philosophers AND scientists, although it will be fashionable for, say, a doctor to say, "In all my life, I never could see a specimen of the much talked about soul blowing off a dying man whom I was treating". The spiritualist, who is a specialized philosopher will not of course give him a Gallantry Award to that doctor for his trivializing the issue of spirituality with such words. In the end of this response, but this debate is bound to be endless!, I feel like adding that there is much more for all of us to wonder and yet not getting a definite answer, in spirituality, while there is so, so much to derive from the interaction of our mind, the natural elements and the forces like gravity, electricity and magnetism. The former is daunting and tantalizing for the sincere seeker, the latter gets titillations with the ad hoc answers based on measuring and counting [ that is science and counting with math and instruments of various kinds ]. The Vedas, or rather the Upanishads which constitute the Jnaana-kaanda or the Spiritual Wisdom portion of them meaning, the Upanishads, are essentially concerned with Spirituality, not at all with electronics, particle physics, or astrophysics and that kind of science areas. The claim that the Vedas contain all knowledge of airplanes, or rockets, trasmutation of one element into another due to the basic oneness of all matter. As one of the thoughtful respondents on this blog site has stated, the Vedas were NOT concerned with these physical concepts and technologies which have their role as size of human population increases, and the landscape gets "shrunk" in relation to population size, giving rise to demands of rapid mass transport, housing with vertical growth of buildings, quick reliefs from physical sufferings, and so forth. The spirit, the consciousness that underlies all matter, whether animate or inanimate, organic or inorganic, is the subtlest cosmic self. Saints, of all religions, realized this spiritual truth, through their subjective experience, and preached that eperience for the benefit of the suffering masses, and wanted that meditation and prayer can help establish a communication link between the individual self and the cosmic self so that the miseries of earthly existence will seem considerably less, and more bearable. Mere rationalistic science will NEVER, NEVER help in the pursuit of happiness and peace which should be the true purpose of knowledge with wisdom, or science with spirituality. Some of the greatest scientsts testify to this truth and yet differed among themselves: Einstein thrilled at the perfection of the natural laws, to the extent his limited span of existence allowed him to realize, but Niels Bohr said perfection does not autopmatically translate certitude in everything for any human being. Einstein said, if God's macrocosmic universe is predictably law-abiding, there is no room for Bohr's and Heisenberg's uncertainty. Einstein elaborated his statement on certainty, saying that his God does not play at dice. To which Bohr retored saying "Einstein, you tell God what to do with his dice". This simple incident between two of the greatest philosopher-scientists, to my little mind, means that by means of arguments all science can only come to a standstill, so avoiding such arguments, nay, through such debate, and yet keeping spirituality as the source of inspiration, we should carry on endlessly with our scientific and spiritual endeavours. I ALSO WISH TO ADD HERE SOMETHING ABOUT THE DEBATE ABOUT EVOLUTION VS. INTELLIGENT DESIGN. My thought on this is that whenever we talk about Evolution, we consciously deal only with unicellular organisms growing in stages, and observing certain laws such as the survival of the fittest, to higher and higher species, so far ending with Man. Maybe, after a few million years later, if man does not extinguish his kind by playing with fission and fusion bombs and tampering with natural elements and the ozone layer, for his own creature comfort, preferring sensory titillation to spiritual and intellectual bliss, THEN, man can evolve still higher, into some species while many of his kind are still languishing as men, due to opertion of law of survival of fittest, along with all those lesser species such as dolphins, chimpanzees, buffaloes, and the like. At this point, I wish to ask the respondents to this blog, what business have we to assume that there are NO SUPERIOR BEINGS, EVEN IF WE CANNOT DIRECTLY OBSERVE THEM WITH OUR SENSES, even at the present time ? And how the hell is it logically correct to think that evolution in other planets in the stellar systems out there, has NOT already resulted in such species far superior to Man on this tiny little earth of ours ? Hence Intelligent Design should, properly, be applied to the whole, infinite, and expanding cosmos, and not just to our Solar system, much less our Milky Way galaxy, alone. So this talk of Evolution and ID leaves much to be desired.BEFORE ENDING THIS, let me say something about this INTELLECTUAL MASTURBATION, a phrase which one respondent has used in his response. I do not myself use this word combination, though it is up to the blog owner to keep it or delete it. The respondent who used it seems to think that what some other respondents have said is some illogical and internally inconsistent, even incogent and inconherent nonsense from his viewpoint. I may illustrate the use of rustic type of usage: My uncles, at least two generations older to me, were from the villages, when there was not even electricity or when buses moved with coal-fired boilers fitted on for steam to provide motive power. My uncles had a penchat for using them frequently.Today I cannot use the same which my uncles did. That is because, whilst they used it with absolute precision, as it were, to put the required punch into what they said - especially objections - we cannot do this since we have evolved different forms of civility norms.While talking of the Vedas and the Puranas, and the various Vidyas or Shastras (such as Dhanurvidya, Vaimaanika shastra, ... ), visavis achievements of modern science and technology, we should also remember that the discoveries and devices get obsolete as advances are made, and hence, it gets confusing to anyone attempting modern science vs. Veda comparisons, to sort out this problem of obsolescence factor. Thus, for example, helicopters, propelller driven aircraft, jumbo jets driven by gas turbine power, and other items (flying saucers?? !! ) in that specific category, have just to be taken as flying machines, again those with capability to fly within the atmospheres of living planets, or inter-stellar machines! The Vedas and the other ancient texts [almost all of them handed down by Karna-paramparaa] do mention flying machines, those with speeds of winds (vaayu-vega) and those with speed of thought/ mind (mano-vega). Given these two facts - obsolescence factor by which today's genre of machines are a forgotten factor tomorrow; and the basic ideas of flying machines with Intra-atmospheric and Inter-stellar capabilities, you don't expect in that perspective to obtain design details of a machine with the features of Sabre Jets or any other specific flying machine types.A slight, but only slight, digression from this subject, in some detail, may provide some further insight for our debate. According to Johannes v. Butlar, writing in his book 'Journey to Infinity', Tsiolkovsky - or, Konstantin E. Ziolkowski (1857-1935), who was among the pioneers in the field of rocketry for space travel, "expressed himself as convinced of the necessity for the use of telepathy in future space-flights. Ziolkowski regarded telepathy as one of the greatest essentials for the further development of humanity. And in his opinion, man would solve the problems of the human spirit by penetrating the mysteries of psychical phenomena, while spce-travel would open up the universe to him. ... Ziolkowski believed that humanity would reach its highest fulfilment through knowledge of space travel and parapsychology."But how the hell is this reference to Tiolkovsky relevant visavis science in the Vedas, you ask? My answer is that we today, on this little 'blue dot' (Carl Sagan's term for the earth), have no business to believe that space and air travels were invented and inaugurated by men just on our own planet, that too in our present centuries. My answer, further, is ours is just one among the possible millions or billions among the numberless trillions of galaxies, each star, in general, having a system of orbiting planets around a sun (star). Please see Carl Sagan's relevant works {like his 'Cosmos') or view selected videos (uploaded on Youtube, for instance) on this subject of galaxies and planetary systems. Sagan has also spoken eloquently on the reality or otherwise the dreamlike nature of the material universe and he talks about the Vedic statements speculating that our universe just may just be dream stuff of Brahmaa, or the universe merely a nonexistent nonmaterial object which is produced in man's dreams. In fact Einstein is said to have squarely asked Rabindranath Tagore what he thinks on the question whether or not the Universe exists independent of human mind/thought. Responding to which, Tagore (pardon me here, I am writing from vague memory, but you can do web research on these points with suitable entry on Google search) elaborted on the Drg-Drshya-Viveka of the Advaita Vedanta in which the seer and the sought are, in the final analysis, one and the same. It may not have been recorded whether Einstein was satisfied with the response, used, as he was, to equations, and science based on them using counting and measuring concepts, though Einstein himself never had to bother himself with apparatuses and conduct experiments (which some contemporaries or later day scientists did, for verification of his equations' truth).
I may end my response here with this: Our ancient texts are not compartmentalized for their conceptual framework, in the sense that physical scientific and technological pursuits were also 00stipulated to be viewed, for serving any noble purpose, in tandem with spiritual profundities. The Vedas had a cosmic vision, and not just of today and OUR earth. The Vedic knowledge IS, to us today, put in soome seemingly vague or obscure and somewhat recondite language. Vedic scholarship exists even today in several parts of our country, and the scholars are an isolated lot, since Sanskrit and Vedic knowledge is hardly ever a favorite for pursuit of study among the youth (not to speak of the old, since youth unprepared even on the margin, only generates the 'old'). There is even utter contempt for these studies, but not among the really serious thninkers with a feeling of remorse at their failures during their earlier years to continue such studies with seriousness,as well as the greatest achievers on intellectual front, many of whom have migrated to greener pastures in the West, mostly with the topmost and aspiring-for-top-slot American universities, NASA, and organizations of that class. It is to be recalled here that Mahatma Gandhi always emphasized the paramount importance of Sanskrit studies in our schools and universities, to the extent that he felt without them, our languages, all rooted in Sanskrit past, will languish and cease to grow in real terms (though not among pseudo educationists).The Vedic methods do not always conform to the rules of empirical science based on what is agreed, rather presumptuously sometimes, as rational logical reasoning. This may be because there are, as I have pointed out earlier in this debate, we are wallowing in a four dimensional universe, as it were, whereas the universe, even by current scientific thinking, may have at least eleven dimensions, of which not more than four may not admit of easy comprehension to all of us but a few to be counted on our fingertips. This being so, we would be merely exhibiting our limitations of thinking, and our ignorance, in discussing the heights to which human comprehension can ascend, such as the Vedic seers were able to. Which does not mean, however, why we should not strive strenuously and earnestly to think individually and collectively into the mysteries of our own exitence. Qeustioons like whether aeroplane designs are found in our Shastras pale into irrelevance, when the insights found in them are such as to attract the serious attention of Western scientists to whom we always reserve our admiration for their extraordinary intellectual prowess. Such scientists and thinkers include, Erwin Schrodinger, Robert Oppenheimer, Albert Einstein, Arthur Schopenhauer,just to cite a few examples. There are innumerable Indologists especially of Germany of the eighteenth century onwards who are still finding it tough, though convinced of the worthwhileness of their effort, to plough and uncover what our scriptures do really say. They are of course convinced that even words are formed in Sanskrit, and the Vedic predecesor of that language, on the basis of both the material and spiritual significance of the component letters (aksharas) conforming to rules of the Nighantu and Nirukta, the two forms of what may be called Grammar today.
(CONTINUED IN THE NEXT PART)
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