WHAT CARL SAGAN LEARNED ABOUT VEDIC HINDU PRINCIPLES

[Dr. Jai Maharaj]

HINDUISM AND CARL SAGAN

Forwarded message from "S.L."

Carl Sagan says in this book the Cosmos:

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great
faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself
undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of
deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the
time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific
cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night
to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long.
longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about
half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much
longer time scales still.

There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe
is but the dream of the god who, after a Brahm years,
dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep.

The universe dissolves with him -- until, after another
Brahm century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins
again to dream the great cosmic dream.

The Chola bronzes, cast in the 11th century, include
several different incarnations of the god Shiv.

The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation
of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each
cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord
Shiv. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraj,
the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose
sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is
a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now
newly created, with billions of years from now will be
utterly destroyed.

The late scientist Carl Sagan, asserts that the dance of
Nataraj signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction
of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory). 'It is the
clearest image of the activity of God which any art or
religion can boast of.'"

These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine,
a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas."

Source - "The Cosmos " by Carl Sagan.

- - -

"The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns and
the moons of previous cycles." - The Ved

Jai Maharaj
http://www.mantra.com/jai
Om Shanti

Hindu Holocaust Museum
http://www.mantra.com/holocaust

Hindu life, principles, spirituality and philosophy
http://www.hindu.org
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The truth about Islam and Muslims
http://www.flex.com/~jai/satyamevajayate

The terrorist mission of Jesus stated in the Christian bible:

"Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not so send
peace, but a sword.
"For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the
daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in
law.
"And a man's foes shall be they of his own household.
- Matthew 10:34-36.

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[OsherD]

It is the only religion in which >the
time scales correspond, to >those of modern scientific
cosmology

This is really interesting! This is a Religion concerned with life
and death, cycles, rebirth, immortality, ethics, knowledge, Spirit,
meditation, psychology, sociology, history, nonviolence rather than
violence (which in itself is very remarkable). It was also concerned
with Self-Defense through martial arts when its people transmitted
kung-fu to China, and they transmitted zero and decimals to the rest of
the world. No science and no Religion can afford to ignore what is one
of the most ancient Religions and sources of science. India itself is
living proof that Victims and not Victimizers are Creative Geniuses
despite all the shouting and the terror in our world.

Osher Doctorow

[Luna Sea]

Carl Sagan pissed on Vedic science = crapware
put your godhead back in your pants.
"Acintya-bhedabheda", give me a break!
.............................................................................
Types of Vedic science

Adherents of Maharishi Vedic science describe it as the science of self
(atmavidya). Veda means knowledge; and Vedic science asserts that there are
two kinds of knowledge: lower or outer, and higher or inner. Further, the
Vedic system asserts that one needs traditional modes of reasoning to obtain
outer knowledge. But to obtain inner knowledge, special study, discipline
and practice is recommended.
Vedic science claims that there is a connection between the outer and the
inner and this connection manifests itself in our awareness. Vedic science
is another name for the science of consciousness. It also claims that such a
science cannot be like any standard science, since it deals with the
experiencing subject and not objects.

Some believe that these writings to anticipate modern science suggesting
that many mathematical axioms of modern age have their ancient equivalents
in the Vedic chants. Vedic mathematical methods are said to aid in fast and
accurate mental multiplication of extremely large numbers using numeric
properties as their base. The branch of study of vedic methods in
mathematics is commonly referred to as Vedic mathematics.

[edit]Criticisms of Vedic science

Critics dencounce these theories as pseudoscience similar to Western
Creation science. Some charge that "Vedic science" is promulgated by
right-wing Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) politicians as part of their
cultural agenda.

Physics to Metaphysics

For India's great realizers, the primary evidence in support of their theses
is revealed scripture (sastra), such as the Vedanta-sutras. This evidence is
considered to originate beyond the limits of human reasoning. Yet,
especially for Westerners, as an introduction to the virtues of scriptural
evidence, it may be prudent to first discuss the concept of a transcendental
personal Godhead in the context of modern science and quantum mechanics in
particular.

In the transition from Newtonian classical physics to quantum mechanics,
several scientists have explored the possibility of a connection between
physics and transcendence. This may be due to the more abstract nature of
quantum mechanics as opposed to classical physic. For example, classical
physics attempts to describe the physical reality in concrete, easily
understandable terms, while quantum mechanics deals in probabilities and
wave functions. Quantum mechanics, however, is much more rigorous in its
attempt to describe reality and it explains phenomena that classical physics
fails to account for. The "quantum leap" has given several physicists the
hope that the transcendentalist's experience of consciousness can be
explained by quantum mechanical theory. Although quantum theory does not
account for consciousness, it has become popular to attempt to bridge the
gap between the transcendentalist's experience and the quantum mechanic
worldview. Some people have loosely called this attempt the "new physics."

The rational, spiritually minded community cheered the appearance of Fritjof
Capra's The Tao of Physics and Gary Zukav's Dancing Wu Li Masters. Several
years later, David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order was similarly
praised. Although there is good reason to applaud these authors' work and
the work of others like them, their theories, scientifically speaking, do
not bridge the gap between physics and transcendence. However, these
scientists have to some extent become "believers," and their theories have
turned many educated people in the spiritual direction.

Of all the recent attempts to show the "oneness" in what physicists and
transcendentalists speak of, Bohm's implicate order theory is the most
worthy of consideration. In comparison, Capra's "realization" that the dance
of Siva and the movement of atomic particles is one and the same-although
profoundly beautiful-falls more in the realm of poetry than science.

Bohm's explanation of reality involves what he calls an "implicate" and
"explicate" order, with vague references to love, compassion, and other
similar attributes that may lie beyond both the implicate and explicate
orders. The implicate order is the ultimate reality, which underlies our
present perception of the world. The reality that we perceive is what Bohm
calls the explicate order. All order and variety, according to Bohm, is
stored at all times in the implicate order in an enfolded or unmanifested
state. Information continually unfolds, or becomes manifest, from the
implicate order as the explicate order of our experience.

Bohm uses the example of the hologram to help explain his theory. A hologram
is a photographic plate on which information is recorded as a series of
density variations. Because holography is a method of lensless photography,
the photographic plate appears as a meaningless pattern of swirls. When a
coherent beam of light-typically a laser-interacts with the plate, the
resultant emerging light is highly ordered and is perceived as an image in
three dimensions. The image has depth and solidity, and by looking at it
from different angles, one will see different sides of the image. Any part
of the hologram will reproduce the whole image (although with less
resolution). Bohm would say that the three-dimensional form of the image is
enfolded or stored in the pattern of density variations on the hologram.

A further understanding of the nature of Bohm's implicate order is somewhat
more difficult to grasp. In the transition from the classical description of
physical objects to a quantum mechanical description, one is forced to use
mutually incompatible descriptions. The
concept of complementarity, conceived of in the 1920s by the physicist Niels
Bohr, says that to understand the behavior of electrons, it is necessary to
describe them as pointlike particles and extended waves. This leads
naturally to the thought that electrons or their ultimate substrate, may not
actually be fully describable in mathematical terms. Thus the ultimate
physical reality may be only partially definable, because some of the
partial descriptions will inevitably contradict each other. This is Bohm's
idea regarding the nature of his implicate order.

Although Bohm accepts a whole containing distinguishable parts, he maintains
that ultimately reality is fundamentally devoid of variety or individuality.
Bohm believes that individuality is a temporal or illusory state of
perception. According to his theory, although the parts appear to be
distinct from the whole, in fact, because they "enfold" or include the
whole, they are identical with the whole.
The hologram provides an easily understandable example. If portions of a
hologram are blocked off, the resultant image remains basically the same.
This helps to illustrate metaphorically the concept that the whole is
present in each of its parts. Consider, then, a continuum in which all
patterns ever manifested in any part of the continuum are represented
equally in all parts. Loosely speaking, one could then say that the whole of
the continuum in both space and time is present in any part of the
continuum. If we invoke the precedent of quantum mechanical indefinability,
we could leap to the idea of a unified consciousness encompassing all space
and time in which each part of the consciousness contains the whole of the
consciousness and thus is identical to it.

Although Bohm's theory of the implicate order is partially based on the
standard methodology of physics, it is also apparent that it involves ideas
not found in traditional science. Most of these ideas are clearly the
influence of a preconceived notion of nondualism. Richard Thompson, author
of Mechanistic and Non-Mechanistic Sciences, has brought out some of the
weaknesses in Bohm's theory, which he feels are due to Bohm's prejudice
toward monism.

Thompson points out in his critique that while Bohm emphatically states that
it is not possible for unaided human thought to rise above the realm of
manifest matter (explicate order), he proceeds to carry on a lengthy
discussion about the unmanifest (implicate order). Bohm also states that all
things are timeless and unitary, and therefore incapable of being changed.
Later, he proposes that through collective human endeavor the state of
affairs can be changed. This is similar to the contradiction of
advaita-vedanta in which ultimate oneness is thought to be attained even
though it is beyond time and is forever uninfluenced by our actions.

Bohm's theory is sorely in need of a logical source of compassion so as to
provide inspiration enabling finite beings to know the infinite. Although he
speaks of compassion, it is only in a vague reference to an abstract
attribute. The idea of an entity possessing compassion is avoided by Bohm
(although he almost admits the need). He retreats from this idea because the
standard notions of a personal God are dualistic and thus undermine the
sense that reality at the most fundamental plane is unified.

Bohm's idea that the parts of the implicate order actually include the whole
is not fully supported by his physical examples alone. Indeed, this is
impossible to demonstrate mathematically. The part of the hologram is not
fully representative of the whole. The part suffers from lack of resolution.
It is qualitatively one but quantitatively different.

Bohm's explanation for the corruption in human society is another
shortcoming in his theory. The theory alleges that evil arises from the
explicate order. This is in contradiction with the basis of the theory,
which states that everything in the explicate order unfolds from the
implicate order. This means that evil and human society, or something at
least resembling them, must be originally present in the implicate order.
But what would lead us to believe that an undifferentiated entity would
store anything even remotely resembling human society? How could there be
evil in the implicate order if it is the source of love and compassion?

These are some of the scientific and philosophical problems with the theory
of the implicate order pointed out by Thompson. These problems are resolved
by Thompson, however, by replacing advaita-vedanta with acintya-bhedabheda.
Simply stated, acintya-bhedabheda means that reality is inconceivably one
and different at the same time. Acintya-bhedabheda holds that the world of
material variety is illusory but not altogether false. It insists that there
is a transcendental variety and spiritual individuality that lies beyond
illusion.
The history of philosophy bears evidence that neither the concepts of
oneness (nondualism) or difference (dualism) are adequate to fully describe
the nature of being. Exclusive emphasis on oneness leads to the denial of
the world and our very sense of self as an individual-viewing them as
illusion. Exclusive emphasis on difference divides reality, creating an
unbridgeable gap between man and God. Yet both concepts are essential
inasmuch as unity is a necessary demand of our reason, while difference is
an undeniable fact of our experience. A synthesis of the two can be seen as
the goal of philosophy. In the theory of acintya-bhedabheda, the concepts of
oneness and difference are transcended and reconciled into a higher
synthesis; thus, they become complementary aspects of Godhead, for whom all
things are possible.

The word acintya is central to the theory. It can be defined as the power to
reconcile the impossible. Acintya is that which is inconceivable, because it
involves contradictory notions, yet it can be appreciated through logical
implication.
Acintya, inconceivable, is different from anirvacaniya, or indescribable,
which is said to be the nature of transcendence in the monistic school of
thought.1 Anirvacaniya is the joining of the opposing concepts of reality
and illusion, producing a canceling effect-a negative effect. Acintya, on
the other hand, signifies a marriage of opposite concepts leading to a more
complete unity-a positive effect.
An example drawn from material nature may help us understand the concept of
acintya-bhedabheda. We cannot think of fire without the power of burning;
similarly, we cannot think of the power of burning without fire. Both are
identical. While fire is nothing but that which burns; the power of burning
is but fire in action. Fire and its burning power are not absolutely the
same, however. If they were absolutely the same, there would be no need to
warn children that fire burns. It would be sufficient to say "fire." In
reality, the fire is the energetic source of the power to burn. From this
example drawn from the world of our experience, we can deduce that the
principle of simultaneous oneness and difference is all-pervading, appearing
even in material objects.

Just as there is neither absolute oneness nor absolute difference in the
material example of fire and burning power, there is neither absolute
oneness nor absolute difference between Godhead and his energies. Godhead
consists of both the energetic and the energy, which are one yet different.
Godhead is complete without his various emanations. This is absolute
completeness. No matter how much energy he distributes, he remains the
complete balance.

In the theory of acintya-bhedabheda, the personal form of God exists beyond
material time in a transtemporal state, where eternality and the passage of
time are harmonized by the principle of simultaneous oneness and
variegatedness. This principle also applies to transcendental form. In the
material conception of form, the whole can be reduced to a mere
juxtaposition of the parts. This makes the form secondary. In the theory of
acintya-bhedabheda, the material conception of form is transcended. The
Supreme Being is fully present in all the parts that make up the total
reality and thus is one unified principle underlying all variegated
manifestations. Yet he has his own personality and is different from his
parts or energies at the same time. Each of the parts of Godhead's form are
equal to each other and to the whole form as well. At the same time, each of
the parts remains a part. This is fundamental to the philosophical outlook
of acintya-bhedabheda. It allows for the eternal individuality of all things
without the loss of oneness or harmony. It also allows for the possibility
that human beings, even while possessing limited mind and senses, can come
to know about the nature of transcendence. The infinite, being so, can and
does reveal himself to the finite. Just as the eye cannot see the mind but
can be in connection with it if the mind chooses to think about it, the
finite can know about the infinite by the grace of the infinite.

If Godhead has personal form, it is reasonable to conclude that a
transcendental society exists that resembles human society and could unfold
as the explicate order. In this conception, the explicate order is a
perverted reflection of the ultimate reality existing in the transcendental
realm. The reflection of that realm, appearing as the explicate order, is
the kingdom of God without God. It is without God inasmuch as God, being the
center of the ultimate reality, no longer appears to be the center. This
produces illusion and thus corruption. The basis of corruption is the
misplaced sense of proprietorship resulting in the utterly false notions of
"I" and "mine."
According to acintya-bhedabheda, the individual self is a minute particle of
will or consciousness-a sentient being-endowed with a serving tendency. This
tendency for service is a result of the individual self's dependency on the
Supreme Self. The Supreme Self is the maintainer, while the individual self
is maintained. This minute self is transcendental to matter and
qualitatively one with Godhead while quantitatively different. The inherent
smallness of the atomic soul in contrast to Godhead makes the atomic soul
prone to illusion, whereas Godhead is not. This is analogous to the example
of the hologram in which only a portion of the holographic plate is
illuminated. The resultant image, although apparently complete, is slightly
fuzzy and does not give the total three-dimensional view from all directions
that one would observe if the entire holographic plate were illuminated.

Living in illusion, the atomic soul sees herself as separate from Godhead.
As a result of imperfect sense perception, she makes false distinctions,
such as good and bad, happy and sad. The minute self can also live in an
enlightened state in complete harmony with the Godhead by the latter's
grace-which is attracted by sincere petition or devotion. This is so because
while independent and unlimited, Godhead is affectionately disposed to the
atomic souls. The very nature of devotion is that it is of another world,
and for it to be devotion in the full sense, it must be engaged in for its
own sake and nothing else. This act of devotion is the purified function of
the inherent serving tendency of the self. It makes possible a communion
with Godhead. In this communion, the self becomes one in purpose with
Godhead and eternally serves Godhead with no sense of separateness from him.
If we accept this theory, there is scope for action from within the
explicate order, such as prayer or meditation, to have influence upon the
whole. At least it appears as though the atomic soul can have influence on
the whole, although in reality the inspiration for prayer and meditation
comes from Godhead.

Acintya-bhedabheda cannot be fully appreciated without reference to the
Vedic literature, or revealed scripture. The truth of the personality of
Godhead, a supreme controller and enjoyer, will never be demonstrated in the
laboratory of the controlled experiment. We can only control that which is
inferior to ourselves. Revealed scripture is one of the principal means
through which Godhead chooses to make himself known to us. While we can
explain Sri Chaitanya's theory of acintya-bhedabheda and conception of a
divine person to some extent in the language of logic and modern science, a
more comprehensive understanding of his truth is derived from the essence of
the revealed scripture. [Reprinted with permission from Saranagati OnLine
Magazine]

Mathematics and the Spiritual Dimension
Extensive Philosophical Discourses
Saranagati OnLine Spiritual Magazine
The cutting edge of higher awareness
Perspectives from the Vedas
East Meets West
Shuddha-nama
The Pure Names of God
Shri Narasingha Chaitanya Matha
Extensive Philosophical Discourses

[r***@yahoo.com]

fantastic , man... let me suggest something... I think Godhead is the
Ichhashakti.. and Godhead manifests in / by condesation of energy into
3 dimensinal form i.e mass..? and trnsforms back into formless
energy... on a vast timescale, or sometimes in a flash-in less than an
eye-bat..howzatt? the unseperatability of the Godhead and this material
world? Achintya bhedaabheda? everything is a continuum? and it Is gods
grace to be able see through things. I have seen it more coming thru
observing things like an observer,, rather than get involved in the
drama.. though i do feel pain and laughter in the events in which i am
involved, and many a times in others' dramas too...... i try to see
mine and others' scenes like i am a third party...a saakshi... it does
give me a sense that I AM, despite all things and events. It is not
that i am dependent on them.. I wonder ,,, what sense to make of the
fact that i feel unaffected by time and events... i just feel that
nothing much has touched me... I still exist.. unaffected,,,

[r***@yahoo.com]

fantastic , man... let me suggest something... I think Godhead is the
Ichhashakti.. and Godhead manifests in / by condesation of energy into
3 dimensinal form i.e mass..? and trnsforms back into formless
energy... on a vast timescale, or sometimes in a flash-in less than an
eye-bat..howzatt? the unseperatability of the Godhead and this material
world? Achintya bhedaabheda? everything is a continuum? and it Is gods
grace to be able see through things. I have seen it more coming thru
observing things like an observer,, rather than get involved in the
drama.. though i do feel pain and laughter in the events in which i am
involved, and many a times in others' dramas too...... i try to see
mine and others' scenes like i am a third party...a saakshi... it does
give me a sense that I AM, despite all things and events. It is not
that i am dependent on them.. I wonder ,,, what sense to make of the
fact that i feel unaffected by time and events... i just feel that
nothing much has touched me... I still exist.. unaffected,,,

[h***@indero.com]

Postmodernism, Hindu nationalism and `Vedic science'

MEERA NANDA



The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas with the logos of science
must be of great concern not just to the scientific community, but
also to the religious people, for it is a distortion of both science
and spirituality.




The first part of a two-part article

The Vedas as books of science

IN 1996, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) of the United Kingdom
(U.K.) produced a slick looking book, with many well-produced
pictures of colourfully dressed men and women performing Hindu
ceremonies, accompanied with warm, fuzzy and completely sanitised
description of the faith. The book, Explaining Hindu Dharma: A
Guide for Teachers, offers "teaching suggestions for introducing
Hindu ideas and topics in the classroom" at the middle to high
school level in the British schools system. The authors and editors
are all card-carrying members of the VHP. The book is now in its
second edition and, going by the glowing reviews on the back-cover,
it seems to have established itself as a much-used educational
resource in the British school system.

What "teaching suggestions" does this Guide offer? It advises
British teachers to introduce Hindu dharma as "just another name"
for "eternal laws of nature" first discovered by Vedic seers, and
subsequently confirmed by modern physics and biological sciences.
After giving a false but incredibly smug account of mathematics,
physics, astronomy, medicine and evolutionary theory contained in
the Vedic texts, the Guide instructs the teachers to present the
Vedic scriptures as "not just old religious books, but as books
which contain many true scientific facts... these ancient
scriptures of the Hindus can be treated as scientific texts"
(emphasis added). All that modern science teaches us about the
workings of nature can be found in the Vedas, and all that the
Vedas teach about the nature of matter, god, and human beings is
affirmed by modern science. There is no conflict, there are no
contradictions. Modern science and the Vedas are simply "different
names for the same truth".

This is the image of Hinduism that the VHP and other Hindutva
propagandists want to project around the world. The British case is
not an isolated example. Similar initiatives to portray Vedic-Aryan
India as the "cradle" of world civilisation and science have been
launched in Canada and the United States as well. Many of these
initiatives are beneficiaries of the generous and politically
correct policies of multicultural education in these countries.
Under the worthy cause of presenting the "community's" own views
about its culture, many Western governments are inadvertently
funding Hindutva's propaganda.


KAMAL NARANG
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Human Resource Development
Minister Murli Manohar Joshi at the inauguration of the Indian Science
Congress in New Delhi in 2001. The obsession for finding all kinds of
science in all kinds of obscure Hindu doctrines has been dictating the
official education policy of the BJP ever since it came to power
nearly half a decade ago.


But what concerns us in this article is not the long-distance
Hindutva (or "Yankee Hindutva", as some call it), dangerous though
it is. This essay is more about the left wing-counterpart of Yankee
Hindutva: a set of postmodernist ideas, mostly (but not entirely)
exported from the West, which unintentionally ends up supporting
Hindutva's propaganda regarding Vedic science. Over the last couple
of decades, a set of very fashionable, supposedly "radical"
critiques of modern science have dominated the Western
universities. These critical theories of science go under the label
of "postmodernism" or "social constructivism". These theories see
modern science as an essentially Western, masculine and
imperialistic way of acquiring knowledge. Intellectuals of Indian
origin, many of them living and working in the West, have played a
lead role in development of postmodernist critiques of modern
science as a source of colonial "violence" against non-Western ways
of knowing.

In this two-part essay, I will examine how this postmodernist left
has provided philosophical arguments for Hindutva's claim that
Vedas are "just another name" for modern science. As we will see,
postmodernist attacks on objective and universal knowledge have
played straight into Hindu nationalist slogan of all perspectives
being equally true - within their own context and at their own
level. The result is the loud - but false - claims of finding a
tradition of empirical science in the spiritual teachings of the
Vedas and Vedanta. Such scientisation of the Vedas does nothing to
actually promote an empirical and rational tradition in India,
while it does an incalculable harm to the spiritual message of
Hinduism's sacred books. The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas
with the logos of science must be of great concern not just to the
scientific community, but also to the religious people, for it is a
distortion of both science and spirituality.

In order to understand how postmodern critiques of science converge
with Hindutva's celebration of Vedas-as-science, let us follow the
logic behind VHP's Guide for Teachers.

This Guide claims that the ancient Hindu scriptures contain "many
true scientific facts" and therefore "can be treated as scientific
texts". Let us see what these "true scientific facts" are. The
prime exhibit is the "scientific affirmation" of the theory of guna
(Sanskrit for qualities or attributes). Following the essential
Vedantic idea that matter and spirit are not separate and distinct
entities, but rather the spiritual principle constitutes the very
fabric of the material world, the theory of gunas teaches that
matter exhibits spiritual/moral qualities. There are three such
qualities or gunas which are shared by all matter, living or
non-living: the quality or guna of purity and calmness seeking
higher knowledge (sattvic), the quality or guna of impurity,
darkness, ignorance and inactivity (tamsic) and the quality or guna
of activity, curiosity, worldly gain (rajasic). Modern atomic
physics, the VHP's Guide claims, has confirmed the presence of
these qualities in nature. The evidence? Physics shows that there
are three atomic particles bearing positive, negative and neutral
charges, which correspond to the three gunas! From this "scientific
proof" of the existence of essentially spiritual/moral gunas in
atoms, the Guide goes on to triumphantly deduce the "scientific"
confirmation of the truths of all those Vedic sciences which use
the concept of gunas (for example, Ayurveda). Having "demonstrated"
the scientific credentials of Hinduism, the Guide boldly advises
British school teachers to instruct their students that there is
"no conflict" between the eternal laws of dharma and the laws
discovered by modern science.

PARTH SANYAL
In Kolkata, astrologers demonstrating against the West Bengal
government's decision not to introduce astrology as a subject in the
State's universities. A file picture.


One of the most ludicrous mantras of Hindutva propaganda is that
there is "no conflict" between modern science and Hinduism. In
reality, everything we know about the workings of nature through
the methods of modern science radically disconfirms the presence of
any morally significant gunas, or shakti, or any other form of
consciousness in nature, as taught by the Vedic cosmology which
treats nature as a manifestation of divine consciousness. Far from
there being "no conflict" between science and Hinduism, a
scientific understanding of nature completely and radically negates
the "eternal laws" of Hindu dharma which teach an identity between
spirit and matter. That is precisely why the Hindutva apologists
are so keen to tame modern science by reducing it to "simply
another name for the One Truth" - the "one truth" of Absolute
Consciousness contained in Hinduism's own classical texts.

If Hindu propagandists can go this far in U.K., imagine their power
in India, where they control the Central government and its
agencies for media, education and research. This obsession for
finding all kinds of science in all kinds of obscure Hindu
doctrines has been dictating the official educational policy of the
Bharatiya Janata Party ever since it came to power nearly half a
decade ago.

Indeed the BJP government can teach a thing or two to the creation
scientists in the U.S. Creationists, old and new, are trying to
smuggle in Christian dogma into secular schools in the U.S. by
redefining science in a way that allows God to be brought in as a
cause of natural phenomena. This "theistic science" is meant to
serve as the thin-edge of the wedge that will pry open the secular
establishment. Unlike the creationists who have to contend with the
courts and the legislatures in the U.S., the Indian government
itself wields the wedge of Vedic science intended to dismantle the
(admittedly half-hearted) secularist education policies. By
teaching Vedic Hinduism as "science", the Indian state and elites
can portray India as "secular" and "modern", a model of sobriety
and responsibility in contrast with those obscurantist Islamic
fundamentalists across the border who insist on keeping science out
of their madrassas. How useful is this appellation of "science",
for it dresses up so much religious indoctrination as "secular
education".

Under the kindly patronage of the state, Hindutva's wedge strategy
is working wonders. Astrology is flourishing as an academic subject
in public and private colleges and universities, and is being put
to use in predicting future earthquakes and other natural
disasters. Such "sciences" as Vastu Shastra and Vedic mathematics
are attracting governmental grants for research and education.
While the Ministry of Defence is sponsoring research and
development of weapons and devices with magical powers mentioned in
the ancient epics, the Health Ministry is investing in research,
development and sale of cow urine, sold as a cure for all ailments
from the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) to tuberculosis
(TB). Faith-healing and priest-craft are other "sciences" receiving
public and private funding. In the rest of the culture, miracles
and superstitions of all kinds have the blessings of influential
public figures, including elected Members of Parliament.

THERE are two kinds of claims that feed the notion that the "Vedas
are books of science". The first kind declared the entire Vedic
corpus as converging with modern science, while the second
concentrates on defending such esoteric practices as astrology,
vastu, Ayurveda, transcendental meditation and so on as scientific
within the Vedic paradigm. The first stream seeks to establish
likeness, connections and convergences between radically opposed
ideas (guna theory and atomic particles, for example). This stream
does not relativise science: it simply grabs whatever theory of
physics or biology may be popular with Western scientists at any
given time, and claims that Hindu ideas are "like that", or "mean
the same" and "therefore" are perfectly modern and rational. The
second stream is far more radical, as it defends this "method" of
drawing likenesses and correspondences between unlike entities as
perfectly rational and "scientific" within the non-dualistic Vedic
worldview. The second stream, in other words, relativises
scientific method to dominant religious worldviews: it holds that
the Hindu style of thinking by analogies and correspondences
"directly revealed to the mind's eye" is as scientific within the
"holistic" worldview of Vedic Hinduism, as the analytical and
experimental methodology of modern science is to the "reductionist"
worldview of Semitic religions. The relativist defence of
eclecticism as a legitimate scientific method not only provides a
cover for the first stream, it also provides a generic defence of
such emerging "alternative sciences" as "Vedic physics" and "Vedic
creationism", as well as defending such pseudo-sciences as Vedic
astrology, palmistry, TM (transcendental meditation) and new-age
Ayurveda (Deepak Chopra style).

In what follows, I will examine how postmodernist and social
constructivist critiques of science have lent support to both
streams of Vedas-as-science literature.

But first, I must clarify what I mean by postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a mood, a disposition. The chief characteristic of
the postmodernist disposition is that it is opposed to the
Enlightenment, which is taken to be the core of modernism. Of
course, there is no simple characterisation of the Enlightenment
any more than there is of postmodernism. A rough and ready
portrayal might go like this: Enlightenment is a general attitude
fostered in the 17th and 18th centuries on the heels of the
Scientific Revolution; it aims to replace superstition and
authority of traditions and established religions with critical
reason represented, above all, by the growth of modern science. The
Enlightenment project was based upon a hope that improvement in
secular scientific knowledge will lead to an improvement of the
human condition, not just materially but also ethically and
culturally. While the Enlightenment spirit flourished primarily in
Europe and North America, intellectual movements in India, China,
Japan, Latin America, Egypt and other parts of West Asia were also
influenced by it. However, the combined weight of colonialism and
cultural nationalism thwarted the Enlightenment spirit in
non-Western societies.

Postmodernists are disillusioned with this triumphalist view of
science dispelling ignorance and making the world a better place.
Their despair leads them to question the possibility of progress
toward some universal truth that everyone, everywhere must accept.
Against the Enlightenment's faith in such universal
"meta-narratives" advancing to truth, postmodernists prefer local
traditions which are not entirely led by rational and instrumental
criteria but make room for the sacred, the non-instrumental and
even the irrational. Social constructivist theories of science
nicely complement postmodernists' angst against science. There are
many schools of social constructivism, including the "strong
programme" of the Edinburgh (Scotland) school, and the "actor
network" programme associated with a school in Paris, France. The
many convoluted and abstruse arguments of these programmes do not
concern us here. Basically, these programmes assert that modern
science, which we take to be moving closer to objective truth about
nature, is actually just one culture-bound way to look at nature:
no better or worse than all other sciences of other cultures. Not
just the agenda, but the content of all knowledge is socially
constructed: the supposed "facts" of modern science are "Western"
constructions, reflecting dominant interests and cultural biases of
Western societies.

Following this logic, Indian critics of science, especially those
led by the neo-Gandhians such as Ashis Nandy and Vandana Shiva,
have argued for developing local science which is grounded in the
civilisational ethos of India. Other well-known public
intellectuals, including such stalwarts as Rajni Kothari, Veena
Das, Claude Alvares and Shiv Vishwanathan, have thrown their
considerable weight behind this civilisational view of knowledge.
This perspective also has numerous sympathisers among "patriotic
science" and the environmentalist and feminist movements. A defence
of local knowledges against rationalisation and secularisation also
underlies the fashionable theories of post-colonialism and
subaltern studies, which have found a worldwide following through
the writings of Partha Chatterjee, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha,
Dipesh Chakrabarty and others. All these intellectuals and
movements mentioned here have their roots in movements for social
justice, environmental protection and women's rights - all
traditional left-wing causes.

Social constructivist and postmodernist attacks on science have
proven to be a blessing for all religious zealots, in all major
faiths, as they no longer feel compelled to revise their
metaphysics in the light of progress in our understanding of nature
in relevant fields. But Hinduism displays a special resonance with
the relativistic and holistic thought that finds favour among
postmodernists. In the rest of this two-part paper, I will examine
the general overlap between Hindu apologetics and postmodernist
view of hybridity (part I) and alternative sciences (part II).

Postmodern "hybridity" and Hindu eclecticism

THE contemporary Hindu propagandists are inheritors of the 19th
century neo-Hindu nationalists who started the tradition of
dressing up the spirit-centered metaphysics of orthodox Hinduism in
modern scientific clothes. The neo-Hindu intellectuals, in turn,
were (consciously or unconsciously) displaying the well-known
penchant of generations of Sanskrit pundits for drawing
resemblances and correspondences between religious rituals, forces
of nature and human destiny.

Postmodernist theories of knowledge have rehabilitated this
"method" of drawing equivalences between different and
contradictory worldviews and allowing them to "hybridise" across
traditions. The postmodernist consensus is that since truth about
the real world as-it-is cannot be known, all knowledge systems are
equivalent to each other in being social constructions. Because
they are all equally arbitrary, and none any more objective than
other, they can be mixed and matched in order to serve the needs of
human beings to live well in their own cultural universes. From the
postmodern perspective, the VHP justification of the guna theory in
terms of atomic physics is not anything to worry about: it is
merely an example of "hybridity" between two different culturally
constructed ways of seeing, a fusion between East and West,
tradition and modernity. Indeed, by postmodernist standards, it is
not this hybridity that we should worry about, but rather we should
oppose the "positivist" and "modernist" hubris that demands that
non-Western cultures should give up, or alter, elements of their
inherited cosmologies in the light of the growth of knowledge in
natural sciences. Let us see how this view of hybridity meshes in
with the Hindutva construction of Vedic science.

It is a well-known fact that Hinduism uses its eclectic mantra -
"Truth is one, the wise call it by different names" - as an
instrument for self-aggrandisement. Abrahamic religions go about
converting the Other through persuasion and through the use of
physical force. Hinduism, in contrast, absorbs the alien Other by
proclaiming its doctrines to be only "different names for the One
Truth" contained in Hinduism's own Perennial Wisdom. The teachings
of the outsider, the dissenter or the innovator are simply declared
to be merely nominally different, a minor and inferior variation of
the Absolute and Universal Truth known to Vedic Hindus from time
immemorial. Christianity and Islam at least acknowledge the radical
otherness and difference of other faiths, even as they attempt to
convert them, even at the cost of great violence and mayhem.
Hinduism refuses to grant other faiths their distinctiveness and
difference, even as it proclaims its great "tolerance". Hinduism's
"tolerance" is a mere disguise for its narcissistic obsession with
its own greatness.

Whereas classical Hinduism limited this passive-aggressive form of
conquest to matters of religious doctrine, neo-Hindu intellectuals
have extended this mode of conquest to secular knowledge of modern
science as well. The tradition of claiming modern science as "just
another name" for the spiritual truths of the Vedas started with
the Bengal Renaissance. The contemporary Hindutva follows in the
footsteps of this tradition.

The Vedic science movement began in 1893 when Swami Vivekananda
(1863-1902) addressed the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago.
In that famous address, he sought to present Hinduism not just as a
fulfilment of all other religions, but also as a fulfilment of all
of science. Vivekananda claimed that only the spiritual monism of
Advaita Vedanta could fulfil the ultimate goal of natural science,
which he saw as the search for the ultimate source of the energy
that creates and sustains the world.

Vivekananda was followed by another Bengali
nationalist-turned-spiritualist, Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950).
Aurobindo proposed a divine theory of evolution that treats
evolution as the adventures of the World-Spirit finding its own
fulfilment through progressively higher levels of consciousness,
from matter to man to the yet-to-come harmonious "supermind" of a
socialistic collective. Newer theories of Vedic creationism, which
propose to replace Darwinian evolution with "devolution" from the
original one-ness with Brahman, are now being proposed with utmost
seriousness by the Hare Krishnas who, for all their scandals and
idiosyncrasies, remain faithful to the spirit of Vaishnava
Hinduism.

Vivekananda and Aurobindo lit the spark that has continued to fire
the nationalist imagination, right to the present time. The
Neo-Hindu literature of the 19th and early 20th centuries,
especially the writings of Dayanand Saraswati, S. Radhakrishnan and
the many followers of Vivekananda, is replete with celebration of
Hinduism as a "scientific" religion. Even secularists like
Jawaharlal Nehru remained captive of this idea that the original
teachings of Vedic Hinduism were consonant with modern science, but
only corrupted later by the gradual deposits of superstition.
Countless gurus and swamis began to teach that the Vedas are simply
"another name for science" and that all of science only affirms
what the Vedas have taught. This scientistic version of Hinduism
has found its way to the West through the numerous ashrams and yoga
retreats set up, most prominently, by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his
many clones.

ALL these numerous celebrations of "Vedas as science" follow a
similar intellectual strategy of finding analogies and
equivalences. All invoke extremely speculative theories from modern
cosmology, quantum mechanics, vitalistic theories of biology and
parapsychology, and other fringe sciences. They read back these
sciences into Sanskrit texts chosen at will, and their meaning
decided by the whim of the interpreter, and claim that the entities
and processes mentioned in Sanskrit texts are "like", "the same
thing as", or "another word for" the ideas expressed in modern
cosmology, quantum physics or biology. Thus there is a bit of a
Brahman here and a bit of quantum mechanics there, the two treated
as interchangeable; there are references to "energy", a scientific
term with a definite mathematical formulation in physics, which
gets to mean "consciousness"; references to Newton's laws of action
and reaction are made to stand for the laws of karma and
reincarnation; completely discredited "evidence" from
parapsychology and "secret life of plants" are upheld as proofs of
the presence of different degrees of soul in all matter;
"evolution" is taught as the self-manifestation of Brahman and so
on. The terms are scientific, but the content is religious. There
is no regard for consistency either of scientific concepts, or of
religious ideas. Both wholes are broken apart, random connections
and correspondences are established and with great smugness, the
two modes of knowing are declared to be equivalent, and even
inter-changeable. The only driving force, the only idea that gives
this whole mish-mash any coherence, is the great anxiety to
preserve and protect Hinduism from a rational critique and
demystification. Vedic science is motivated by cultural chauvinism,
pure and simple.

What does all this have to do with postmodernism, one may
legitimately ask. Neo-Hinduism, after all, has a history dating
back at least two centuries, and the analogical logic on which
claims of Vedic science are based goes back to times immemorial.

Neo-Hinduism did not start with postmodernism, obviously. And
neither does Hindutva share the postmodernist urgency to "overcome"
and "go beyond" the modernist fascination with progress and
development. Far from it. Neo-Hinduism and Hindutva are reactionary
modernist movements, intent on harnessing a mindless and even
dangerous technological modernisation for the advancement of a
traditionalist, deeply anti-secular and illiberal social agenda.
Nevertheless, they share a postmodernist philosophy of science that
celebrates the kind of contradictory mish-mash of science,
spirituality, mysticism and pure superstition that that passes as
"Vedic science".

For those modernists who share the Enlightenment's hope for
overcoming ignorance and superstition, the value of modern science
lies in its objectivity and universality. Modernists see modern
science as having developed a critical tradition that insists upon
subjecting our hypotheses about nature to the strictest, most
demanding empirical tests and rigorously rejecting those hypotheses
whose predictions fail to be verified. For the modernist, the
success of science in explaining the workings of nature mean that
sciences in other cultures have a rational obligation to revise
their standards of what kind of evidence is admissible as science,
what kind of logic is reasonable, and how to distinguish justified
knowledge from mere beliefs. For the modernists, furthermore,
modern science has provided a way to explain the workings of nature
without any need to bring in supernatural and untestable causes
such as a creator God, or an immanent Spirit.

For a postmodernist, however, this modernist faith in science is
only a sign of Eurocentrism and cultural imperialism. For a
postmodernist, other cultures are under no rational obligation to
revise their cosmologies, or adopt new procedures for ascertaining
facts to bring them in accord with modern science. Far from
producing a uniquely objective and universally valid account of
nature, the "facts" of modern science are only one among many other
ways of constructing other "facts" about nature, which are equally
valid for other cultures. Nature-in-itself cannot be known without
imposing classifications and meaning on it which are derived from
cultural metaphors and models. All ways of seeing nature are at par
because all are equally culture-bound. Modern science has no
special claims to truth and to our convictions, for it is as much
of a cultural construct of the West as other sciences are of their
own cultures.

This view of science is derived from a variety of American and
European philosophies of science, associated mostly with such
well-known philosophers as Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, W.O Quine,
Ludwig Wittgenstein and Michel Foucault. This view of science has
been gaining popularity among Indian scholars of science since the
infamous "scientific temper" debates in early 1980s when Ashis
Nandy, Vandana Shiva and their sympathisers came out in defence of
local knowledges and traditions, including astrology, goddess
worship as cure for small-pox, taboos against menstruation and
(later on) even sati. Over the next two decades, it became a
general practice in Indian scholarly writing to treat modern
science as just one way to adjudicate belief, no different from any
other tradition of sorting out truth from mere group belief.
Rationalism became a dirty word and Enlightenment became a stand-in
for "epistemic violence" of colonialism.

According to those who subscribe to this relativist philosophy, the
cross-cultural encounter between modern science and traditional
sciences is not a confrontation between more and less objective
knowledge, respectively. Rather it is a confrontation between two
different cultural ways of seeing the world, neither of which can
claim to represent reality-in-itself. Indeed, many radical
feminists and post-colonial critics go even further: they see
modern science as having lost its way and turned into a power of
oppression and exploitation. They want non-Western people not just
to resist science but to reform it by confronting it with their
holistic traditional sciences.

What happens when traditional cultures do need to adopt at least
some elements of modern knowledge? In such cases, postmodernists
recommend exactly the kind of "hybridity" as we have seen in the
case of Vedic sciences in which, for example, sub-atomic particles
are interpreted as referring to gunas, or where quantum energy is
interpreted to be the "same as" shakti, or where karma is
interpreted to be a determinant of biology in a "similar manner" as
the genetic code and so on. On the postmodern account, there is
nothing irrational or unscientific about this "method" of drawing
equivalences and correspondences between entirely unlike entities
and ideas, even when there may be serious contradictions between
the two. On this account, all science is based upon metaphors and
analogies that reinforce dominant cultures and social power, and
all "facts" of nature are really interpretations of nature through
the lens of dominant culture. It is perfectly rational, on this
account, for Hindu nationalists to want to reinterpret the "facts"
of modern science by drawing analogies with the dominant cultural
models supplied by Hinduism. Because no system of knowledge can
claim to know reality as it really is, because our best confirmed
science is ultimately a cultural construct, all cultures are free
to pick and choose and mix various "facts", as long as they do not
disrupt their own time-honoured worldviews.

This view of reinterpretation of "Western" science to fit into the
tradition-sanctioned, local knowledges of "the people" has been
advocated by theories of "critical traditionalism" propounded by
Ashis Nandy and Bhiku Parekh in India and by the numerous admirers
of Homi Bhabha's obscure writings on "hybridity" abroad. In the
West, this view has found great favour among feminists, notably
Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway, and among anthropologists of
science including Bruno Latour, David Hess and their followers.

To conclude, one finds a convergence between the fashionable left's
position with the religious right's position on the science
question. The extreme scepticism of postmodern intellectuals toward
modern science has landed them in a position where they cannot, if
they are to remain true to their beliefs, criticise Hindutva's
eclectic take-over of modern science for the glory of the Vedic
tradition.

Meera Nanda is the author of Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern
Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism (Rutgers University
Press, 2003). An Indian edition of the book will be published by
Permanent Black in early 2004.

[OsherD]

Post by h***@indero.com
The mixing up of the mythos of the Vedas with the logos of science
must be of great concern not just to the scientific community, but
also to the religious people, for it is a distortion of both

science

Post by h***@indero.com
and spirituality.

I'm a member of sci.physics, and I've been responding to the very
interesting postings by Dr. Jai Maharaj which come through to
sci.physics from the other forums. I notice two postings after my last
one which attack either me or Dr. Maharaj's views, including this one
which opposes the latter. I'm not an expert in Vedas, and I suppose
that the cross-postings don't assume expertise especially to a physics
forum.

I am curious about the origins of these attacks, since there hasn't
been one for many months if not years that I'm aware of. Here are some
of my concerns.

A. Why do the attacks suddenly come after such a long period of
non-criticism?
B. The attacks on "Hindu Nationalists" only make political sense if
they come from either Islamists or "Hindu socialists". If the former,
then I'm inclined to believe the Hindu Nationalists more. If the
latter, then I'm still inclined to believe the Hindu Nationalists more,
since the main "socialist" friend of India (Russia or formerly USSR)
has proven to be one of the major (if not the major) fomenters of the
Middle/Near East conflicts and almost totally disregards the Individual
for its obsession with an abstract Plurality that usually translates
into "Me First" or "Number One (Myself)" or "My bureaucracy first" or
"I am the state", not to mention its fear of Parliamentary Democracy.
C. It is not necessary to concentrate on the negative features of the
Hindu Faith since it has a super-abundance of positive features
including reverence for Life (any Islamist parallels?), non-violence
(any Islamist parallels?), real concern with the Plurality rather than
with Ayatollahs' power or Mullahs' power, real concern with the
Individual through Meditation and self-improvement, and Parliamentary
Democracy which has accompanied the Hindu Faith in the 20th and 21st
centuries.

Osher Doctorow

[h***@indero.com]

Dr. Sagan spent much of his life debuncking the kind of "truth claims" of
"vedic science". He was an atheist and faught greatly any attempt of
religion meddiling in science. His reference to hinduism is about the
scale of time and how it was of a kind that used large amounts of it to
explain the history. Like so many things jay stevens,aka dr. jai etc.,
posts this is in directed contridiction to the effect he tries to force
upon it. Dr. Sagan would have laughed him off the stage after sweeping
the floor with him, for as many cycles as jay stevens could have absorbed
before asking for mercy in any intellectual interchange.