| > pseudoscience Sorry. Disagree. As someone who studies Vedanta I know for a fact that it is not pseudoscience. > Read this and stop all the magical fairy tales. You have to remember that these scriptures were written in a different era. They used poetry and stories as a medium to explain difficult to understand concepts. That does not make it "magical fairy tales". Those who can grasp the inner meaning of the stories know what they were actually trying to say. For everyone else it seems like a magical story/mythology. Take this hymn as an example: ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते ।
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥
ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥ The translation is roughly: 1: Om, That is Purna; This is also Purna; From Purna is manifested Purna, 2: Taking Purna from Purna, Purna indeed remains, 3: Om, Peace, Peace, Peace. It might seem complete gibberish at first glance. But it is definition of Infinity in the form of poetry. Purna means fullness. It is explaining the characteristic of infinity and how adding/removing anything from infinity doesn't change its intrinsic value. That it always remains infinite. This is just one example. The problem is not in the authors of these scriptures. They were highly advanced beings for their Time. The problem is with us that we do not have the capacity to understand it the right way. Even now many Vedic scriptures are mistranslated with even more of them tragically lost due to burning of the Nalanda University by invaders. I also checked the book you linked to see what the author has to say about Time. Funnily enough, the book itself quotes Dharmic concepts of cyclical Time to further its points albeit in a convoluted and rejigged way, where the author says: "An alternative to the periodicity view of the universe is to display periodicity
as a series of sine waves. Now we can walk along the troughs and peaks of the line
without ever returning to the starting point (figure 1.1, right). Time here is a continuum with the cycle as its metric. The cycles are identical in shape, and the start
and end points of the cycles form an infinite path into the seemingly endless universe.". He doesn't realize that this is exactly what Dharmic concept of Time is anyways. So his assumption that "Time is cyclical" to mean everything "repeats" is not what Dharma says at all. It just stems from a common misunderstanding of Dharmic concepts that has plagued the discourse in the West as most of the translations are done by Western Indologists without conversing with Indian Vedanta scholars who are experts in the field. |
This is why we should use Mathematics, it's an universal language. If you think about it, from Geometry itself you can extrapolate the 90% of the core Algebra laws.
Religion and philosphy are just either methods of power or the emergent culture of the society of their days. Kinda like Nietzche was the "son" of the industrial revolution on cities against the old Regime which was tied to rural societies.
When Nietzche said "God it's dead" for sure it meant as the old regime which emerged from ruralist towns and the Neolithic revolution which was something born of agriculture.
Even the Bible itself it's a metaphor as a war between hunters/gatherers and farmers (Cain vs Abel) and the Abrahamic religion are just Sun/wheat workshippers. The Holy Week meets exactly harvesting times after a hard winter. Abrahamic religions are just that, the glorification of the Neolithic symbols.
The paradise was in the hunter/gatherer society, were no hard work was needed to keep the lands farmed and the cattle fed, you just hunted animals and collected fruits; and giving a painless childbirth could be possible maybe with either drugs or hallucinogenic mushrooms.