On Dec 30, 2008, at 6:39 PM, ruthsimplicity wrote:
The religion question is partly an east-west issue of the nature of religion. From what I am reading, the mixing of religion and science is common in fundamentalist Hinduism. I posted a link a week or two ago about how fundamentalist Hindus may view Hinduism as inclusive of everything and to illustrate inclusiveness they use the language of science to explain essentially religious concepts. The language of quantum physics has been used not just by the TMO but by Hindu fundamentalists as well. With this sort of world view neither their religion nor their science is ever wrong, and you are just unenlightened or uneducated if you do not buy their reasoning about how it all fits together. Haglin, Nader, et al seem to fall into this camp when talking about TM and science. There are meditators here that fall into the same camp.
What's important to understand is that MMY's strain of Vedic science is purely--from an eastern Indian POV--a fundamentalist trend. Both he and Guru Dev were associated with Right-wing political parties all of which, up to this day, are associated with trying declare the Vedas as an internal and external science. The bizarre thing is, to the western POV, these concepts seem very left, "greenish". But these are the Indian parallels to western creation science (and Christian and Jewish fundamentalism), make no mistake. The most striking example of this is the guy who was originally voted to be the Shankaracharya before Guru Dev, Swami Karpatri. Sw. Karpatri declined the Shank. largely because he had founded a political party intending to reestablish Hinduism as a state religion. That party and trend continues up to the present and includes a movement that is trying to claim the Vedas are science and insert them into mainstream Hindu life. Islamic extremism is further fueling these fires of ignorance just as 9/11 energized the USA and our fundies.
Before MMY came to the forefront there was already a large movement to connect physics to the Vedas and mantra yoga, etc.
So don't make the mistake of not seeing MMY as a right-wing fundamentalist Hindu, he clearly was and this is easily demonstrated if one is willing to take the time and look into it. I highly recommend looking into the works of Meera Nanada, a Hindu rationalist, on "Vedic Science"
LINK
