Just to clarify my pre-coffee snippy post about Atlanteans visiting India, my "take" on myth (which I consider the Vedas to be) is similar to Joseph Campbell's. He viewed myths as maps of consciousness, as filtered through a region's existing beliefs.
It is possible to project great wisdom onto myths because it's really there -- they are tales woven around subjective experiences of consciousness and the stages that consciousness goes through as it expands -- "tales of power" in a Castanedan sense. The tales are meant to give those who have not *had* those subjective experiences something to hold onto, some "finger pointing to the moon," some outer, relative expression of an experience which is by definition inner. But IMO each of the mythic stories got "filtered" along the way. The seers who wrote them or who committed them to some oral tradition probably really did have some neat subjective experiences, but in trying to describe them to their neighbors, they "filtered" those subjective experience through the objective beliefs and superstitions of the time and location they lived in. Thus inner exper- iences in India got "filtered" through a pre- existing set of beliefs about multiple gods and goddesses cavorting in Brahmaloka. Inner experiences in Mesopotamia got filtered through an existing set of beliefs about a dualistic universe in which the relative world was created by the Bad Guy and God dwelled outside it, in a separate realm of spirit. Inner experiences in North America got filtered through a belief in animal spirits, and ended up with Coyote sneezing the world into creation. Campbell was fascinated both by the variety of such myths around the world, and by the similar- ities he saw in them. The *same* stories show up in myths all over the world, but even more so the same *themes* show up all over the world. He saw those similarities as the important thing, the "maps of consciousness" shining through the surface storytelling like signposts for those who hadn't had the personal experience of the shift in consciousness that the stories were really about. That's how I approach the Vedas. I don't buy the MMY/TMO "the Vedas were the first and primal knowledge" stuff; that's just India-chauvinism IMO. Almost EVERY society in history has believed that its myths reflect the first and primal know- ledge. There almost certainly *is* useful knowledge to be gained from studying the Vedas, or any other myth. But clouding that study by believing that the myths represent literal truth is IMO as deep a trap as believing that the Old Testament was literal truth, or that the Koran was, or that the Native American Coyote stories were.
