Hindyguy,

But replace the word universe with Brahma or Indra, and the faithful will keep the story alive.

That is the best explanation of why myth is important I have ever heard. I have never thought of it like that before, I don't relate to myth very much at all, but now I see why it is important.

Maya

Thank you Maya. you have to thank my mother for this, becuase when I was kid and laughed off one of the stories, she told me to try to understand and pay attention to what they were trying to say, to not get lost in the story itself. For example the question: When a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to hear it, does it make a sound? For the longest time I thought this was such a silly question, of course it makes a sound. But now I realize, no, the tree does not make a sound.

Haaaaaaaaaa

Even i could not understand how the tree does not
make a sound???????

Actually western science especially physics has just been catching up and confirming the wisdom of buddhism and hinduism and other ancient wisdom since the advent of particle physics .. confirming some of the tenets of this ancient wisdom..physicists are becoming mystics and mystics are becoming physicists..

Here is a great article that first appeared on http://www.metanexus.net/magazine/tabid … fault.aspx that talks about the intersection of Hinduism and Science.

Concluding Thoughts on Science and Hinduism
By Varadaraja V Raman

After more than a century of open conflict, science and religion have initiated mutually respectful dialogues in the Western Christian tradition.  Scholars in other traditions which never had such confrontations are joining in these discussions, largely because these are conducted in the global languages of English and French.  Thus, the debates between Science and Christianity have now been extended to Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism also.  African religious perspectives are also making their way into this arena.

In the multicultural world in which we live, it is good to know how various traditions approach the topic of science and religion.  Each brings its particular light, each unique in its own way.  What distinguishes the Hindu perspective is that it does not hinge upon holy books and prophetic messages, nor even on claims of its own mode being superior, but rather on recognitions that are accessible to one and all who would undertake the quest.  In this regard, it is closer to the scientific quest, and like it, the Hindu vision transcends race and religion, geography and culture.

Yet, it does have historical roots.  What is now called Hinduism is a capsule epithet for a complex, ancient, and extremely diverse culture in which practically every aspect of human endeavor has found rich expression.  Mainstream Hinduism traces its spiritual and intellectual roots to the wisdom of the Vedas and the Upanishads which have nourished the Hindu mind and soul for millennia.  The ancient aphoristic genre in which the insights are articulated affords ample room for discussion and dispute.  So, Hindu thinkers vary widely in their interpretations and even allegiance to these most sacred texts of their tradition.

These texts combine the insights of poetry and the reflections of philosophy with the visions of spiritually awakened sages.  Their contents may strike the modern mind as arcane and incomprehensible at first blush, but upon careful analysis, they impress us as more than inspired metaphysical utterances: sometimes, they seem to be glimmers of deep scientific understanding of the world.

In a sense, traditional Hindu reflections may be looked upon as theologies as one would use the term in the Western tradition: For they do talk about God in concrete name-bearing modes and in the abstract spiritual sense also.  But it must be noted that the seers don't simply confine themselves to lauding the Divine and seeking His blessings or mercy.  Rather, they probe into the most fundamental question of all: the nature and source of this most mysterious presence in an otherwise cold and concrete physical world, this stamp of self-identity which each of us is heir to, called consciousness.  This is a matter in which modern science has been intensely engaged in recent decades, but Hindu thinkers have always explored it in theory and in practice too.

So it is that contributors to this series have reflected on consciousness.  Whether it is via neuroscience, studies of yogic potential, AI, or whatever, this is a topic to which even more time and energy will be directed in the decades to come.

In this context, it is good to recall that Hindu experimenters who recognized levels of reality declared that much confusion would arise if we adopt the methodology of exploring one level in probing another.  This brings us to the domain of application of the rational mode.  Reason, logic, and mathematics are powerful tools in interpreting the world on the intellectual and epistemic plane.  But whether they are equally effective in handling other levels of experience is a question that is worth examining, if only because there is no point in trying to unlock a sturdy lock with an incompatible key.  This question has been analyzed in another essay.  Finally, there are uncanny coincidences in the age of the universe obtained in current cosmological calculations and in ancient Hindu reckoning.  Without claiming to solve the mystery, one of the essays presents the relevant facts.

Now there are two ways of looking upon the vast corpus of Indian philosophical writings and spiritual utterances: The first is to regard them as yet another interesting body of speculative thought about the world.  Seen thus, Indian philosophy strikes us as rich in the variety of problems it explores, and impressive in its scope and range.  It is creatively imaginative in its analogies and hypotheses, tantalizingly appealing in its picturesque worldviews.  The output of Indian philosophers is staggeringly voluminous and their mode insightfully classificatory.  The goal of the various schools is invariably the same: liberation of the jivatman (individual soul) from the doctrinally proclaimed cycle of birth and death.  Few who have even scratched the surface of the grand visions of Indian philosophy can deny that the thinkers who originated them were mighty intellects who were altogether convinced of whatever they were declaring.

This leads us to the second view.  From this perspective, even with its mutually opposing positions as to the identity or the distinctions between the jivatman (individual soul) and the paramatman (supreme soul), and other logically questionable metaphysical assertions, Indian philosophy has at its core certain profound insights into the ultimate nature of the world and of the human experience.  The basic theses of Hindu thought do not simply subtend speculative systems, any more than Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism is mere mathematics.

Rather, the proponents of Indian philosophy were telling us something that is not only meaningful, but revelatory about the ultimate nature of consciousness and the cosmos.  They were not building a system of thought so much as unveiling a not-so-apparent dimension of Reality.  Their aphorisms were not just doodles on the mental plane: they arose rather from experiential certitudes resulting from sustained tinkering with the subtlest centers of the inscrutable Self.  Their words and wisdom are to be taken, therefore, not as grand imaginative poetry, but as findings and discoveries about the physical universe, exactly as twentieth century science, after persistent probing into the heart of matter and energy, after countless hours of search and reflection, has erected its own views of fundamental reality.

If this were so, if spiritual probing via yogic efforts do lead to insights about the ultimate nature of physical reality, while scientific peelings of the layers of matter via instrumental ingenuities and mathematical formalisms also lead to the deep-down details of that same reality, then one would expect the two lines of quest to merge, somewhat as travelers by jet planes and by ocean liners, starting from the same point, could ultimately meet at the same destination.

This, in the view of some, is precisely what is happening in our own times.  For, it turns out that the philosophical quagmire into which quantum physics has been sliding during the past few decades turns topsy-turvy our common sense pictures of a solid substantial world of cause and law, of rigid particles and conserved quantities, of smooth flowing time and three-dimensional space.  As we delve deeper into the remote recesses of atoms and nuclei, funny things begin to happen.

Mathematical clouds of probability take over, electrons seem to know, information seems to get transmitted instantaneously, everything seems to be interconnected, and a good many more strange things are taking place in the microcosm.  In the depths of black holes and in the singularities of quarks, space and time and physical laws get warped and dissolved.  Now we begin to wonder if those sage-poets of India had not after all tumbled upon some profound truths about the perceived world which, because of their very nature, could not be adequately expressed even in sacred Sanskrit.  They were perhaps quite right in insisting that in the stark denuded aspect, stripped of mute matter and measuring mind, there is a level of reality that only pure consciousness can experience, and pure consciousness can only experience, not convey.  Could it be that now at long last, after countless tortuous turns of reason and experimentation, of mathematics and microscopes, science is slowly beginning to get a glimmer of what the sages were speaking about?

That is why in our own times some eminent physicists and philosophers of the quantum world, commentators and speculative thinkers are drawn towards this ancient wisdom.  It would seem that there is much to be gained if, as Alexis Comfort suggests, the yogic quest on the one hand, stripped of its mumble-jumble, and no-nonsense empirical science on the other, stripped of its rationalistic straight-jacket and model-building prejudices about what can and what cannot be, combine forces in unscrewing the deeper mysteries of the world of experience.