Nobel Excerpts about Bharata Varsha -13

Some of the  intellectual celebraties in the world of the

West and the East had the following things

 to say about Hinduism:

431.  Major Francis Yeats-Brown (1886 - 1944) was the younger son of an English diplomat. The Orient called to him and he became a Bengal Lancer, although every turn of his mind was toward scholarship, literature, and philosophy. His book The Lives of a Bengal Lancer was perhaps the most extraordinary book ever written about India by a westerner. 

Francis Yeats-Brown liked Indians, so he was not unhappy to be sent to an Indian regiment (17th Cavalry, Indian Army). But his acquaintance with Indians and Indian culture educated him out of humor with Western civilization. "Very humbly and hopefully'' he went to Benares, holy city of the Hindus, there to sit at the feet of Theosophist Annie Besant, How far Yeats-Brown has progressed in the practice of Yoga is not clear. But he tried the primary breathing exercises, says he attained moments of impersonality. "Poised and relaxed and completely in my body (not out of it, as the mystologues would have it) I saw myself at times impersonally. The future lay at my feet. I surveyed it as an interested traveler."

In India he plunged deeply into the study of the Hinduism, Vedantism and Yoga. 

He was a Bengal Lancer who became a yogi and wrote a book called Yoga Explained. 

(source: India: Land of the Black Pagoda - By Lowell Thomas p. 10 - 12).

432. Horace Alexander (1899 - 1989) was an English Quaker, diplomat, teacher and writer, pacifist and ornithologist. He was the youngest of four sons of Joseph Gundry Alexander (1848–1918). One of his brothers was biologist Wilfred Backhouse Alexander. He has observed that:

"Western scholars of our age, when they talk of heritage of the ancient world, still commonly confine themselves to the Mediterranean countries, with Mesopotamia and Arabia and Persia possibly included. The ancient cultures of China and India are omitted. 

“It is impossible to do justice to the profound insights and philosophical majesty of the Bhagavad Gita as a whole.”

“The wisdom of ancient India, which has sustained the lives of millions through the centuries, is in fact highly relevant to the sickness of our world order.”  

"But the idea that the Hindu tradition is dead, an idea commonly accepted on the authority of Macaulay and others in 19^th century England, needs to be revised. The India of the Buddha, the Mahabharata, and especially of the Bhagavad Gita, has come to a new birth. It is important, therefore, that we examine both its roots and its new vitality."

“It is impossible to do justice to the profound insights and philosophical majesty of the Bhagavad Gita as a whole.”

“The Gita emphasizes that the activities of the world must go on. The good man does the tasks to which he is called and which appertain to his place in society. In all his activities, he does things like others outwardly; but inwardly he maintains a spirit of detachment. He does everything without selfish motive, and maintains equilibrium of mind. Self-knowledge is, in fact, the way from immaturity to maturity. Many illiterate and poor Indian villagers are more mature as persons than their western city counterparts, who have wealth, knowledge of the kind that can be acquired through books, technical skills and the other attributes of western civilization.  The Gita shows man the way to live a complete and satisfying life." 

“The wisdom of ancient India, which has sustained the lives of millions through the centuries, is in fact highly relevant to the sickness of our world order.”  

“Many westerners are suspicious of “oriental wisdom” because they think of it in terms of metaphysical speculation, or in terms of gross superstition. The Gita is a very remarkable book. Hinduism is perhaps the least dogmatic and the most tolerant of religions.”

(source: Consider India: An essays in values - By Horace Alexander p. 1 - 26)

433. Ed Viswanathan (     ) is the author of the bestseller book, Am I a Hindu?: The Hinduism Primer (1992) is a form of dialog between a Hindu father and his American-born son. It presents a great overview of Hinduism.

He has written very astutely about the open mindedness of Hinduism and one of its greatest traits, thus:
“Hinduism has no problem facing any type of question. It does not have to hide behind unpronounceable Sanskrit words or spiritual dogma. Instead, it absorbs new ideas like a sponge. Believe it or not, Hinduism recharges itself with modern thoughts. Technology, psychology, parapsychology, modern astronomy, the new physics and genetics all enrich Hinduism.” “Within Hinduism, you can think and argue on any subject. It has no hierarchy, it has no establishment and it has no governing body.”
Viswanathan has rightly pointed out that Hinduism readily and easily encompasses a whole gamut of ideas and thoughts known to mankind:
“It has highly spiritualistic Advaita and Raja Yoga on one side and highly materialistic atheistic, hedonistic Charvaka philosophy, which does not believe in God or the Vedas, on the other side. On one side, idolatry is a part of Hinduism. The Jahala Upanishad says, “Images are meant only as aids to meditation for the ignorant.”

Hinduism is not a religion that seeks to convert. In fact Hindus consider it to be absurd to state that only one religion is the true religion of the world. 

Writing about this, he states: 

“The Hindu yogi will never try to convert a person from another religion to Hinduism. Instead he will try to make a person’s faith steadfast in his/her own religion. The Bhagavad Gita says, “In whatever form a devotee seeks to worship Me with faith, I make his faith steadfast in that form alone.” He further explains about sin in Hinduism: “Hinduism very scientifically deals with sin, explaining the law of karma, or cause and effect. All the parables in mythology explain how to deal with sins in a very positive manner. When a child puts his hand in fire, he gets burned. His action here is due to his ignorance of the power of fire. The child did not commit a sin, but due to his ignorance of the truth that fire burns, he did a bad Karma and he had the result of getting burned. That is the way the idea of sin is explained in Hinduism. Christianity has stressed sin and fear of God and hell. Hinduism stands against the doctrine of sin.”

(source: Am I a Hindu? The Hinduism Primer - By Ed Viswanathan Halo Books San Francisco p. 1-5 and 287)

434. Dr. William Ralph Inge (1860 - 1954) Anglican Platonist author in his Christian Mysticism refers to the mystic strains in the early thinkers. 

Inge, however, agrees with Heiler in looking upon the negative descriptions of the deity and the world-denying character of ethics as Indian in origin. He says: 

“The doctrine that God can be described only by negatives is neither Christian nor Greek, but belongs to the old religion of India.” 

"To give a negative account of God is to affirm His immensity of being."

(source: Eastern Religions & Western Thought - By. Dr. S. Radhakrishnan  p. 293).

435. Richard Schiffman (  ) is nationally known as an on-air journalist whose features regularly appear on the National Public Radio shows: Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Living of Earth. He has studied in India for over four years and is the author of Sri Ramakrisnhna - Prophet for the New Age (1989).  Schiffman lived in India for a number of years and studied Hindu spirituality under several spiritual Masters, including the Jillellamudi Mother, Bhagavan Sri Sathya Sai Baba and Mata Amritananadamayi. He is the author of Mother of All, a biography of the Jillellamudi Mother, and former editor of the Matrusi Journal.

He has observed about the Upanishads thus:
“These sparse treatises of great beauty, intensity, and revelatory power are set for the most part in the form of dialogues of spiritual guidance between youthful seekers and their enlightened masters, the immortal rishis. The approaches pioneered by the rishis remain to this day the mainstays of Hindu mystical practices.”
“Living far from the concerns of the larger society, these sages nonetheless initiated a revolution in thought and spiritual practice which would spread throughout Asia and beyond, setting the basic agenda for the development of over two millennia of Eastern civilization – and just now sparking some interesting fireworks along the cutting edge of our own exploration which has continued until the present day. And they charted in breathless and enigmatic words – the only words possible for describing such a mystery! – the rough outlines of a realm as wide as the cosmos and equally as wondrous. For had not the sage of the Chandogya Upanishad declared: “The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and He dwells within our hearts.” “With words such as these, the rishis were the first to proclaim the virtually unlimited potential of consciousness, not as an abstract theoretical possibility, but as an experiential reality.”
“The Upanishads are the living expression of that understanding.”
Reflecting on post-Newtonian physics, he has noted that:

“This primal insight into the dreamlike nature of the world of appearances has an oddly contemporary resonance given the direction of modern scientific thought. Long before post-Newtonian physics “discovered” that matter is essentially energy in drag – E =MC2 – the sages had already intuited that the physical universe is an emanation of the omnipotent Force, which they call Shakti. “By Primal Energy, all that exist is born; by Primal Energy all that exists is sustained; and into Primal Energy all that exists returns in the end.” Creation, according to this view, is neither static, nor at base even material, but a dynamism of ceaseless transformation, the ecstatic dance of the Divine Mother Kali. The astrophysicist, the molecular biologist, the subatomic physicist could only agree.”

(source: Living Wisdom: Vedanta in the West - Edited By Pravrajika Vrajaprana Vedanta Press. Hollywood, CA p. 60 – 70).  Refer to The Vedanta Kesari

436. John Moffitt (  ) a graduate of Princeton and the Curtis Institute of Music, was a monastic member of the order of Ramakrishna for 25 years and then became a Catholic. In his book, Journey to Gorakhpur he gently leads the Westerner to shed his cultural imperialism in an encounter with the ongoing vitality of Indian tradition. He said that Christians must guard against a premature assumption that God intended everyone in the East to become a professing Christian. 

"The majority of the people in the West have largely misunderstood both (Hinduism and Buddhism) religions. Up till now these ancient faiths have been devoutly misrepresented by most scholars who are professing Christians."

"Hinduism's doctrine of the "divinity" of the soul, the non duality of the Godhead, the unity of existence, and the harmony of religions were strongly appealing and he joined the Ramakrishna Order of India, working at the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York under the direction of Swami Nikhilananda."

"In India, after all, religion is like the air you breathe, and almost every Hindu's given name had a religious association. But is is not just a matter of conventions. Even villagers who practice what look to Westerners, like grossly superstitious forms of worship are not unfamiliar with many of the subtleties of what we in the West would call scholastic philosophy."

"The Upanishads announce the advent of a new consciousness of the nature of ultimate reality. Even among the earlier hymns of the Vedas we find one or two that contain speculations about the first cause of the universe. But with the Upanishads we have a new and liberating revelation. The Upanishads record the efforts of the later Vedic sages to communicate to qualified pupils what they had found as a result of their quest for the True Self of man and the Divine Ground of the Universe. These treatises, though they still reflect some of the earlier beliefs, offer a profound insight into the nature of ultimate reality and of the soul. Traditional Christian thought would no doubt brand the Upanishadic record as heretical. Yet, from the point of view of intuitive wisdom, it is far more explicit about the soul's relationship to God than any of the books of the New Testament."

The use of the phrase "the truth of truth" has a peculiar fitness in the Hindu context. In India men have from time immemorial emphasized the centrality of truth. The Rig-Veda, the earliest of Indian scriptures, declares:  "It is truth that bears up this earth." 

"The Self is never born, nor does it ever die, nor, having once been, does it again cease to be. Unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval, it is not slain when the body is slain." "Weapons cut it not, fire burns it not, water wets it not, the wind does not wither it."

These few quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, like those from the Upanishads, offer only an infinitesimal hint of the rich variety of experience in the form of intuitive wisdom to be found in the Hindu canonical scriptures. They show the kind of thinking and experience that preoccupied the later Vedic seers. 

(image source: Indika: The Country and the people of India and Ceylon - By Rev. John F Hurst).

The Taittiriya Upanishad, a source book for Shankara's Vedanta philosophy, says, "The Satya (the Truth) became all this: whatever there is." And this veneration of truth has continued into modern times. It is well known that Mahatma Gandhi, though for many years in the habit of saying, "God is Truth." Perhaps without knowing it, he had gone back to the Vedas. The Hindu scriptures abound with reference to acts of truth. When the earth opened at Queen Sita's bidding, in the Ramayana story, and when she passed through the flames unscathed, what happened bore witness to her perfection in truth. 

The Bhagavad Gita not only illuminates but carries forward the teachings of the Upanishads in a grand synthesis whose potentialities were only fully realized in India over two millenniums later. In his instruction, Lord Krishna defines not only what Arjuna's duty is as dictated by his position in society, but also the basis of belief for those who by nature emphasize the voice of intuitive wisdom. Followers of this voice speak of the Bhagavad Gita as a dialogue between the Supreme Self and the individual self. "The unreal never is," Krishna says. "The Real never ceases to be...That by which all this is pervaded know to be imperishable...The Self is never born, nor does it ever die, nor, having once been, does it again cease to be. Unborn, eternal, permanent, and primeval, it is not slain when the body is slain." "Weapons cut it not, fire burns it not, water wets it not, the wind does not wither it. Here we have the Upanishadic doctrine of Atman, spelled out in slightly greater detail. These few quotations from the Bhagavad Gita, like those from the Upanishads, offer only an infinitesimal hint of the rich variety of experience in the form of intuitive wisdom to be found in the Hindu canonical scriptures. They show the kind of thinking and experience that preoccupied the later Vedic seers. Those who followed them in the post-Vedic age, by weaving their findings into the stories of legendary heroes, made these available to average man. They also provided future generations with their first detailed, though perhaps partly idealized, view of everyday life in ancient India."

The Bhagavad Gita offers a highly refined and well-balanced exposition of love of God.

(source: Journey to Gorakhpur: An Encounter with Christ beyond Christianity - By John Moffitt  p. 1 - 89)

437. Samuel Johnson (1822- 1882) went to private schools, Harvard, and then Harvard Divinity School from which he graduated in 1846. Among his class mates were Octavius Brooks B Frothingham and his lifelong friend Samuel Longfellow, brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

Johnson was a minor Transcendentalist whose faith was centered in naturalism, and he rejected much of Christian tradition as revelatory, and held little faith in established institutions always refusing to join any organized groups. His later years were devoted to study and writing. He often looked outside of Christianity for his inspiration. In his hymn. “Life of Ages,” he writes, “never was to chosen race that unstinted tide confined.” His work on eastern religions was especially important. He published three volumes of his Oriental Religions. These were India (1872), China (1877) and Persia (1885).  

Johnson shared characteristics with Emerson’s Transcendentalism; like Emerson, Thoreau, he was capable of seeing daily life in terms of Hinduism.  

He criticizes the West and contemporary Western society and wrote in his essay “Fulfillment of Functions” begins with words “Doing one’s own duty badly is better than doing another’s well - The Hindu concepts of Svadharma, which can be translated as “fulfillment of functions.”  

The terms of disease and corruption clearly show Johnson’s dissatisfaction with current America , and at the end of the essay he exhorts:

“Let us educate for this principle (svadharma). Let us flood these torch-light politics, this pitchy trade, these pyrotechnic manners, with its simple, open day. Let us substitute it for the herded dependence and noisy Baal-worship that is called religion, and vindicate the name that is broader and more beautiful than Christianity itself. For this is the prophecy in the struggling heart of humanity today.”  

Here Christianity is implicitly compared with Baal worship and is being prophetically replaced by the “svadharma” derived from Hinduism.  Johnson restates the Hindu doctrine of svadharma that underlies the caste system; every man should fulfill the function to which he was born. Svadharma was at odds with American notion of personal liberty, and Johnson wrote: 

“The American takes his oath to public opinion in the name of freedom.” But “there is no tyranny, after all, more terrible than the public opinion which forces all men into availability for all uses.” “Above all, must individual culture be guarded from the tyranny of mere mass-power.”

He has termed the Hindu mind the “brain” of Asia , being “subtle, introversive…cerebral,” made for mediating between thought and work. 

Johnson’s prose is as vigorous and as inspiring as anything Emerson wrote. He observed:  

“The old Hindu philosophy called everything below God Maya or Illusion. There is a practical truth veiled here we all must learn. You have seen a little picture of what seems to be a death’s head; but which, as you approach it, turns into a pleasant room, and the eyeless sockets become two happy children at play. It is a petty trick of art; but the sublime craft of nature is imagined in it. We cannot comprehend what we call evil, in any form, until we remember the laws of illusion.”  

He asserted that “it was time the older religions were studied in the light of their own intrinsic values. They are at once spontaneities of desire and faith,” and, he affirms, it is time that Westerners cease following the belief that “Christianity will tolerate no rival,” as one missionary write put it, cease to use the Orient, to prove “the superiority of Christendom.”  This universalism appears throughout his work. When speaking of the Himalayas as the Edenic center of the world, Johnson calls them Mount Merus, the Bible of all Asia, source of all the world’s religion, just as the “great rivers of Asia descend on every side.”  

He has termed the Hindu mind the “brain” of Asia , being “subtle, introversive…cerebral,” made for mediating between thought and work.  

About The Mahabharata and Ramayana he notes that they “glow with a luxuriance of imagery which contrasts with the Iliad or AEneid as the stupendous vegetation of India differs from that of Italy or Greece . All that this colossal people have dreamed or done in philosophy, mythology, ethics, in imaginative or didactic thought, is here transmuted into song."

He was a man with a scholarly bent of mind and for a single statement about the antiquity of Hindu devotionalism he cited pages from Muller, Whitney, Duncker, Koeppen, Colebrooke and Lassen. He was able to provide an extensive and clear and accurate portrayal of Hindu gods and practices. His discussions of Indra, Varuna, Vishnu and Agni and their counterparts in the Greek and Hebrew religions; his discussions of the Laws of Manu, the caste system, Vedanta, Sankya, transmigration, and Buddhism spanning in total over eight hundred pages demonstrate Johnson's interest and scope. He wrote that Buddhism remained within the old Hindu circle.  (source: American Transcendentalism and Asian religions - By Arthur Versluis  p  100 - 262)   

438. Willy Haas (1891- 1973) German writer and contemporary of Heinrich Zimmer and Herrmann Goetz once stated that:  

“At its culminating point, Indian art does not attempt to represent eternity through the fleeing moment, duration through change or god through nature, on the contrary: it makes change appear through permanence, the variable through identity."

“As an example he quotes the Trimurti at Elephanta, where the triple-faced head of Shiva shows the three aspects of Shiva as Brahma (the creator), as Vishnu (the preserver), and as Rudra (the destroyer), thereby achieving the ever sought after identity of form and content. 

This old quest for the perfect harmony of form and content was forged into a grand image by Rabindranath Tagore in our times “I plunge into the very depths of the ocean of forms, hoping to find the perfect and formless pearl.”  

(source: Treasures of Indian Art: Germany's Tribute to India's Cultural Heritage - National Museum p. foreword by Dr. Georg Lechner, Director Goethe – Institut Muechen).

439. Martin Gray (  ) is an anthropologist and photographer specializing in the study of sacred sites and pilgrimage traditions around the world. His father was in the US diplomatic service and was privileged to travel widely around the world. When he was twelve years old his family moved to India for four years. During this period he went on frequent journeys, both alone and in the company of wandering holy men, to the temples, mosques and sacred caves of India , Nepal and Kashmir . Reading widely in the fields of Buddhism and Hinduism, he became intrigued with the beauty and mystery of the sacred places of India. During the past eighteen years, Martin has visited and photographed over 1000 sacred sites in seventy countries. His efforts culminate with a beautiful website called Places of Peace and Power, which can be found at: www.sacredsites.com.
He has remarked that:
"In India we find the oldest continually operating pilgrimage tradition in the entire world. The practice of pilgrimage in India is so deeply embedded in the cultural psyche and the number of pilgrimage sites is so large that the entire subcontinent may actually be regarded as one grand and continuous sacred space."

"In India we find the oldest continually operating pilgrimage tradition in the entire world. The practice of pilgrimage in India is so deeply embedded in the cultural psyche and the number of pilgrimage sites is so large that the entire subcontinent may actually be regarded as one grand and continuous sacred space."

Refer to chapter on Nature Worship.

"In discussing pilgrimage places in the Hindu tradition, it is important to say a few words about the number and diversity of deities in Hinduism and about the iconic and aniconic forms in which those deities are found. The personification of the mysterious forces of the universe into the anthropomorphic deities of the Hindu tradition involves both a convergence into certain supreme deities (the main three deities today are the gods Shiva and Vishnu and the goddess Shakti) and a splintering into a myriad of lesser deities. Certain writers call this polytheism, but the term is inaccurate in this case."
Hindu seriously believes in the multiplicity of gods but rather is aware that each of the many gods and goddesses are merely aspects of the One God (who is also the god of all other religions). The majority of Hindus ally their beliefs with one or the other of the three cults, worshipping Shiva, Vishnu, or Shakti as the highest principle. In doing so they do not deny the existence of the other two deities but regard them as complementary, though minor, expressions of the same divine power. Hinduism is thus, in its essence, monotheistic; a Hindu's worship of a particular personal deity is always done with the awareness that all deities are simply representations of one unconditioned, transcendental, supreme existence, known as Brahman. Each of the greater and lesser deities is understood as a sort of window or lens through which the whole of reality may be glimpsed.

The primary intention of a pilgrim's visit to a holy site is to receive the darshan of the deity resident in the temple's inner sanctum or open-air shrine. The word darshan, difficult to translate into English, generally means the pilgrim's having a sight and/or experience of the deity. Hindus believe that the deity is actually manifest in the image, statue, or icon of the temple. To receive the darshan of the deity is to have a spiritual communion with it. The image of the deity may either be an iconic, or representational, image that bears some resemblance to its mythic subject; or an aniconic form that merely symbolizes the deity.
In a large number of celebrated shrines in India no beautiful statues of the gods and goddesses are found, but only aniconic blocks of stone or stumps of wood. This tradition of aniconic images derives from the rural folk religions of ancient India and bears witness to the great antiquity of the sanctity of certain places. The shrine in its initial phase may have been only a crude little hut covering a stone that both represented and contained some spirit of the natural world. As millennia passed and the small rural village grew slowly into a larger and larger town, both the myths concerning the stone and the shrine surrounding that stone were richly elaborated. It is therefore important when studying or visiting the monumental pilgrimage shrines of India to rememberthat they had their architectural genesis in the simple nature sanctuaries of the pre-Aryan rural folk.

Hinduism is thus, in its essence, monotheistic; a Hindu's worship of a particular personal deity is always done with the awareness that all deities are simply representations of one unconditioned, transcendental, supreme existence, known as Brahman. Each of the greater and lesser deities is understood as a sort of window or lens through which the whole of reality may be glimpsed.

The myths and legends of these sacred places have their roots in the ancient peoples' felt experience of the characteristics or qualities of the natural place. The various mythological personality characteristics of the deities in pilgrimage shrines may therefore be interpreted as metaphors for the way in which the spirit of the place has affected human beings. This spirit of place is not just a fanciful story, it is an actuality, an energy, a presence that touches human beings and affects them profoundly. Why are certain places said to be the dwelling place of a feminine deity and others the dwelling place of a masculine deity? Is it not perhaps because some ancient rural people, deeply in touch with the earth as a living entity, sensed either a feminine or masculine presence at a place and spoke about it in anthropomorphic terms? These terms were then given representational form by the artistic rendering of a statue or image.

Looking deeper into this matter, let us then ask why there are not simply male and female deities but, more precisely, why there are different kinds of male and female deities? Conventional explanations refer to such things as the fanciful human imagination, the rich and varied proto-religious inputs into formative Hinduism, and prehistoric deification of charismatic human figures into legendary archetypes. While all these things did occur, they are not the only explanations. The central premise of my theory is that the different personality characteristics of the deities derive from the various characteristics of the Earth spirit as it manifests at different geographical locations. To understand the quality or character or power of a place, we need only study the nature of the deity enshrined there. Encoded in the deity's mythological form is a clear message telling us how the sacred site will affect us.

(source: Sacred Places: Sacred Sites, places and temples in India - By Martin Gray). 

 440.  Mani Bhaumik  ( ?  )  is a Bengali elected fellow of the American Physical Society as well as the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and is the author of the bestseller Code Name God. He is the co-inventor of the laser technology that made LASIK surgery possible. 
Bhaumik says ancient Indian philosophy, put into action by Gandhi, has its counterpart in modern science. He says both try to explain the cosmos and improve the world. 

“The ancient Vedantic concepts that we all cut our spiritual teeth on are a part of the grand reconciliation now going on between science and religion. We find these concepts embodied in the extensive literature starting with the four Vedas and their subsequent elaborations in the Upanishads. The recurring theme of these perceptions is that, underlying all physical reality, there is one abstract entity, Brahman, with the quality of consciousness.”  

“Having created the universe, Brahman remains present everywhere today, administering basic aspects of everything in our cosmos. Recent scientific discoveries seem to validate the concept of Brahman. Physicists and cosmologists are close to proving that there is one source behind the physical universe, and they call this source the unified field. In a profound sense, Brahman, the Vedantic concept and the unified field of physics appear to be synonymous. All the physical objects and phenomena around us are not illusory or maya, but are quite real. However, what we see is only the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it is the interplay of an abstract substance called energy, which in turn is controlled by something even more abstract: The fields that underlie all physical reality.”  

“The compilers of the Vedas were the first monotheists, Bhaumik points out. 

“In the West, when we think of monotheism, we think of a being. But the Vedists did not think of a being, they thought of an abstract entity that they called Brahma, which some people deify and think of as a being. But God is the source of everything, not a being but a transcendent power.”  

(source: Physics & Vedanta: So much in common – By Mani Bhaumik – bikramyoga.com and Code Name Success – India, Life and Style).

441. Satyanand Stokes aka. Samuel Evans Stokes (1882-1946), was the son of a wealthy Philadelphian engineer-businessman of Quaker antecedents, well-known for his contribution to the elevator technology. Young Samuel was not interested in following his father into business, and at 22 gave up his studies at the University of Yale, and opted to serve mankind. He set for sail to India and arrived at the leper home in Sabathu in 1905. He was sent for relief work to Kangra, then devastated by a severe earthquake. Thereafter, he came to the Christian Mission House at Kotgarh.
In 1910, he bought a derelict tea garden, got married and made Barubagh in Kotgarh his home. But Stokes was of a reflective and enquiring mind and although he described himself as a "lover of Christ" he could not shut his mind to Indian metaphysical thought. He learnt Sanskrit, studied eastern and western thought, and expounded his philosophy of life in a book entitled Satyakam.  
In 1932, under the aegis of Arya Samaj, he became a Hindu, and converted from Samuel Evans to Satyanand.
There were many Christian precepts and practices with which Stokes did not agree. In 1932, he converted to Hinduism, in part because he detested the Christian notion of eternal punishment.

In Hinduism he found the validation of his rejection of the Christian idea of eternal punishment. His belief in universal salvation, transmigration of the soul and the non-existence of sin as a power in opposition to holiness show him closer to the Vedantic philosophy. In the Hindu scriptures he found "not so much in the actual solutions arrived at, as in the general tendency of thought and method of approach, the key to much that the Christian religion, as evolved in the West, has never attempted to explain, or about which its teachings have been frankly agnostic."
Though Stokes remained true to the Christian canon, he showed courage of conviction when he freely admitted, "The light from the Hindu scriptures had come to fill the gaps in Christianity."
During his rest and recuperation days at the Kotgarh church, young Samuel came in contact with a lot of Sadhus on the Hindustan-Tibet road making their way to Kailash Mansarovar. While the priest of the church was finely robed and had three meals a day, the simplicity of these Sadhus perturbed him and set him thinking about the Hindu religion.
He builds the temple that becomes his legacy to Thanedar. Next to the house is an Arya Samaj Mandir. The temple reclines amidst wooden pillars, surrounded by inscriptions from the Upanishads and Bhagvad Gita and gazing at the lofty white Himalayas that seemed a stones throw away. Juggal Kishore Birla, a scion of Indian industry at that time contributed Rs 25,000 to encourage him. He called the Paramjyoti Mandir or the Temple of Eternal light, he wanted it to be a storybook in wood and stone.  
In 1926, there is evidence in Stokes's writings that he did not adhere to the Christian doctrine of the divinity of Jesus. It is evident that he did not tolerate appeals to scripture but thought all religious scripture could be useful by evoking spiritual insight. In an essay explaining why he became a Hindu, Stokes saw no reason for Hindus to convert to Christianity, denied the uniqueness of Jesus and his message, and confessed that it would be hypocritical of him to raise his children as Christians with such reservations.
(source: The man behind the success story of Kotgarh - By Pamela Kanwar and A Quaker who joined freedom struggle - by Randeep Wadehra and  In a New Book, the Story of An American Who Embraced India and The India of My Dreams: Samuel Stokes's Challenge to Christian Mission  
442. Dr. Hilda Raja (   )  was a professor at Queen Mary's College, Chennai. She has held an advisory position in the Catholic Bishops Conference in India. She was a sociology professor at Stella Maris College, Chennai. . Her writings are forthright but balanced, precise, incisive, thought provoking and informative. Apart from being a practicing Catholic Christian, she is a true nationalist, who values the cultural heritage of this great country and respects the Hindu tradition too. She is Catholic by religion and an outspoken critic of religious conversion as it is practiced by Christian missionaries in India. Ms. Raja writes on her blog that: "There is no place for conversion because this ancient land of ours was already oriented to its Creator and the people had connected to the Supreme being of the Cosmos. Much before Christianity / Islam appeared our forefathers had their religion. It was their openness and utterly secular outlook which enabled all world religions to make India their home. To me India and all that it holds is sacred."
"There is misconception that Hinduism is not progressive and modern. The quest for Truth was not restricted to mere meditation but oriented to the explorations and scientific enquiry into the universe, thus emerged the tharkashastra. The intellectual basis of India’s heritage continues. The quest for truth and the spirit of free enquiry gave India an intellectual sharpness. This stands in contrast with the Abrahamic religions, with their monolithic structures and dogmas which stifle--nay ban the freedom of enquiry. One leads to the other--where there is freedom there is greater knowledge and where there is greater knowledge there is greater prosperity. Little wonder that India attracted people from all over the world. A. L. Basham’s description of this land in “The wonder that was India ” unfolds the tapestry with its beautiful colors and patterns—that was India. The rights of the people and their protection were coded in the Arthasashtra. 
"No country in world can boast of a heritage where the rights of the people were safeguarded and coded at a time when slavery existed. Yet the world thinks and even educated Indians think that civilization came from outside—that law was brought with the British and that India was steeped in ignorance. "

Here was a civilization with spirituality at the core but with sciences of all branches developing in harmony. This rational spirituality of Sanatana Dharma gave greater vision of life and an impetus towards a well balanced growth of the family, society, nation and the world. 

(image source: World Mythology - By Roy Willis p. 68).

It is almost staggering to find that there was an undying and unending quest for Truth. This marked with the spirit of free Enquiry etches the refined contours of India ’s culture. What is fascinating is how the aim of intellectual knowledge in India expanded in ever widening circle like ripples. The need to penetrate ignorance and enlighten all the aspects of living seems to be the pursuit India ’s ancients were engaged in."  
It is inexplicable how such a rich heritage of Hindu Dharma did not find a place in our education curriculum. A civilization which was not only Spiritual but which gave to the world from the Zero--the decimal system to the sciences like chemistry, anatomy, medicine, surgical know-how. Here was a civilization with spirituality at the core but with sciences of all branches developing in harmony. This rational spirituality of Sanatana Dharma gave greater vision of life and an impetus towards a well balanced growth of the family, society, nation and the world. The majority of the Indians are unaware of this rich mine of theirs. The Vedic concept of, ‘may all be safe in the world’ speaks volumes of a philosophy that reaches to all and wishes all safety and peace. In a world with so much of violence and brutality, when man is against man—nation against nation, this stands out as bacon beckoning all nations to be knit as a family in brotherhood.
(source: India's Gift to the World - A Book review - By Dr. Hilda Raja). Refer to In Rome Durga Puja is not welcome - By Hilda Raja 

443  Walter Raymond Drake (1913 - 1989), a British disciple of Charles Fort (1874 - 1932) published nine books on the ancient astronaut theme, the first four years earlier than Erich Von Däniken's bestseller Chariots of the Gods. In his book Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East, he wrote:
"The oldest source of wisdom in the world must surely spring from India , whose initiates long ago probed the secrets of heaven, the story of Earth, the depths of Man’s soul, and propounded those sublime thoughts which illumined the Magi of Babylon, inspired the philosophers of Greece and worked their subtle influence on the religions of the West."

“Today we tend to belittle the past and boast our age as the highest peak in human culture, despite its sadly apparent short-comings; the common man in the West certainly lives more princely than many a King centuries ago and enjoys marvels of genius which would have amazed the old magicians, yet the literature of Eastern peoples shows that the Ancients sometimes surpassed us in the very things of which we are proud. The Indian lyricise of spaceships faster than light and missiles more violent than H-bombs; their Sanskrit texts describe aircraft apparently with radar and cameras; the wonderful ‘Mahabharat’ rivals the ‘Iliad’, the ‘Odyssey’…”  

The religions and philosophies of the East distilled a sublimity of thought scarce attained in the West; the wonderful Indian system of Yoga, the Gnani Yoga of Wisdom, Raja Yoga of Mind, Hatha Yoga of Body, Bhakti Yoga of Love, Karma Yoga of Work, developed a discipline millennia ago blending mysticism with daily life, showing Man’s relation to the Universe incarnating ever upwards to perfection to Union with God;  this supreme and beneficent teaching now exercising widening influence in our Western world must surely have sprung from civilizations long vanished …”  

The sublime Upanishads stress that our whole universe throbs with One Life.

The sublime Upanishads stress that our whole universe throbs with One Life.  

The oldest source of wisdom in the world must surely spring from India, whose initiates long ago probed the secrets of heaven, the story of Earth, the depths of Man’s soul, and propounded those sublime thoughts which illumined the Magi of Babylon, inspired the philosophers of Greece and worked their subtle influence on the religions of the West. 

The oldest literature in the world is probably the Rig Veda, meaning ‘verse-knowledge’, comprising 10,000 invocations to the Gods written in Sanskrit about 1500 BC,. Sanskrit scholars like the erudite Dr. Max Muller, agree that the Vedas are far more ancient than Homer and from the real theogony of the Aryan race, in comparison the cosmogony and theogony of Hesiod and Genesis appear crude images of the Vedic sublimity. 

The Ramayana telling in magic imagery the quest of Rama for his stolen wife Sita, has thrilled the people of India for thousands of years; generations of wandering story-tellers have recited its 24,000 verses to marveling audiences captivated by this brilliant panorama of the fantastic past, the passions of heroic love, tragedies of dark revenge, aerial battles between Gods and Demons waged with nuclear bombs; the glory of noble deeds; the thrilling poetry of life, the philosophy of destiny and death.

This wonderful epic of the ‘Ramayana’ the inspiration of the world’s great classic literature, intrigues us most today by its frequent allusions to aerial vehicles and annihilating bombs, which we consider to be inventions of our own 20^th century impossible in the far past. Students of Sanskrit literature soon revise their preconceived ideas and find that the heroes of Ancient India were apparently equipped with aircraft and missiles more sophisticated than those we boast today.  

The Indian lyricize of spaceships faster than light and missiles more violent than H-bombs; their Sanskrit texts describe aircraft apparently with radar and cameras; the wonderful ‘Mahabahrata’ rivals the ‘Ilad’ and the ‘Odyssey’, the ‘Aeneid,’ the plays of Shakespeare and most of our modern fiction all combined. The religions and philosophies of the East distilled a sublimity of thought scarce attained in the West; the wonderful Indian system of Yoga, the Gnani Yoga of Wisdom, Raja Yoga of Mind, Hatha Yoga of Body, Bhakti Yoga of Love, Karma Yoga of Work, developed a discipline millennia ago blending mysticism with daily life, showing Man’s relation to the Universe incarnating ever upwards to perfection to Union with God; this supreme and beneficent teaching now exerting widening influence in our Western world must surely have sprung from civilizations long vanished…” 

While our Western civilization is based on the Greeco-Judaic cultures, it is seldom realized that the Greeks and the Jews derived many of their fundamental concepts from old India especially after the invasion of Alexander in 327 BC.  Kannada and the Gnani Yogis speculated on the atom five hundred years before Democritus, Aryabhatta in the 6^th century BC taught the rotation of the Earth, the scientific principles of medicine, botany and chemistry were established as early as 1300 BC in India while Indian astronomy dates from remote Antiquity.  

The Creation in Genesis seems a primitive version of the profound teaching of the Days and Nights of Brahman; the tale of Noah an echo of Vaivasvata warned by Lord Vishnu to build a ship for the coming Flood; the Jewish Kabbala and various events in the Bible can be traced to Hindu scriptures written many centuries earlier.  

To minds conditioned by two thousand years of Christianity, the lives and teachings of Krishna and Buddha throw so much doubt on the historicity of Jesus, that we dare to wonder if the whole Christian Legend is but a plagiarism of Hinduism and Buddhism. Such apparent blasphemy outrages all our feelings, to doubt the reality of Jesus seems mortal sin, yet if we honestly study the teachings of Krishna, Hellenized to Chrestus hence Christ, and compare the fundamental dogma of Virgin Birth, Miracles, Ritual death on a tree or cross, Immortality, we find ourselves speculating whether Jesus was a myth based on the earlier historical Krishna.  Many scholars believe that Old India was the source not only of civilization, the arts and sciences, but also of all the great religions of Antiquity.

(source: Gods and Spacemen in the Ancient East - By Walter Raymond Drake p. 25 and 226 and 9 - 49 and 1 – 65 ). Refer to chapter on Vimanas. 

444. Bharat Gupt (  )  is Associate Professor, Delhi University, Founder member and Trustee International Forum for India's Heritage and author of the book India a cultural decline or revival?
He has observed that:

"Under the impact of colonial Christianity, Hinduism underwent a special phenomenon, which may be called as the ‘Commandment-alization of Hinduism.’ In India , this trend still continues even after Independence as the Anglophonic ruling class has stayed under the sway of neo-colonialism. In their hubris, the Abrahamics have not recognized that the Upanishaic Brahmavaada came to be evolved from the same tradition as the Vedic worship of multiple gods and is the oldest philosophy that propounded the unity of the Divine. For Christians and Muslims, the problem still exists as a divide between the people who believe in One omnipotent God and the people who admit the existence of many gods. The Abrahamic monotheists claim themselves to be logical and systematized and allege that polytheists are irrational and incapable of cosmic vision. It is primarily to address their false claim that one has to show that Hindus have thought on the subject more deeply.  

The Naasadeeya Sukta of Rig Veda gives indication that there was somebody who created even before the gods came into existence.  

“Then was not non-existence nor existence; there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. The One, breathless breathed by his own nature; apart from it was nothing whatsoever.”   (Rig Veda, Book X, verse 129). 

No doubt/It/He/She was the Purusha of the Purusha Sukta. That One, along with the later well defined Brahman is what the Hindus believed in. In this sense the unity of the Divine, behind all gods like Indra, Agni, Varuna, Mitra, Pooshaan, Usha and so many others of different manifestation is quite evident. ‘Ekam adviteeyam’ (Chandogya Upanishad, 6-2-1) or ‘Ishaavaasyamidam sarvam’ (Ishopanishad, 1), is the Hindu monotheism that admits also of material looking manifestations of the Divine. Western monotheism has come to be riddled with virulent ikonophobia (hatred for images).  

The Indian philosophies that avoid the pursuit of manifested imagery have not denounced others as in falsehood and error. While stating the unity of the Divine, they are not exclusivists as they do not admit that there can be only some manifestations/incarnations/characteristics of the One. The Abrahamic people are the exclusivists and as they insist that God can have only those characteristics as is found in Allah or Yahweh. The problem, then, is not One God versus Many Gods but God as seen by me alone versus God as seen by Others.  The Hindu faith in the Ultimate Reality behind all beliefs and philosophical systems is reflected nowhere better than in the benedictory verse of the play Mahanatakam by the 11^th century poet Hanuman.  

“The One who is worshipped as Shiva by the Shaivas, as Brahma by Vedantees, as Buddha by Bauddhas, as Kartaa by Naiyayikas the logicians, as Arhat by the Jains and Karma (yajna) by Meemaansakas; such a Vishnu, the lord of three worlds, may fulfill your desires.”  

Hinduism now needs to strongly resist this commandment-alization in order to save its original genius. It also means restoration of the unity of thought, speech and action which was broken by the other-worldly religiosity (loka paraangamuckha Bhakti), Euro-modernity, Protestant, Catholic and Islamic iconoclasm, and Gandhian dryness/rasaheenataa, but is found as the ambrosiac kernel in the universe of pagan rituals.”  

In the traditional Hindu cosmology, the Universe was perceived as the body of the Being or Purusha and the parts of the Universe as his limbs. The human individual was part of the body and limbs. Alternatively, the Universe was perceived as a Cosmic Egg (Brahmaanda) containing the individual. Whatever was contained in the individual was also perceived to be contained in the Cosmos (yat pinde e tat brahmaand.e) because the individual was also perceived as a Purusha, thus asserting a complete unity of the individual with the Universe. All Hindu ritual was conceived as a method of heightening the awareness of this unity…"  

Replacement of the Vedic Model of Purusha with the Gutemberg-Newtonian model of Objectivity. - But a great change of attitude toward the very value of ritual set in after Independence . In the state-manipulated intellectual climate that prevailed during Nehru’s rule, reality and truth came to be defined in a realistic Newtonian terms of European physical sciences. This fascination did not account the post-classical developments in physics and their implications on philosophy. Not only were some of the rigorous traditions of native reasoning disregarded, even the latest views of modern science were blatantly ignored. 

(source: India a cultural decline or revival? - By Bharat Gupt p. 4 - 16)
445. Daniel Joseph Boorstin  (1914 - 2004)  was the grandson of Russian Jewish immigrants, American historian, lawyer, professor, Librarian of Congress from 1975 to 1987, prize-winning author of several books including The Discovers, The Creators and The Seekers wrote this about Hinduism:

“The Hindus have left an eloquent history of their efforts to answer the riddle of Creation. The Vedas, sacred hymns in archaic Sanskrit from about 1500 to 900 BC do not depict a benevolent Creator, but record a man’s awe before the Creation as singers of the Vedas chant the radiance of this world. Their objects of worship were devas (cognate with Latin dues, god) derived from the old Sanskrit div, meaning brightness. Gods were the shining ones. The luminosity of their world impressed the Hindus from the beginning. Not the fitting-together-ness, not the hierarchy of beings or the order of nature, but the blinding splendor, the Light of the World. How the world once came into being or how it might end seemed irrelevant before the brightness of the visible world.  

What sanctifies the worshipper is no act of conversion, no change of spirit, but the simple act of seeing, the Hindi word darsan. A Hindu goes to a temple not to “worship,” but rather for “darshan,” to see the image of the deity. Each of the cities sacred to each of the thousands of gods offers its own special darsan: Benares (Varanasi) for the darsan of Lord Vishvanath, the high Himalayas for the darsan of Vishnu, or a nearby hilltop for the darsan of a local god. In the life of the sacred city of Benares the quest for seeing embodies much that is distinctive to the religions of Hindus. The Hindu is dazzled by a vision of the holy, not merely holy people but places like the Himalayan peaks where the gods live, or the Ganges which flows from Heaven to Earth, or countless inconspicuous sites where gods and goddesses or unsung heroes showed their divine mettle. The Hindu pilgrims trek hundreds of miles just for another darsan.  

According to the Hindus, the deity or a holy spirit or place or image “gives darsan” amd the people “take darsan” for which there seems no counterpoint in any Western religion. Darsan, is a two-way flow of vision. While the devotee sees the god, so too the god sees the devotee, and the two make contact through their eyes. In building a new temple, even before images of the gods are made, the gods are beseeched to turn a kindly eye on all who come to see them. And when the images of the gods are made, their eyes are the last part completed.  For the Hindu, seeing became a form of touching. Western religious traditions were wary of the seen, of the image, and the Protestant Reformation built a theology on this suspicion of all images.  

Western religions begin with a notion that One – One God, One Book, One Son, One Church, One Nation under God – is better than many. The Hindu, dazzled by the wondrous variety of the creation, could see not see it that way. For so multiplex a world, the more gods the better. Howe could any one god account for so varied a creation? And why not another alternative between monotheism and polytheism? It is hardly surprising that the awestruck Hindu never came up with a single grand Creator-god.  

Western religion begin with a notion that One – One God, One Book, One Son, One Church, One Nation under God – is better than many.  An Olympian democracy allowed the Hindu devotees to focus his darsan on one particular god at each moment.

In India, the tolerant, ever growing community of gods and goddesses, each divinity was willing to take a turn receiving the darsan of the faithful. None of the nasty envy of the Greek gods whose festering pride and jealousy motivated the Homeric epics! And how unlike the sovereign Creator-God of the Hebrews and Christians and Muslims. “for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.”  But Vishnu, Shiva, and Devi is each momentarily seen as creator, sustainer, and supreme power, each surrounded by a galaxy of lesser gods. The Western worshiper is baffled in his quest for a hierarchy among them. The dazzled vision sees no hierarchy but the mystery expressed in every growing thing. As the Upanishads, commentaries on the Vedas, sang:  

“Fetch me a fruit of the banyan tree.”
“Here is one, sir.”
“Break it.”
“I have broken it, sir.”
‘What do you see?”
“very tiny seeds, sir.”
“Break one.”
“I have broken it, sir.”
“Now what do you see?”
“Nothing, sir.”
“My son,” the father said, “ what you do no perceive is the essence, and in that essence the mighty banyan tree exists. Believe me, my son, in that essence is the self of all that is. That is the Truth, that is the Self. And you are that Self, Svetaketu!”  

It is hardly surprising that the awestruck Hindus never came up with a single grand Creator God.

In India, the tolerant, ever growing community of gods and goddesses, each divinity was willing to take a turn receiving the darsan of the faithful. None of the nasty envy of the Greek gods whose festering pride and jealousy motivated the Homeric epics! And how unlike the sovereign Creator-God of the Hebrews and Christians and Muslims. “for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God.” 

The Hindus never allowed themselves the comfort of dogma. How many were the gods? Who ruled among them? Despite all this wondrous wealth of myth and poetry, the Brahman poet in the Rig Veda sang courageous doubt. 

Western religious traditions (Judeo-Christianity and Islam) were wary of the seen, of the image, and the Protestant Reformation built a theology on this suspicion of all images.  

While the Hindus sought and found the solace of myth in their countless communities of god and goddesses, they never allowed themselves the comfort of dogma. How many were the gods? Who ruled among them? Despite all this wondrous wealth of myth and poetry, the Brahman poet in the Rig Veda sang courageous doubt. So went their “Hymn of Creation:  

But, after all, who knows, and who can say?
whence it all came, and how creation happened?
The gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?  

Whence all creation had its origin
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows – or maybe even he does not know.  

And there is no deeper division between West and East than that marked by this reluctance of Hindu sages to answer the luminosity of the creation with simple dogmas and definitions.  

For the Hindus the creation was not a bringing into being of the wonder of the world. Rather it was a dismemberment, a disintegration of the original Oneness. For him the Creation seemed not the expression of a rational, benevolent Maker in wondrous new forms but a fragmenting of the unity of nature into countless limited forms. The Hindu saw the creation of our world as “the self-limitation of the transcendent.” For the Hindu our very notion of creation was reversed. Instead of transforming nothing into everything, the Hindu creation broke into countless imperfect fragments what was already there. The Hindu reached back for the Oneness that was there in the beginning and he aimed to reintegrate nature. The cycles of birth and death have perpetuated that disintegrating force of creation. Samsara, the transmigration of the soul from one life to another, perpetuated the separateness of the individual. The object for all was to “get off the wheel,” to escape the cycle, and merge finally into the original One.  While the aim of the Christian faithful would be “eternal Life,” the aim of the Hindu was to be uncreated. Yoga, or “union,” was the disciplined effort to reverse creation and return to the perfect Oneness from which the world had been fragmented.  

(source: The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination - By Daniel J Boorstin p. 4 - 8).  

He has also observed:

"The Hindu dynasties produced their many ornate versions of the primeval mountain – dome, spire, hexagonal or octagonal tower. The surfaces and panels, the niches and friezes of these stone monuments, bubble with images of plants, and elephants, and of men and women in all postures. The grandest of them, the Hindu temple Kailasa (Shiva’s paradise) at Ellora, in south-central India , ingeniously used the mountain itself to make the effigy of a divine mountain. A mountain-carved-out-of-mountain, Kailasa was constructed by first cutting a trench into the mountain to isolate a mass of rock 276 feet long, 154 feet wide, and 100 feet high. By working from the top of the mass down, the rock cutters avoided the need for scaffolding. The product of two hundred years’ labor was a worthy replica of Shiva’s paradise, Mount Kailasa in the Himalayas. Hindu architects and sculptors down to their latest efforts, as at Khajraho in central India (c.1000), never gave up their rebuilding of Mt. Meru, and spent their energy with ever greater profligacy in carving erotic images of the reunion of man and his gods. The sikhara, or spires, which topped the Hindu temple also meant mountain peak. Perhaps the most gigantic religious monument in the world is the temple complex of Angkor Wat, built by King Suryavarman II as his sepulcher and the temple of his divinity. The temple here, fantastically elaborated and multiplied, is a vast filigreed steeped pyramid, a sculptured mountain. "

(source:  The Discoverers - By Daniel Joseph Boornstin p. 85 – 86)

446. Deepak Shimkhada ( ) was in the faculty of Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California where he taught courses on Asian religions including Hinduism, Buddhism and the Visions of the Divine Feminine. He is currently a visiting professor at California State University in Northridge. 
He gives the composition and meaning of Om thus:

The sound of OM is followed by a silence, and the silence is
reconnected with the sound, hence completing a full
circle. Om is composed of three letters, and yet it's not a
word. The unique aspect of Om is that it is monosyllabic. It is
considered to be the sound of creation, hence it's primordial.
He is the author of the book, The Constant and Changing Faces of the Goddess: Goddess Traditions of Asia. He has written:
"The temple of Kumari, a living embodiment of the Hindu goddess Durga, has been a significant shrine of national importance in Nepal for over three centuries. Ever since Nepal was thrown open to the world with the abolition of the Rana dynasty in the mid twentieth century, the temple has also increasingly become a popular tourist attraction. While the temple itself is only three centuries old, the tradition of worshipping the goddess in a virgin form in South Asia and among the Hindus is over two millennia old. Not only was the ancient shrine to her at Kanyakumari (the virgin maiden) at the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent well known to the Romans, but the worship of a virgin girl is an essential part of the autumnal worship of the goddess Durga. Nowhere is this religious festival more important than in Bengal among the Bengali speaking Hindus where a virgin girl is the center of the celebration. The Maoists of Nepal should note that the Communists who have been ruling West Bengal for over two decades have not abolished the tradition."
(source: A Tribute to Hinduism: Thoughts and Wisdom spanning continents and time about India and her culture - By Sushama Londhe p. 57 and The Future of Nepal’s “Living” Goddess: Is Her Death Necessary? - By Deepak Shimkhada). 
447. Gene D Matlock (  ) is author of several books including India Once Ruled the Americas and Jesus and Moses Are Buried
in India, Birthplace of Abraham and the Hebrews. In his book, Yishvara 2000 he has remarked that :
"In ancient times, the country we of today call India was not confined to the Indian subcontinent alone. Its northern limit was the Artic Circle or North Polar regions. Its human inhabited parts began in the northeastern extreme of Siberia, including Alaska, extending downward through what are now Russia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, and every other nation in those regions not named down to and including Antarctica or the uninhabited South Polar regions. The Indians in the North Polar regions down to Iran were called Scythians. These Scythians also extended as far west as the British Isles and eastward into China. They gave their name to Scotland. The Indians south of today's Iran were and still are, called Bharatiya.
As far as we know, everyone originally spoke Sanskrit dialect, also such North Indian languages as Brahma Bhasha or Balhika Bhasha. We are told that Sumerian was the world's first civilized nation. The "Outer Space" cultists like to say that astronauts from other planets founded the Sumerian civilization because it seemed to "spring up all at once." According to them, this proves that someone from outside this planet flew in suddenly, landed, and left civilized people behind. They're going to be disappointed to find out that a highly developed civilization existed in India at least two millenniums before the Sumerian civilization, from 8,000 to 6,000 BC, in what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tibet and Kashmir. According to Hindu tradition, a privilege few in that society even owned flying machines....""The citizen of that region of Northern India were known as Yadvas, Yadu, Yahu-Deva, Yauda, Yahuda etc. 
In his book, India Once Ruled the Americas! he states: "The people of India have long known that their ancestors once sailed to and settled in the Americas. They called America 'Patala,' The Underworld,' not because they believed it to be underground, but because the other side of the globe appeared to be straight down."
(source: Yishvara 2000 - By Gene D Matlock  p. 1 - 3 and India Once Ruled the Americas!)
448. Jerry Earl Johnston (   )  two-time winner of the national Wilbur Award. He is a columnist, critic, and feature writer for the Deseret News. He has won awards from the Associated Press, Reader's Digest, Society of Professional Journalists, and the Utah Arts Council. He is also the author of Dads and Other Heroes. He has observed that:
"Of the five major world religions -- Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Islam and Hindu -- Hinduism is likely the least understood by Westerners. People see aspects of it -- the bathing in the Ganges River, Yogis in meditation, the Hare Krishnas -- but they seem like so many random puzzle pieces.

That's because Hinduism exists as a series of unlinked pieces.

There is no doctrine to follow in Hinduism. No central authority. To be a Hindu you only have to declare yourself one. And unlike the other four major religions, Hinduism has no founder, no beginning, which leads many Hindus to claim the religion has existed as long as the universe. Scholars have so far traced the religion back at least 3,500 years, to the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan . There, an ancient civilization blossomed and became surprisingly sophisticated....."

The striking together of those two cultures produced our earliest traces of modern Hinduism, though scientists have few answers for how it all came to be. Do Hindus worship animals? Well, yes and no. They worship animals as manifestations of the great Absolute, or Brahman -- an eternal reality behind the multiplicity of forms.

When told worshipping animals is idolatry, they may reply, "Why do you limit the forms the Absolute can assume?" 
One of the best-known "puzzle pieces of Hinduism" is reincarnation, the idea that the essence of each individual keeps recycling itself until it is released.

But reincarnation is really about cleansing -- like that bath in the Ganges River . Imagine a pair of dirty gym socks. You run them through one wash cycle in the washing machine, but that doesn't do the trick. So you run them through again to make them cleaner. Maybe even a third time. After enough washings, they are ready to come out. 
Living in the world forces us to suffer. As we work our way through our challenges and burdens we search for ways out. Each time we are reincarnated we have moved along the path.

There are Hindu holy books -- such as the Vedas -- to help people discover how to free themselves.

In the end, Hinduism is a fascinating religion -- a religion that, despite newspaper stories like this, lies beyond explanation.
(source: Hinduism for beginners - By Jerry Johnston - deseretnews.com  10/18/2009)
449. Charles Michael Byrd aka Charukrishna (1952   ) who describes himself as being “of black, white and Cherokee heritage,” made a name as the editor and publisher of Interracial Voice Web site from 1995 to 2003. 
In his first book, The Bhagavad-Gita in Black and White: From Mulatto Pride to Krishna Consciousness, Byrd, whose Krishna name is Charukrishna, has said he found the answer to his lifelong quest of transcending race, ethnicity, religion and other physical categories to ascend to a higher, universal identity. This book is primarily aimed at the multiracial population in America, and any American who wants to avail him or herself of the Vedic knowledge and how it might apply to the current situation of race consciousness in the United States.
"The Bhagavad Gita is an important source book on yoga, is the essence of India's Vedic wisdom, and is one of the great spiritual and philosophical classics of the world. Remarkably, however, the setting for this best known classic of spiritual literature is an ancient Indian battlefield - in the land of Kurukshetra." "At the last moment before entering battle, the great warrior Arjuna begins to wonder about the real meaning of his life. Why should he fight against his friends and relatives? Why does he exist? Where is he going after death? In the Bhagavad Gita, the 'Supreme Personality of Godhead, Lord Kirshna - Arjuna's friend and spiritual master - brings His disciple from perplexity to spiritual enlightenment through instruction in the science of self-realization. In the course of doing so, Krishna concisely but definitively explains transcendental knowledge - karma-yoga (the path of God realization through dedicating the fruits of one's work to God), jnana-yoga (the path of spiritual realization through a speculative philosophical search for truth), and bhakti-yoga (linking with the Supreme Lord through devotional service).
"The perennial philosophy of the Gita has intrigued the philosophical mind of man, both Eastern and Western, for millennia. Henry David Thoreau wrote that in relation to the Bhagavad gita, "our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial."
"Most of us are familiar with the late George Harrison's 1970's hit "My Sweet Lord" in which he sings of longing to be with and to see Lord Krishna. "Hare Krishna" is a mantra that one chants. The holy name of the Lord is His sound incarnation, and since the Lord is the absolute whole, there is no difference between His holy name and His transcendental form. Thus by chanting the holy name of Lord Krishna one can directly associate with Him by sound vibration. We are all expansions of God's spiritual energy, and we are all trying to find a way out of the trap of maya or the illusory material energy. We're all trying to find out our way back home - back to Godhead."
(source: The Bhagavad-Gita in Black and White: From Mulatto Pride to Krishna Consciousness - By Charles Michael Byrd p. 1 - 9).

450. Alok K Bohara is Professor of Economics at the University of New Mexico and he has remarked that: "Half a century later, it was a nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer who finally brought the Gita into the popular vocabulary of the scientists in the West by citing this quote from the Bhagavad Gita. "If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. " and "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." (July 16, 1945, inscription at first nuclear test site Trinity, New Mexico)."

"With this began a western love affair with the wonderful tradition of the Vedic philosophy and the Gita. Since then, many scientists have quoted the Gita. For example, famous astro-physicist Carl Sagan was awed by the revelation in the Gita that the creation and destruction, an essential part of the cosmic evolution, was actually postulated in a more realistic vast time scale [8.17-8.19]."

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faith 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.”

"Meditation, yoga, and the idea of spiritual living have now become an accepted part of the mainstream society. These popular phenomena have also begun to come under objective scrutiny. As the science discovers the power of spirituality through various scientific tests, the essence of the Gita becomes ever more relevant to our modern society. The simple idea of meditation discovered five to six thousand years ago in the Rigveda (oldest of the four Vedas), and a preferred choice of the true knowledge seekers, has been scientifically shown to have power to alter brain waves. Experiments have also shown that meditation reduces criminal intent, stress, and anger, and helps with recovery from illness."

"To that end, quantum physics has attempted to show through experiment that the sub-atomic particles behave unpredictably (in a probabilistic sense) and can exist in multiplicity except when it is observed. This raises the possibility that the physical surrounding around us is just one of many possible “worlds” that comes in existence in its fixed form only in reference to our viewing or the frame of mind. In Gita, Krishna alludes to the possibility of this other “parallel world” by telling Arjuna of having already witnessed the Mahabharata battle and its outcomes. Is this the maya (illusion) that the Gita warns us about? That is, is reality the projection of our mind as postulated in the Gita?"

(source: Science and the Gita - By Alok K Bohara).             

451. Dr. Subramanium Swamy (1939 -  )  He is also a reputed economist and worked as Assistant Economic Affairs Officer, United Nations Secretariat, New York in 1963. He worked with two Nobel laureates, Simon Kuznets and Paul A. Samuelson for his doctorate in economics at the Harvard University, awarded in 1965. He was a faculty at Harvard in 1964 and has been teaching there off and on for 12 years with the latest stint completed in 2005. He is acknowledged as an authority on comparative studies of India and China. He is also well-versed in the Mandarin Chinese (Hanyu) language. He was Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi from 1969.
He is the President of the Janata Party and author of the book Hindus Under Siege - The Way Out and Hindutva and National Renaissance
He has written eloquently about Hinduism and danger Hindus face today. Hinduism is under an invisible multi-dimensional siege, and that the manifestation of this siege can be seen by those alerted to it. There are four dimensions - 1. Religious - denigration of Hindu icons. 2. Psychological - in the foisting of fraudulent version of our history. 3. Physical - the Islamic terrorist driven ethnic cleansing of Hindus of Kashmir and Bangladesh, and the money-induced conversion of Hindus to Christianity. 4. Cultural - through globalization of tastes, dress and interpersonal morality that are determined in the Anglo-saxon white Christian world ("The West").
"Hinduism, known as Santana Dharma is unique in that in all the world, it has a continuous and unbroken tradition for the longest time; and it is a religion constituted by its theology, cultural ethos, and civilizational history. India's Hindu society is founded on the content of these three constituents. Hindustan, as India is known abroad even today (eg. Yindu guo in Chinese, Hind in Arabia), as concept is defined as a nation of Hindus and those others in the nation who accept that their ancestors are Hindus and revere their legacy. The Hindu ethos provided a sanctuary and home to those of other faiths fleeing from their countries due to religious persecution. That is the glorious Hindu tradition, the ethos of compassion and co-option that is unparalleled in world history."
" The true factual history is that defiant Hindus suffered persecution and economic depravation during Islamic and Christian reigns, such as through taxation - jizia and plain brutality, but Hindus by and large refused to capitulate and convert. These legacies need to form the mindset of the modern Hindu. What exactly is today confronting Hindus, is however, much more difficult to meet than earlier in history because the forces at work to erode and undermine HIndu faith, unlike before, are unseen, clandestine, pernicious, deceptive but most of all sophisticated and media savvy. Tragically therefore, a much more educated and large numbers of Hindus have been unwittingly co-opted today in this sinister conspiracy directed by foreigners who have no love for India and who also see (much as Lord Macaulay saw in the 19th century), that the hoary Hindu foundation of India is a stumbling block for the furtherance of their nefarious perfidious game. Adherence to Hinduism is also being sought to be diluted in the name of modernity and this dilution is made a norm of secularism. The concept of a collective Hindu mindset is being ridiculed as chauvinist and retrograde, even fundamentalist. What Swami Vivekananda, Bankim Chatterjee, Sri Aurobindo, and Subramaniya Bharati had achieved by raising Hindu consciousness to that end, has now been depleted and dissipated over the last six decades."

In India's long history, Sanskrit has been the greatest integrating force, the source of cultural continuum, the medium of literary creativity, the voice of the sages and the languages of the most sublime thoughts and the profoundest of the philosophies of life. 

The great grammarian Panini is now being called the first software man, without the hardware. And the focus is on the roughly 4,000 rules of Sanskrit grammar that he evolved. Rules that are so scientific and logical in manner that they closely resemble structures used by computer scientists throughout the world."

Writing about Sanskrit - he says: " In India's long history, Sanskrit has been the greatest integrating force, the source of cultural continuum, the medium of literary creativity, the voice of the sages and the languages of the most sublime thoughts and the profoundest of the philosophies of life. Sanskrit had its impact in many countries outside. It became the language of the learned even in the South-East Asia and to some extent parts of Central Asia. Most interestingly, many of the ancient Sanskrit plays that exists were found not in India but in Turfan on the edge of the Great Gobi desert in China. The great grammarian Panini is now being called the first software man, without the hardware. And the focus is on the roughly 4,000 rules of Sanskrit grammar that he evolved. Rules that are so scientific and logical in manner that they closely resemble structures used by computer scientists throughout the world."
(source:  Hindus Under Siege: The Way Out - By Dr. Subramanium Swamy  p. 1 - 111). Refer to More Equal Than Others: Study of the Indian Left – by Ravi Shanker Kapoor
452. Professor Dean Brown (  ) an eminent Theoretical Physicist, cosmologist, philosopher and Sanskrit scholar, whose translation of the Upanishads was published by the Philosophical Research Society. 
In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove of Thinking Allowed TV show brings about an interesting co-relation of Sanskrit & Physics. 
He has pointed out that most European languages can be traced back to a root language that is also related to Sanskrit – the sacred language of the ancient Vedic religions of India . Many English words actually have Sanskrit origins. Similarly, many Vedic religious concepts can also be found in Western culture. 
He discusses the fundamental idea of the Upanishads – that the essence of each individual, the atman, is identical to the whole universe, the principle of Brahman. In this sense, the polytheistic traditions of India can be said to be monistic at their very core.
(source: Interview with Jeffrey Mishlove - Thinking Allowed).
453. Dr. Gautam Sen was a lecturer in politics of the world economy, London School of Economics and Political Science, and a member of the Indo-British Roundtable. He is the author of the book, The Mind of Swami Vivekananda and director of Gandhi-Einstein Foundation. 
He has written about the danger a tolerant Hinduism faces today: 
"The most significant aspect of Hinduism is not just shared popular custom and culture, but a philosophical and practical orientation towards life."
"Hindus often repeat the forlorn cry that the truth will triumph. In some abstract sense such a conviction may be valid because trial and error propel supposedly rational humankind towards verisimilitude. But such an outcome does not preclude that much will vanish in the interim while rational man achieves higher levels of consciousness and approaches the truth. Satyameva Jayate did not prevent countless Jews being incinerated in gas chambers and everything known as Hinduism may also perish. The Jewish tragedy in Europe was colossal and the demise of Hinduism may only turn out to be more long drawn out, but inevitable. The path to truth is littered with the corpses of the innocent as untruth overcomes itself. The deeply rooted self-doubt and self-destructive impulse of Hinduism has joined hands with the opportunistic Semitic paws that had been stroking their kill since time immemorial. The nominally Hindu intellectual class is in virtual unison in their wish to crucify their past, embracing Christian and Islamic imperialism instead.
Of all the ancients, Hinduism alone survives in a contemporary form that has recognizable antecedents.
Perhaps this is primarily the case because economic transformation and modernity have been slow in enveloping Hindu society. By contrast, Japan, despite escaping modern colonial depredation succumbed to the forces of modernity, though not without a struggle to retain its older identity. In its indecorous haste towards modern statehood China seems impatient to discard anything of the past that might stand in the way of a militarised and garish nationalist incarnation. And it has dragged Tibet down with it in paroxysms of ignorant malice. Its economically successful Korean neighbour has been turned into a mere Christian outpost by aggressive proselytisation. 
The fate of Hinduism still hangs precariously in the balance.
An important dimension of the academic curriculum should be based firmly on the heroic struggles of Hindu and Sikh kingdoms to defend their way of life and sovereignty and reflection on the manifold ideas and practices of indigenous traditions. Every student must emerge knowledgeable about the divinity of Lord Ram, the Buddha, Guru Nanak and Ramakrishna, the transcendent significance of the Adi Shankara and the achievements of the many saints that succeeded him."
(source: Practice is what matters: Hindu, only a Hindu - By Dr. Gautam Sen and Manifesto for saving Hindu India - By Gautam Sen). Refer to How India's Intellectuals spread lies - By Ravi Shanker Kapoor and More Equal Than Others: Study of the Indian Left – by Ravi Shanker Kapoor.

 

Om Tat Sat

                                                        

(Continued...) 

( My humble Pranam, Honour  and also gratefulness  to   Ms. Sushma Londhe ji for her  noble, magnanimous and eminent works on the   peerless  Wisdom of our Sacred Scriptures)
  
_{(My humble salutations to   , H H Swamyjis, Hindu Wisdom, great Universal Philosophers, Historians, Professors and Devotees   for the discovering  collection)}

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