The Original Good Cop

The Abrahamic God has often been described as a ruthlessly strong, angry, jealous male, quick to take offense, one who can toss you into eternal hellfire, etc. But being as subtle as a sledgehammer creates an image, and hence recruitment, problem. Some Abrahamic variations do not care about PR or niceties. His will will be done, one way or another, and peace is established by the fear of the sword or the fear of the bigger sword. Other cults are smarter.

Enter: son of God. The epitome of love, charity, kindness, and persuasion. Benevolence multiplied by Goodness raised to the power of divinity. Rather than put the fear of God in you right away, you first do a meet-and-greet, and then gradually get acquainted with the good son. He's the good guy, who is on your side, fighting your cause in the trenches, accepting your shameful sins, who's taken the hit for you so you won't have to, who will save you from the torrid wrath of the angry big-boss CEO upstairs. And he's the only one who can protect you from the quintessential bad cop, and all you have to do is sign on the dotted line. And it works. every time. spectacularly. You are hooked. The good guy too has a dark side - after all, he's a chip of the old Abrahamic block, but you do not want to see it until it is too late. It's like an age old retail trick that works like a charm. You are suckered by the promotion that practically gives away the core, attractive hardware, and you end up paying through your nose for the endless expensive accessory products for the rest of your life. No surprise then that billions around the world have fallen, and continue to fall for the world's first and original good-cop bad-cop trick.

The GCBC routine has since been re-employed over the years in a variety of different forms and improvisations to facilitate religious conversion and digestion of native cultures. India is a prime example. Hindus, in particular, fall for this all the time because they invariably view the junior good-cop very positively in isolation but then fail to spot the GCBC system at work, and that it is the bad cop boss upstairs that ultimately calls the shots. This failure of not adopting a systems approach is costing India. Some of the intellectual Hindu writers online fall for this and end up looking silly.

The work and methods formulated by Rajiv Malhotra to delineate the hostile ecosystems at work, expose them, guard against them, and eventually turn them back, are incredibly important to internalize. Listen to this debate between Rajiv Malhotra and a wonderful, nice, courteous, and friendly good cop in Houston. RM explains the GCBC system really well here.

Murugan, Pillayaar, and Anjaneya as Hindu Knowledge Models

An inordinate number of Indians born in dharmic families who are understanding their dharma and sharing experiences of this self-study journey online over the last couple of decades belong to STEM disciplines. This is no coincidence. Science, technology, and the scientific approach (via first person empiricism, for example) is one of the useful means in this rediscovery. As we progress along this path, we note the beneficial and positive changes it brings within us, our family, and our community. Our body and mind becomes a laboratory in this fascinating journey. Non-verified theorizing using pulled-out-of-thin-air ideas, text-parsing-regurgitating, or using mental gymnastics to come up with new formulas, however brilliant they may seem, falls short in the end. The process cannot be reduced to some intellectual steeple chase. From a personal point of view, it is a scientific journey of inner-discovery.

So, how have we gone about acquiring this dharmic fruit of knowledge?

There are two ways. Many Hindus (self included) have taken the scenic route. You leave dharmic India to travel round the world (mentally or physically) learning about everything else, before realizing, after a decade or three, that you have to do a full circle and return home to India and start from near-scratch to seek the questions that really matter and the answers that are really honest. This is the Murugan (Kartikeya) model. It is no coincidence that I visit Sri Subramaniya Swami at Pazhani every year in this voyage of inner-discovery. A lucky few have adopted the Pillayaar (Ganapathi) model. They already realize (not merely believe) that this 'Gyana Pazham' is right there in India, and save themselves a lot of time and hassle. Muruganists can be grumpy about all the hard yards they've put in and retreat into their shell, but their encounters with the non-dharmic world is not a wasted effort. Some of the Pillayaarists, because of their kind disposition or naivete, tend to be less aware of the subtle nature, ways and means employed by hostile non-dharmic forces, and despite their naturally deep understanding of Hinduism, become likely candidates for 'digestion' into secular/Abrahamic ideologies. Hence, rather than debate endlessly on "which model is better", we can see this as a re-enactment of 'Thiruvilayadal', the divine play of Shiva to bring his children who have adopted different paths to realize the underlying integral unity that binds us, and to complement one another to achieve balance. Doing so allows us to combine the strong points of each model to produce the best response to the challenges we face today.

But is this enough? Most Indians (of either model) are in doubt about their own strengths, while being excellently up-to-date as far as knowing their negatives and limitations. 'What Indians cannot do', 'top 1008 defects in Hindus', 'why we are corrupt', etc. is what we are hearing every day. It has reached such a stage where this stuff is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, and we have forgotten all that is strong and positive about dharmics that is critical to turning things around. India today is like the Anjaneya who sat quietly when the rest of his team was volunteering to take the giant leap across the ocean. Yet, Hanuman is there to remind us that just like he forgot his own strength for long but recalled it at the right time, and was there at the right place to be able to take advantage of it, we too are sure to discover our inner Anjaneya if we do our dharma without expectations, and show up at the table. And it doesn't matter which dharmic path we took to show up there.

Clearly, our wise ancestors have left us enough clues on how to go about things.

Digestion of Hinduism: Inside the American Veda

The first part of my notes-to-self covered my interpretation of digestion, a term coined by Rajiv Malhotra. This lead to an active twitter debate that led to many questions, mostly centered around Phil Goldberg's 'American Veda', which was previously critiqued elsewhere as facilitating digestion, and a stand which I support. I fact, I have found that AV does a lot more than that. It also directly digests and misrepresents Hinduism, and celebrates the digestion of Hinduism, perhaps unintentionally. This second set of notes will add more substance and take some of those follow-up questions as a starting point.

Throughout these posts, the emphasis in bold/underline/quotes are mine. Often direct quotes are italicized. Let me state upfront that I admire Goldberg's candid admissions. I believe he is Jewish, and therefore does not proselytize. This is my critique of his work, as well as the other interviews and articles he has written. There are places in the book AV where he even agrees that Indian methods and dharmic ideas have been misappropriated. But his disappointing response is to kick the can down the road to the Hindu advocacy groups to deal with the Hindu image issue, and washes his hands off, i.e. 'it is not my problem'. Fair enough. He is not Hindu, and this book is not about Hinduism. AV is a book written by the west, of the west, and for the west. Hindus and Hinduism are but props in the AV stage.

[update Dec 23: typos fixed]



Cover Page
American Veda: How Indian Spirituality Changed the West

American Veda and Indian spirituality implies that Hindu religious concepts are tied to a geography. There is no call-out in the book of the universal truth claims of Karma and Punar Janma of Hinduism and the universality of dharma - the latter is the single-most important thing, in my opinion, a Hindu reader should look for in such books: Ask what is the status of dharma in the book? It is totally ignored in the title. The title suggests that the book starts with some fuzzy "spirituality" from India toward building a new American Veda suitable for western consumption without the stench of Hinduism's caste, cows, and curry.

Strong words? read on and make up your own mind.

Foreword by Huston Smith
Who is this Huston Smith and why did Goldberg pick him to write the foreword?
He's described a 90+ year old "rock star of religions". My ignorance. I never heard of this chap, so I looked him up. Here are some interesting snippets.

"Smith was born in 1919 in China, where his parents were Christian missionaries...."

Smith: "... "I happen to be a Christian. I was brought up and drenched in that," he said. "I am very orthodox in thinking that Jesus acted in his life the way God would have acted if God had assumed human form... I think that God imploded, like a spiritual big bang, to launch the eight civilizations that make up recorded history and the religions in those civilizations.""

Zero connection with dharma so far, but we see Mr. Smith clearly state where his roots are: History-centric Christianity.

Here's the Wikipedia entry on his religious practice that examines other religions (including, and in particular, Hindu Vedanta) for many years, he returning to his Christian roots to write this book:
"The Soul of Christianity: Restoring the Great Tradition"

 Here's an Amazon.com blurb on what this restored Christianity looks like:
"... "I have tried to describe a Christianity which is fully compatible with everything we now know, and to indicate why Christians feel privileged to give their lives to it."
—Huston Smith

.... In his most personal and passionate book on the spiritual life, renowned author, scholar, and teacher of world religions Huston Smith turns to his own life-long religion, Christianity....Smith cuts through these to describe Christianity's "Great Tradition," the common faith of the first millennium of believers, which is the trunk of the tree from which Christianity's many branches, twigs, and leaves have grown. This is not the exclusivist Christianity of strict fundamentalists, nor the liberal, watered-down Christianity practiced by many contemporary churchgoers..."


Right in the introductory pages available for free at Amazon.com, you can clearly see Smith states that he visited India may times and learnt of "dharma" before proceeding to digest Dharma into the Christian notion. His exact words on how he redefines dharma: "It is the duty that God has imposed on me". Being a Christian, he is of course referring to a monotheist God who is a task-master.  The meaning of dharma has been totally inverted. This is the abysmal level of scholarship and mis-translation of Sanskrit, which we see in other chapters of the AV book too.

In the first chapter of Smith's book, after the introduction, Smith talks of his new Christian world view, where the very first set of paragraphs attempts to mangle the dharmic idea of "Purna" made famous by the famous Shloka. Next, tackles at causation (related to Karma...), at which point I cried halt. The foreword to AV cites a single verse from the Christian bible where false equivalences for Bhakti, Jnana, and Karma is given! Rock star.


Foreword writers are deliberately and carefully chosen, and usually for deep reasons. AV's foreword writer is a famous and devout Christian, the son of two devoted missionaries who studied Vedanta for long, and visited India several times, and ultimately used this information, not to become Hindu or dharmic, but to repair and re-invent an improved Christianity for the west using digested versions of Hindu concepts.

This is how American Veda begins and ends. This is the template.

Theme of American Veda
Goldberg is sincere westerner who is looking to improving the condition of his country and repairing their society and religion. To achieve this task, he, like Huston Smith, uses Hinduism as a tool-box containing an useful assortment of nuts and bolts, from which the west can freely select compatible parts to plug the gaping holes in their systems. Chapter after chapter in this book is not about how Hinduism and India benefits from the interaction with the west, but the total opposite.  Which begs the question:

If AV is about utilizing bits and pieces of Hindu ideas deleted from their Indian context, and suitably modified to enhance Christianity, Judaism, and western health care, etc., why the heck are the useful Hindu idiots cheering, showcasing, and funding such works? What has India and dharmic systems got in return from the US for this? ZILCH.

Much of American Veda is a biographical celebration of who's who of U-turners and digesters:

Maslow, Bensen, Ken Wilber, Carl Jung, Father Keating, ....

and a bunch of opportunists like Deepak Chopra who have made a lot of money selling faux-Vedantic snake oil to a gullible western audience. This blogpost links to a video lecture of Rajiv Malhotra that walks through an entire list of U-turners and digesters. We won't go into these biographies, even though they make for fascinating and bewildering reading. In this remainder of this part of the self-study, I cover the introduction and the first chapter of AV, focusing on Goldberg's own words and annotations. I highlight just a few of the many gaping holes in this book that makes a mockery of dharmic concepts and try to point out how these mangled ideas facilitate digestion.

For more background and context on American Veda and Phil Goldberg, readers can read this blog: digestingveda.blogspot.in. We owe the writer a thanks.


Chapter - Introduction
1. Here, PG starts off providing a list of excuses about why he has not used Hinduism in the title. Clearly, he is aware this would become an issue. Some reasons include:
a.  "people will misconstrue the nature of this book". (Exactly how?)

b. [Opportunistic] gurus who came to the west said they were not preaching Hinduism (so?)

c. Yoga and Vedanta do not have to be viewed religiously at all ...

2. As far as Buddhism, he equates the Buddha to Jesus as a reformer. I would seriously contest this as another false equivalence, but some other day. This book does not credit Buddhism in the cover either. Of Jainism or Sikhism, I could find no mention.

3. He calls Yoga and Vedanta, India's major export. Despite that, India has not seen one dollar in returns yet!

4. He finds India's epic 'tales' of Ramayana and Mahabharata to be rich in 'magic and mystery', and makes the Iliad and Odyssey look like short stories.

5. Page 10:
Goldberg offers us this gem: infinite divine can be called Allah, Lord, or Brahman, which is justified citing 'Ekam sat Vipraha bahudha vadanti'.
 
Shockingly poor scholarship fills the American Veda. Goldberg is honest enough to concede that he is not confident about the completeness of the translation of the Vedantic principles he cites by adding caveats such as "does not pretend to do justice to Vedanta...". What can we be sure of in AV then?

The above reasoning is a distortion of Hinduism, designed to propagate the myth of sameness. Doing so allows him to move on to his next, and by far, most serious error, which opens the door to wholesale digestion.

6. On Page 11, Goldberg claims:
 "Vedantic principles are accompanied by Vedic concepts of Karma.... and reincarnation. Most applications of Vedanta-Yoga do not require these supplementary ideas, and ordinary practitioners in the west do not necessarily believe in them"

Supplementary ideas?!

Karma (cause and effect) and Punar Janma (Reincarnation) are central and fundamental truth-claims of dharmic thought system. Hinduism (and its pluralism of manifestations), Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists subscribe to this. These dharmic fundamentals are precisely the ones that the Judeo-Christian system is incompatible with, and this is also exactly why Goldberg has deliberately brushed them aside as unimportant waste material that can be rejected! Once we get rid of these crucial dharmic elements, the mutilated remainder of the Hindu concepts can be digested into JC systems, without hurting their history-centric dogma.  This is exactly what was stated in part-1. In Philip Goldberg's own words, we have clear evidence of digestion being facilitated.

7. On the same page, PG favorably compares Vedanta to perennialism. Rajiv Malhotra has previously stated that "The whole Perennial Philosophy is merely stage-2 of the uturn." AV systematically glorifies (as Rajiv Malhotra put it) these so-called western pioneers, who in reality, just reassembled and repackaged many of the original ideas from dharmic systems.

8. In Page 12, he says "whether it's a falafel or philosophy, Americans embrace foreign products when the circumstances are right, and conditions in the United States were right for Vedanta-Yoga from the start"

Falafel. Vedanta-Yoga. foreign product (!)

Wow, such reverence and seriousness.

This is the author that Ms. Nirmala Seetharaman's foundation found worthy enough to invite for a talk, and for RSS to promote? that certain Sanathana Dharma institutions showered money on?



These are just the first few pages. Toward the end of the book, there are sections where it appears like Goldberg is practically showing Padres/Rabbis how such digested Vedanta-Yoga' can improve the situation in their church and synagogue without impacting their central dogma. He also does this in a Huffington Post article. Indeed as early as page 23-24, Goldberg very honestly states his intentions. Indeed, AV is a very honest book. I'm sure PG believes in his mind that he's doing a lot of good.

9. In his own words, we can find the real reason for deleting Hinduism/Buddhism/Sikhism/Jainism from this book:

 "This [book] is not a threat to Western religions; Americans are not about to abandon their churches, synagogues, and mosques, for Hindu temples. Figures of Shiva and Krishna will not replace crosses in American homes."

It is very, very clear. Hinduism has NO role in this book, and he sees no role for Hinduism in American homes. He is seeking not to replace dogmatic Judeo-christian ideology with dharmic ideas as many gullible Hindus believe. Instead, he is seeking to complement and solidify the existing dogma with a digested Hindu layer. This is precisely what was mentioned in part 1. In his own words, we have the evidence of the outcome of digestion.  Once this happens, this enhanced Christianity can be re-exported to India. Conversion in India will be a piece of cake. This is what India gains from digestion.

Still not convinced? then read further ...
"Exposure to eastern spirituality is more likely to strengthen a person's relationship to his or her native religion than to destroy it".

Goldberg has gone out of his way to calm his western audience and his publishers. This book is not about bringing dharma to replace dogma. This is about making Judeo-Christianity stronger to stem the flow of disenchanted members out of their system.

I could go on. There are nearly 400 pages in this book, and I have covered less than 25 in this post since I do not have a digital copy to expedite this work. There are more fallacies and errors to point out, but that will take up a lot of space and is left as an exercise to the reader. I will however add one final point on the comments that Goldberg makes in page 292, to illustrate the kind of lame arguments used to justify digestion.

"One physician told me "But replacing the the orange robe with a white lab coat opens it up to a lot more people". So does calling meditation a stress-reduction technique, not a sadhana for achieving moksha. We will never know how many heart attacks were prevented, or how many millions of pills were not taken, because of that decision.

There is another place in the book where a false argument of "Indian philosophy versus Western science" argument is given. Digestion of Yoga into all these medical buzzwords is justified since it gives these methods the requisite "scientific legitimacy".  Mr. Goldberg: Indians, Tibetans, Sri Lankans, Indonesians, and many millions in Asia (not just India) for centuries benefited scientifically from Yoga, without having to mutilate Yoga and delete moksha, and did not require white lab coats to "make it look" scientific. It always was scientific, and dharmic religions have never been in conflict with science. This silly justification insults intelligence.
 

Conclusion and Summary
Based on my study, I personally find American Veda to be a mediocre and error-ridden piece of work that directly enables, and also (perhaps inadvertently) celebrates digestion while moving toward a goal of ensuring that western society derives maximum benefits from the Hindu toolbox, taking what it deems to be compatible and useful (dharma-nirpeksha stuff), and discarding the rest.

Digestion is not an end-goal. It is not easy to spot unless you examine the end-state of the Hindu concept being appropriated. It is merely a means to an end. Usually, that end-goal is to preserve and enhance Western religion. The primary goal is neither to harm or help the cause of dharma. Rather they are indifferent to it. Impact on Hinduism and dharma is collateral damage, which authors may express regret about, but is not really their concern.

It's time we stop celebrating every new and shiny piece of work that comes of the west just because it is superficially favorable to Hinduism. That's a symptom of mental colonization. Let's first fund and support those among our own who are busting their backs coming up with high-quality work. Being brown should not be a disqualification.

Digestion of Hinduism: A Self-Study

Introduction
This is the first update on an ongoing self-study to improve my own understanding of 'digestion' using the example of Yoga. This is work in progress.

'Digestion' is a term coined by Rajiv Malhotra. My reading is that it represents the calculated misappropriation of methods and concepts from Indian (dharmic) knowledge systems, which are subsequently reassembled and integrated into an existing western or non-dharmic framework with the final goal of maintaining or enhancing the latter's balance of power, and if necessary, discarding the original dharmic method/concept/source/context as redundant and obsolete. Rajiv Malhotra explains this via the tiger-deer metaphor, which is discussed in other blog posts and in his forum.

Background
(Read 'Being Different' book for the complete and accurate details)
Fundamental Christianity, like its Islamic and Judaic counterparts, are history-centric systems. In more general language, their core is dogmatic and tied to a finite number of unique supernatural top-down intervention(s) in human-recorded history. On the other hand, Indic religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism are based on Dharmic thought systems that are not history-dependent. Dharma is a Sanskrit non-translatable that roughly means ~ 'that which sustains or upholds'. I view dharma as 'that which is essential', and Sanskrit as the best available language to explain the essence of the cosmos. Though there are significant and deep metaphysical differences between these different dharmic systems and a pluralism of their dharmic sub-variants, they all adhere to a common set of Dharmic truth claims, including Punar Janma (rebirth) and Karma (cause and effect). All these systems believe in one more forms of Yoga as a dharmic path to reach the ultimate truth without external crutches or textual/historical artefacts.

Being Different
Dharmic truth-claims are permanently irreconcilable with a history-centric core.  For example, if Christianity becomes dharmic, the idea of original sin, the need for a son of God, intermediary prophet, etc. become totally irrelevant. Dharma and Dogma are incompatible. Islam, and Judaism have similar issues. Furthermore, these history-centric religions are themselves incompatible with each other, since each rejects the other's record of unique divine interventions in history. Thus there is also a need for a HC systems to augment it's own idea inventory to appear superior to its HC competitor when they fight for global market-share.

Why Digestion and Not Complete Borrowing?
If the HC west were to attempt to openly borrow and adopt authentic Yoga, it would immediately clash with their dogmatic core, because Yoga as path of achieving self-realization, represents freedom from history and history-centrism (a full chapter in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different discusses this). Hence, Yoga in its original form, meaning, and context cannot be adopted by the west unless they give up their HC dogma. The Yogasanas may help them look better, feel healthier, but they cannot proceed beyond that to reach higher levels of consciousness without seriously comprising their dogmatic beliefs. Thus openly acknowledging and borrowing Yoga poses an existential question. What to do?

Visit India as students, humbly learn from Gurus for years. Then take a step back, analyze Yoga, de-construct it and strip it down to smaller components. Then pick and reassemble those pieces that are not in conflict with their dogmatic core, to synthesize a bastardized or cannibalized version of Yoga, and reject the rest as waste material.

This mangled synthesis of "Yoga" is initially considered as generic knowledge, and not unique to dharmic systems, but is eventually retro-fitted and back-traced to some obscure Western source, over time. Thus, history-centricity is preserved, while also allowing their followers to get real but highly limited benefits of Yoga, while still keeping them dependent on prophets and supernatural interventions. To increase the comfort level, "Yoga" practititioners can mechanically chant "Hallelujah" or "A.Hu.A", or recite the Torah instead of the essential and profound 'Om'.

Interestingly, look at the reverse case. Dharmic thought systems can happily and openly borrow from progress achieved by western science and technology since it is compatible their dharmic 'operating system' core that is based on the scientific idea of cause and effect. No digestion is required and the original ideas are neither distorted, nor misrepresented. Science has always been compatible with dharma, but not always with a HC core.


Summary
To summarize, Digestion is a method of:
1) extracting the 'nutrients' out of a dharmic concept,

2) discard the crucial dharmic constituents itself as unnecessary waste,

3) reassembling non-dharmic nutrients to synthesize a new distorted concept (rename it as "Christian Yoga, Christu-natyam for comfort and acceptance) that is of limited use and importantly, is fully compatible with history-centric dogma,

4) obfuscate, alter, or delete the original context, depth and meaning of the concept (e.g. the true, deep meaning and intent of Yoga and Bharatanatyam is lost)

5) deny credit to the dharmic primary source, and erase it over time, and even sell the mangled form back to Indians


Outcomes
I count at least two crucial practical benefits of digestion to the west. Let's use HC Christianity as an example.

Once we have a Hindu-DNA enhanced Christianity , there is
OUTCOME 1) SIGNIFICANT REDUCTION IN EFFORT TO FORCE OR COERCE CONVERSIONS OF HINDUS.

OUTCOME 2) REDUCED MOTIVATION FOR DOGMA-FOLLOWERS TO TURN DHARMIC


why? Aren't these positive outcomes?

To see (outcome 1), History-centric religion will now have all the externally observable equivalent features contained in Hinduism - Christian Yoga, Christunatyam, Christian Veda, Jesus Pooja, etc.  The myth of sameness becomes incredibly strong. The message to dharmic peoples will simply be:
YOU DO NOT EVEN NEED TO CONVERT ANYMORE. WE ARE THE SAME. PLUS WE DO NOT HAVE CASTE/COW/SATI/DOWRY PROBLEMS. YOU MERELY NEED TO UPGRADE.

For (outcome 2), the message to dogma-followers will be:
YOU DO NOT NEED TO CONVERT OUT OF YOUR FAITH. WE ALREADY HAVE EVERYTHING DHARMIC FAITHS HAVE, AND WE ARE MODERN.

To summarize, hte net outcome of digestion is that the HC system gets stronger, and the dharmic system gets weaker. Thus a digester like Phil Goldberg will have no problem criticising conversion because:

After digestion is complete, there is no need to coerce and convert! Digestion allows HC religions claim equivalence and even superiority in features and benefits, even though they are only superficially the same as dharmic religions. The myth of sameness becomes incredibly strong.

Furthermore, since these digested concepts are delinked from dharma, existing dharmic systems will be seen as obsolete relics of a bygone era that never contributed much, and fit only for a museum. Where are the original native thought systems of Africa, North America, Australia, Middle East? They have been digested into one of the history-centric systems. Only India still remains their unfinished business, and barely so, because of the remarkable anti-fragile properties of Hinduism.








How Phil Goldberg made the Vedas Kosher
Now take the case of Phil Goldberg. His ideas and views have been covered in the 'hitchhiker's guide to BD' blog. His American Veda book deliberately makes no mention of Hinduism. anywhere. Why? This is not mere semantics. His audience is the west. His goal, as he himself has openly stated is that the western peoples can retain their existing (history-centric) faiths but be able to get the benefits of 'sprituality' (without caste/cow/sati/dowry etc). Thus, the only way out for him to be successful while also achieving this goal is employ digestion. Platitudes at other times keeps the Indians convinced that all is well and hunky-dory.

Digestion (as a strategy) relies on treating Hindus as useful idiots.

To summarize, we can now see that Goldberg's actions results in:

a) The original Vedas being stripped of their context, ideas appropriated and digested into an "American Veda" that is 'kosher' and compatible with history-centrism dogma.

b) The full meaning,and context of the original, Hindu Vedas get diminished over time and eventually lost.

c) The AV becoming a ready-to-consume all-American, self-contained reference textbook for Vedic ideas that gives it's readers a comfortable western interpretation of dharmic concepts. See how Hinduism is bypassed? This can only result in further degradation of Hindu dharma's 'brand' in the west, which Phil Goldberg does not see as his problem.

d) Any random person can latch on to this approach as a cookie-cutter to create a Scientology Veda, or a Timbuktu Veda, and sell books, patent, commercialize, and make money. A lot of "Yoga" methods have been similarly appropriated, commercialized, patented, and even weaponized by the Pentagon (e.g. Yoga Nidra). Just like the west has "paddle boat Yoga, Power Yoga, Aqua Yoga, ...".
 
e) Note that this digested multiplicity does not represent genuine and dharmic pluralism, since such proliferation is dharma nirpeksha (sans dharma), thereby only leading to corruption and adharma in the form of egoistic patent quarrels, practitioner injuries and disillusionment, marketing wars, greed, etc. 
 
f) Furthermore, since the west controls the global discourse, these mangled meanings and definitions become the accepted ones, show up in Wikipedia, western school textbooks, and eventually accepted by the leftist-controlled textbooks consumed by Indian students.

g) Net result, as Rajiv Malhotra states: the history-centric tiger has eaten up the deer, the deer nutrients are converted into tiger DNA, making the tiger stronger. What is left of the dharmic deer is a pile of poop.


Phil Goldberg Celebrated in India
How have the dharmic deer welcomed folks like Phil Goldberg?
Some samples that I am aware of:

1) He was invited to give a talk organized by Ms Nirmala Seetharaman's foundation, which was promoted by a prominent RSS intellectual/spokesperson. Attempts to contact Ms. Seetharaman on twitter prior to this talk got zero response.

2) His HuffPost article that condemns conversion was reproduced on a reputed Indian website (IndiaFactsOrg) that promotes dharma. Note that these articles in themselves are not a problem and such sites have every right to publish any material they deem worthy. However, such articles help Hinduism very little, but boosts the digester's credibility a lot. As Rajiv Malhotra tweeted "it is like Rahul Gandhi talking about evils of corruption". Does Hinduism need a 'facts lecture' from the Goldbergs of the world to tell us that the coerced conversions represents a clear and present danger to India?

3) Monetary funding from Sanathana Dharma institutions.

4) Have his book cited as an shining example of positive Hindu influence on the west, even by strong 'Hindutva' proponents, when all that AV really does is to make it easier for the west to remain rooted to dogma by incorporating useful (intellectual/textual but not the deep dharmic) benefits of Hinduism.
 
Note: I look forward to IndiaFactsOrg uncovering the complete facts about digestion of dharmic ideas and methods, and disseminate it to a wider audience.


Questions to Ponder
1. Do some Hindutva giants and organizations even realize that they are celebrating an end-product that is Hindu-DNA enhanced Fundamental Christianity and not some pluralistic western branch of Hinduism as they foolishly believe it to be?

2. That this history-centric Christianity running on digested Hindu energy needs even less effort to convert dharmic peoples to their side, while also keeping their own followers bound in Dogma?

3. How is the cause of dharma served by celebrating this digestion?

Not just Phil Goldberg, Rajiv Malhotra has identified several westerners who have digested (for example) Aurobindo's ideas, repackaged it to suit Western audiences, and are now paid high fees and invited back to India by big companies to "educate" their management trainees.

The dogmatic tiger's conquest is being celebrated by dharmic deer.

Part-2 of self study is continued here.

Crusades 2.0 and the Indian Sepoy

Some rambling thoughts that arose from informal discussions with some engineering and B-school professors from universities around the globe...

The crusades aren't really over. The skirmishes are quite clear. A Syria here, an Iraq there, a Pakistan somewhere else. In response, a 9-11 here, a Kenya mall quiz there... World domination is a ludicrous movie theme that never goes out of fashion.The contemporary crusade is couched in modern language and subterfuge, but at the end of the day, it is still a Pax Romana versus Dhimmicracy, where dharmic peoples are expendable. A Darwinian battle between two history-centric systems. China may seem to be making it a tri-cornered fight, but really, it is being digested by the former, what with their huge underground church movement.

Which really leaves us with the pluralistic, dharmic Indian systems as the only viable, scientific and sustainable alternatives. As it has invariably been since forever. As the battle between these two Tamassic park dinosaurs begins to overflow into India, enter: India's secularist sepoys. A bunch of English-speaking Desi Don Quixotes and Def Sufi poets. Conquering heroes in the battle of futility fought and won entirely against vast strawmen armies, sailing their battleships through storms in many a teacup. Oblivious to data-driven methods, unhindered by fact, these dharma-illiterates remain supremely confident in their theoretical ability to alter the center of mass from within a closed physical system, despite failing in every single experiment. The more opportunistic sepoys get rewarded and graduate into prize idiots, while their subalterns remain content as intellectual coolies for either side.  Satyam eva Jayate in the long run, but in the short term, secular Mithya rules the roost in India.

Updated October 28
The blasts in Bihar during the Hunkaar political rally that killed many innocent civilians, is a gentle reminder from sepoys for their fellow Indians to renew their membership of (Pax Romana + Dhimmicracy) and not strive for dharma based governance.

Why Did Shiva Drink The Poison?

[This is an example of an attempt at digesting Shiva into Christianity (Jesus). An abbreviated version of this blog was first posted in the Rajiv Malhotra Forum]

(link source: http://beingdifferentbook.com)


The Samudra Manthana story in Hinduism (pictured in book cover, above) appears to be a key metaphor to describe order & chaos in the book 'Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism" (BD),  where the Amrit (nectar) that comes out of the churning the ocean represents 'order', and the accompanying poison, the 'chaos and disorder'. In multiple online forums, Shiva's drinking of the poison is equated to Christ's crucifixion to proactively save humanity from original sin. Some Hindus have equated Shiva's act as one of collective salvation from sin, feeding the myth of sameness. (see here, here, and here). A key truth-claim of Hinduism is the cause-and-then-effect concept of Karma, so Shiva cannot bear anybody else's "sins". We all have to follow our own Sva-Dharma and shape our own destiny across multiple births. Hindus do not have to (and can't) depend on a "single-life + third-party salvation model" like Christianity. (Read BD & the earlier blog posts on history-centric model of Abrahamic Faiths). Reading Chapter 4 of BD again (I quote from the Amazon-Kindle copy), indicates that this interpretation is incorrect.

1. Firstly, BD notes:
"....The story of the Samudra-manthana is not intended to be taken literally.
Indeed, the ultimate uncertainty of knowing how the universe came about is given
eloquent expression in the famous 'Hymn of Creation' ..."

whereas History-Centric Christianity requires Crucifixion, resurrection & its
implications of collective salvation to be literally and absolutely true, with
no room for alternative explanations.

2. BD also rules out equivalence to a story in the 'book of revelation' where
'satanic disorder' has to be absolutely vanquished:
"...In one such story, Lord Shiva himself consumes the fierce, dark and bitter
poison first churned up from the ocean. He does so in order to overcome it,
leaving the nectar to others. But significantly, Shiva makes this choice both
out of knowledge (of the poison's deadly effect) and love (for those who might
suffer harm) – not out of any dark, destructive passion. Furthermore, he is able
to transmute the poison not by ejecting it but by incorporating it in himself.
An equivalent story in the Book of Revelation, conceivably, might be for Christ,
in his second coming, to assimilate the Devil rather than defeat him in an
external struggle. Thus Christ would be setting a constructive example as
opposed to demanding that all humans join him in a war against all those who
side with the Devil. But, needless to say, this is but a hypothetical scenario;
the good versus evil dualism of Judaism and Christianity is absolute."

3. The section below appears to give the interpretation of 'why Shiva drank the
poison':
"... Disorder serves as a source of creativity by preventing order from becoming
fossilized. The Lord is not only the creator of the universe (as Brahma) and the
maintainer of its order (as Vishnu) but also the one who ultimately dissolves it
(as Shiva). The dissolution makes room for the next cycle of creation. At the
spiritual level, Shiva, the Lord of Yoga, aptly assumes the appearance of chaos
to facilitate the dissolution of bondage to the falsehoods in our minds – making
way for new creation..."

(picture link source: http://bhavanajagat.com/tag/bhagavata-purana-prahlada-charitra/)

Review of Asimov's 'Nightfall' from a Dharmic Perspective

Introduction
Nightfall (NF) was written by Isaac Asimov in 1941, when the war that was burning down Europe would escalate into a global war. It remains one of the best science fiction stories ever written and won many awards. Reams have been written about this book in the western literature. The attempt here is to subject 'Nightfall' to a Purva Paksha, i.e., examine the ideas in the book from a native Indian (Dharmic) viewpoint, utilizing some key ideas in Rajiv Malhotra's book 'Being Different'. We will rely on the original version (about 20-odd pages) of NF that was published in 'Anthropology through Science Fiction', 1971. (The next post in the TQ blog will cover another Asimov story in this book). You can read 'Nightfall' online here.

(picture source link: ghostradio.files.wordpress.com)

Synopsis
NF visits the human-inhabited planet of Lagash at a most critical point in its civilization, when five of its six suns have fizzled out, and the sixth ("Beta") appears to be in danger of meeting the same fate, leaving its inhabitants to endure 'night' for the first time ever. Archaeologists determine that Lagash has gone through repeated cycles of birth and destruction. Physicists , after applying the laws of gravity and orbital motions, and centuries of analysis, calculate that each boom-bust cycle lasts 2049 years that ends with a solar eclipse of a sole remaining sun. Psychologists explain that the resulting onset of nightfall and its terrifying darkness brings about an extraordinary claustrophobia among the population. Driven insane by fear and chaos, the people will proceed to light up and eventually burn down Lagash to cinder. This fear drives a bunch of scientists to build and move into an artificially lit doomsday hide-out.

On the other hand, Lagash has a group of cultists who follow 'the book of revelations' that pretty much talks about all these effects, but attributing causality to some external divine force. Furthermore, the book talks about an appearance of many stars in the sky in the end, which cult followers have to view to achieve salvation. While the cult cares less about the cause ("they believe it because the book says so"), they share valuable data with the scientists, and in this bargain, the scientists will validate that the cultists were indeed prophetic.
The scientists proceed to provide rational explanations for the phenomena that coincide with that the cult says, but as a result of this scientific explanation, increasing number of Lagashians desert the cult since they do not need the book anymore for supernatural explanations, greatly annoying the cult that accuses the seculars of Blasphemy. The scientists reciprocate this dislike for the cultists and in the end, the cultists attempt to destroy their observatory that is trying to photograph and analyze the final scene, fearing that the scientists were interfering with their moment of salvation. As nightfall descends, the Lagashians go crazy and burn down their civilization, as predicted.

Asimov's introduction to Nightfall
Per Wikipedia, Asimov says that he wrote NF after being introduced to Emerson's quote by John Campbell:
"... If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, 
and preserve for many generations,
the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!
Campbell's opinion to the contrary was: "I think men would go mad." "

Asimov writes a two-page introduction to NF in this book and makes the following observations:

a. A cult that at it's core does not address the problems that cause the society's ills will hasten its disintegration.

b. Religion or science? (classical binary choice approach that characterizes the Western frame of reference). Science was successful in explaining why Lagash would burn down, and in that process were able to rescue many cultists from their dogmatic existence. But in the end, neither science, nor the cult were able to save the people from self-destructing, thereby indicating the inadequacy of the cult and science in providing timely and practical solutions for a critical problem.

Emerson's Quote
Emerson, whose quote inspired the book, was greatly influenced by Hinduism. Rajiv Malhotra writes in his book 'Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism': "... Europe's encounter with Sanskrit revolutionized the European study of linguistics, and its encounter with Hinduism and Buddhism deeply informed Western philosophy and challenged the Judeo-Christian traditions. Some westerners, such as the American transcendentalists: Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, broke away from Christian orthodoxy as a result. This process continues today ever more deeply in the mainstream of the West through yoga, meditation, healing sciences, the arts, eco-feminism, philosophy, and pop culture...".

Indeed, Emerson's aforementioned quote is taken from his work 'Nature'. Sanderson Beck notes:

".. In his essay on "Nature" Emerson reveals the essence of his philosophy: "Philosophically considered, the universe is composed of Nature and the Soul." This has been stated before in the Sankhya philosophy of India ... Spirit, or the oversoul which includes all individual souls, is the eternal essence of an infinite absolute reality which creates all the transitory phenomena of Nature The Sanskrit terms are Purusha which means Person and Prakriti meaning Nature.."

Interestingly, Beck says "....the truth may be spoken in any language, and we must not hasten to conclude that he merely adopted the Hindu religion, but rather that he found there corresponding ideas to the illumination he received from his own soul and experience in life. In his essay "Compensation" which describes the spiritual law of karma, or cause and effect in human action, he indicates he discovered this principle himself although it has been known for millennia in India and is similar to Greek notions of justice and retribution .."

This paragraph can be recognized as yet another attempt to digest Hinduism into Western universalism, and amputate critical Hindu ideas from its original body of work. In fact, Emerson's text reads but like an English re-interpretation of the original Sanskrit texts of Hinduism.

Nightfall appears to depict Emerson as the cultists in NF who see the divine in the once-in-a-thousand-year stars but at the same time, also exposes the limitations of science in solving society's most difficult problems. In the end, the scientists of Lagash are shocked to see thousands of stars that they never expected would fit into such a small sky, and as they begin their descent into terror, lose their coherence, and remain unable to find a rational explanation for this final phenomenon. On the other hands, the cultists did have an explanation, however inadequate.

Dharmic point of view
Hinduism, like other Dharmic religions, does NOT see a contradiction between itself and science. Indeed, concepts of Hinduism have not come into conflict with science so far, be it Heliocentrism, Evolution, Quantum Mechanics, or the
Theory of Relativity. The Hindu belief of cyclical time is exemplified in NF by the creative-destructive cycles of Lagash. In contrast, NF's cultists accept their book-ordained fiery end without question and implicitly reject Karma - a mindset that could have potentially changed the end result for the population. They believe that the stars that show up on doomsday are a historically divine intervention from elsewhere (duality). These stars provide, at the risk of madness, a collective salvation for only the populace of Lagash that views them but not others, who will be damned, and is thus not linked to individual Karma or Sva-Dharma. It is clear that NF's cult is not based on a Dharmic thought system but is history-centric, and nearly exactly models any Abrahamic religion.


In the end, neither the cultists (who are not dharmic but dogmatic), nor the atheistic seculars (limited by their senses to incomplete understanding) are able to develop adhyatma vidya (inner sciences, self-realization techniques) required to transcend the limitation of the human sense and the primordial fear of darkness. Doing so would have also enabled them to get past the few hours of darkness due to a solar eclipse.

Nightfall on Earth
Clearly, all religions are NOT the same, not in 1941 when the global war began, not now on earth, or in some futuristic Lagash. Every year, there are many predictions of the end of the world. Every year, the primordial fear of nightfall drives many so-called rational and smart people to believe this may well be possible and call for a collective holding of hands to fight the terror of darkness. This is how cults operate.  Science merely laughs. Dharmic faiths like Hinduism, on the other hand that have no conflict with science by design, talk of timeless, cyclical time and empower you to overcome your fear of eternal darkness.