BY NAVIN DOSHI
The United Nations has declared that June 21 will be International Day of Yoga, adopting a measure proposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who said yoga lets people “discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature.” The 193-member U.N. General Assembly approved by consensus a...
The United Nations has declared that June 21 will be International Day of Yoga, adopting a measure proposed by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi who said yoga lets people “discover the sense of oneness with yourself, the world and the nature.” The 193-member U.N. General Assembly approved by consensus a...
resolution establishing a day to commemorate the ancient practice, which Modi called for in September 2014 during his inaugural address to the world body.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the International Day of Yoga would bring attention to yoga’s holistic benefits. “Yoga can contribute to resilience against non-communicable diseases. Yoga can bring communities together in an inclusive manner that generates respect. Yoga is a sport that can contribute to development and peace. Yoga can even help people in emergency situations to find relief from stress,” Ban said in a statement.
The sense of oneness within and with nature in the words of Prime Minister Modi, implies unification of all at every level. Yoga practice of the body is a starting process followed by many other activities that could bring the sense of unification. Vision, sound, and meditation are included in the practice of yoga for an ultimate objective of becoming unified with the whole. Every human faculty, meaning every layer and sub-layer of the body and the mind needs to be working in balance and in harmony complementing each other to realize oneness.
The truth about unification is natural and personal and is knowable through both reason and experience. Truth of oneness is revealed occasionally through spontaneous “revelations”, expressed by ancient Rishis of Indic tradition and modern Rishis of quantum physics. Knowledge of objective truth employing observation and reason can never be final and complete. Why? Because the nature we live in is dynamic and changing, never absolute! There are two approaches to discover truth. Scientific approach, also known as reductionist approach, divides observer as a state of being from what is observed. Becoming, that is experiencing through participation and integration, on the other hand, seems to be the right way toward unification. Practice of yoga is through participation guiding the practitioner towards unification.
The Holy Grail in every human endeavor is unification; leaders may want to unify people for different causes. Scientists have been trying to discover a theory to unify four fundamental forces of nature. I consider some scientists as modern day Rishis engaged in the effort to learn more about nature and the ultimate or absolute reality. They have been successful in discovering the smallest sub-atomic particles like quarks, and neutrinos employing machines like atom smashers. They have discovered the smallest sub-atomic particles closer to Nothingness or Sunyata articulated by Buddhist scholars.
There are moments of being unified- for example a musician or a vocalist, or a dancer, immersed in their art. They lose their identity and become one with the audience. It could happen to anyone involved in selfless actions of goodness. Unification or oneness requires the experience of participation, the experience of becoming. Deep meditation may be another process of losing identity and become unified with the ultimate reality.
In the 1920’s quantum mechanics was created by three great minds, three modern Rishis, Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, who all read the Vedas. They elaborated upon these ancient books of wisdom in their own language and with modern mathematical formulas in order to try to understand the ideas that are to be found throughout the Vedas. Impressed with Upanishad, Schrödinger had stated, “Some blood transfusion from the East to the West is needed to save Western science from spiritual anemia. Vedanta teaches that consciousness that is Ultimate Reality is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.”
Werner Heisenberg spent some time in India as Rabindranath Tagore’s guest in 1929. There he got acquainted with Indian philosophy which brought him great comfort for its similarity to modern physics. Heisenberg is best known for his Uncertainty Principle and was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He had stated, “Quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta. The startling parallelism between today’s physics and the world-vision of eastern mysticism reinforces this conjunction. One cannot distinguish between statements made by eastern metaphysics based on mystical insight, and of modern physics based on observations, experiments and mathematical calculations.”
Niels Henrik Bohr, Danish nuclear physicist who developed the Bohr model of the atom, received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, for his theory of atomic structure. He is on record as saying that he goes into the Upanishads to look for answers in modern physics.
Einstein’s famous quote on the Bhagavad Gita is: “When I read the Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.” He also wrote in his book The World as I See It, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research”. He also had an intimate dialog with Tagore about Upanishads.
Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist and the Supervising Scientist for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, acquired a deeper knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita in 1933. He was a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley, and he studied Sanskrit with Professor Arthur Ryder. After President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Oppenheimer spoke at a memorial service at Los Alamos and he quoted a passage from the Gita. He wrote:
“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
The general notions about human understanding, which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find in modern physics is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.” Oppenheimer’s spontaneous conjunction of a Hindu mystical poem with a nuclear explosion was of great symbolic significance. Nowhere in Western literature could he have found an almost clinical description of mystical rapture that also fits the description of a nuclear explosion in the outer world.
Carl Sagan, a famous astrophysicist, in his book, Cosmos says: “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths 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. And there are much longer time scales still. There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream.”
Sagan carries on: “The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed. These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas.” Sagan continues, “A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions”(Cosmos - By Carl Sagan p. 213-214).
In the episode entitled “The Edge of Forever” in the “Cosmos” television series, Carl Sagan visits India, and by way of introducing some of the bizarre ideas of modern physics, he acknowledges that of all the world’s philosophies and religions those originating in India are remarkably consistent with contemporary scenarios of space, time and existence.
I highly recommend seeing the movie CONTACT, based upon Sagan’s book, CONTACT. The theme of the movie includes: Universal Language (of science) is mathematics. Faith and belief are as or more important than science. Also unification of all, and the singularity of consciousness is conveyed by the alien who looked like her father. These are all features of Vedas. He strongly believed that we are not alone in this universe. “It would be such a waste of space if there are no other living planets like Earth”.
(Navin Doshi is a writer, philanthropist, and deeply interested in education. For more: www.nalanda
international.org)
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the International Day of Yoga would bring attention to yoga’s holistic benefits. “Yoga can contribute to resilience against non-communicable diseases. Yoga can bring communities together in an inclusive manner that generates respect. Yoga is a sport that can contribute to development and peace. Yoga can even help people in emergency situations to find relief from stress,” Ban said in a statement.
The sense of oneness within and with nature in the words of Prime Minister Modi, implies unification of all at every level. Yoga practice of the body is a starting process followed by many other activities that could bring the sense of unification. Vision, sound, and meditation are included in the practice of yoga for an ultimate objective of becoming unified with the whole. Every human faculty, meaning every layer and sub-layer of the body and the mind needs to be working in balance and in harmony complementing each other to realize oneness.
The truth about unification is natural and personal and is knowable through both reason and experience. Truth of oneness is revealed occasionally through spontaneous “revelations”, expressed by ancient Rishis of Indic tradition and modern Rishis of quantum physics. Knowledge of objective truth employing observation and reason can never be final and complete. Why? Because the nature we live in is dynamic and changing, never absolute! There are two approaches to discover truth. Scientific approach, also known as reductionist approach, divides observer as a state of being from what is observed. Becoming, that is experiencing through participation and integration, on the other hand, seems to be the right way toward unification. Practice of yoga is through participation guiding the practitioner towards unification.
The Holy Grail in every human endeavor is unification; leaders may want to unify people for different causes. Scientists have been trying to discover a theory to unify four fundamental forces of nature. I consider some scientists as modern day Rishis engaged in the effort to learn more about nature and the ultimate or absolute reality. They have been successful in discovering the smallest sub-atomic particles like quarks, and neutrinos employing machines like atom smashers. They have discovered the smallest sub-atomic particles closer to Nothingness or Sunyata articulated by Buddhist scholars.
There are moments of being unified- for example a musician or a vocalist, or a dancer, immersed in their art. They lose their identity and become one with the audience. It could happen to anyone involved in selfless actions of goodness. Unification or oneness requires the experience of participation, the experience of becoming. Deep meditation may be another process of losing identity and become unified with the ultimate reality.
In the 1920’s quantum mechanics was created by three great minds, three modern Rishis, Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, who all read the Vedas. They elaborated upon these ancient books of wisdom in their own language and with modern mathematical formulas in order to try to understand the ideas that are to be found throughout the Vedas. Impressed with Upanishad, Schrödinger had stated, “Some blood transfusion from the East to the West is needed to save Western science from spiritual anemia. Vedanta teaches that consciousness that is Ultimate Reality is singular, all happenings are played out in one universal consciousness and there is no multiplicity of selves.”
Werner Heisenberg spent some time in India as Rabindranath Tagore’s guest in 1929. There he got acquainted with Indian philosophy which brought him great comfort for its similarity to modern physics. Heisenberg is best known for his Uncertainty Principle and was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. He had stated, “Quantum theory will not look ridiculous to people who have read Vedanta. The startling parallelism between today’s physics and the world-vision of eastern mysticism reinforces this conjunction. One cannot distinguish between statements made by eastern metaphysics based on mystical insight, and of modern physics based on observations, experiments and mathematical calculations.”
Niels Henrik Bohr, Danish nuclear physicist who developed the Bohr model of the atom, received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1922, for his theory of atomic structure. He is on record as saying that he goes into the Upanishads to look for answers in modern physics.
Einstein’s famous quote on the Bhagavad Gita is: “When I read the Gita and reflect about how God created this universe everything else seems so superfluous.” He also wrote in his book The World as I See It, “I maintain that the cosmic religious feeling is the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research”. He also had an intimate dialog with Tagore about Upanishads.
Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist and the Supervising Scientist for the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb, acquired a deeper knowledge of the Bhagavad Gita in 1933. He was a professor of physics at University of California, Berkeley, and he studied Sanskrit with Professor Arthur Ryder. After President Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945, Oppenheimer spoke at a memorial service at Los Alamos and he quoted a passage from the Gita. He wrote:
“Access to the Vedas is the greatest privilege this century may claim over all previous centuries.
The general notions about human understanding, which are illustrated by discoveries in atomic physics are not in the nature of things wholly unfamiliar, wholly unheard of. Even in our own culture they have a history, and in Buddhist and Hindu thought a more considerable and central place. What we shall find in modern physics is an exemplification, an encouragement, and a refinement of old wisdom.” Oppenheimer’s spontaneous conjunction of a Hindu mystical poem with a nuclear explosion was of great symbolic significance. Nowhere in Western literature could he have found an almost clinical description of mystical rapture that also fits the description of a nuclear explosion in the outer world.
Carl Sagan, a famous astrophysicist, in his book, Cosmos says: “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths 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. And there are much longer time scales still. There is the deep and appealing notion that the universe is but the dream of the god who dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep. The universe dissolves with him - until, after another Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins again to dream the great cosmic dream.”
Sagan carries on: “The most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed. These profound and lovely images are, I like to imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical ideas.” Sagan continues, “A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions”(Cosmos - By Carl Sagan p. 213-214).
In the episode entitled “The Edge of Forever” in the “Cosmos” television series, Carl Sagan visits India, and by way of introducing some of the bizarre ideas of modern physics, he acknowledges that of all the world’s philosophies and religions those originating in India are remarkably consistent with contemporary scenarios of space, time and existence.
I highly recommend seeing the movie CONTACT, based upon Sagan’s book, CONTACT. The theme of the movie includes: Universal Language (of science) is mathematics. Faith and belief are as or more important than science. Also unification of all, and the singularity of consciousness is conveyed by the alien who looked like her father. These are all features of Vedas. He strongly believed that we are not alone in this universe. “It would be such a waste of space if there are no other living planets like Earth”.
(Navin Doshi is a writer, philanthropist, and deeply interested in education. For more: www.nalanda
international.org)
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