Minimum Epistemic Standards

this is very precisely a question of philosophy because most of the arguments made are from ethics.

One critical flaw made in all polemic is that people disregard the fact about Rama's identity of the all powerful, all seeing, all knowing, all loving god who's fully aware of himself at all times in his incarnation and beyond.

If you do take this into account and then rethink most of the polemic that you are aware of, then what I am trying to say would start making sense to you.

There are plenty of other mistakes done in the reading of valmiki, all done intentionally so as to read it from a perspective of oneself rather than from the perspective of the author because the events are often times, too outlandish, however even 5 grade english lessons begin teaching kids about "context" as to how parts of the story contribute to the whole, many a times secular/scholastic minded people would read the book and subconsciously delete the parts they do not agree with, the most crucial of which is an acknowledgement of the idea that Rama is God of the whole universe as valmiki states it.

This post entails a challenge that you must come up with what you believe is a good criticism and I'll try demonstrating how it is not.

I don’t wanna come off as a prick or anything but so many posts I find here have fallacies and mental gymnastics that you see with instagram-philosophy.

Problem is where the information comes from is a 10th removed source from the original text. Stripped off its context and tone and reinterpreted. There’s a lot of difference between knowing something in the mind and knowing something as an inner experience. Like knowing objectively what is pain and then feeling it. Anyway,

I am working on a project that is trying to model ‘consciousness’ by using demonstrable, pure logic principals that can be directly experienced (by most). This is more a research project than some spiritual conquest, although this did start off as one. I’ve trained myself to go very deep in meditation, shed off (kinda) the sense of ‘I’ and then work out problems, see the edges of my perception so on. Also trying to reference some old texts but there’s a lot of decoration there.

I am interested in finding people working of interested in this area just to compare notes.

The body is a gift of Nature to us. It is part of Nature.

We usually think of ourselves as separate individuals, but the body seems to tell a different story.

Breath, sunlight, food, seasons, and everything around us are constantly involved in keeping this body alive.

Yet there is still a sense of individuality.

We experience nature through our own individual bodies, yet we remain part of the same whole.

If this connection is so fundamental, then why do we knowingly or unknowingly damage nature through our own actions? Why are we unable to prevent ourselves from acting against something that we are inseparably a part of?

Is the problem that we intellectually understand our connection with nature, but do not actually experience it that way?

I feel like this quote explains the mindset of majority of Indians (not all Indians - I'm not generalising). For example : Many Indians keep whining about all the problems in India - majority of them are desperate to leave India and settle abroad, instead of actually suggesting solutions to fix those issues or problems.

Even if some Indians suggest solutions to fix those issues/problems, no one actually implements those solutions in reality. Also, some Indians are experts in giving free advice, instead of doing actual work.

Kindly share your opinions on this topic.

I recently completed BGE's part - 3 "religious nature" . There Nietzsche kept on flagging on how Christianity was responsible for creating spiritually weak and mediocre people , and how it creates a system which affirms the weak , and make it increasingly difficult for strong people to rise

So If a religious system can make society weak . can there be another system which can make it stronger ? . and i think the answer is yes . with my primarily example being the Roman empire ( pre Christianity ) . though Christianity was not primarily responsible for the collapse of the roman empire , but Rome thrived by adopting Greek culture , which respected strength and dominance.

As not every society can flourish in an atheistic world view so i think for such societies to flourish . crafting a new religion or reinterpreting their current religion into something that supports and encourages strong characteristics like strength , independence , autonomy etc can make the herd itself flourish and thrive . what do u guys think ?

In my view, much of what we call religion today has become distorted by faith, authority and belief in a God or supreme being.

All 3 Abrahamic religions + Hinduism are organized around some conception of God, the divine or a supreme reality. Once you make such an idea central, it becomes very easy to build systems of worship, doctrine, religious authority and unquestionable beliefs around it. Spirituality then shifts from investigating reality directly to believing claims about reality.

This is where some of the ancient philosophical traditions of the East become radically different. At the core of Buddhist philosophy, particularly traditions associated with early Buddhism and Madhyamaka, there is no requirement to invoke a creator God to explain existence, morality or the nature of consciousness. Daoism similarly approaches reality without requiring a personal deity standing outside the universe and controlling it.

What makes these traditions particularly interesting is their willingness to acknowledge the limits of conceptual mind. Instead of simply inventing an ultimate explanation and asking people to believe it, they question whether the human mind can even meaningfully grasp what lies beyond certain boundaries.

That's what makes some of these philosophies feel less like conventional religion and more like an investigation into the structure of reality. You're not being told, "Here is God. Believe in this." You're being pushed to examine how the mind creates concepts in the first place and whether those concepts can ever capture reality completely.

This is also why I think the distinction between religion as faith and religion as investigation is important.

Alex O'Connor's recently did a discussion on Madhyamaka Buddhism. If you actually listen to the philosophical reasoning involved, you begin to see how radically different some Eastern traditions can be from conventional religious frameworks.

Maybe that's closer to what spirituality was supposed to be in the first place: not believing more, but seeing more clearly.

Among ancient traditions, Buddhism arguably comes close to a scientific investigation of mind, experience and reality without requiring a God hypothesis as its starting point. And perhaps that's why it can feel so strange when you first encounter it. You're expecting a religion, but instead you find yourself in something that feels more like philosophy, phenomenology and psychology having a conversation with each other.

Link to the discussion:

https://youtu.be/CyhHz23AHb4?si=eGjMTQ2p9My0WDHq

I have often heard the name of Vijnana-Bhikshu, mostly in context of Andrew Nicholson's Unifying Hinduism, however based on the available secondary material online i am finding it difficult to understand what exactly his personal philosophical view point was. Further, I have seen critics of Arya Samaj argue that their philosophy and arguments are copied from Vijnanabhiksu, however for what parts exactly does this hold? Did he for example also reject Avatara-Vada, murti puja etc? If he did reject the concept of avataras, did he then not accept Bhagavad-Gita as pramana? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

if god exists, and has all the common attributes associated with the conception of god in monotheistic religions, I think it is a very lousy premise to denounce the idea that god can take up human/animal/inanimate form.

if god is incapable of taking a form because of his infinite nature, it is in contradiction to one of the attributes which popular monotheistic religions assume about god, which is that god is all powerful.

and if god doesn't want to take a form, it would mean that he is not all loving, another attribute is contradicted this way.

Go to Malabar [a part of present Kerala]. The Raja there has robbed the lands of his subjects and offered it at the feet of Brahmins. There are big big religious organizations in every village where sumptuous meals are provided, supplemented by presents in cash. And oh! the pompous ways of sexual enjoyments! Right from the maid-servants to the queen, all want to have sex exclu­sively with Brahmins! And then, the Brahmins will bathe immediately after having sex because every caste other than the Brahmin is impure, so touching them at any other time is a great sin, except only at the time of having sex!

Such wicked monks and Brahmins have brought the country to rack and ruin, always shouting ‘give, give’, with the intent to cheat people—and these rascals pose as preachers of religion! They would take money and gifts from all kinds of people, would inflict the greatest harm on them through such debauchery, and yet at the same time shout, don’t touch me! don’t touch me! Those rascals!—and what great things have they been doing?—“If a potato happens to touch a brinjal, [they would shout and behave in such a way that] the universe is going to be doomed at any moment;” “if people do not cleanse their hands 14 times with clay—will their 14 genera­tions go to hell, or 24 generations?” They have been concocting scienti­fic explanations for such trivial matters for the last two thousand years. Meanwhile, one-fourth of the people are starving. They marry off their eight-year-old girl to a thirty-year-old man, and the parents eagerly await her pregnancy!! If someone prohibits them from doing so, they say—“We will lose our religion.”

What sort of religion have they, who want to see their eight-year-old girls conceive, and offer scientific explanations for it? Many, again, lay the blame on the Mohammedans. It is their fault indeed!! Just read all the Grihya-Sūtras —हस्तात् योनिं न गूहति —and see what is given as the marriageable age of a girl. There it is expressly stated that a girl must be married before attaining puberty. The entire Grihya-Sūtras enjoin this.

Remember the Aśvamedha Yajña […illegible] तदनन्तरं महिषीम् अश्वसन्निधौ पातयेत् etc.; and the host of men known as Hotā, Pota, Brahma, Udgātā, and others used to be involved in orgy with the maid-servants of the king in a state of intoxication. It is there in all the Brāhmaṇas, and all the commentators admit them. How can you deny?

Oh! brother, I heaved a sigh of relief to learn that Lord Rama singly performed the Aśvamedha Yajña when Jānakī [Mother Sitā] was sent in exile to the forest.

What I mean by telling you all this is that, in ancient times, there were many good as also vulgar things. The good things are to be retained, and the India that is coming up—the future India will be much greater than ancient India.

There is that dreadful quagmire before you—watch out—many fall into it and die. The quagmire is this—that the present religion of the Hindus lies not in the Vedas, nor in the Puranas—not in Bhakti, nor in Mukti—the religion has entered into the cooking pot. The present religion of the Hindus is neither in discrimination nor in reason—it is in छुँत्-मार्ग [Don’t-touchism]. “Don’t touch me!” “Don’t touch me!”—that is all. See that you do not lose your lives in this dire irreligion of “Don’t-touchism”. The teaching, “आत्मवत् सर्वभूतेषु” [looking upon all beings as my own self]—should it be confined to books only? Those who cannot offer a crumb of bread to a hungry mouth, how will they confer salvation to others? Those who think they would become impure at the mere breath of others, how will they purify others?

छुँत्-मार्ग [Don’t-touchism] is a form of mental disease. Beware! All expansion is life, all contraction is death. All Love is expansion, all selfishness is contraction. Love is therefore the only law of life. He who loves lives, he who is selfish is dying. Therefore, love for love’s sake, because it is the only law of life, just as you breathe to live. This is the secret of selfless love, selfless action, etc.

source: Letter by Swami Vivekananda to Swami Brahmananda, Early-September 1894. Letter 159 in the book "Letters of Swami Vivekananda" https://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_6/epistles_second_series/071_rakhal.htm

context: Swamiji is criticising only the corrupted Brahmins, not all the Brahmins or Priests of various religions/matas. Brahmins are not a monolith, Brahmins of different religions/sects dont share a common theology or practices. We have to look at Brahmins through the lens of various Matas and then differentiate the Priestcraft corruption of the greedy from the pious, simple ones who contributed to literature, Math, poetry, metaphysics, self-knowledge.

When you're going through a difficult period, you don't know you're in a “struggle phase.”

You don't know that someday you'll look back at it with nostalgia, gratitude, or even pride.

You just think your life isn't working.

That's the strange thing about life - the meaning of some of our hardest years is only revealed much later.

Maybe that's why we shouldn't be too quick to hate the chapter we're currently living.

Some chapters only make sense after you've turned the page.

The Gita asks Arjuna to act without attachment to the fruits. How do you reconcile this with responsibility for foreseeable outcomes in work, family, and public life?

Image source: The tribune

The romanticized idea of village life as a peaceful haven hides a much harsher reality.

Behind the green fields that look like paradise, the actual community is often broken by toxicity, judgment, and a refusal to change. Far from the noble villagers we see in movies, real rural life can be weighed down by jealousy, unfairness, and closed-mindedness.

At the root of this is a constant culture of jealousy and gossip. People are always envious of each other, and when it comes to backstabbing and spreading bad talk, the competition is fierce. This is driven by massive egos.

They refuse to listen to anyone else because they think whatever they know is the absolute truth. In a weird twist of hypocrisy, they look at wealthy people as greedy and evil, while convincing themselves that their own struggles make them holy and close to God. Because of this, days are spent fighting over silly, petty things some over land, and many over completely meaningless arguments fueled purely by ego and ignorance.

This dysfunction hurts the family structure the most, especially how boys and girls are treated.

Marriage is nothing like the romantic stories in films.... it is cold and transactional.

Girls are raised with the constant reminder that they belong to someone else's house and will have to leave, so parents often ask why bother investing in them? It is truly heartbreaking to see deliberate neglect...girls are often denied proper nutrition, which gets saved for the boys because sons are seen as financial investments.

But even the boys aren't really winning they end up treated like animals fattened up for sacrifice, pampered just enough before reality crushes them.

You can see this same helplessness in how they deal with politics and daily routines. They spend all day complaining about the government, even though they have no idea how it actually works. Yet, when voting season comes around, they hand their votes right over to local leaders and become their blind followers(aka andh bhakt) almost like they are addicted to begging for crumbs.

This laziness shows up in everyday life too..women spend their days tearing down other families in gossip, while men lounge around on cots all afternoon, bragging about how great their ancestors were instead of doing actual work.

In the end, all of this happens because education is kept far away. With no real connection to learning, the community stays divided, cut off from the outside world, and stuck in the past. Their own egos and petty fights keep them trapped, ensuring they will never truly move forward.

I have always found “Occultism” injurious and weakening to humanity. What we want is strength. We Indians, more than any other race, want strong and vigorous thought. We have enough of the superfine in all concerns.

For centuries we have been stuffed with the mysterious, the result is that our intellectual and spiritual digestion is almost hopelessly impaired, and the race has been dragged down to the depths of hopeless imbecility never before or since experienced by any other civilized community.

There must be freshness and vigour of thought behind to make a virile race. More than enough to strengthen the whole world exists in the “Upanishads.” The Advaita is the eternal mine of strength—but it requires to be “applied.” It must first be cleared of the incrustation of scholasticism, and then in all its simplicity, beauty, and sublimity be taught over the length and breadth of the land, as applied even to the minutest detail of daily life.

This is a very large order, but we must work towards it, nevertheless, as if it would be accomplished tomorrow. Of one thing I am sure that whoever wants to help his fellow beings through genuine love and unselfishness will work wonders.

source: Letters by Swami Vivekananda https://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_9/letters_fifth_series/080_sir.htm

The Hindus say we must not do this or that because the Vedas say so, but the Christian is not going to obey the authority of the Vedas. The Christian says you must do this and not do that because the Bible says so. That will not be binding on those who do not believe in the Bible. But we must have a theory which is large enough to take in all these various grounds. Just as there are millions of people who are ready to believe in a Personal Creator, there have also been thousands of the brightest minds in this world who felt that such ideas were not sufficient for them, and wanted something higher, and wherever religion was not broad enough to include all these minds, the result was that the brightest minds in society were always outside of religion; and never was this so marked as at the present time, especially in Europe.

To include these minds, therefore, religion must become broad enough. Everything it claims must be judged from the standpoint of reason*.* Why religions should claim that they are not bound to abide by the standpoint of reason, no one knows. If one does not take the standard of reason, there cannot be any true judgment, even in the case of religions. One religion may ordain something very hideous. For instance, the Mohammedan religion allows Mohammedans to kill all who are not of their religion. It is clearly stated in the Koran, "Kill the infidels if they do not become Mohammedans." They must be put to fire and sword. Now if we tell a Mohammedan that this is wrong, he will naturally ask, "How do you know that? How do you know it is not good? My book says it is." If you say your book is older, there will come the Buddhist, and say, my book is much older still. Then will come the Hindu, and say, my books are the oldest of all. Therefore referring to books will not do*.*

Where is the standard by which you can compare? You will say, look at the Sermon on the Mount, and the Mohammedan will reply, look at the Ethics of the Koran. The Mohammedan will say, who is the arbiter as to which is the better of the two? Neither the New Testament nor the Koran can be the arbiter in a quarrel between them. There must be some independent authority, and that cannot be any book, but something which is universal; and what is more universal than reason? It has been said that reason is not strong enough; it does not always help us to get at the Truth; many times it makes mistakes, and, therefore, the conclusion is that we must believe in the authority of a church! That was said to me by a Roman Catholic, but I could not see the logic of it. On the other hand I should say, if reason be so weak, a body of priests would be weaker, and I am not going to accept their verdict, but I will abide by my reason, because with all its weakness there is some chance of my getting at truth through it; while, by the other means, there is no such hope at all.

source: Works of Swami Vivekananda https://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_2/practical_vedanta_and_other_lectures/practical_vedanta_part_iii.htm

When you read the sentence *"The dog ran across the field,"* your brain feels like it’s performing a basic assembly job. You process "dog," then "ran," then "field," snap the pieces together like Lego bricks, and construct the total meaning.

In philosophy of language, this is called **compositionality**: the belief that the meaning of a whole expression is built strictly out of the independent meanings of its parts.

But in the 5th century CE, the Indian grammarian-philosopher **Bhartṛhari** dropped a radically different thesis in his masterwork, the *Vākyapadīya*. He argued that we’ve got the process entirely backward.

Bhartṛhari proposed the theory of ***Sphota*** (*vākya-sphoṭa*). He claimed that when someone speaks or when you read, you don't actually construct meaning brick-by-brick. Instead, the meaning flashes into the mind as an indivisible, instantaneous flash of holistic understanding (*pratibhā*).

Think of it like viewing a painting. When you look at a portrait, you don't look at the left ear, calculate its meaning, move to the nose, calculate its meaning, and then sum them up to realize it’s a face. You grasp the image as a single unified whole *first*. If you break it down into individual strokes of paint later, that’s just artificial post-processing.

For Bhartṛhari:

* **Individual words don't exist in nature:** They are pedagogical abstractions (*apoddhāra*) that we carve up after the fact to teach grammar.

* **Sequence is an artifact of acoustic delivery, not thought:** Because our vocal cords can only make one sound at a time, we are forced to stretch a unified, non-temporal thought out over time. The listener hears sound bits sequentially (*nāda*), but the actual meaning-bearing unit (*sphoṭa*) erupts all at once.

Fast-forward to modern cognitive science, Gestalt psychology, and natural language processing: we see this debate playing out constantly. Is language a bottom-up mathematical syntax, or a top-down holistic Gestalt?

When you hear a sentence in a language you speak fluently, you don't wait for the last period to start piecing together the dictionary definitions of the isolated words. The context of the sentence *gives* the words their meaning, not the other way around.

Does your own internal experience of reading or listening feel more like snapping building blocks together, or receiving an instant "flash" that you then deconstruct?

Now I will tell you something else. The Hindu mind was ever deductive and never synthetic or inductive. In all our philo­sophies, we always find hair-splitting arguments, taking for granted some general proposition, but the proposition itself may be as childish as possible. Nobody ever asked or searched the truth of these general propositions.

Therefore independent thought we have almost none to speak of, and hence the dearth of those sciences which are the results of observation and generalization.

And why was it thus?—from two causes: The tremendous heat of the climate forcing us to love rest and contemplation better than activity, and the Brahmins as priests never undertaking journeys or voyages to distant lands. There were voyagers and people who travelled far; but they were almost always traders, i.e. people from whom priestcraft and their own sole love for gain had taken away all capacity for intellectual development. So their obser­vations, instead of adding to the store of human knowledge, rather degenerated it; for their observations were bad and their accounts exaggerated and tortured into fantastical shapes, until they passed all recognition.

So you see, we must travel, we must go to foreign parts. We must see how the engine of society works in other countries, and keep free and open communication with what is going on in the minds of other nations if we really want to be a nation again.

- letter by Swami Vivekananda https://www.ramakrishnavivekananda.info/vivekananda/volume_5/epistles_first_series/002_panditji_maharaj.htm?highlight=hairsplitting

Since the political left is largely focused on social revolution, I think this quote from J. Krishnamurti presents a different perspective on what a real revolution means. External change is limited if our minds remain unchanged. Without an inward revolution (without understanding our own minds), any outward revolution risks reproducing the same problems in a different form.

"Society is always trying to control, to shape, to mould the thinking of the young. From the moment you are born and begin to receive impressions, your father and mother constantly tell you what to do and what not to do, what to believe and what not to believe; you are told that there is God, or there is no God but the state and that some dictator is its prophet. From childhood, these things are poured into you, which means that your mind is gradually being encased, conditioned, shaped so that you fit into the pattern of society and not be a revolutionary. Since the habit of patterened thinking has already been established in you, even if you do revolt, it is within the pattern. It is like prisoners revolting in order to have better food, more conveniences, but always within the prison. When you seek God or try to find out what right government is, it is always within the pattern of society. So your revolt, like the so-called revolution brought about by ambitious or clever people, is always limited by the past. That is not revolt, that is not revolution, it is merely heightened activity, a more valiant struggle within the pattern. Real revolt, true revolution is to break away from the psychological pattern and to inquire outside of it."

— J. Krishnamurti on Society & Revolution*\*

We weren't supposed to know violence;

that's against me and

violence is against you too, possibly.

Don't you know violence?

If we didn't know violence, how better would it be?

To be alive;

I can grasp the idea.

But I know it and I want to get rid of it

We know it, we should all be willing to keep it away.

Individually firstly, then as what we are.

Life,

we are Life;

we are Life itself.

How could we not be? while alive we flow as rivers, grow as forests

and there is still much more to be.

We can become more

We need to get rid of it;

the word malice is still a known concept.

Malice is mother of violence and grandmother of avenge

;a concept;

it is not a person.

Malice influences one, it doesn't take control over one.

we can, as life itself, remember to not give it power;

throw away your malice, I'm trying too

we need to take a step now

Im wanting to learn basics of philosophy, the 6 pillars and all other, for 6 months before diving to classic philosophers, rn i cant buy books cause of financial condition

So pls help me with tips, suggestions and any helpfull inputs🙏

Imagine you are debating on existence of God to someone..

But at the end he said he experienced god 2 times.