Important new book by Neil DeGrasse Tyson

[meeno8]

Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization.
To balance your reading material instead of having your noses buried in ancient and medieval materials.  At least for those of you who actually want some balance and rationality...

Just trying to be helpful as always.

[madanmohandas]

There are plenty of ways to balance ones reading I think without taking up astrophysics. hahaha. Devotees often turn to Jung or Frankl for that, or Dickens. But each to his own. Personally I'd prefer some grand history like Eric Hosbawm or Edward Gibbon, as it is observed occasionally that history is philosophy in action, or a practical lesson. And as for ancient authors, Plato etc. are as relevant today as they were, or even more so it seems to me, after all it is only time that separates us and them.

[meeno8]

Aha, a post besides some of your poetry. The book is not on the subject of astrophysics. You can peek inside of it on Amazon to see that it is really about. Or you can check out his interviews on it on youtube. The main thesis is how opinions often win out over hard evidence and facts for many persons. I am reading through Steven Pinker's latest title, Rationality. Sort of along the same lines, but he is a psychology professor at Harvard, an entirely different field to Tyson's. In a way I view psychology as a pseudoscience in some respects after reading the book Shrinks, which compares them to psychiatrists that went to medical school. Pinker takes many scientists to task in Rationality for a few different reasons. Although they are expected to be rational, that is not always the case. People in general have a tough time being rational, but then again it is easier said than done. For those of us that have had certain experiences that defy any rational explanation, well Pinker does not account for those, but they are beyond the scope of his book. To me he is not like most of those in the field of psychology.

[meeno8]

In Plato's Republic he is really just ranking different forms of government as to which are relatively more or less tyrannical in nature. That does not account for what we have in the US today, which is essentially an oligarchy blended with a representative democracy. But he also did not anticipate our current electoral college that we have to elect the President and Vice-President every 4 years. As outmoded as that is, and there have been quite a few attempts to either replace it or at least revise it as needed, it has managed to stick around. I read through some of The Prince by Machiavelli. It kind of harkens back to ideas of political science in Sanskrit texts.

[meeno8]

Joachim Wach wrote of the noumenal as opposed to the phenomenal.

www.religion-online.org/book-chapter/phenomenology-of-religions-and-philosophy-of-religion-by-jean-danilou/

Despite Jiva's possible machinations (without drilling down into his sandarbhas or putting them under the microscope in this post) to push CV into a rational framework, at its core the tradition embraces the irrational as opposed to the rational. There is, however, an unresolved question in my own mind if that was forcing it into that framework or rather simply a means to the end of laying out a cohesive philosophy via the attendant logical arguments.

Critical thinking is essential to functioning in the realm of the phenomenal, if for nothing more than simple survival of our species. The question to ponder is what role it should play in CV. Discarding it entirely has led to some aberrations over the past century or more, without a doubt. So, perhaps it is just striking a delicate balance between the rational and the irrational without any attempt to pull the rug out from either of those. The other question is whether or not this can be accomplished with the progressive (or non-progressive) hermeneutics of each succeeding generation since Shree Chaitanya Mahaaprabhu et al. Finally, should saadhakas within CV even be overly concerned with these matters in the first place as they self-monitor their own progress on their individual paths?

[meeno8]

Back into The God Equation by Michio Kaku. More than halfway through it so far.

[meeno8]

In The God Equation, Dr. Kaku discusses the Christian creation myth of Genesis vis a vis the concept of the universe in Buddhism in terms of having no moment of creation, only timeless Nirvana. (The author was raised Presbyterian and his parents were Buddhists.)

He mentions the the late Stephen Hawkings' concept of a bubble foam from which universes constantly 'pop out', then eventually fizzle out of existence.

What is striking to me is the Puranic creation story of Garbhodakashayi Vishnu lying down on the cosmic ocean of creation and in his eternal slumber universes coming out of his pores when he exhales, then receding back in (to oblivion?) when he inhales. Was the author of the Sanskrit texts onto something along with cosmologists among the physicists of our era? As the late astronomer Carl Sagan mentioned on his series Cosmos about the Sanskrit texts arriving at the same age of our universe as modern physics, could this be along the same lines of ancient seers coming up with the similar, or even same, theories as today's scientists?