New member introduction: Shrinivas Gadkari

[Aniruddhan]

namaste,

>Why should we assume that science and Vedas are non-overlapping.
>I tend to think that science should (in some sense) be a subset
>of vedic teachings.

I don't think so. As I understand it, if you look at what advaita says,
there are two levels of truth:

1) vyavaharika satya, or empirical truth involving all the dualities in
the world. obviously science and even the vedas and vedic teachings come
under this.

2) paramarthika satya or ultimate truth, which would be the fourth state
of turya or atman/brahman.

Now, brahman is the sum total of everything, so in one sense you can talk
of anything and everything being a subset of brahman. But, that doesn't
mean that at the vyavaharika level, we should have some teaching (vedas,
for example) which are the sum total of all knowledge. Probably, that
wouldn't be anything human, maybe only Ishvara can know everything at the
vyavaharika level.

>As an example, we talk of energy, say energy associated with
>the electromagnetic force. Vedic approach would however refer
>to Prana and insist that any physical energy necessarily has
>to be a manifestation of Prana. Thus Prana must be some generalized
>version of energy. If one reads more about the Vedic descriptions
>of Prana, one is convinced, that Prana transends the physical
>plane itself. At the same time, Vedas remind us that every
>event in the physical plane is mobilised by Prana. So there must
>be some connection between the physical energy (which falls in the
>domain of physics) and Prana - a concept that is so central in vedic
>literature.

Yes, but I think an important difference between prana in the vedas and
energy in science, is that the latter is insentient, and needs to be
thought of as the shakti of some sentient being, whereas the former is
sentient by itself. I'm not sure what kind of parallels we can draw
between these two.

>Similar concerns motivate a search for an unifying framework.

But first, we need to know whether such a unifying framework encompassing
all knowledge is humanly possible or even exists.

Sruti smRti purANAnAm Alayam karuNAlayam
namAmi bhagavatpAdaM Sam.karam lokaSam.karam

Aniruddhan