The Logic of Ancient Indian Sciences
Vedic schooling is kept alive by simply preventing naysayers — who are disconnected from their inner compass — from access to the quiet inner sanctum of authentic teachings until the students are ready.
The Logic of Ancient Indian Sciences
Their minds lost from the information in today’s schoolbooks, modern scholars think there is no logic in ancient Indian sciences. Thus, they prohibit the principles of vedic schooling into modern school education.
When scholars - the really smart ones, not the ones just trying to get a degree for a job - reach advanced education at the masters level, their minds usually evolve to a higher world view that seek to reconcile disciplines of knowledge.
If scholars are still able to be perceptive after years of the kind of education that emphasizes the superiority of disjointed modern sciences, then only do many begin to connect mathematics with architecture, botany with physics, music with ornithology, chemistry with phonology, culinary science with histology… but only if they were ever exposed to a perfect example. The universe of ancient Indian sciences is a true model of the Universe of education.
When a scholar studies any subject and feels fully connected to the source of the information and its origin, that is mastery. To achieve the understanding of that Universe, one must have time to learn using a healthy body, just as one must have a well-oiled car to reach a long distance. Ayurveda whispers that the time needed for true education to develop into wisdom requires a healthy body. Then, one can integrate all the sciences. Mastery of the art of a healthy body is Ayurveda.
Meanwhile in India, teachers in vedic schooling programs continue with the end-goal of developing wisdom by teaching the same material their teachers’ generations have taught for 10,000 years, while demonstrating robust examples of its applications and relevance in the world around us.
Vedic schooling is kept alive by simply preventing naysayers from access to the quiet inner sanctum of authentic teachings until students are ready. Why? The naysayers infuse indignity and chaos inadvertently to a system they do not understand, which is a waste of time for everyone trying to master the subjects. Naysayers doubt before engaging in rigorous, open-minded inner-questioning. They do not learn debate. They only bludgeon with their demands. In contrast, true scholars are encouraged by the world around them, to use modern teaching examples to deepen connection between today and the ancient sciences which are profound, subtle, and elegant.
Logic and mathematics are learned by watching proportions in nature. The Fibonacci sequence is not taught as a complicated calculation, but rather as the basis of Sankhya, using 1.618 as a perceivable pattern in nature, logical not magical. Spirals form with a lag in time, revealing the movement between matter and energy. Witness the movement of a healthy baby down into the birth canal. Watch cloud formation or the development of a hurricane. See hot and cold intermingle with water and air. Shells in the ocean develop as spirals. Leaves emerge from their roots in spiral patterns. Vines weave in spirals. Ancient martial arts used the spiral to accelerate movememnt and harness power. Spirals form throughout nature as a obvious solution to challenges in time and space. The practical applications of mathematics inspire its mastery.
Over 11 years of regular meetings, vedic teachers convey skills of logic and mathematical concepts, demonstrating how to infer and predict, as well as how to take larger bodies of information and deduce an answer that unifies. They teach strong interpersonal skills, using the science of debate known as tarka shastra, so that students will be confident in communication, non-verbal expressions of hands, body and facial expression, as well as verbal tone, volume and pitch. These students must after all, transmit what they have learned to a new generation before they die.
Vedic teachers transmit linguistic skills so that expression of deep inner feelings are conveyed appropriately and neither harm through repression nor harm through abuse. Vedic teachings focus on spatial learning both outside in the world to reveal patterns of beauty and harmony, as well as discord, and of what does not work to produce harmony in the world. Intra-personal skills are taught fervently so that each person can explore the Universe inside, with confidence. Able students learn to experience no fear; they have no entanglements of anger or refuse hurling through their mind during meditation. Meditation as dhyana is the seventh step in the limbs of yoga, practiced after control of the thinking mind, self-restraint, control of the body’s movements, breath, senses and the ability to focus are mastered.
In contrast, the hatchet-burn-and-discover method of learning meditation in the west leaves the meditation student often confused and frustrated. A syndrome of danger of hurting others or self due to uncomfortable sensations, anxiety and psychosis is now described in the medical literature!
Vedic masters teach body awareness and movements through kinesthetic skills so that students are confident in moving through the world, and choosing how to be seen, and when to become chameleons that fade into the background, so that they are effectively hidden and cannot be targeted. Musical skills are also mandated, to learn patterns in sound and the power of accessing the 5000 dhatus that connect the great power in sound energy with the immense potential power in human bioelectric energy.
Through these 7 sets of skills, students master tools for working with the Universe to successfully and harmoniously create whatever their life purpose requires. Rather than experiment, the teachers in vedic schooling today follow examples and lessons that their teachers’ teachers followed, testing whether they are true today, … just as scientists today blindly follow the theorems and laws that teachers before them followed.
These concepts of space-time, balance, and harmony are feared by the west because they unleash the mind into a realm that is unknown to residual puritanic thinking in people who imagine they are secular.
week38. TheSouthAsianTimes
Download the .pdf version of this column by clicking on the image.
Dr. Bhaswati Bhattacharya is a Fulbright Specialist 2018‐2023 in Public Health. She serves as Clinical Asst Professor of Family Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, NY. Her bestselling book Everyday Ayurveda is published by Penguin Random House. To order an autographed copy, write to bhaswati@post.harvard.edu.
www.drbhaswati.com