Okay so here's something about the Chinmaya Mission and why my parents were at Siddhibari (or Siddh..baaadi as the locals call it).
The Chinmaya mission is dedicated to to the rediscovery and propogation of Hinduism. It is not so much a zealous missionary organization trying to make new converts as much as trying to get Hindus to rediscover Hinduism. Their website is here , and it has a good biography of the founder Swami Chinmayananda. They have a huge number of branches in India and abroad and seem to be doing well.
As part of their work they often organize religious tours and religious camps and the one that my parents went on, was one such. The religious camp was at the ashram at Siddhibari in Himachal Pradesh, which has the distinction within the mission of being the one where the founders' remains are interred.
Overall, I'm neutral to the mission. I feel most of the well known swamis like Chinmaya and Ramana Maharshi genuinely had something going, though what it is I do not know :-). Vaguely one expects that there is value in pursuing the Hindu holy and philosophical literature, and occasionally I do so myself, but on my scale of priorities it doesn't come that high (especially with having been schooled in the J.Krishnamurti tradition of rejection:-). Why keep going back to the Vedas when we can instead approach the world clean and with an open mind learn ?
The camp routine consisted of various activities spread out through the day starting very early in the morning and ending early at night. I took part in the last day of the camp and got some flavour. There was meditation, religious lectures on various topics, shloka recitation, going to the temple things like that. I was mostly unmoved by the activities.
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This is an appropriate point to link to one of the most wonderful and crazy site ideas on the web:
Saarlo's Guru Rating Service. Chinmaya is not rated too highly here :-)
5 comments:
Say what?
"Why keep going back to the Vedas when we can instead approach the world clean and with an open mind learn?"
Re, your comment about the vedas, I essentially agree.
Open mind - no. Critical mind - yes.
Creator - no. Darwin - yes.
Vedas (or any religious text for that matter) - no. Empiricism - yes.
Random assurances and sureness of any faith - no. Sure demonstrations of randomness of life - yes.
Faith based firm belief in an objective for life - no. Empiricial evidence that life has so far had no end goal but to randomly evolve - yes.
Aesthetic intepretation of religion - yes. Aesthetic interpretation of science - hopefully no.
JK's methods - no. Some of JK's claims - yes.
Arvind
Good points. So how much of the Vedas is re. the experiential and empirical? An experiential/empirical answer? ^_^
http://www.bhagavad-gita.org/Gita/verse-03-03.html
Pleasantly surprised with the contents of the web site. However I cannot help but feel that there is a large amount of extremely dangerous pseudo scientific bs that is being masked by the verse. Empiricism is recommended to be a path not to falsifiable knowledge about the world but to knowledge about some ultimate consciousness whose properties are not stated in a falsifiable manner. And this is not a co-incidence, when you define a property it can be concretely rejected. Hence the deliberate vagueness in defining any falsifiable properties of the unconsciousness.
I dont think it is appropriate for religion to hitch a ride on science and empricism in one way or another. Sophisticatedly perhaps in the Gita or crudely in the nonsense that shows up on tv in programs such as "Science of the Bible." Either way the path of nonfalsiable acceptance cannot elevate itself by name dropping empirisim when convenient.
The only view of religion that makes sense is an aesthetic one - there are some ways recommended for us to lead lead life in a beautiful way, such as kindness and compassion. At other times, it makes sense in facilitating communication by prescribing honesty etc. Those properties are worth keeping. Very little else.
Arvind
You have cut to the heart of the matter. Re. the ultimate consciousness of Krishna and (your) falsifiable knowledge - the Buddha plainly insists that this quality is only true in experience. The Vedas, coming from a simpler world, are more assertive. It seems that this FK/UC (!) is falsifiable but cannot be communicated. This is abstract but the path to it is very pragmatic.
To start with the experiential - all realization comes from the universe which is defined as the body. This is the information set. A definition that permeates all Eastern knowledge and practice.
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