Ben Dhyan
Veteran Member
Dear gnostic, meditation is a non-dualistic practice, science in the context of astronomy is a dualistic practice, there is no objection to, or competition with, on the part of a meditator as to the practice of astronomy. In fact, there is no reason why an astronomer could not practice meditation, one deals with the material world and the other with pure awareness free from conceptualization.@Ben Dhyan, who I have been debating with, believe that mere meditation, concept are more than real, but I have yet to seen any past or present master yogi actually formulating science treatise on the cosmology of the universe with any accuracy that modern astronomers & astrophysicists have done so far.
For astronomy & astrophysics, it has been long, ongoing learning process, where there have been mistakes or false leads, but the great things about either sciences, that people can learn from their mistakes.
Most religions have only described the world they lived in, especially ancient religions, never knew much about how much larger the universe is. What astronomers saw before the invention of telescopes, was merely some planets, moons, and about 2000 to 3000 stars in their given location (so whether you live at the equator or near equator, or further south or further north, hemisphere-wise) and depending on how good & clear the eyesight, they would only see the tiniest of fraction of the Milky Way, closest to Earth.
For centuries after Galileo, but before Edwin Hubble in 1919 to 1929, astronomers thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy, that Andromeda and other galaxies were mistakenly as identified and cataloged as nebulas.
As Ben is a pantheist with leaning towards more more easterly dharma religions, like Hinduism & Buddhism, than with the Abrahamic religions, then you would have to ask yourself, just much did the ancient Hindu or Buddhist astronomers really know about the universe?
Without even basic telescopes, not much at all. Eastern and western astronomers in ancient times, knew very little.
Ben Dhyan like to pretend that people that have mastered the meditation of yoga would know more about the universe than today with current knowledge supported be technology, but this is all anachronistic.
I am saying ancient astronomers were ignorants and idiots…no, they were simply just limited by what they can learn from their own eyes, just like everyone else back then.
It took times, for ancient people to reason that the Earth was spherical in shape, not flat like a disk or cylinder, that the earth wasn’t the centre of the celestial planetary system (geocentric vs heliocentric). It was the same with those astronomy in ancient India as well as well for ancient Greek astronomy. Both sides of the world in ancient times, really didn’t know where all the light and heat come from the Sun, no idea about Stellar Nucleosynthesis, until mid-20th century.
Instead, the Sun was personified as various deities in ancient religions, like the Ra in Egypt, Shamash in Babylonia, Heilios in Greece, Surya in India, and so on.
Until the mid-19th century, astronomy was often entwined with astrology, including India.
my understanding of the word concept, lies pretty much with definitions given, and it is clear to me, that Ben has taken the word out-of-context, he wanted more than the what the actually means, then perhaps he should use a different word.
So here is a commonly used image that helps to explain to the conceptual minded person that reality is on the other side of conceptualization.
Like the metaphorical finger pointing to the moon, the finger is not the moon and is unimportant except as an expedient to show where one should actually direct their gaze to see the moon. So it is with conceptual descriptions and thoughts pertaining to reality, they act as an expedient to 'point' to THAT which is real, but are not real in themselves except as mental conceptualization/pointing finger.
Meditation opens one's awareness to apprehend reality on the other side of thought. Difficult for sure, and may take some years of practice to transcend the conceptual mind, but actual reality is so awesome relative to thinking about reality.