Experience of a mantra

[Guest guest]

A freind's views on mantra shAstra who is also happens to be a practicing

scientist:

 

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There are certain things which only make sense to the insiders of the

mantra-shAstra. To others it might appear to be a purely subjective matter,

while to the practitioners there is a clear objectivity to it. The link between

yoga and mantra-shAstra lies at this point. The correctly educated Hindu, as in

real science, does not accept anything as a matter of faith. I was incited to

mention this because a freind mentioned to me how she found some sincere Hindu

sAdhaka-s made deprecatory comments about ritual or karma. Instead, they said

that they had a preference for " mystical " and " philosophical " interpretations.

But this is not correct because nothing can be accepted as a matter of faith –

one has to perform the experiment and study the result. The karma (ritual)

and/or yoga indeed comprise the only experiments in this realm – hence, without

ritual or yoga there is absolutely no way of gaining knowledge. In another

domain of knowledge being a scholar does not make you a scientist. You may know

all the knowledge in the books of science, but you are not yet a scientist. You

become a scientist only when you make reproducible discoveries that increase

your (and others) knowledge. Often in science a pre-requisite is that you

acquire knowledge of methods like a good sense of observation and mathematics or

computation, and accumulate actual factual knowledge to be an effective

scientist. Similar to science one needs to know the shAstra-s and study them in

depth. Then one needs to do the experiments in the form of rituals –karma or

yoga otherwise knowledge is not produced. Like in science one must realize that

one could be wrong or that one may have incomplete knowledge. From approximation

one proceeds to preciseness.

 

For a practitioner of mantra-shAstra the experience of mantra-s is very

important. Sometimes these are like difficult experiments – they need many

components to be carefully put together. Yet from time to time the sAdhaka might

have an experience that provides a remarkable verification at clarifies many

lose ends. Yet, this being the mantra-shAstra the parallels to science end here

in terms of a description. I cannot describe such experience using the same

terminology of used in science and I also have resort to a different language –

is there a human language at all – or is it just the language of the mantra-s.

So it human language to most onlookers it sounds like madness.