Thoughts Of Western Philosophers And Thoughts Leaders On Advaita Vedanta And Hinduism

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Thoughts On Hinduism And Eastern Philosophy: 

What distinguishes the Vedanta philosophy from all other philosophies is that it is at the same time a religion and a philosophy. ~ Max Muller

In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life; and it will be the solace of my death. They are the product of the highest wisdom. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer, German Philosopher

India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe’s languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all. ~ Will Durant, World Historian

Alexander the Great died a young man having accomplished many feats, having travelled all the way into India, but never having completed the most important journey of all – the inner journey. ~ Simon Haas, The Book of Dharma: Making Enlightened Choices

What extracts from the Vedas I have read fall on me like a light of a higher and purer luminary. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavad-gita, in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial.. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The whole teaching of the Bhagavad Gita is that there is but One and that it becomes to us just what we first believe into it. In other words we manifest the unmanifested. This in no way takes away from the omnipotence of God, but adds to it, for He has created something that is able to do this. God still rules in the Universe, but we are given the power to rule in our lives. We must realize, then, absolutely that we are dealing with a Substance that we have a right to deal with, and by learning its laws we will be able to subject them to our use, just as Edison does with electricity. Law is but we must use it. ~ Ernest Holmes, Author Of The Science of Mind

The soul is not born, it does not die; it was not produced from anyone; unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain. I owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavad-gita. It was the first of books; it was as if an empire spoke to us, nothing small or unworthy, but large, serene, consistent, the voice of an old intelligence which in another age and climate had pondered and thus disposed of the same questions which exercise us. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson Paraphrases The Gita In The Essay Immortality

The essential teaching which the Gita is trying to convey is that the real center and soul, the basic reality of you and I, is not the superficial consciousness which we ordinarily call, ‘myself.’ What we are, fundamentally, is this unthinkable source of life and existence named Brahman, the expansive. ~ Alan Watts

At a symbolic level, what the Gita is, is a dialogue between God and the seeker. And the battlefield turns out to be the inner battlefield, the battlefield of our own evolutionary being. ~ Ram Dass

BREATH IS LIFE. The Yogi’s ideal is a body strong in all its parts, under the control of a masterful and developed Will, animated by high ideals. ~ William W. Atkinson (Yogi Ramacharaka) In The Hindu-Yogi Science of Breath

German Prof. Max Muller while recording the first voice on a Gramophone chose the first Shloka of Rig Veda “Agni Meele Purohitam”. He proceeded to explain the reason for his choice – “Vedas are the oldest text of the human race. And Agni Meele Purohitam is the first verse of Rig Veda. In the most primordial time, when the people did not know how even to cover their bodies and lived by hunting and housed in caves, Indians had attained high civilization and they gave the world universal philosophies in the form of the Vedas.” ~ Excerpt from Roots By Kadambi Srinivasan

Through Hinduism, I feel a better person. I just get happier and happier. I now feel that I am unlimited, and I am more in control. ~ George Harrison (1943-2001)

It (Hinduism) is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the earth or the sun and about half the time since the big bang. ~ Carl Sagan In Cosmos

I read a bit from the Gita every morning before I get out of bed, Swami Nikhilananda’s annotated version. (It seems such a reasonable pleasure to imagine that Shankara would have approved unreservedly of Swami’s inspired intelligence, devotion, and authority. How could he not?) ~ J. D. Salinger In A 1975 Letter To Swami Adiswarananda who succeeded Swami Nikhilananda, The Founder Of The Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York

The most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality can be found in Vedanta. ~ Aldous Huxley

For me the most important thing is to spread the Hindu knowledge about the soul. This is more important than any other knowledge and is my main priority. ~ Alfred Ford, great-grandson of Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company.

The most brilliant wise man. It is doubtful in this age that another man has risen above this selfless, spiritual meditation. ~ Leo Tolstoy About Swami Vivekananda

The perennial philosophy is expressed most succinctly in the Sanskrit formula – ‘tat twam asi’(That art thou); the Atman, or the immanent eternal Self is one with Brahman, the Absolute principle of all existence; and the last end of every human being, is to discover the fact for himself. The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity. ~ Aldous Huxley

I go into the Upanishads to ask questions. ~ Niels Bohr

I should only believe in a God who knew how to dance. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Vedanta is, now as in the ancient time, living in the mind and heart of every thoughtful Hindu This fact may be for poor India in so many misfortunes a great consolation; for the eternal interests are higher than the temporary; and the system of the Vedanta, as founded on the Upanishads and Vedanta-sutras and accomplished by Sankara’s commentaries on them, equal in rank to Plato and Kant is one of the most valuable products of the genius of man- kind in its search for the eternal truth. On the tree of wisdom there is no fairer flower than Upanishads and no finer fruit than the Vedanta philosophy. ~ Paul Deussen (1854-1919)

The earliest of these Upanishads will always maintain a place in the philosophic literature of the world, among the most astounding products of the human mind. ~ Max Müller

We find that Materialists and Immaterialists existed in India.. before Berkly or Priestley, or Dupuis or Plato or Pythagoras were born. Indeed Newton himself, appears to have discovered nothing that was not known to the Ancient Indians. ~ John Adams In 1817

I am that which is. I am all that was, that is, and that shall be. No mortal man has ever lifted the veil of me. He is solely of himself, and to this Only One all things owe their existence. ~ Excerpt From The Paintings of Egypt By French Egyptologist, Jean-Francois Champollion

Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali’s metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. ~ T.S.Eliot In After Strange Gods

When I read the Bhagavad-Gita everything else seems so superfluous. ~ Albert Einstein

The marvel of the Bhagavad-Gita is its truly beautiful revelation of life’s wisdom which enables philosophy to blossom into religion. ~ Herman Hesse

The greatest error of a man is to think that he is weak by nature, evil by nature. Every man is divine and strong in his real nature. What are weak and evil are his habits, his desires and thoughts, but not himself. ~ In Maharshi and His Message By Paul Brunton

“I obtained not the least thing from complete unexcelled awakening, and for that reason it is called complete, unexcelled awakening.” ~ Henry Miller Quoting The Buddha

As the Zen masters say: Think only and entirely and completely of what you are doing at the moment and you are free as a bird. No Westerner wants to accept such a statement, naturally — it seems so simple to be true. We prefer to complicate things, with our prejudices, or principles, our beliefs, our judgments. And so we continue to feed the machine which grinds us to nothingness. ~ Henry Miller On Zen in a letter to a friend.

I am a Zen addict through and through… No intelligent person, no sensitive person, can help but be a Buddhist. It’s clear as a bell to me. ~ Henry Miller

The idea that man is like unto an inverted tree seems to have been current in by gone ages. The link with Vedic conceptions is provided by Plato in his Timaeus in which it states…” behold we are not an earthly but a heavenly plant.” This correlation can be discerned by what Krishna expresses in chapter 15 of Bhagavad-Gita. ~ Carl Jung

In the philosophical teaching of the Gita, Krishna has all the attributes of the full-fledged monotheistic deity and at the same time the attributes of the Upanishadic Absolute. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Sanskrit language, whatever may be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin and more exquisitely refined than the either. ~ Sir William Jones, Chief Justice of India under the British and founder of the Royal Asiatic Society.

The word Vedanta meant originally the end of the Vedas-that is, the Upanishads. Today India applies it to that system of philosophy which sought to give logical structure and support to the essential doctrine of the Upanishads-the organ-point that sounds throughout Indian thought-that God (Brahman) and the soul (Atman) are one. The oldest known form of this most widely accepted of all Hindu philosophies is the Brahma-sutra of Badarayana (ca. 200 B.C.)-555 aphorisms, of which the first announces the purpose of all: “Now, then, a desire to know Brahman.” Almost a thousand years later Gaudapada wrote a commentary on these sutras, and taught the esoteric doctrine of the system to Govinda, who taught it to Shankara, who composed the most famous of Vedanta commentaries, and made himself the greatest of Indian philosophers. ~ Excerpt From the Book The Story Of Civilization – Our Oriental Heritage By Will Durant

The Bhagavad Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. The Gita is one of the clearest and most comprehensive summaries of the spiritual thoughts ever to have been made. ~ Aldous Huxley

On the friendship Between Swami Vivekananda And Nikola Tesla: After meeting the Swami and after continued study of the Eastern view of the mechanisms driving the material world, Tesla began using the Sanskrit words Akasha, Prana, and the concept of a luminiferous ether to describe the source, existence and construction of matter. Read more at the Tesla Society HERE.

Divorce the idea of your being a physical being, and realize that you are above body. But do not let this conception and realization cause you to ignore the body. You must regard the body as the Temple of the Spirit, and care for it, and make it a fit habitation. ~ William W. Atkinson (Yogi Ramacharaka) In A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga

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Ralph Waldo Emerson And The Supreme Being: 

Brahma By Ralph Emerson:

If the red slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near;
Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanished goods to me appear;
And one to me are the shame and fame.

They reckon ill who leave me out;
When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt,
And I the hymn of the Brahmin sings.

The strong gods pine for my abode,
And pine in vain the sacred Seven;
But thou, meek lover of the good!
Find me, and turn thy back on heaven.

Ralph Emerson (1802-1823) had received a copy of Sir Wilkins’ English translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. His poems Celestial Love, Woodnotes and Brahma describe nature and immanent God, akin to that seen in the Upanishads. Katha Upanishad influenced Emerson and he embraced the principle of the Supreme Being (parama-atman).

“Soul is not born” he wrote, “it does not die; it was not produced from anyone; Unborn, eternal, it is not slain, though the body is slain.” He was a believer in the immortality of the soul and in reincarnation. Emerson wrote, “It is a secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again – Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new and strange disguise.”

Emerson’s poem Brahma, wherein he extols the parama-atman, the cause and result all things as well as the strength and weakness all that is living or inert, is a classic.

SOURCE: https://americanvedantist.org/2018/articles/hidden-history-of-vedanta-in-the-west/

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J. Robert Oppenheimer Bhagavad-Gita Quote:

In 1933, while he was teaching at Berkeley, his interest apparently reached new depths when he met Arthur W. Ryder, a professor of Sanskrit who taught Oppenheimer the language. Especially captivated by the Gita, Oppenheimer called it “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.”

Always keeping a well-worn copy of it near his desk, he gave the book to friends and regularly quoted passages, once at a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. When asked by Christian Century magazine in 1963 to name the top 10 books that shaped his “vocational attitude” and “philosophy of life,” Oppenheimer listed the Gita, along with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Read more HERE.

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Paul Deussen and Max Muller:

Paul Deussen, acknowledged as his heir and successor by Max Muller himself, immensely enriched Upanishadic studies in the West with publications such as Sixty Upanishads, The Philosophy of the Upanishads and Spirit of the Upanishads.

Max Muller devoted nearly 25 years of his life to editing the 51-volume Sacred Books of the East and was known for his voluminous writings on India and Indology, including the 6-volume Rig-Veda with Sayana s Commentary, Three Lectures on the Vedanta Philosophy and What Can India Teach Us?

Source: https://science.thewire.in/society/history/erwin-schrodinger-quantum-mechanics-philosophy-of-physics-upanishads/

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George Harrison Of The Beatles:

George Harrison Of The Beatles

“If there’s a God, we must see Him. If there’s a soul, we must perceive It; otherwise it’s better not to believe.” ~ George Harrison Quoting Vivekananda; The #1 hit Beatles’ single “My Sweet Lord” was inspired by a passage from one of Swami Vivekananda’s books.

The Hare Krishna philosophy had a significant impact on Harrison’s albums Chants of India, My Dear Lord, All Things Must Pass, The Hare Krishna Mantra, and Life in the Material World. The subject of his song “Awaiting on You All” is japa-yoga. Swami Prabhupada had an impact on the song “Living in the Material World,” which included the phrase “Had to get out of this place by the Lord Sri Krishna’s grace, my salvation from the material world.” Swami Prabhupada is credited with inspiring the song. The Bhagavad Gita served as the primary inspiration for the song “That Which I Have Lost,” from the album Somewhere in England.

From the Hindu perspective, each soul is divine. All religions are branches of one big tree. It doesn’t matter what you call Him just as long as you call. Just as cinematic images appear to be real but are only combinations of light and shade, so is the universal variety a delusion. The planetary spheres, with their countless forms of life, are naught but figures in a cosmic motion picture. One’s values are profoundly changed when he is finally convinced that creation is only a vast motion picture and that not in, but beyond, lays his own ultimate reality. ~ George Harrison

George Harrison celebrates his 30th birthday with a picture of Paramahansa Yogananda: Find it HERE.

Note on Parahamsa Yogananda: According to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs first read the book “Autobiography of a Yogi By Paramahansa Yogananda” as a teenager, then reread it in India and had read it once a year ever since.

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The Brahman forms everything that is living or non-living. The wise man knows that all beings are identical with his self, and his self is the self of all beings. ~ Isha Upanishad

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Schrödinger On The Indian Maya:

According to the Upanishads, Brahman alone exists. Everything we see around us is Maya, a distortion of the Brahman caused due to our ignorance and imperfect senses. The Chandogya Upanishad says, “All this is Brahman. Everything comes from Brahman, everything goes back to Brahman, and everything is sustained by Brahman.”

On this, Schrödinger wrote, “… there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception (the Indian Maya); the same illusion is produced in a gallery of mirrors, and in the same way Gaurisankar and Mt Everest turned out to be the same peak seen from different valleys.”

It is easy to see why such a concept would have appealed to Schrödinger. Quantum physics insists that reality exists as waves, and wave-particle duality arises due to our observation. Because we cannot perceive the true wave nature of reality, our observation reduces it to the incomplete reality we see. This reduction is what we know as the collapse of the wave function. The emergence of Maya thus neatly maps to the collapse.

Quantum physics eliminates the gap between the observer and the observed. The Upanishads say that the observer and the observed are the same things. In his 1944 book What is Life?, Schrödinger took on a peculiar line of thought. If the world is indeed created by our act of observation, there should be billions of such worlds, one for each of us. How come your world and my world are the same? If something happens in my world, does it happen in your world, too? What causes all these worlds to synchronize with each other?

He found his answer, again, in the Upanishads. “There is obviously only one alternative,” he wrote, “namely the unification of minds or consciousnesses. Their multiplicity is only apparent, in truth there is only one mind. This is the doctrine of the Upanishads.”

Schrödinger was not making passing references to the Upanishads; instead, he had wholly internalized their core message. “Myriads of suns, surrounded by possibly inhabited planets, multiplicity of galaxies, each one with its myriads of suns… According to me, all these things are Maya.”

SOURCE: https://science.thewire.in/society/history/erwin-schrodinger-quantum-mechanics-philosophy-of-physics-upanishads/

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Quotes From Books: 

“The young Hindu, of course, is optimistic. He has been to America and he has been contaminated by the cheap idealism of the Americans, contaminated by the ubiquitous bathtub, the five-and-ten-cent store bric-a-brac, the bustle, the efficiency, the machinery, the high wages, the free libraries, etc., etc.”
~ Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

“Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. […] They who work selfishly for results are miserable. — “Bhagavad Gita.”
~ J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

The Bhagavad gita says: whenever there is a decline of the law and ‘an increase in iniquity; then I put forth myself for the rescue of the pious and for the destruction of the evildoers, for the establishment of the law I am born in every age.
~ Carl Jung’s marginal note, The Red Book, Footnote 281, Page 317.

The Bhagavad Gita—that ancient Indian Yogic text—says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection. So now I have started living my own life. Imperfect and clumsy as it may look, it is resembling me now, thoroughly.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. — “Bhagavad Gita.”
~ J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

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JD Salinger And Swami Nikhilananda:

Swami Nikhilananda, Founder of the Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center of New York wrote a book on Hinduism.

The book is structured on Hinduism’s four stages of life. The table of contents headings read: Part I – Brahmacharya (Apprenticeship); Part II – Garhasthya (Householder Duties); Part III – Vanaprasthya (Withdrawal from Society); Part IV – Sannyasa (Renunciation of the World). This perspective allows the authors to offer a plausible explanation for Salinger’s withdrawal from public view based on the principles of renunciation and self-abnegation as laid out in the Bhagavad Gita, which Salinger read daily.

Along with these above writers, the works of Christopher Isherwood, Erwin Schrödinger, Joseph Campbell, Gerald Heard, and Huston Smith directly or subtly introduced Vedanta themes and teachings to the world. They influenced W. Somerset Maugham, who wrote The Razor’s Edge, the book that set JD Salinger on the path leading to Vedanta.

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Poetry On Life And Death:

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was deeply influenced by the Vedas and the Upanishads, the Hindu scriptures. He wrote several poems to show his admiration for these works. In the poem, Leaves of Grass, he acknowledges the immanence of God and the ability of our intuitive knowledge.

In his poem, Song of Myself, he wrote:

I know I am deathless
We have thus far exhausted
Trillions of winters and summers,
There are trillions ahead, and
Trillions ahead of them.

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Books To Read: 

• The Hindu Yogi Science of Breath By William Walker Atkinson (Yogi Ramacharaka)
• Proof of Vedic Culture’s Global Existence By Stephen Knapp
• The Story of Mankind By Hendrik van Loon
• American Veda By Philip Goldberg
• The Bhagvat-Geeta – Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon By Sir Charles Wilkins
• The Story Of Civilization – Our Oriental Heritage By Will Durant
• The World as Will and Idea By Arthur Schopenhauer which was influenced by the Chandogya Upanishad
• Siddhartha By Herman Hesse
• Bhagavad Gita: A New Translation By Stephen Mitchell
• Hinduism – The Eternal Tradition By David Frawley
• The Hidden Glory of India by Steven J. Rosen (Bhaktivedanta Book Trust)
• Karma: A Guide to Cause and Effect By Jeffrey Armstrong
• Vegetarianism: Recommended in Vedic Scripture By Stephen Knapp
• In Maharshi and His Message By Paul Brunton
• Vedanta For The West By Carl Jackson
• The Wishing Tree (2008) By Subhash Kak
• Sapiens By Yuval Noah Harari
• A New Earth By Eckhart Tolle
• Be Here Now By Ram Dass

More books HERE.

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Important Articles For Reference:

 The Influence Vedic Philosophy On Tesla’s Idea of Free Energy:
https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/the-influence-vedic-philosophy-had-on-nikola-teslas-idea-of-free-energy

 Indian Influences on Western Literature:
https://asiasociety.org/education/indian-influences-western-literature

 Impact of Bhagavad Gita on West:
https://arisebharat.com/2011/10/22/impact-of-bhagvad-gita-on-west/

 6 Physicists Who Were Influenced By Hinduism:
https://www.pgurus.com/6-famous-international-physicists-who-were-influenced-by-hindu-dharma/

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All this is Brahman. Everything comes from Brahman, everything goes back to Brahman, and everything is sustained by Brahman. ~ Chandogya Upanishad

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Cern And The God Particle: 

Why does CERN have a statue of Shiva?
The Shiva statue was a gift from India to celebrate its association with CERN, which started in the 1960’s and remains strong today. In the Hindu religion, Lord Shiva practiced Nataraj dance which symbolises Shakti, or life force. This deity was chosen by the Indian government because of a metaphor that was drawn between the cosmic dance of the Nataraj and the modern study of the ‘cosmic dance’ of subatomic particles. India is one of CERN’s associate member states. CERN is a multicultural organisation that welcomes scientists from more than 100 countries and 680 institutions. The Shiva statue is only one of the many statues and art pieces at CERN.

Why is the Higgs boson referred to as the God particle?
The Higgs boson is the linchpin of the Standard Model of particle physics but experimental physicists weren’t able to observe it until the arrival of the LHC, nearly 50 years after the particle was first postulated. Leon Lederman coined the term ‘the God particle’ in his popular 1993 book ‘The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What is the Question?’ written with Dick Teresi. In their book, Lederman and Teresi claim the nickname originated because the publisher wouldn’t allow them to call it ‘the Goddamn Particle’ – a name that reflected the difficulty in observing the elusive boson. The name caught on through the media attention it attracted but is disliked by both clerics and scientists.

Nataraja At The CERN

Source: 

https://home.cern/resources/faqs/cern-answers-queries-social-media

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Aldous Huxley Describes the Dancing Shiva Nataraja: 

Listen To It HERE.

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The Hidden Influence of Vedanta: 

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The wise neither grieve for the dead nor for the living. I myself never was not, nor thus, nor all the princes of the earth; nor shall we ever hereafter cease to be. ~ Bhagavad Gita

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