Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Frawley David
Title : How I became a Hindu My discovery of Vedic Dharma
Year : 1999

Link download : Frawley_David_-_How_I_became_a_Hindu.zip

Foreword. We live in the age of science. The frontiers of our knowledge are receding everyday. The method of science is empirical : it uses experiment to verify or to refute. Science has dispelled miracles from the physical world and it has shown that physical laws are universal. Technology had made astonishing advances and a lot that was the stuff of religious imagination has been brought under the ambit of science. Why should we then be interested in the subject of conversion to Hinduism ? Isn't this the age of questioning old-style religion in the manner of Why I am not a Christian by the great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, or the more recent Why I am not a Muslim by Ibn Warraq ? David Frawley's remarkable spiritual autobiography answers this question and many more. In a fascinating narrative, he walks us through his own discovery of how the stereotype of Hinduism presented by schoolbooks as a tradition of worship of many gods, social inequity, and meaningless ritual is false. Not that there are not social problems in Hindu society, but these problems are a result of historical processes, India's political and economic vicissitudes of the last few centuries, and not central to the essence of Hinduism. Apart from this and, more significantly, he provides us a portrait of living Hinduism as mirrored by his own life experience. Just as there can be only one outer science, so there can be only one inner science of the spirit. One can only speak of levels of knowledge and understanding. The dichotomy of believers and non-believers, where the believers are rewarded in paradise and the non-believers suffer eternal damnation in hell, is naive. Also, since the physical universe itself is a manifestation of the divine, the notion of guilt related to our bodily existence is meaningless. Modern science, having mastered the outer reality, has reached the frontier of brain and mind. We comprehend the universe by our minds, but what is the nature of the mind? Are our descriptions of the physical world ultimately no more than a convoluted way of describing aspects of the mind - the instrument with which we see the outer world? Why don't the computing circuits of the computer develop self-awareness as happens in the circuitry of the brain ? ...