[QUOTE=Surya Deva;58817]Yeah, sure Western music is good - by their standards. Not by ours. The truth is their music is crude and loud. I mean come on anybody who is familiar with ragas, tala, sargam will know just how vastly superior our music is. The same goes for our drama and literature; yeah sure they have their Shakespeare’s, Miltons, Austens, Elliots - but are they any comparison for our Vyasas and Kalidasas? Absolutely not. It is a whole different league.
Just a few decades ago they would not have hesistated from patronizing you underming all your cultural achivements - so why do you - especially when it is true! We know Indian music is more refined, sophisticated, complex and textured than Western music is. Ditto for poetry; dance; cuisine. So why not assert it? As I said before when they say:
Newton, Dalton, Joules - you say Aryabhatta, Kananda
Einstein, Schrodinger - you say Kapila
Shakespeare, Milton, Elliot - you say Kalisada, Vyassa
Leibiniz - you say Pingala
Sauserre, Bloomfield, Chomsky, Boole, Bakus - you say Panini
Roman empire - You say Mauraya empire, Chola emprie, Gupta empire, Vijaynagra empire
Medicine, Hippocrates - Ayurveda: Sushratua, Charaka
Freud, William James, Jung - You say Patanjali
Mill, Marx, Machivelli - you say Chanakya, Vidhura
Cantebury tales - You say Panchatantra, Hitupodesha
Plato, Aristotle, - You say Gotama, Adishankarcharya
You have what we in hindi say Moor tor Jawab - an answer to break their face i.e., to show them whose really ahead. Then why do you hestitate from doing it?[/QUOTE]
Hello SD, nice list you got there.
Let me highlight one personality from that list that I consider a key element in bridging east and west. It is Carl Gustav Jung.
While outsiders may think he was merely a psychologist, he was also a great philosopher, knower of all fields of knowledge. His investigations in eastern philosophy/mythology/etc were rich because what was he really after was not a direct correlation of psychology in eastern texts, but the core symbology, what it really meant to the most profound unconscious level.
In the Tavistock lectures, a collection of introductory lectures on analytical psychology, Jung boldly states:
“We, the europeans, are not the only creatures in the world. We are just a peninsula of Asia, and in that continent there are old civilizations, where people trained their minds in introspective psychology for thousands of years, while we started our psychology not yesterday, but today morning.”
The introduction of the concept of Self in his view of the psyche came from a direct interaction with eastern philosophy.
I’m currently reading the appendix of a doctorate thesis on Abhishiktananda (http://bit.ly/juUEwZ - part 4), a benedictine monk that went to India and after getting to know its philosophy became a swami there. This monk then turned swami got into contact with Jung psychology and then began to analyze his own experiences, his symptoms of moksha and that of other saints through the lens of analytical psychology. So it’s a nice rich reading for me, a monk turned swami that utilizes the work of a psychologist that researched so much the east.
Analytical psychology is seen with great prejudice in the west, specially by the academy, dominated by the short-sighted ideals of Freud. A psychology that tries to reduce everything to repression and instincts, great for an animalistic society, ahm? But while our society (specially western) trails back again to the light, such gross views of life are going to be discarded and the rich work of Jung (a great scientific work, with not theories, but concepts based on extensive studies) is going to be the key in uniting west back to east. That is the reflection of a neurotic conscience that thinks reason and logic is the answer to all, back to its deep unconscious, from which it emerged, and where lies the key to all its angsts. As eastern philosophies clearly now, the macrocosm reflects the microcosm in a synchronical relation.