Post by: Surya Deva - Thread: Samkhya vs Vedanta

Asuri has reported a post.

Reason:

You have to stop these personal attacks. I’m being forced to respond and its having a detrimental effect on my life because I’m spending time on this that I need to be spending on other things. I suspect it’s also having a detrimental effect on the forum as a whole.

Post: Samkhya vs Vedanta
Forum: Spirit’s Path
Assigned Moderators: N/A

Posted by: Surya Deva
Original Content:

[quote]I am not going to apologize, in fact I’m proud to have defended my Christian heritage, and would do it again.

You defended your Christian heritage by making a racist comment against Neitzsche by calling him a filthy, cow piss drinking dot head? OK…

In any case I think the readers reading this thread, in front of whom you are trying to act very innocent, will come to understand you are not so innocent at all. You often make blanket statements and never back them up. In this thread I have called your bluff.

Not only do you not understand Vedanta - a philosophy which you have condemned and attacked on several occasions in in the past 2 years, not just the philosophy, but even me for being a propnent of it - you also do not understand Samkhya, a philosophy which you claim to be an expert on and even have a website on. The real reason you clash with me, is because you know I show you up. I am far more educated than you in the subject of Samkhya or Indian philosophy in general, and that really grates on you. Hence why you create threads like, “Intellectual or con artist” it betrays your insecurity and envy.

Prior to me coming to this web site you tried to make yourself look like the resident scholar. When I arrived, your comfortable bubble was shaken up and you hated it when others here praised my scholarship, this is why you positioned yourself as my enemy. In your words you saw me as "dangerous’
But the real danger was not anybody else, but the danger to your ego and your self-assumed title as the Samkhya-Yoga expert on this board.

I demonstrated a long time ago that you did not even understand the basic concepts in Samkhya: Purusha and Prakriti dualism. You mistook Samkhya to be an empirical dualism like Cartesian dualism(which you more or less said was the same as Samkhya) which is a Christian dualism - and as a self-confessed Christian you were trying to force Samkhya to fit your Christian worldview - when in fact they couldn’t be more incongruent. I demonstrated to you by directing citing from Samkhya texts that it is not an empirical dualism, but a rational dualism i.e., Purusha and prakriti are not things you can see, they are inferred to exist using logic. (This is very basic knowledge that any student of Samkhya philosophy knows, but you didn’t even know this) Your ego could not take being proven wrong, so as usual you threw a tantrum.

Then you tried to force Yoga into your Christian worldview. You decided to change the often repeated definition of Yoga, “Yoga is the cessation of the modifications of the mind, then then the witnesses essential form is revealed” to Yoga is the cessation of only negative thoughts in mind, not all of them and asserted this new definition you fabricated as if it was gospel. You could not careless for what the sutras actually really said or what 2000 years of scholarship on Yoga said.

And a real expert in Samkhya or Yoga would not be so dismissive of the criticisms of these philosophies by scholars. I recall what you said, “I hate critics, I don’t care what they think” What this showed is that you were not even making an attempt to look at the philosophical problems in Samkhya, like a true Christian, you just turned a blind eye to it and pretended they did not exist.(I have bought light to those problems in this thread)

I have a good memory indeed and I can remember many of these blanket statements you have made without ever backing your points up. Your interest in Samkhya is not for the sake of Samkhya, but to give your Christian worldview an air of rational semblence, hence why you freely distort it to fit into it. This is why you are a pseudo-Samkhyan. You’re really just another fundamentalist Christian trying to justify and rationalize your faith, by selectively borrowing from every other tradition, and leaving out what does not fit in with it.[/quote]