(September 25, 2026 at 3:23 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: As early as 500bc Hindu tradition already contained people who didn’t believe in gods but still accepted Vedic authority as a matter of deeper meanings™…and those who didn’t believe in gods and called the deeper meaning™ a scam for the maintenance of traditional hierarchies of oppression.

Right, so you mean nothing's changed in 2500 years? Hehe. I don't even know what Vedic means yet but I'll get to it. I'm very new to this but the consciousness stuff is looking potentially interesting... is it to you at all? For instance in Buddhism the view is that there is nothing permanent, like a 'soul' or close enough, behind consciousness, whereas this Advaita Vedanta, sees something extra...'awareness'... behind consciousness. So just as in Buddhism, or especially Zen Buddhism, you can get people trying to break the illusion of 'self'... as in the narrative sense of self... they apparently do the same sort of thing in Advaita Vedanta, calling it 'self-inquiry'... i.e. trying to step out of that me-ness as it were, or step back from it, in the same sort of objective or detached way as in Buddhism, but in their case they come to the conclusion that there is more than just the processes of consciousness; that there's awareness behind it, and that body and mind is some sort of illusion that we need to see through. So it does seem a bit similar to Buddhism on those sorts of scores, but at this point for me it just raises a lot of questions...for instance, how do they perceive the idea of awareness without a body and mind... i.e. that suggests no individual perspective whatsoever in the infinite awareness 'afterlife' that might await you... so I'm just curious how they answer those sorts of questions.

There's no harm in thinking about it as far as I can see. I'm never going to believe in anything supernatural, but I see no harm in exploring different perspectives on consciousness, or for instance, the power of let's call it 'personalisation'... that for instance, some of the talk about these things had the Hindu gods as different facets of the same god as it were... described as different waves of the same sea... and therefore that people could relate to different facets... different personalities of it... in different situations. And just personalising it that way, whether you actually believe in the god or just see it metaphorically let's say, as perhaps they did with the Greek myth characters etc, I can, or think I can, see the potential value in that. Just psychologically there's not necessarily too much harm in that sort of idealisation/personalisation, like how the Buddha is often idealised in Buddhism.

(September 25, 2026 at 8:16 pm)Angrboda Wrote:

ॐ नमः शिवाय (Oṃ Namaḥ Śivāya)

... a common devotional prayer or chant to Shiva (the statue you're showing... which I had to Google, and I take it I'm represented by the 'dwarf' he's standing on ('ignorance')? )... and in the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, repeated by the sacrifice victim whilst he's being lowered into the lava, as a sacrifice to that other God you mention so often, काली मा (kālī mā)... and following is the first video I've seen about that goddess since that Indiana Jones film (which as an aside, I know the chants from pretty much off by heart (phonetically), hence looking them up here, because I watched that film a lot when I was a child, but now I'm in a position where I could perhaps try to translate them, or at least attempt to spell them in Devanagari)... it's quite a hypnotic and nice sounding song imo, and sounds like it also includes that reverential Om ॐ sound I mentioned earlier, at the beginning of lines, so I'd guess it's a devotional song... hope you like it :

I think that just about every view of consciousness we've come up with is notable for historic interest...but as far as hindu philosophy goes I don't think anyone has ever had it better than chavarka. Consciousness is a byproduct of a material body and dies with it. That there's nothing more or supernatural going on. No ghosts, no souls, no afterlives, nothing to reincarnate..nada.

Chavarka is a nastika tradition, one that rejects vedic authoroity - because the vedas say otherwise. To chavarka, those stories are a way for the priestly class to make a buck and nothing more. So...you know...probably haters and uncultured swine. The only interpretation that can't be right despite all evidence to the contrary in any religion.

(September 26, 2026 at 5:50 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: I think that just about every view of consciousness we've come up with is notable for historic interest...but as far as hindu philosophy goes I don't think anyone has ever had it better than chavarka.  Consciousness is a byproduct of a material body and dies with it.  That there's nothing more or supernatural going on.  No ghosts, no souls, no afterlives, nothing to reincarnate..nada.  

Chavarka is a nastika tradition, one that rejects vedic authoroity - because the vedas say otherwise.  To chavarka, those stories are a way for the priestly class to make a buck and nothing more.  So...you know...probably haters and uncultured swine.  The only interpretation that can't be right despite all evidence to the contrary in any religion.

Wow, thanks for that! Who would have thought it?... that there was essentially atheism/skepticism in ancient India, in this 'Charvaka' and 'Nastika' (which I've just asked ChatGPT about to get a broad overview of). It's a shame it never happened so early in the West That here, atheistic/skeptical thought was a later development, not an earlier one And yeah, just also asking what was meant by 'Vedas'/'Vedic authority'... basically the Indian equivalent of a collection of sacred texts, like our Bible, roughly, and the priestly class that surrounds it. Sorry, I didn't know anything about this... I've never looked into Indian history at all really, but I will now of course, thanks to this new interest. Is it something you've studied a lot?

On that last point, some of the YouTube videos I've been seeing popping up are trying to defend the 'caste' system, if that's what you mean by 'traditional hierarchies of oppression'... I haven't watched them yet, and maybe won't, but I'm just saying there does seem to be some dispute about whether the 'caste' system means what we think it means. But of course I'm not in a position to argue about that, cos this is all very new to me.

Anyway, as for me, obviously I have no interest in the Western idea of souls, but I was just curious if and/or how the Hindu idea of them differed, given that it seems to frame it differently in the sense of 'awareness'... infinite awareness. The main question then, from my POV being, how can there be 'awareness' of nothing, or with no individual perspective? And that's what I wanted to look into by looking into Hinduism... ie what they think they find after 'self-inquiry'. Ie from Buddhism's perspective (in my understanding of it anyway), there is nothing behind consciousness, but in contrast, in Hinduism's, (it seems they are saying) even if you took away all conscious experience, and perspective, there would still be something... this 'awareness'... behind it, but I'm just curious what they mean exactly by that, because on the face of it, it makes no sense.

So this is not about me looking for gods or the supernatural to believe in or anything like that, but just looking for different ways of looking at awareness and consciousness etc, but as I say, a perspectiveless awareness, which is what the lack of an individual body and mind, after death, would seem to imply, makes no obvious logical sense to me, but still curious to see how they justify it.

It actually did happen just as early in the west. Diagoras, Democritus, Protagoras, and Epicuras. That we believe, or are lead to believe, otherwise is a consequence of a blood feud between roman nobility and the subsequent collapse of their welfare state - and this is according to Cyril of Alexandria in Contra Julianum. Events that would be 800 years into the then-future from the earliest skeptics and atheists and deaceds in the then-past by the time of christian apologia that accidentally preserved it. Supernaturalist and theistic beliefs in the west would then go through a more or less identical development to that which had lead to the late hellenic form of cultural or political religion - of artful metaphor and deeper rather than literal meanings.

As far as systems of oppression, a caste system would be just one thing. There are less formal expressions and consequences of in group out group dynamics in a theocratic culture. Our imaginations are truly the limit here!

Big caveat - hinduism is a ton of religions just called hinduism - but in general...hindu orthodoxy and western orthodoxy are both soul forging ideologies. In the hindu version you get many bites at the apple. In the western version only one. In the hindu version you are eternal. In the western version you were created. In the hindu version you are something like a god in training, you may pass through a state of godhood on your way to awareness but this is not the end or "highest" state (and it may just be better to be human for the purposes of reaching that end state!). No analog here in the west, obvs. In this setup, you can see how a person might interpret their individual ego or self as they pass through many incarnations - as an illusion? You are not a rock, not a plant, not a frog, not a person, not a god. However, the underlying "you" - the thing that passes through the forge, atman, is real. One of buddhism's major revisions to hindu thought is, appropriately, anatman.

In buddhisms perspective there is no unchanging essence. In hinduisms perspective..there is. I guess the really gigglesome observation here is that buddhism did end up retaining the "lower order" personification of hindu brahman - brahma the god - they just chopped his unchanging essential head off (and all of the rest of ours along with it - fuckers).