/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20063643]

Why were 20th century physicists drawn to the Upanishads?

[Anonymous No.20063654]

>>20063643
>physicists
implies all, or at least several
name several 20th century physicists who were

[Anonymous No.20063670]

>>20063654
Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Bohr

[Anonymous No.20063673]

>>20063643
Im just riffing here, i think its because of their approach to their work, and their experience with God.
All religions have a way of experiencing with God: Buddhism is about the methodology of coming to experience God, Christianity is about the individual, personal experience with God, and Islam is about the collective experience among your in-group, with God.

Hinduism is about the indirect experience of God, a being who doesnt speak to you personally, and ages are defined by him moving his finger or breathing (decadent ages lasting millenia are from brahmas exhale, prosperous ages are from brahmas inhale.) So as a physicist who engages a lot with the analyzation of things that are totally out of your control, like the Universe, it would be surprise they would be attracted to a religion that also reflects this indirect experience with God.

[Anonymous No.20063691]

>>20063643
Indian philosophy was popular amongst German academics at the time due to guys like Deussen and Max Müller.

[Anonymous No.20063693]

>>20063673
>it would be surprise
no surprise*****

[Anonymous No.20063707]

>>20063673
They also came to the conclusion that consciousness is primary to matter, which Vedanta is receptive to
>>20063691
Do you think the attraction was just a product of their time and place? They were also influenced by Schopenhauer

[Anonymous No.20063753]

>>20063707
Yeah, it was funky Oriental thinking for them, so namedropping the Upanishads was a way of coming off as more cultured and open to the world for them, even though the only parts they actually embraced from them were not the parts about throwing ghee into fire and sacrificing animals while reciting verses in Sanskrit, but rather the ones about the universe being one and one being the same as God, which also appear in the works of Western philosophers like Parmenides and Spinoza.

[Anonymous No.20063764]

>>20063643
I think a lot of people embrace it simply because it provides a more positive world view

[Anonymous No.20063765]

>>20063643
Because the Upanishads are a strictly and explicitly allegorical ontology. You have to understand that the growing and experimentally verifiable body of quantum-mechanical knowledge flew completely in the face of everything anyone had ever known. It's an entirely different experience in the 21st century to learn about the behavior of quanta with the weight of a century's trivialities buttressing your casual overview on a phone screen. In the early 20th, mathematics had until then been inextricably linked to a Christian God. Throughout the Renaissance, a major mathematician who wasn't also at least a minor theologian was a rarity. Math was the language of God—a divine language language—that, until Gödel, was a language also of truth and of continuity. When physicists and mathematicians began examining the most minute quanta of existence, they began to come up against unknowability immanent. They came upon particles that didn't speak in precisions of true and false, but in strict probability. They locked their secrets away beyond a cosmic stop sign that none, seemingly even God, could bypass. If mathematics was his language, then even he speaks the language of quantum mechanics as a second tongue.

At the quantum level, determinism sloughs away like charred flesh from a bone. A Christian God is a deterministic God. Now, I'm not trying to say that this is The Reason why the 20th century mathematicians found comfort in a Vedic ontology, which allows more forgivingly for experimental realities of the configurations of matter, but it is a compelling idea, isn't it? It must have shaken men to their fucking cores to peer down into the smallest building blocks of the universe and find only a void staring back at them. It gives a special flavor to that old Nietzschean aphorism.

[Anonymous No.20063778]

Westerners tend to look everywhere but internally. History and geography are up for grabs when it comes to intellectual striving.

[Anonymous No.20063798]

>>20063643
Einstein and Planck were vehemently opposed to mysticism

[Anonymous No.20063965]

>>20063798
On what grounds? In what way?

[Anonymous No.20064064]

>>20063673
>Hinduism is about the indirect experience of God
Hindusim also is about the direct, personal and intuitive realization of God.

[Anonymous No.20064520]

>>20063965
Einstein: The mystical trend of our time, which shows itself particularly in the rampant growth
of the so-called Theosophy and Spiritualism, is for me no more than a symptom of
weakness and confusion ... the concept of a soul without a body seems to me to be
empty and devoid of meaning.
Planck: It is surprising to find how many people even of the educated classes allow themselves to be fascinated by these new religions— beliefs which vary from the obscurest mysticism to the crudest superstition.
We are living in a very singular moment of history. It is a moment of crisis ... in the literal sense of that word ... tidings of a downfall to which our civilization is fatally destined. Formerly it was only religion, especially in its doctrinal and moral systems, that was the object of skeptical attack. Then the iconoclast began to shatter the ideals and principles that had hitherto been accepted in the province of art. Now he has invaded the temple of science. There is scarcely a scientific axiom that is not
nowadays denied by somebody. And at the same time almost any nonsensical theory
that may be put forward in the name of science would be almost sure to find believers
and disciples somewhere or other.

[Anonymous No.20064609]

>>20063765
It threw Heisenberg into despair:
In a darkened world no longer illuminated by the light of this center, technical advances are scarcely more than despairing attempts to make Hell a more agreeable place to live in. This must be particularly emphasized against those who think that by spreading the civilization of science and technology even to the uttermost ends of the earth, they can furnish all the essential preconditions for a golden age. One cannot escape the Devil so easily as that.
>explicitly allegorical ontology
Can you expand upon this?

[Anonymous No.20064711]

>>20064520
Einstein was a Kabbalist who probably despised goys getting into Theosophy.
Planck was just a sperg.

[Anonymous No.20064731]

>>20064064
Yes, but that is still an indirect experience with God, and don’t all religions have that element of intuitive realization of God? To show my point, in christianity, prayer is an active, and direct heart-to-heart with God, but Hinduism is very much passive. In Hinduism God (brahma) doesnt care if people believe in him or worship him, he does what he pleases. This is in contrast to the direct experience, where Christianity demands works, and God is watching you and only you, so you must keep your soul clean for Him.

[Anonymous No.20064864]

McLuhan chalks it up to a simple change from cog to circuit. Einstein represents the mechanistic fulfillment of Newton and the whole tradition of print media and science. All the particle physicists were studying subatomic shit, electrons. The gist is that electricity, because of its instantaneous nature is inclusive. All at onceness = all is oneness. This also explains orientalism in general throughout the 20th century as westerners coping with the new electric environment, flocking to a metaphysics that fits it more, as opposed to the god of the German clockmakers like Newton. Medium = Mess-age. Ground over figure. Surf the Kali Yuga.

[Anonymous No.20064989]

>>20063643
>Why were 20th century physicists drawn to the Upanishads?
Because several of them thought their work was intrinsically related with consciousness and the Upanishads are the scriptures that perhaps focus on consciousness the most out of any major world religion.

>The Upanishads is a watershed in the evolution of consciousness. Instead of being ethnocentric and dividing all global history between B.C. and A.D., we should really divide it between before Upanishads and after Upanishads—B.U. and A.U.—because the sophisticated psychology of consciousness in the Upanishads represents a quantum leap forward in human development
-William Irwin Thompson

[Anonymous No.20065304]

Indian and Buddhist philosophy tend to be more process-oriented and relational than much of the Western corpus. Also less object-oriented. Much of it maps onto theoretical physics fairly well.

[Anonymous No.20065841]

>>20063643
They weren't. It's just a meme that did the rounds and they namedropped it.

[Anonymous No.20065866]

>>20063673
>Buddhism is about the methodology of coming to experience God
Why keep going with your post if you are wrong from the start? Do you even bother reading anything at all? It would take you five minutes to learn that Buddhism blasphemes any notion of a capital-G creator god. The sutras regularly have Buddha debate Brahmā and mock the ignorance of the latter

[Anonymous No.20065942]

>>20063673
>Buddhism is about the methodology of coming to experience God

[Anonymous No.20065978]

>>20065866
You converted to Buddhism after taking a mindfulness training course at work. Chill bud.

[Anonymous No.20067791]

>>20065942
Retard

[Anonymous No.20067839]

>>20063643
Jewish atheists or spiritual agnostics

[Anonymous No.20069143]

>>20063753
>embraced from them were not the parts about throwing ghee into fire and sacrificing animals while reciting verses in Sanskrit
Thats not a part of the Upanishads dumbass

[Anonymous No.20069160]

>I had several discussions with Heisenberg. I lived in England then [circa 1972], and I visited him several times in Munich and showed him the whole manuscript chapter by chapter. He was very interested and very open, and he told me something that I think is not known publicly because he never published it. He said that he was well aware of these parallels. While he was working on quantum theory he went to India to lecture and was a guest of Tagore. He talked a lot with Tagore about Indian philosophy. Heisenberg told me that these talks had helped him a lot with his work in physics, because they showed him that all these new ideas in quantum physics were in fact not all that crazy. He realized there was, in fact, a whole culture that subscribed to very similar ideas. Heisenberg said that this was a great help for him. Niels Bohr had a similar experience when he went to China.

[Anonymous No.20069325]

>>20067839
>Jewish atheists
they are drawn to Buddhism, not the Upanishads

[Anonymous No.20070238]

>>20063643

>Why were 20th century physicists drawn to the Upanishads?
Because the UpaniChads be bussin fr fr no cap

[Anonymous No.20070252]

>>20069143
the Upanishads talk about much crazier things, e.g. fiery vaginas

[Anonymous No.20070649]

>>20063670
bohr was an atheist
as for the first two, omne ignotum pro magnifico est