Sambodhi 2009 Vol 32

Author(s): J B Shah, K M patel
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 12

S. N. Bhavasar and R. W. Boyer
SAMBODHI
objective material world only, believed to exist independently from the inner subjective knower. This fragmented knowledge and experience is directly associated with the lack of fundamental grounding in modern and post-modern social thought, which has rendered modern life devoid of existential meaning, purposeless, ungrounded, and unfulfilling to the knower. Modern science has paid virtually no attention to development of inner mental resources to guide balanced use of outer material resources. It has developed a massive body of reliable knowledge of the gross material level of nature, mainly derived from logical theories and empirical experiments. It certainly represents major steps of progress over previous eras marked by irrationality and unfounded beliefs. But epistemologically, it is limited to gross sensory experiences in the ordinary waking state of consciousness. Based on application of the principles of modern science focusing only on the gross outer level of the physical world, modern and postmodern life has been tightly bound to the superficial flatland of material existence (1).
With even slight reflection on the part of the investigator or observer, how ever, one finds a subjective underpinning to all of the perceptual, cognitive, memory, and intuitive processes involved in any objective observation of nature. Knowledge is fundamentally a subjective phenomenon; objective knowledge has a subjective basis. Any third-person objective observation, any consensual validation or inter-subjective agreement across observers, has at its base the first-person empirical experience of individual conscious observers. The fragmenting experiential separation that has been a core feature of modern scientific objectivity is now fundamentally challenged by the interaction of the observed and observer in quantum theory. This core dilemma in quantum theory has brought to the forefront of modern science the important issues of the role of mind and consciousness and how they relate to the physical world.
At the same time these developments are taking place, a revival of ancient Vedic science has been underway, and its practical technologies have been made understandable in the modern scientific context. Ancient Vedic science is becoming increasingly recognized as based on systematic, reliable, and verifiable means of gaining knowledge. It is an integrated empirical science that incorporates both subjective and objective approaches. It emphasizes systematic, reliable, replicable first-person, subjective methodologies that had been missing in modern science. It is in the systematic development of higher states of consciousness that the dilem