Vedanta by Torwesten

I finished Vedanta, Heart of Hinduism, by Hans Torwesten a little while ago. Overall, I would recommend it, but there are some caveats.

First, the writing is very ambiguous at times - it is often not clear what a pronoun refers to for example. This can be irritating. There are also some really strange sentence constructions at times. The book was translated from German into English; perhaps the translator was a little too literal.

The first chapter of the book was confusing. The book is supposed to be an introduction/overview, but it assumes the reader knows a lot of things up front that most probably do not. In addition, the writing could be clearer.

Afterwards, things do improve quite a bit. Now and then though, especially near the end, the author assumes that the reader knows a lot about certain philosophers making the book hard to follow if you do not.

Despite these issues, the book does have its good points. It does give a pretty good overview of Vedanta philosophy - one of the six orthodox forms of Hundu philosophy. A reader would then know what parts are worth further study by him/her.

I did find Torwesten's comments near the end of the book interesting that concern merging the concepts of Vedanta with western/Christian views to get a more balanced whole. His take is that Vedanta offers so much on the big picture, but loses touch with what is going on here on Earth, while western/Christian philosophy tends to do the opposite in many ways. A happy medium would seem best. Makes sense to me.

I also like the cover of the book. Silly reason to read a book, but it is a nice cover.

In any case, if my caveats don't scare you off, give it a try. There is much in it of value.

My Journey

Someone wrote a comment on a recent posting asking about my religion/journey. Perhaps that is a little hard to figure out from the postings I make here. I'll try to explain.

Currently, I attend a Christian/Disciples of Christ church near my home. They are not all that concerned with creeds there, although it is clearly Christian. There is a great Sunday school for adults ( I attend an adult class that takes up various spiritual issues in a contemporary fashion), and the service is very traditional with sermons on more comtemporary issues. Just my kind of place - at least for now.

I was raised Catholic, but left the church many years ago. It is the faith still of most of my family. I still respect it, but it is too much ritual and in other ways too limiting for me. I did learn many faith basics growing up Catholic which I still retain. I also learned personal discipline from the church and from attending Catholic schools for most of my pre-college education. I will defend the church against people who are unfairly critical even now. It is what it is, and it means a lot to many sincere people. It has done some wrongs, but it has done a lot of good - it is only a human institution after all.

I later experimented with some other faiths, and stayed with one for many years, up until about 2 years ago. It took a long time to see it, because it was so subtle in many ways, but this last one was way too controlling - made the Catholics look very liberal.

After this, I looked into old-style (Christian) Unitarianism and Universalism. I have not given up on them entirely, but they seem a bit too narrow. I started going to a Disciples Church for a lot of reasons that are too complicated to go into here.

Recently, I have read many books on various aspects of religion. I am even doing a Bible study. Currently, my main focus is Hinduism, especially when in a synthesis with Christianity. I plan to look into the Tao and Zen to some extent later on.

One thing that I have learned is how some Hindus have seen Jesus. He is pretty great in their eyes, for reasons that most Chrisitians have never heard I am sure. Think of something way beyond the Gospel of John type Jesus, but still something a classical Unitarian could accept. Pretty good stuff so far.

I think that I will stay basically Christian. It is the basis of my culture and ethics if nothing else. I could not see throwing it out totally. It will, I am sure, at least remain the foundation for my spiritual journey.

This is where things stand. I hope to keep on with my search until I find the thing we all are searching for, whether we realize it or not.

Autobiography of a Yogi

Finished this book last night. It was very interesting on many levels. I read the edition by Self Realization Fellowship - the orange, not the blue cover.

The book is made up mostly of stories of extraordinary people that the Yogi, Yogananda, met in his life. Many of the stories described various "supernatural" abilities that these people had. Even if one didn't accept these as fact, the book also goes into a lot of religious philosophy and ways of getting closer to God that are really worth looking at.

Yogananda seems to have merged Christianity and Hinduism in his system. His interpretations of the New Testament made a lot of sense to me; some passages had always seemed odd to me, until I read what Yogananda had to say about them. I have noticed that a two volume New Testament interpretation by him has recently come out; I have looked throught it, and it has some interesting things in it.

I'm not sure where I stand on some of the stories, but the philosophy made a lot of sense to me. Who knows, maybe the people he met really could do the things he said. I think we would all be better off if things were as he described.

The book has inspired me to investigate Yogananda's philosophy some more. I am signing up for the Self Realization Fellowship home study program - it is very reasonably priced I think.

Give the book a try.