New Age – No Edge, part 9

Consciousness and Speech Series X.

Sacred Speech Masterclass X, part nine.

The New Age has reduced many of these incredible things and potentials we are talking about and exploring to unusable substances whose value and application is strictly in its marketing.

Hari: I have a question, Babaji. This morning, I was checking my Facebook feed, as I occasionally too frequently do, probably, and I found this forum, I guess, page, called, I f-ing love science. It’s a combination of like what’s happening in science today, kind of inspiring things about the scale of things, like how insignificant we are or how amazing this animal is, and also as a way a kind of anti-new age political commentary. And this morning, the post that was on there, somebody had done a Venn diagram, the categories of which were like medical quackery, religious quackery, and two others, and then it proceeded to list everything that like on there that wasn’t the hardcore, Western scientist thing, so astrology, religious quackery, mantra – probably was on there, homeopathy, Ayurveda, you know, that kind of thing, and which really ticked me off, if I’m perfectly honest, but left me wondering why, why does it tick me off…. and part of it, you know, is that, to me, somehow like, creating some sort of the bridge of understanding, is something of value, which is why when you earlier, said things like how we will arrive at things, from a kind of empirical starting point rather than kind of ideological purchase, that to me is like really cool, really good stuff. My question really is what’s so amazing about the example, of Rishi Garg, is it? Garg? Rishi Garg?

Babaji: Yeh.

Hari: Is exactly as you are saying, it’s just, coming from that position that would, you know, put him in religious quackery in this Venn diagram, he actually was able to produce something that they would put up you know as a scientific, you know, great work, and that’s incredibly compelling, especially when like you know it’s blatantly obvious he didn’t have telescopes and lasers to, however they do it nowadays, and my question really is, why is it now that it is so easy for that kind of thought to just completely rule out things like astrology and the other and what I would call the other non-causal types of understanding of the world? Why is there, why is it, is it that there is no one as darn good as Rishi Garg nowadays? I mean if someone were to come along today and did a Rishi Garg like for string theory or I don’t know whatever turns people on in modern thought, and said, “There take that,” suddenly the whole Western scientific world would be say, “Lets wait a minute, we need to wake up and actually seriously take a look, at this, you know, at these concepts we’ve just shunned, without any really effort to understand them at all. And why do you suppose that is? What is the solution to kind of…

Babaji: Well, first of all, I think are there is a number of people in the Western academic and scientific establishment that are enormously knowledgeable and have already gone beyond a 19th Century mindset and so forth. I can tell you that one of my teachers, Prof. Fritz Staal, who left us just a couple of years ago, who was a considered to be one of the really great Western Sanskritists and grammarians of our times, he was also a mathematician and he was also very close, by the way, interestingly enough, with Noam Chomsky and, in fact, Prof Stall taught at MIT for a couple of years in the 60s at the same time that Noam Chomsky was there. And of course, when mathematicians read some of Emil Post’s work, and especially his anecdotes on deriving this from Panini’s grammatical systems in the 5th century, BC, people took this serious. And I think that there are a number of people out there. There is a whole field, a micro field now, I think it is connected with linguistics, that is dealing with Paninian logic, in the Western academy.

So, what’s happened is that the New Age has reduced many of these incredible things to unusable substances that whose value and application is strictly in its marketing. It’s like the pet rock. I don’t know. I guess, maybe Rico remembers that the pet rock. They were selling a pet rocks, a rock, in a shop, for $10 and you’d buy a leash for it. And you’d have to feed it three times a day, and the whole thing. And, to me, this sums up, basically, the New Age. Is that, yeh, there’s these wonderful ideas, you know, astrology, wow, how great, you could know the future, you could know who to marry or who to marry off your son or daughter to, or when to do something or when not to do something, and Ayurveda, not using dangerous chemicals with side effects, using herbs and all the other things of Indian culture, but then when you take these things, and either knowingly or unknowingly reduce it to pet rocks, to things that you can market, you know, that .. One of the trips years ago that I made to the States…. I was seeing a friend of mine who just had this wealthy young man visiting her and she said to me, “This guy just made $10 million, producing and selling yoga mats. What have you been doing in India all these years.” But you see, that’s really, you know, what it comes down to. Because, look, there’s a problem with all this sophisticated knowledge and sophisticated tastes. It’s not for the masses. That’s just the way it is. The finer the taste, the finer the knowledge, the finer the things, it’s for a more and more an elite kind of audience. So somebody who wants to take a brand, or create a brand, and go out and market a brand, and the products contained within that brand, and become wealthy and all that other stuff, this is a whole different thing. And, of course it, spoils in many ways the reality and, Hari, I hate to say it, but I am that sure a lot of these things, these people on this page, the terrible things they say about New Age, I probably agree with half of them. And you know there is a reason for that also. When I first came to India, if I believed everything that everyone told me about the mystical, and the magical, and the wonderful, and the esoteric, you know I could have just turned around in circles for the rest of my life, and just not been able to learn or do anything. You have to develop a sense of discrimination, a sense of taste, you have to know, you know, what’s likely to be more substantial, and what’s likely to be more flaky, you know, and to not accept everything you hear and not to believe everything that you read, and all this other stuff. If you are truly interested in knowledge, if you are truly interested in the fine things of the world or thinking and so forth, you have to be very, very discriminating, otherwise forget it.

Hari: I see plenty of flakiness even amongst the practices that I do. But, you know, we talked about the Oral Tradition being in its kind of a dawn period and part of that process is that when otherwise discriminating intelligent people who for essentially social reasons have been bred into a certain of arrogance that stops them from inquiring– everything becomes like, you know, an immediate judgment rather of a quizzical, inquisition. It’s not so much, I mean I am glad they are looking at studies, want to see what’s good and what’s not, what frightens me I guess about that mentality or what bothers me, is that it become this kind of like, it really becomes quite religious you know and then and then fast forward 50 or a 100 years and people like yourself are gone and there’s an entire chapter of human, incredible, profound, you know, understanding developed over centuries, that’s just, poof, gone, and maybe I should just say, that’s how it is and be grateful to experience a little, tiny bit of it, which I very much am, but part of me wants you to you know not have these things be so quickly thrown out, you know, the baby with the bath water.

Babaji: But I’ll tell you something. I’ll tell you a very interesting quick story, and then we’re going to have to wrap up. But you know President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, and I don’t remember the exact time, but it must have been maybe the end of 1964, the beginning, of 1965, I don’t know, somewhere around then, there was this very intrepid reporter by the name of Mark Lane who connected with the District Attorney of the City of New Orleans by the name of Garrison and together they wrote a book about the assassination of Kennedy, where they disputed all the findings of the Warren Commission, and in fact they wrote a book that blamed the basically the CIA, they blamed the CIA for doing this thing, right. So I was, I don’t know, 14, 15 years old at this time and read this book, some of my friends read this book. It was called, Rush to Judgment. We were thinking, my God, they’re going to kill these guys, they are just going to send people out, these guys, they are going to kill these guys. You can’t write stuff like that. I mean, especially if it is true, you know. They didn’t kill them. They didn’t do anything to them. What happened, was that within the next year, about 150 different conspiracy books came out on the Kennedy assassination blaming everyone from the Queen of England to the Lizard People from Mars for doing this. And, so, here you are. You are an average person. You know. Wow. What happened? They killed our president. How do you know which book to read? How do you know? How do you which is something that is legitimate? That has substance. How do you know which is the flaky. And the answer is in those days that it wasn’t so difficult to determine. But by today, the magnitude so much larger, that I mean really, we are just completely overwhelmed with ideologies, theories, interpretations, classes, weekend seminars, teacher training classes, this one and that one, live and online, in the book, and in the comic book, and you know God knows what else. So that’s the reality of our situation, and that is why things like the Oral Tradition are is nothing close to what it was even 30, 40 years ago, let along hundreds of years ago. And, it’s, nothing you can really do about it, you just, you know, the best thing is to understand what is happening and be a witness to what you can be a witness to in your life, and hopefully pass it down to your kids, or to your students, or to whoever you have to pass it down to, but, other than that, you can’t lead a sort of protest march down 5th Avenue, that’s not really going to solve the problem. You can put a page on Facebook or something, that’s going to do it. The only thing that is going to do it is to whisper into the ears of your beloved.

May all the Gods and Goddesses bless you all. I’ll see you next week. And hopefully communicate with you in the meantime.