COURSE of STUDIES

A draft of the course proposed for wisdom seeking students of the Narayana Gurukula.

Possible venue for studies are tentatively at Fernhill, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu; Sreenivasapuram, Varkala in Kerala, ShantiNagar, Palakkad, Portland, Oregon and Bainbridge, Washington, in the USA.

Narayana Gurukula Foundation is a contemplative institute for higher education to benefit all wisdom seekers, irrespective of the student's country of origin, faith, language, gender, economic means, and educational status. As the Narayana Gurukula Foundation is founded by Nataraja Guru holding in his mind Narayana Guru as an exemplar in wisdom appreciation, there is bound to be a bias for the fundamental teachings of Narayana Guru, in the course proposed. The roots of Guru's value vision belong essentially to classical Indian studies of Aryan and Dravidian origin. This natural affinity of the Gurukula to India's historical culture and civilization doesn't exclude the basic stand of the major religions of the world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam of the Semitic areas of contemplative mysticism and the Jain, Buddhist religions originated from India, and the theistic Indian religions like Saivism, Vaisnavism and Sikhism (or recent origin).

The period for this course of studies is limited to seven years. Therefore, it is not possible to make extensive studies in any of the above mentioned disciplines. The main interest of this course is not to make a historic survey, but to help students to evolve ultimately into their own utmost development, which thy have to achieve by continuously making their immediate and present interest and abilities progressively channeled to their unfoldment to fit into the future of their physical, aesthetic, moral, intelligent, and spiritual advancement.

Two basic aims of the Narayana Gurukula Foundation are:
1. Self realization in its accurate and fullest sense
2. To become a fellow citizen of every living member of the human family of the world at large.
In other words each person should be able to take upon him or her a total commitment to the welfare of mankind as a whole with unlimited liability. Such a course of study is to be placed within three spheres:
1. The enormous unlimited field of the possibility of search with a view of turning to the relevant field of the most probable.
2. Helping each person to become fully experienced researcher by making his or her program of action fundamentally based on the ultimate probe by which one can narrow the field of the possible into the most probable.
3. The exposure to the expanding consciousness of extending one's avenues of interest to the maximum opportunity of promoting the most relevant probability into the facts of life by which actualization of values can result in one's personal endeavor.

Where to Begin and What Should be the Priorities?

The search is to begin with an introspection of each individual. By listing the person's value vision and making a studious effort to define, describe and illustrate the values which each person holds supremely important to the individual's actualization of life's goal. Out of the value matrix each person can make convincingly a chosen path for his or her ultimate pilgrimage.

Why Values?

From microbes to the fully developed wise person two questions are held before each.
1. Where is one placed? This question can be put better for human beings as 'where am I placed?'
2. Subsequent possible question are 'what or whom am I related to?'
Ultimately there may arise the question, 'how can my chance relationship be fully taken advantage of to arrive at the most satisfactory performance. This necessarily has to include in it the uniqueness of a person as well as the participation of the person in the universal context. The desired result can be achieved only through positive relationship of caring, sharing, and working together from the basis of a commonly accepted criteria of universal and benevolent knowledge.

Why Uniqueness?

To explore a possibility of each person's position in the world is to be considered only by interlinking a person's position in time and space. No person or no thing can be simultaneously at two places in a given time. Thus, the position of the seeker comes instantaneously where the search is to be commenced. It is in reference to the 'position in time and space' that the vista of a certain possibility might arise as an area of consciousness with deep temporal and futuristic significance. The first delineation that comes in deciding th size of the possibility is by relating everything in the world to the uniqueness of the seer or the knower who will invariably also be the doer. Hence possibilities stem mainly from the uniqueness of the 'position' held by the programmer, to a position of factual relationship in which the objective environmental aspect and the subjective imperiential aspect can be brought to bear upon on each other in the most meaningful manner. By pursuing less the same methodology of reduction one comes to the unique fact of actualization. Thus without confirming the uniqueness of the educand, no program of education can be commenced.

Why Universal?

The uniqueness of an individual, the individual's position and the individual's structural and functional reality are stemming from a homogeneity that constitute the universal concept of space and time. There is an ever-changing, shifting, moving, streaming flux of being which is held paradoxically in the changeless law of purposive change. Thus the universal is a matrix of innumerable varieties of uniqueness. This brings the categorized requirements of reaffirming the time commencement and it's closure. Thus space time continuum necessitates the individual to be unique. The same law necessitates the uniqueness of the individual to generate the universality of the social matrix to which uniqueness belongs.

What Order Follows When Relating the Uniqueness to Universality?

The incomparable uniqueness and universality gives the monitoring of the greatest theme of search in education. Our continuous search is for becoming fully conversant with values of the highest order. The values invariably belong to the relationship between two unique units and as if in magic both the unique and the universal contribute to the universality of the flux of being. In other words the most desirable study is to decipher all values to make the most valuable probe into the seemingly irrefutable values and make every individual able to arrive at the certitude that can be self-evident. The probability thus resides in the varying and variegating relationship between several sets of uniqueness.

Is it Possible in the Carving of a Program in the Search for the Possibility Without Recognizing the Position That Leads to a Certain Possibility?

The probability of healthy relationship btween units and maintianing the position of a unique perosn can be a hypothesis which may bring contraries. The epistemologies of the unique and the univerals can be correlated only by designing an overall epistemology of the unique and the universals. This is achieved only by exposing the unique individual to the universal society and the universal society coming into encounter with various units which all share collectively. What results from it is well known in the world of science as evolution.

We begin this course of study with an invitation to those who understand that they may have to plunge into fundamentals. For that they may have to question the precedent convictions which are honored ad the bulwark of faith held true for many eons.

At the first step of our entry into this universal search, let each one of us prepare our own bio-data as a value seeker. Use the following chart for it:

1. Time of birth
2. Exact place where you were born.
3. The name and a short history of your father.
4. The name and a short history of your mother.
5. The structure of your family and your position in it.
6. You can leave out any comment of the schooling you had and the public programs in which you happened to be associated with. Instead give genuine questions that have come to your mind up to now.
7. The search you have made, if any.
8. Is the search continuing as an inner urge or have you given it up to revise and restart?
9. What are your personal convictions about you, your relationship with your most intimate partner or co-worker with whom you share your most intimate thoughts?
10. Do you have any religious faith? If yes, what?
a. To what conclusion has that taken you?
b. Are you fully satisfied?
11. If you are joining the course of studies of the Narayana Gurukula Foundation what considerations prompt you to look into its possibilities and probabilities?
12. What is the exact field where you want to actualize your highest search?

Consolation of Philosophy (Latin: Consolatio Philosophiae) is a philosophical work by Boethius written in about the year AD 524. It has been described as the single most important and influential work in the West in Medieval and early Renaissance Christianity, and is also the last great work that can be called Classical.

Some Images from the life and teachings of Boethius


This early printed book has many hand-painted illustrations depicting Lady Philosophy and scenes of daily life in fifteenth-century Ghent (1485)



From a 1385 Italian manuscript of the Consolation: Miniatures of Boethius teaching and in prison



Lady Fortune with the Wheel of Fortune in a medieval manuscript of a work by Boccaccio; Consolation of Philosophy was responsible for the popularity of the goddess of Fortune and the wheel of fortune in the Middle Ages

"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better than not to think at all."
"All formal dogmatic religions are fallacious and must never be accepted by self-respecting persons as final."
"Life is an unfoldment, and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend. To understand the things that are at our door is the best preparation for understanding those that lie beyond"

Hypatia of Alexandria: C370-415AD

Follower of Plotinius who developed neo-Platonism at Alexandria from about 400 to her death in 415. She was so well-known, apparently, that correspondence addressed only to "The Philosopher" is said to have reached her.

Also a leading mathematician and astronomer, she is thought to have taught ideas relating to different levels of reality and humanity's ability to understand them. She seems to have believed that everything in the natural world emanates from "the one" - and that human beings lack the mental capacity fully to comprehend ult imate reality.

Her subsequent obscurity probably reflects the fact that none of her work survives (although letters from a pupil do). It appears, however, that her influence made the city's Christian community feel threatened - perhaps partly because of her emphasis on the value of science. She was torn to death by a Christian mob (including monks armed with oyster shells). Admirers revere her as a philosophical martyr comparable to Socrates.


THE TRAGEDY OF HYPATIA

by John Spiers

The acknowledged head of the Platonic Academy at Alexandria, Hypatia’s martyrdom at the hands of a monk-led rabble, marks the first great blot of dogmatic intolerance in the records of orthodox Christianity

Millions of people have seen one or all of the many spectacular films depicting life in Roman times, and there have been quite a number and probably more to come showing the courage of Christian martyrs under the tyranny of the Roman emperors. But it is hardly likely that more than one cinema-goer in a hundred thousand has heard of Hypatia. A hush-hush curtain spreads over her name, and yet compared with many a saint of the Church, Hypatia was a far more important individual, being the recognized Head of the Greek philosophic world.

The Christians murdered Hypatia -- savagely -- in a Church! Such a scandalous, unheard-of deed is unlikely to be the central theme of any of these cinemascopic entertainments. People can stand seeing Christians being nobly slaughtered by pagans. It goes to prove the intolerance of the opposition. Non-Christians are expected to be brutal. But when a proved intolerance is equally manifested on the part of Christians themselves, as soon as they stepped into imperial power in the person of the Spaniard, the emperor Theodosius in the year 379, there is silence.

Her Eminence: Hypatia lived during the reign of Theodosius and his sons (who divided the Empire at Rome and Byzantium between them). Hypatia was born at Alexandria, a city which for hundreds of years had been famed as the great meeting-place of the whole world, where Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Persian and Indian met in commerce and above all in religion and philosophy. Until the dictatorship of the Christian emperors it had always had an open character. Great teachers had achieved fame in its halls, and the noble Plotinus, some 200 years earlier, had found his Guru at Alexandria in the person of Ammonius the Sack-Bearer (probably an Indian), as had also Origen who was a Christian, and between these pupils, one pagan and one a follower of Jesus, there was no quarrel. The memories of the great Library (burnt accidentally when Julius Caesar was there) lingered on in what was left of it, and in the later additions of three centuries. The official language was Greek and great scholars whose names are still in use were proud to belong to his university city of the old world. Euclid was an Alexandrian and so was Eratosthenes who correctly measured the globe, and there was Apollonius who wrote on conic sections. Hipparchus charted the stars and here also Hero devised a steam engine.

To rise to academical eminence in such a centre as Alexandria was therefore difficult, and yet Hypatia, a Greek woman, daughter of Theon, a mathematician, filled the highest seat of honor. To thousands of pupils who flocked to hear her lectures she was the incarnation of wisdom, a veritable Athena, a true disciple of Plato and Plotinus. She seems to have been an only child, and she assisted her father in his learned commentaries, as well as writing commentaries herself on learned subjects like astronomy and mathematics.

Hypatia was noted for four things: her modesty, her beauty, her eloquence and her devotion to philosophy. All her contemporaries of whom there is record bear witness to these four qualities. Many sincere Christians who strove to know something of philosophy, attended her lectures, and among them was a student called Synusius, who after wards became the Bishop of Ptolemais. His letters to her which are extant, are full of reverence and praise. He asks her about the construction of an instrument for ascertaining the positions of the planets and stars, called an astrolabe. She was also on friendly terms with the highest officer of the land, the Prefect of Alexandria, a “pagan” named Orestes.

Why she was murdered: But her advent was at an ill time. Only one hundred years before, the Christians were being persecuted most atrociously by Diocletian, the Roman emperor. Now, although the tables were turned, and a Christian emperor ruled at Constantinople, the memory of those years still persisted, smouldering like an underground fire. And it was Hypatia’s misfortune to be the innocent victim of an occasion for that fire of hate to burst out.

In the year 412 Cyril was made Bishop of Alexandria and there began a kind of minor inquisition, for Cyril wanted power for the church and he was, at the same time, representative of that zealous bigotry which marks many Western theologians. Cyril was the main supporter of the creedal dogma that the Virgin Mary was Theotokos, the Mother of God, and managed to get twelve anathemas on the subject accepted at the general church Council of Epesus in 431. Already there had been rumblings of the hatred-response of the Christians. The great statue of Serapis or Siris had been destroyed by the Christians. The Egyptian Trinity Osiris-Isis-Horus was clearly a rival to the new revalued Christian Trinity, and it had to go.

How irritating for Cyril then, to be bishop of a stronghold of the new religion, and to have even his own best intelligences stolen by a beautiful pagan woman. No compromise was possible for a man of his type. The danger must be stopped.

It was easy. In March, 415, led by one Peter the Reader, a mob of monks from one of the many monasteries, abducted Hypatia when she was returning from one of her lectures. They stirred up the Christian crowd and carried Hypatia to a church - yes, a church! There they stripped her, flayed her with oyster-shells and burnt her poor body piecemeal...

Thus they thought to kill philosophy by savaging an innocent woman. So did the torturers of
Spain and the witch-burners of Scotland and Massachusetts even a few hundred years ago. They all thought that by hurting and liquidating humans they could stifle supposedly rival views. But one Hypatia for her philosophy is worth a thousand emperors and plaster saints. There is no outward monument to this last of the classical Greek philosophers, but in the hall of the Absolute she lives eternally, a lovely light bright in the midst of a light of loveliness.






Illumination from the Liber Scivias showing Hildegard receiving a vision and dictating to her scribe and secretary

Hildegard of Bingen (German: Hildegard von Bingen; Latin: Hildegardis Bingensis; 1098 – 17 September 1179), also known as Blessed Hildegard and Saint Hildegard, was a German magistra who later founded (Rupertsberg in 1150 and Eibingen in 1165) in the third quarter of the 12th century.
Hildegard of Bingen was an abbess, artist, author, counselor, linguist, naturalist, scientist, philosopher, physician, herbalist, poet, activist, visionary, and composer. She is the first composer for whom a biography exists and one of her works, the Ordo Virtutum is the first form, and possible origination, of opera [1][2]
She wrote theological, botanical and medicinal texts, as welll as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and the first surviving morality play, while supervising brilliant miniature illuminations. A biographer, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, described Hildegard of Bingen as a polymath in the 2007 publication, Hildegard of Bingen: A Spiritual Reader.

Philosophy

The word 'Philosophy', meaning "love of wisdom" comes from the Greek 'philein', to love + 'sophia', wisdom.
In the Western world, philosophical pursuits are mainly generated by one's curiosity to know Truth, whereas in India, philosophical pursuits also imply the disciplining of one's life in the light of one's best knowledge. In the pursuit of wisdom the seeker should have at least a hypothetical notion of the kind of truth he or she seeks. That will decide the epistemological characteristics of the pursuit. The word "epistemology" is derived from the Greek word "episteme" which means knowledge.
Two Sanskrit words which come closest in meaning to "philosophy" are 'darshana' and 'tattva jnana'. 'Darshana' means the envisioning of truth. 'Tattva-jnana' means knowledge of the fundamentals. 'Tttva-jnana' is constituted of three terms: 'tat'. 'tvam' and 'jnana'. 'Tat' means "That"; 'tvam' means "you"; 'jnana' is "knowledge. In other words, it is knowledge about 'tat' the universal, and 'tvam' the particular.

Dear Friends,

The inaugural session of a rather ambitious project to learn the wisdom traditions of the Western world began in a modest way with a group of friends in a coffee shop in a book store. There is a certain degree of romance attached to such a setting considering the intellectual ferment that has taken place in coffee shops all around the world.

There are challenges to face when undertaking such a study. The first being the technical terms used by philosophers. They generally use ordinary words but give them special meanings. The word "Form" used by Plato is one such example. We, living in India, have our own heritage and traditions which have a lot to offer. In this study we have set aside any prejudice and learn with an unbiased mind the teachings of masters whose words have stood the test of time. We still hear the names of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Parmenides, Heraclitus, Plotinus, Diogenes, and many many others, and thus we understand that their insights are valuable and can enrich and deepen our own understanding about the perennial questions that always vex our thinking species. May this study broaden our intellectual horizon.

Given below is an entry on Plato from the Encyclopedia of Mysticism. The dialogues mentioned are:
1. The Republic
2. Meno
3. Phaedo
4. Phaedrus
5. The Symposium
6. Theaetetus
7. Timaeus

With the help of the comments in the Encyclopedia we can chose one of the above Dialogues for detailed study. We can also conduct our own independent research through the internet and relevant books. Please feel free to share any insights and comments.

For those of you interested in Neuroscience, you may read and listen to Dr. Ramachandran's The Emerging Mind lectures on the web:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/



Plato (427 - 347)

Athenian philosopher. Socrates taught him to search for ethical definitions, disciples of Heraclitus that the world of our senses is in a condition of constant change, disciples of Parmenides that true reality cannot change. Contact with Pythagoreans in Magna Graecia showed him that in Geometry we deal in propositions which are never more than approximately true of the visible world, but are absolutely and immutably true of the triangles and circles we can perceive with our minds. So he came to his Theory of Forms (or ‘Ideas’). True reality is unchanging, and is perceived with the mind. The perfect Triangle is imperfectly materialized in the physical triangle, the perfect Table in the tangible table, perfect Beauty in beautiful objects, perfect Justice in human actions. The things of this world may ‘imitate’ or ‘participate’ in the perfect Forms, but they are never more than shadows or reflections. ‘Plato’ said Diogenes ‘I see tables and cups but not Tableness and Cupness.’ ‘Precisely,’ said Plato, ‘because you need eyes to perceive tables and cups , and you have those; you need intelligence to perceive Tableness and Cupness, and that you do not possess.’ In The Republic he compares mankind with prisoners in an underground cave, watching shadows on a wall (The Myth of the Cave). The philosophers is the man who is released into the daylight. At first he is blinded by the brilliance, but gradually his eyes grow accustomed to the light and he sees objects, nor shadows, and knows the shadows for what they are. If he then goes back into the cave tells the prisoners that they are living in a world of illusion they will mock him. Nonetheless, go back he must.

The soul which knows the Forms must itself be immortal since they are eternal and only like can know it. Plato put forward in the Meno and Phaedo a doctrine of Recollection. The soul has known the Forms before birth, but ‘our birth is but a sleep and forgetting’ and material objects may serve for us a reminder of eternal truths. Plato took from the Pythagoreans the doctrines of transmigration and reincarnation. He expounded the immortality of the soul in mythical form at the end of Phaedo and The Republic. But the soul itself has a rational and an irrational element, and it seems that ultimately the rational alone survives.

The aspiration of the soul to things higher is called Eros, Love. Plato gives an account of it in Phaedrus and The Symposium. In the latter the ultimate vision is one of Beauty. It was a passage which gripped the imagination of Shelly: ‘He who has been instructed thus far in the science of Love, and has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the absolute Beauty...he will see a Beauty eternal, nor growing or decaying, not waxing not waning; nor will it be fair here and foul there, nor depending on time or circumstance or place, as if fair to some, and foul to others; nor shall Beauty appear to him in the likeness of a face or hand, nor embodied in any sort of form whatever...whether of heaven or of earth; but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither increase nor diminution, nor any other change...O think you...that it would be an ignoble life for a man to be ever looking thither and with his proper faculty contemplating the absolute Beauty and to be living in its presence? Are you not rather convinced that he who thus sees Beauty as only it can be seen, will be specially fortuned? and that, since he is in contact not with images but with realities, he will give birth not to images, but to Truth itself? And being thus the parent and nurse of true virtue it will be his lot to become a friend of God, and so far as any man can be, immortal and absolute.’ (Sym. 210E-212A tr. R. Bridges.)

In The Republic the ultimate is the Form of the Good, Good not in a merely ethical sense, but representing the source of all value and all excellence. As the Forms are Reality, and are contrasted with the material world as Being to Becoming, the Form of the Good is said to be ‘beyond reality’ or ‘beyond being’. It is the source of knowledge: as the sun enables the eye to see and objects to be seen, so the Form of the Good enables the mind to know and the Forms to be known. Scholars have argued whether Plato identifies the Form of the Good with God. Certainly he does not explicitly do so.

In Theaetetus (176 A-B) Plato wrote that because of the imperfections of earth we ought to try to escape as speedily as possible to the place of the gods. To escape means so far as possible to become like God; and that means to combine righteousness and holiness with wisdom. This concept of ‘likeness to God’ is frequently quoted by later writers.

Plato’s most influential work on subsequent religious thought was Timaeus, a kind of hymn of creation. The divine Craftsman is good and desires all things to be like himself. So he brings order out of chaos and fashions a world-soul; the cosmos is thus a living creature endowed with life and intelligence. The material universe includes fire and earth to make it visible and tangible, and the other elements to give it proportion. The Father creates the divine heavenly bodies, the visible gods; and entrusts to them the fashioning of the mortal part of man; he himself creates, from what is left over from the creation of the world-soul, souls equal in number to the stars. Physical objects are produced by the imprint of the Forms on matter within the Receptacle of space. The vital aspect of the cosmology of Timaeus is that soul bridges the worlds of being and becoming.

Plato is somewhere at the root of nearly all Western mystical philosophy.



Socrates preparing to drink hemlock