thoughts on gymnastics and Hinduism

Gymnastics has started up again, I am super excited about that. They got rid of Saturdays for the summer, and I'd been waiting all summer for the fall to come so I could start going again. Went the first time on Saturday, and... oh so good. It's funny, I've been thinking a lot lately about what I want out of life, and have been realizing how totally lost I am. But when I sit down and try to figure it out, I always come back to the only thing that I know for absolute sure I want... which is to be able to do gymnastics every day of the week. I can't accomplish that in the town I'm living in--the YMCA is so sick of me bugging them about it, they no longer even return my phone-calls. And the other gymnastics programs in town are similarly kids only. I don't mind driving up to Chicago once per week for the time being, but I will eventually need more than once a week. I'm ok with waiting though. But as a long term goal, I do hope to move toward that within the next 10 years.

I spent 10 hours on Sunday reading Wikipedia articles on Hinduism. I've had this happen to me before, reading too much Wikipedia in one day--I've noticed it's one of the few things lately that I'm somewhat dangerously addicted to. I broke for 30 minutes to eat lunch, although for some of that half hour I just brought my food over to the computer to read while I was eating! Literally, when I get interested in a topic on Wikipedia, I find it's almost impossible to pull myself away from the computer, I just keep saying "1 more click, I have to read this link and then I'll go do something else!" Fortunately, as opposed to most weekends where I've got lots of stuff I wanted to get done, I really did have enough time to relax that weekend, and reading Wikipedia is one of the most relaxing things for me. Normally, 10 hours of Wikipedia reading I would consider "way too much" but it was only slightly too much this time because I got a lot out of it and enjoyed it.

The more I read about Hinduism, the more I realized how much more complex it is than any other religion I've encountered. Just trying to find all of the names of the various sacred texts involved took me through at least 10 pages alone, and I'm not quite sure I've found them all (and certainly don't remember them all). The main ones that stick out in my mind though are the 4 Vedas, the Upanishads (there's about 200 of them!), the Brahma Sutras, and the Puranas. This only scratches the surface though, and as I say, I don't even remember most of the names of the texts that I read about, and I didn't even read any of them directly (although I did briefly open up one of the Upanishads to see what it looked like). I also don't think I even scratched the surface on getting a handle on all the different variants of Hinduism. Unlike much simpler more narrow coherent religions like Christianity, there is so much more variation within it. For example, there are monotheistic sects of Hinduism, there are polytheistic sects, and there are atheist and/or pantheist sects. There are dualist versions of Hinduism, and also non-dualist versions.

So far, the one that stands out as the most resonant with me and interesting to me, is Advaita Vedanta. (Although that's not to say there isn't some other version that would be better that I haven't found yet.) This interpretation actually makes so many of my confusing thoughts about how to view deities make more sense. In Advaita Vedanta, Brahman is absolute, ultimate reality... the continuous whole that has no attributes, boundaries, form or shape of its own. In physics, you'd call this the "unified field theory" or the "theory of everything". Pantheists would call this "God" but not regular monotheists since it is not a someone but a something. The problem is, Brahman is an abstraction that stands for everything but as such has no properties or attributes to distinguish it from anything else... since there *is* nothing else. So how can you possibly comprehend it? There's not really any way to actively meditate on it or to worship it. The solution, according to Advaita Vedanta, is for humans to personify Brahman by projecting animate qualities onto it, which then becomes an omnipotent being called Ishvara (essentially, the same as God or Allah from monotheistic religions). But this still leaves Ishvara mostly formless and personalityless. So you have to project more qualities onto Ishvara, which then splits Him into the holy trinity (or as Hindus call it, the Trimurti)... Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (creator, maintainer, and destroyer... in physics, these are called "creation operator", "propagator", and "annihilation operator"). These three deities then each have 11 eminations, 11 different even more concrete ways in which they can appear to humans on earth. (On a side note, it's a somewhat interesting numerological coincidence that string theory (well, really M-Theory) requires 11 dimensions of spacetime, and the Qabalastic tree of life involves 11 Sephirot; I'm not sure if anyone has tried to line either of these up with the 11 forms of each Hindu god though). Similarly, there are 3 goddesses, the Tridevi: Lakshmi, Parvati, and Saraswati. The female counterparts of the holy trinity. They also each have 11 eminations. This leads to a total of 33 gods and 33 godesses, although it's interesting that this interpretation sort of combines atheism, pantheism, theism, and polytheism all into one unified theory. It makes a lot of sense to me posed in that way. The abstract formless attributeless Brahman is more true but less useful than if you split it into more concrete manifestations and worship those individually. (Note: some of the specifics on how the gods and goddesses divide up I may be confusing with other versions of Hinduism, but putting together lots of different stuff I've read, some a while back, this is the most coherent picture I can come up with.)

Another thing I really like about Advaita Vedanta is that it's explicitly non-dualist. There are other versions of Hinduism (for instance, Dvaita Vedanta) where they succumb to dualism, and believe--as Descartes mistakenly did--that there is both a spirit world and a material world, or at least both of those different kinds of substances in the world. This is something I think modern science has pretty thoroughly refuted. I knew that Buddhism for the most part was non-dualist, but it's encouraging to see there are threads of Hinduism that are as well. Unfortunately I get the sense that most people who believe in Advaita Vedanta are more like idealists than materialists, but in some ways that seems like a minor difference compared to the difference between dualism and monism. (After all, in some ways you could just view it as different take on what the best word is to call the single substance that makes up everything... and admittedly there are good reasons why really neither of the two standard choices offered are quite right. I just happen to think that materialism is the clear cut answer if you had to choose one or the other).

Also, I really like the phrase "Ayamātmā brahmā", something from the Mandukya Upanishad. It means "This Atman is Brahman". Atman is the soul of an individual, and Brahman is the whole universe (or God, in the pantheistic sense). It identifies part with whole in a very holographic way. I haven't had this thought about any phrase since I got my first tattoo, but suddenly I had the thought that this would make a really awesome tattoo! Not that I would get it without doing more research into what it really means and how it connects to other things. But it's a neat idea, and very parallel to similar thoughts I've had over the past few years. Strange that all of this was just sitting here all of the time, and I never read it until now... putting these different pieces together.