Bhairitu: "He's not the only guru by a long shot who thought the mantras came about by trial and error instead of being "cognized". So they were "recognized" instead."
I look to science when credible research is available. However, lots of life does not (yet) have substantial numbers of of peer-reviewed double blind studies (if applicable) to help validate a hypothesis. For me, another source of (some) validation, is the fruits of evolutionary advantage. Whether in insight was cognized, or recognized, seen under the influence, or in dreams, deduced, or brainstormed, etc, is not key. The core question is whether some traditional practice (medicinal, health, spiritual, psychological, artistic, customs, rituals) provided some evolutionary advantage over 100s of not 1000's of generations. That is, on day 1, who knows, it may have been a "Life of Brian" type scene, of 1000 different crazy and diverse "truths" being pronounced -- no matter how derived. However, some groups (families, tribes, villages, cultures, etc) survived, others did not. Undoubtedly, some instances of "success" were undoubtedly random. Spurious correlations (of which some great and beautiful examples were posted by someone the other day.) A FEW actually (may have had) a causal effect whereby A did (a majority of the time) result in B (particularly if you did it with C and D co-factors, etc). . The statistical probability that a particular intervention (ritual, custom, practice) provided some survival (affluence, success, well-being) value gets stronger with each successive generation of "practicioners". Over time, over many generations, practices based on spurious correlations become less. Practices with some causal power increase. Over 100's of generations, the probability of some sustained cultural practice being a fluke, a random outcome, a spurious correlation), becomes smaller. And over 100's of generations, I presume many variations of rituals, customs, practices etc were tweaked and outcomes observed. More successful variations were sustained, others dropped off. Edison said he never failed when attempting to develop a new technology, but he did find 10,000 things that did not work. The process of evolution advantage might be viewed in similar vein. 1000's of variations of ritual, practices, customs were conducted, over 100's of generations. Many were found to not work and were discarded, and the few success stories were kept and passed on to subsequent generations. These successful practices provided an evolutionary advantage to these particular groups, families, villages, tribes or networks. They tended to succeed and flourish while others, not using that particular practice, ritual, custom did less so, or eventually fizzled out. Someone once quipped "God [or Nature] created Karma and then retired". An alternative hypothesis is that God [Nature] created Evolutionary Advantage and and then retired. (Outside the box, perhaps karma is a tool of evolutionary advantage, or vv.) Reply Delete
