An Amazon review of “Invading the Sacred” (by reviewer Sutapas Bhattacharya).
My Note:
The book describes how inadequately trained and maliciously motivated American scholars in the field of religion use the general ignorance about Hinduism to misinterpret, distort, and outright demonize Hindu thought and history.
What is significant for geo-political strategy is that Tantric Saivism, which the author mentions as the most accurate Indic portrait of consciousness, is preserved in its best form in the South of India, the locus of Western interference in Indian politics, under the guise of a war on terror or in the course of Afro-Dravidic consciousness-raising.
Western incursions into South India have been bent on dispossessing Hindu temples via state interference mediated by so-called secular Marxists, who turn out to be proxies for the power-elite.
Through eco-feminism centered around the Shekinah (the Kabbalistic correlate or derivative, of the divine feminine of Tantric Saivism), the goal is to appropriate the thought of Hinduism, divorce it from its spiritual heritage, and reinsert it into a materialistic-hedonistic philosophy consonant with the vision of the elites.
Hence the continuing psychic war on India I’ve blogged about:
Here is the review:
“Indians who criticize Western scholars in regard to their dubious interpretations of Hinduism and Indian history are generally denounced as Hindu fundamentalists, fascists and right wingers in order to detract from issue of Western racism. I am in fact a left-leaning Indian and no Hindu fundamentalist, see my 1999 book on the synthesis of Science and Mysticism, in which I attack the BJP. On seeing this book I was amazed that long-discredited Freudian superstitions (see below) are allowed to pass as scholarship in academia – this book does not challenge the basis of Psychoanalysis, rather an Appendix essay by an American psychoanalyst is given which questions the validity of such Eurocentric Freudian reductionism to the Indian context and mysticism. I will give scientific arguments undermining Freud below. See the website […] the sacred.com for more info. Note also that Jeff Kripal who mistranslated Bengali words like ‘lap, head and touching softly’ as ‘genitals, phallus and sodomy’ in his attempt to portray Ramakrishna as a homosexual pedophile is now linked to the New Age Esalen Institute!
Adam Curtis showed in his BBC Series Century of the Self that Freud’s dubious ideas caught on in the USA through the influence of his nephew Edward Bernays due to Freud’s titillating emphasis on SEX. Similarly we find that Wendy Doniger’s works sell because she focuses on sex, sex and nothing but the sex, writing racy books with the sex element hyped up in spite of their inauthenticity and her struggling with first year Sanskrit! I was amused by de Nicolas’ example of how she used a Hebrew translation for a Vedic word making ‘the world of possibilities’ into ‘the one-footed goat’![Lila: Shades of Naomi Wolf….]
I had noticed in 1991 that the 6th East-West Philosophy Congress book “Culture and Modernity” edited by Advaita scholar Eliot Deutsch gave pride of first place to Eliminative Materialist Richard Rorty who believes that Consciousness does not really exist!Rorty asserted that “ascetic priests” like Heidegger and Brahmins sublimate their sex drives and pretend to ‘penetrate the veil of appearances’ so as to claim to be more manly than the warriors!
Thus first position in a East-West philosophy book was given to an American who not only denies the reality of Consciousness (the (primary reality of Advaita Vedanta and much Buddhism) but uses the thoroughly discredited Freudian sex-mythology to supposedly undermine the claims of mystics to transcend mundane reality!
Were Hildegard, Mechthilde and Teresa trying to be more manly!
I also noticed in 2002 that Thomas Blom Hansen in his “The Saffron Wave” chastised Hindu Nationalists for reworking German Romanticist ideas (with no mention of the heavy Indian philosophical influence behind Romanticism founded by the Sanskritist Schlegels) whilst himself referring to the likes of Freud and Lacan (whose pretensions to Einstein-like genius were exposed in “Fashionable Nonsense”) as if these European thinkers were ‘scientific’.
Coming from a Science background and having identified the physical correlate of the Divine Light (cit, Atman, Buddha Nature, Godhead)with overwhelming empirical evidence for this and showing how Science and the core Indian transcendental mystical picture are integrated, I basically treated such ludicrous Freudian myths with the contempt they deserve.
Indeed, I am currently writing a comprehensive section entitled “The Failings of Western Philosophies, Psychologies and Science in regard to Mysticism and Consciousness” including a subsection “Sigmund Freud’s Sexual Superstitions and the Regression to the Womb Myth”. In fact my overall analyses show by undermining every possible form of western ontology that the only viable ontology is one based on distinctionless Pure Consciousness as the Ground from which physical phenomena manifest as in Tantric Kashmir Saivism – i.e. a logical argument by elimination of alternatives rather than “experience it in mystical union”.
I was just reading this week Thompson and Madigan (2005) Memory (a survey of recent research)which asserted that there is no scientific evidence supporting Freud’s key notion of unconscious Repression of memories.
David Bakan’s 1958 “Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition” showed that Freud secularised Kabbala omitting supernatural elements in his “psychoanalysis”. In 1973 Morton Schatzman in his ‘Soul Murder’ showed that Schreber’s father had disciplinary devices and real child abuse had been misinterpreted by Freud as unconscious fantasy based on the nonsensical Oedipus Complex idea! In the 1980s Masson’s “Assault on the Truth” and Peck’s “The People of the Lie” continued to undermine the Freud Cult.
Freud urged Jung never to abandon the sexual theory and even “we must make a dogma” of it. Jung stated that F’s obsession with the primal incest archetype led to dogmatic rigidity. Medical doctor and psychiatrist Anthony Stevens rubbishes Freudian interpretations of dreams of predatory animals as ‘fear of castration’ when REM dream research shows that such instinctual dreams of being chased prepare all young mammals for life’s dangers. F was also wrong to locate all mental problem origins in infancy as Stevens shows adolescence and attaining ‘manhood’ etc. are more critical than early childhood. Schwarz and Begley point out that Foot Fetishism is explained by the brain maps of feet being adjacent to maps of genitals with some overlap, contrary to F’s ideas about sexual deviations. Griffin and Tyrrell whose work is followed by the UK NHS rubbish Freudian talk therapy as it usurps normal healing processes based on sleep etc.
Finally, in regard to F’s primary notion of the Libido, such a notion of a “sexual energy” is just nonsense scientifically as opposed to Jung’s notion of Libido as a generalized psychical energy. Indeed, Jordens essay on Libido and the Prana/Atman identity in Harold Coward’s “Jung and Eastern Thought” provides one of the many pieces of evidence supporting my identification of the Atman/Prana with the underlying activating energy of the brainwaves of the brainstem Reticular Activating System. This ties in with Jung’s ideas of generalised energy as the RAS is simply that, the energy underlying all gross brain activity and the brainstem Reticular Formation is the only structure essential for consciousness. Thus whilst undermining more serious philosophical ideas, my RAS brainwave/Light of Pure Consciousness correlation also undermines the nonsensical Freudian myth of an underlying Sexual libido!”
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Sutapas Bhattacharya