1.0 Introduction: Scientific Analysis of Religious Experience
Within the last few centuries the world has seen many great advances. The most visible ones are the technological breakthroughs that have shrunk the wide world into a village. The modern world has achieved what the ancients only dreamed of or enjoyed only in fantasies. There are also advances made in fields outside the technological but equally important in the long intellectual history of man.
Man has thought about himself for a very long time. Philosophies, religions, social and cultural norms and so forth are products of man's reflecting about himself and his understanding of how the psychological nature of man can be changed for the better, the destructive forces within can be regulated for the betterment of everyone in the community.
With the birth of psychology as a scientific discipline in the nineteenth century, speculative ideas, dogmatic assertions, unfounded hunches and beliefs, superstitions and so forth have given way to a more rational understanding of man. This breakthrough in the approach to understand man himself has not reached its full growth yet. But it is growing steadily as more and more of the social sciences develop and expand. The educational field and modern psychiatry are two good examples of the manner in which the scientific bent of mind is slowly gaining grounds even in areas where man is the focus. Here we are not referring to the positive sciences but rather to the newly emerging hermeneutic or interpretive social sciences, that form of science that developed in India from ancient times with a rigour unknown in the West. {1}.
Religions have remained till today either indifferent or unaware of the possibility of such scientific approaches to deepening religious experience and channeling the religious motivations of man into productive expressions. Some have even built impregnable barriers to safeguard the central dogmas so that they remain unchallenged by the adventurous social scientists. The main objective of such people seems to be to safeguard what they have inherited at whatever cost rather than to deepen and further our knowledge about the deeper recesses of human mind and thereby pattern the social behavior of the community on the basis of a true knowledge of man's real nature .
But fortunately not all religions are organized to be impervious to the scientific approach to its problems. all in the interest of gaining a true knowledge about man and his essence. The chief attraction of Saivism to the modern world appears to be precisely this openness to challenges of whatever kind,
The goal is not preservation of beliefs and dogmas enunciated by some significant individuals in the past but rather knowledge about man and the world that is not further challeangable and discoveries of procedures and practices that are unfailingly efficacious in improving the psychological nature of man.
The modern Saivas have inherited millenniums of effort in this direction of a group of people who have contributed significantly to enrich world culture. As such it is highly possible that among the philosophical and psychological theories that have evolved within the fold of Saivism, there are some that are universally true and hence possibly the terminal knowledge about the essence of man.
Among the ancient Tamils, there arose a school of thought precisely with this claim - the claim that they have reached the terminal phase in the open ended and hermeneutic investigations about the psychic constitution of man. It arose after living through great religions such as Buddhism, Jainism and a host of minor Hindu religions.
Of course, here I am referring to the Saiva Siddhanta school of thought that was the Saiva foundations for the bakti movement in the 5th century that regained Hinduism for India and South East Asia.
The rational foundations of this great religion was brilliantly expounded by Meykandar in the 13th century initiating a very remarkable intellectual revolution in India particularly among the South Indians. This process of reexamining the foundations of religious experience continuously, in order to gain an understanding of it without denying its reality and its essential character has continued to this day and in this long march many brilliant individuals have written numerous treatises making significant advances.
It was my good fortune that I came across a brilliant treatise belonging to this school which summarizes in prose, the essential advances made in this school of thought. The importance of the text is as follows. It is probably one of the most brilliant expositions of the theistic interpretations of religious experience without any recourse to dogmas and revelations. As such one could say that it reveals the essentials of a universal framework for a scientific and objective understanding of the phenomena of religious experience , the philosophical and psychological foundation for not only understanding religious experience but also patterning it both as an individual and collective experience in directions that are efficacious and beneficial.
We are living in a world where several religions coexist. Any understanding of the deep seated commonness beneath the superficially differences will pave the way for a better understanding among the individuals, a greater acceptance of each others cultural norms or values. In view of this, one of the best things I could do in the opportunity that is given to me now is to present the essentials of this text with the hope it would serve as a foundation for reflecting further upon the universal aspects of human religious experience.
( the introduction itself, which is rather long, to be continued )
Loganathan @ Ullaganar
[1] The sciences that were developed by the Tamils are essentially hermeneutic sciences that's emerging also in the West at the moment. The methodology was established at least by Tolkappiyar (300 B.C) if not by some unknown linguists even earlier. In Tol. it is termed Nul Neri, the way of textual analysis, which when translated into Sanskrit became Tantrika (Tantra :text) which later as Tantrism not only lost its original rigor but also degenerated into bizarre forms.
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