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Parashat Chukat 5781 — 06/19/2021

Parashat Chukat 5781 — 06/19/2021

Beginning with Bereishit 5781 (17 October 2020) we embarked on a new format. We will be considering Rambam’s (Maimonides’) great philosophical work Moreh Nevukim (Guide for the Perplexed) in the light of the knowledge of Vedic Science as expounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The individual essays will therefore not necessarily have anything to do with the weekly Torah portion, although certainly there will be plenty of references to the Torah, the rest of the Bible, and to the Rabbinic literature. For Bereishit we described the project. The next four parshiyyot, Noach through Chayei Sarah, laid out a foundational understanding of Vedic Science, to the degree I am capable of doing so. Beginning with Toledot we started examining Moreh Nevukim.

Bamidbar 19:1-22:1

Moving on to other influences on Rambam’s philosophy, we come to Avicenna (980-1036). Prof. Pines writes:

Avicenna (d. 1056) is the only eminent philosopher considered as belonging to the Aristotelian school with regard to whom Maimonides, in his letter to Ibn Tibbon, expresses some reservations and even some distrust. From a certain point of view this attitude is quite understandable. On his own showing, Avicenna was no orthodox Peripatetic at all (he rather tends to overemphasize his freedom from this tradition). And he certainly put forward new views that explain, though they do not justify, the accusation leveled against him by Averroes that he tried to contaminate the philosophic doctrine with suitably modified ideas deriving in the last analysis from the kalam. This charge was characteristic for the rigoristic school of Spanish Aristotelianism, to which both Averroes and, albeit to a lesser extent, Maimonides belonged.

I would note here that Avicenna was born in what is now Uzbekistan and flourished in Persia (Hamadan to be specific, about 320 km SW of modern-day Teheran). The “rigoristic school of Spanish Aristotelianism” was of course at the far western end of the Islamic world, while Persia, in the 11th century, was more or less the far east as far as Islam goes. The Mughal conquest of India came 5 centuries later. This by itself would speak to a divergence in style and substance, especially given the fact that correspondence might take months to go back and forth. This was before the internet of course. Perhaps more important, the scholars of Spain were close to Greece, and Greek patterns of thought would be an obvious influence, leading to a more orthodox Aristotelianism. Avicenna, on the other hand, was close to India, and it is not a stretch to believe that he was aware of, and perhaps influenced by, the rich philosophical tradition to his east.

In fact, Prof. Pines continues:

Moreover, Avicenna’s system, which teaches inter alia that the individual soul survives the death of the body and lives eternally, and which regards the mystical experience of the Sufis as a valid subject for philosophic investigation and attempts to utilize it in its theory of prophecy, is much more consonant with religious feeling – to use a modern, anachronistic, and perhaps irrelevant term – and doubtless also with religion tout court as conceived in the Middle Ages than the doctrine of the orthodox Aristotelians. If Maimonides had been the eclectic and the apologist he is sometimes thought to have been, and if his aim had been merely to devise some sort of a compromise between, and amalgam of, philosophy and a religion freed from the reproach of backwardness and obscurantism, Avicenna would have provided the perfect solution both because of his teaching and of his reputation. He might have been regarded as giving religion, or at least the varieties of religious experience, the hallmark of intellectual respectability. The fact that, regarding the crucial point in which religion and prophecy are involved, Maimonides did not follow Avicenna’s lead (though he did so with respect to other questions), indicates the quality of his feeling about philosophic truth as he saw it. It shows that he was not interested in apologetics at any price, or even in apologetics at all, if the word means the cutting and pruning of philosophic theory so that it should accord with religious dogmas.

Here I would just like to point out the Sufism is associated with Persian Islam (although it certainly exists all over the Islamic world, especially nowadays), and hence it makes sense that Avicenna would give their teachings greater weight than other Islamic scholars. Further, one of the great features of Sufism is its emphasis of direct experience of the Divine, which we can take as experience of the Transcendent. India, where the Veda has been preserved, naturally has a long tradition of contact with the Transcendent, and I would be quite surprised if that knowledge, perhaps even techniques, did not radiate out to the surrounding lands.

Continuing on with Prof. Pines’ discussion, he writes: Moreover, Avicenna’s system, which teaches inter alia that the individual soul survives the death of the body and lives eternally, and which regards the mystical experience of the Sufis as a valid subject for philosophic investigation and attempts to utilize it in its theory of prophecy, is much more consonant with religious feeling – to use a modern, anachronistic, and perhaps irrelevant term – and doubtless also with religion tout court as conceived in the Middle Ages than the doctrine of the orthodox Aristotelians.

There are two basic means of gaining knowledge – objective and subjective. The objective means of gaining knowledge is the basis of Western science, which has its basis in Greek philosophy. (It is obvious that the Greeks were not experimental scientists in the modern sense – that development came 2000 years later in Northern Europe.) The advantage of the objective method is that, more or less, objects are not variable. If I do an experiment today in New York and the same experiment tomorrow in New Delhi, I will get the same results. Even in quantum mechanics, the results will be statistically the same, if not the same for each repetition of the experiment.

Our subjectivity, on the other hand, is quite variable. Our evaluation of the world depends on our moods, on what has happened during the day, on many factors, some obvious and some not so obvious. If we are to use the subjective means of gaining knowledge, it has to be on the basis of a state of consciousness that is non-variable, and this state is Transcendental Consciousness. Since, according to Vedic Science, and, I believe, the Zohar, Transcendental Consciousness is the basis of all creation, then if our awareness is established on this level, we own the whole of creation within us. This is what “religious mystics” have taught from time immemorial. According to Prof. Pines, “orthodox Aristotelianism” rejects the possibility of gaining knowledge this way, as do most people, especially most scientists, in our age.

Apparently, this is why Avicenna is excoriated for “contaminating” Aristotle’s philosophy. One would assume that since Rambam wishes to meld Jewish teaching, which largely has a prophetic basis (i.e. direct cognition, subjectively), that he would go with Avicenna’s formulations, but Prof. Pines assures us that that is not the case. We will delve further into this issue as we go along.