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WHEN JIVA UNITES WITH SHIVA !

 When Jiva Unites in Siva

Siva Bhoga there will be;
Like it will be added a Light
That suffuses sentient knowledge;
The body by Mayaic experience harassed,
Will yours be, controlled full;
The Jiva`s pervasiveness
Will everywhere spread.

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contact: suha_babu@hotmail.com for details

BACK COVER:

 

SAIVASIDDHANTHAM: A HERMENEUTIC AND PSYCHO -ANALYTIC INTERPRETATION

(ISBN:978-81-925287-2-4)

 

 

This book takes a new path in the understanding of hidden themes in the traditional tamil saiva religious texts. It studies the overlap between psychoanalysis and saivasiddhantham. This is an academic text meant for readers who have already some idea about this field.  It may be useful for scholars in tamil,saivism, eastern philosophy, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics and psychiatrists who are interested in philosophy. Tamil diaspora  and Saiva associations worldwide may find it most interesting.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

 

DR.GANDHIBABU( 48) is a practicing psychiatrist. He is a medical teacher in annamalai university for more than twenty years. He has a long association with Chidambaram. He was a  graduate of MADRAS MEDICAL COLLEGE( 1982-88).

 

MAJOR RESOURCE BOOKS :

1.Philosophy:

 -Problems of philosophy- Bertrand Russell(1912)

- History of  western philosophy-Bertrand Russell(1946)

-Appearance and reality-F.H.Bradley(1893)

- Indian philosophy – S.Radhakrishnan(1923), Oxford university press , Indian edition-fourth impression.

-Cambridge companion series to philosophers, Cambridge university press, first editions 1995.

2.Tamil:

-Saiva siddhantha contact training program publications(14 volumes)-Thiruvavaduthurai adheenam – Thiruvavaduthurai, Tamilnadu, India. (2008)

-Sandhana sastra texts with commentaries(11volumes)- published by Thirupanadhal kasi madam- Thirupanandhal, Tamilnadu, India.( 2008)

Fourteen meykanda sastras with notes-Dharumapuram adheenam publication-2014.

-108 Upanishads , Ramakrishna mutt publications, Chennai (13 volumes),1991

3.Psychiatry:

-Oxford textbook of philosophy and psychiatry-oxford university press. New Delhi (2007) - 1^st edition.

-Comprehensive textbook of psychiatry by Kaplan&Sadock-William&Wilkins, Baltimore, USA (2009)-8^th edition.

4.Websites:

meykandar@yahoogroups.com  (the site has been a guiding force and I have exchanged my ideas with eminent scholars abroad through this group)

www.himalayanacademy.org  (I have taken the English translations of thirumanthiram from their site)

www.stanford.plato.edu : a very useful information resource in philosophy

www.shaivam.org : very useful source for original literatures and explanations by eminent authors.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

The author sincerely acknowledges and thanks the guidance given by the faculty members and research scholars of the Departments of Tamil, linguistics, history, Philosophy and Psychology,  Annamalai  University , India.

CONCLUSION:

 

 

The fundamental issue in siddhantham study is the metaphysical striving takes route of searching one’s own self. This has resulted in the extensive informations about the mind. This is more like a by-product. Like the ambrosia(amudham)   and “alagaala visham”( poison) emerging when “the cosmic ocean of milk” was churned.

 

 It is the metaphysical core issues matter for a philosophy student. But the byproducts of the self- search have given us a body of thought that has a solid basis for subsequent logical study of manas(mind) and the body. This may have ended up in siddha system of medicine which is still a popular clinical practice in tamilnadu.

 

The core issues of agama philosophy that is pathi, pasu and pasam are well explained in most other works. Therefore I took up the other issues like the  comparative philosophy, psychoanalysis and most importantly the phenomenology in my work. Needless to say there are abundances of improvements that are needed in my task.

 

 The nayanmaar’s life is a good example how religious attachments may go unhealthy if the appropriate steps in the sadhana are not followed. There are ample instructions to follow them systematically in saiva siddhantham especially in the thiruvavaduthurai -pandara texts.

 

What I find is a good similarity between the analogies and symbolisms in both schools. The symbolisms in the folk psychology and scriptures are equalant to the sublimation on psychoanalysis. Study of symbolism is vital for a student of psychology if he ventures into hermeneutics. They are even more essential for the one  who has taken up an in debth study of saiva  siddhantham.

 

 

          It is impossible to say both are same or even attempt at a comparison may be disliked by many scholars. My idea is to find the symbolisms only. Both schools use symbols. The symbols are similar both in terminologies and wider representations in the descriptions.  It is such analogies brought me to speculate both the schools in same light.

 

The siddha system of medicine and  psychology is well known to the world. The social implications it has especially in the sadhana chapters are noteworthy. The sadhana in my opinion are social in their outlook, rather than pure self absorption as many scholars of Hindu philosophy feel.

 

Therefore I make the following final conclusions:

 

1.Siddhantha has a logical scientific message(logical positivism?)

2.it also deals with unconscious dynamics along with core metaphysics.

3.It has hermeneutic, psycho-analytic and phenomenological connotations.

4. it has psychotherapy principles in it to prevent abnormal god attachments.

 

Thiruchitrambalam!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

9.7:CREATION OF LANGUAGE:

The language develops from the SIVA THATHVA.

They are four types:

1. Sukumai vakku:சூக்குமைவாக்கு this is the intuition we get. It has no thought form

2.Paisanthi vakku:பைசாந்திவாக்கு this is in the form of half intuition and half thought.

3.Mathimai vakkuமத்திமைவாக்கு: here the thought is clearly formed and has a linguistic form but cannot be pronounced.

4. Vaigari vakkuவைகாரிவாக்கு: it is fully formed word that can be communicated in a language.

All the vakku forms are from suddha maya and are from the siva thathva.

The cosmogony chapters in saiva siddhantham have no substantial basis for psycho analytic interpretation to my knowledge. Escept that the creation of mind and language are dealt in small manner. There are reasons to  say  the language came first and it created the other physical bodies- from certain descriptions within unmai vilakkam. These aspects are very hermeneutic in a sense that all out interpretations stem from language and the meanings we attribute to symbols in a language[i]. This is very close to our gestalt models of philosophy and modern philosophical hermeneutic theories[ii].

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[i] Thought, communication, and understanding

Language use is a remarkable fact about human beings. The role of language as a vehicle of thought enables human thinking to be as complex and varied as it is. With language one can describe the past or speculate about the future and so deliberate and plan in the light of one’s beliefs about how things stand. Language enables one to imagine counterfactual objects, events, and states of affairs; in this connection it is intimately related to intentionality, the feature of all human thoughts whereby they are essentially about, or directed toward, things outside themselves. Language allows one to share information and to communicate beliefs and speculations, attitudes and emotions. Indeed, it creates the human social world, cementing people into a common history and a common life-experience. Language is equally an instrument of understanding and knowledge; the specialized languages of mathematics and science, for example, enable human beings to construct theories and to make predictions about matters they would otherwise be completely unable to grasp. Language, in short, makes it possible for individual human beings to escape cognitive imprisonment in the here and now. (This confinement, one supposes, is the fate of other animals—for even those that use signaling systems of one kind or another do so only in response to stimulation from their immediate environments.)

The evidently close connection between language and thought does not imply that there can be no thought without language. Although some philosophers and linguists have embraced this view, most regard it as implausible. Prelinguistic infants and at least the higher primates, for example, can solve quite complex problems, such as those involving spatial memory. This indicates real thinking, and it suggests the use of systems of representation—“maps” or “models” of the world—encoded in nonlinguistic form. Similarly, among human adults, artistic or musical thought does not demand specifically linguistic expression: it may be purely visual or auditory. A more reasonable hypothesis regarding the connection between language and thought, therefore, might be the following: first, all thought requires representation of one kind or another; second, whatever may be the powers of nonlinguistic representation that human adults share with human infants and some other animals, those powers are immensely increased by the use of language.

The “mist and veil of words”

The powers and abilities conferred by the use of language entail cognitive successes of various kinds. But language may also be the source of cognitive failures, of course. The idea that language is potentially misleading is familiar from many practical contexts, perhaps especially politics. The same danger exists everywhere, however, including in scholarly and scientific research. In scriptural interpretation, for example, it is imperative to distinguish true interpretations of a text from false ones; this in turn requires thinking about the stability of linguistic meaning and about the use of analogy, metaphor, and allegory in textual analysis. Often the danger is less that meanings may be misidentified than that the text may be misconceived through alien categories entrenched (and thus unnoticed) in the scholar’s own language. The same worries apply to the interpretation of works of literature, legal documents, and scientific treatises.

The “mist and veil of words,” as the Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685–1753) described it, is a traditional theme in the history of philosophy. Confucius (551–479 bc), for example, held that, when words go wrong, there is no limit to what else may go wrong with them; for this reason, “the civilized person is anything but casual in what he says.” This view is often associated with pessimism about the usefulness of natural language as a tool for acquiring and formulating knowledge; it has also inspired efforts by some philosophers and linguists to construct an “ideal” language—i.e., one that would be semantically or logically “transparent.” The most celebrated of these projects was undertaken by the great German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), who envisioned a “universal characteristic” that would enable people to settle their disputes through a process of pure calculation, analogous to the factoring of numbers. In the early 20th century the rapid development of modern mathematical logic (see formal logic) similarly inspired the idea of a language in which grammatical form would be a sure guide to meaning, so that the inferences that could legitimately be drawn from propositions would be clearly visible on their surface.

Outside philosophy there have often been calls for replacing specialized professional idioms with “plain” language, which is always presumed to be free of obscurity and therefore immune to abuse. There is often something sinister about such movements, however; thus, the English writer George Orwell (1903–50), initially an enthusiast, turned against the idea in his novel 1984 (1949), which featured the thought-controlling “Newspeak.” Yet he continued to hold the doubtful ideal of a language as “clear as a windowpane,” through which facts would transparently reveal themselves.

[ii] MODERN LINGUISTICS VERSUSTRADITIONAL HERMENEUTICS* Robert L. ThomasProfessor of New TestamentAn emerging field of study among evan gelicals goes by the name modernlinguistics. Its terminology, self-appraisal, approach to language analysis, andrelationship to traditional exegesis furnish an introduction to a comparison withgrammatical-historical hermeneutics. Indispensable to an analysis of modernlinguistics is a grasping of its preunderstanding—its placing of the language of the Bible into the same category as all human languages and its integration with othersecular disciplines—and the effect that preunderstanding has on its interpretation

of the biblical text. Its conflicts with grammatical-historical principles include aquestioning of the uniqueness of the biblical languages, its differing in the handlingof lexical and grammatical elements of the text, its differing in regard to the

importance of authorial intention, its lessening of precision in interp retation, itselevating of the primacy of discourse, its elevating of the impact of stylisticconsiderations, and a questioning of the feasibility of understanding the text in a

literal way. Such contrasts mark the wide divergence of modern linguistics fromtraditional grammatical-historical interpretation. http://www.tms.edu/tmsj/tmsj14b.pdf