Seeing is Believing?:

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Unfortunately while I did not have access to Eck’s book on Darsan, I also have had experience in a number of classes learning about divine visualization and its potential for activating religious experiences. In a number of South Asian focused courses, such as Peoples and Cultures of the Himalaya I have had the chance to interact with both the Buddhist and Hindu practice of visualization and it has always captured my attention. Now in this course, it assumes a very different focus as rather than honing in on the regional and ethnic characteristics of the practice, I am taking a peek into the sensory dimension of the act which would seem the most obvious. This practice also interests me from a science vs. religion perspective, what is the appropriate way to categorize and understand a practice like this?

We as people and culture, simultaneously put both a lot of stake and almost none into the act of seeing something in order to believe it. The act of seeing must first be believable to be believed but it also must first be seen to be believable to some degree. A lot of people require some sort of backing evidence such as scientific testing or video before they will believe that what someone saw or experienced is real. There are neuroscientific understandings of the visualization
practice but I find them rather unsatisfactory and they always just seem to be ways of diminishing the acts of others. What is the best way to combine and interface Western perspectives with the acts of other cultures?

Comments

  1. Oskar MattesMay 8, 2020 at 8:22 PM

    I'm really interested to see how cultural relationship between vision and veracity changes as time goes on. With the prevalence of Photoshop, deep fakes, cgi, and many more technologies, the bond between the two is already starting to be broken. I'm wondering how long it will take before we rely on our eyes to tell the truth only as much as we do our noses or hands.

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  2. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 11, 2020 at 1:19 PM

    Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass does a really nice job of "comb[ing] and interfac[ing] Western perspectives with the acts of other cultures," namely biological science and Native American perspectives on our interactions with plants, animals, and ecosystems in general.

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