Tag Archives: INTEGRAL YOGA/IY PHILOSOPHY

Science as we now know it is to quite an extent based on the philosophy of Descartes and Descartes is much maligned; but actually he was an amazingly naïve and religious man. What everybody knows is that he said "'Cogito ergo sum”, i.e. "I think, therefore I am" and of course everybody who knows a little about Yoga knows that you can very well be without thinking, and that your real existence has nothing to do with your thought. So we tend to look down on him, but what's most amazing is not that famous sentence, it is one that follows a little later. His attempt was to start with absolute doubt and then find out what would stand as certain knowledge. The first thing he could not doubt was his own thinking. But even when he looked outside, his doubt didn’t go very deep. When he divided the world into two, the inner, thinking part that was to be looked after by religion and the outer, extended part that was to be studied by science, even for the science part, his doubt really didnt go further than the first step. He said, all I can build upon is what the senses give me, and then he added that the senses could not be wrong “because God has given them to us and God cannot be that malicious that he would give us false witnesses.” I think that's really touching and so incredibly naïve.