What is the Vedic perspective of the book Shiva’s trilogy?

Transcript

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with devotional service. Thank you Once again the books that Shiva has read are representative of a school of thought. Ignorism is the idea that people who are considered divine now were originally ordinary human beings but later on because of excessive glorification by later people they were made into gods.
So the idea that ignorant people were made into gods is what humanism is essentially about and Shiva’s trilogy gives some sort of speculative description of activities of Shiva which are in many ways different from what is given in scriptures there is some core similarity in the sense that many of the characters are same Shiva is there Sati is there then associates are also there but the storyline is in many ways different and normally the storyline is different in the entire context system so this kind of rendition of scriptural stories is largely done to tap into the existing popularity that will be there in the religious market so this statue of Udgopal will say that if people want to write their own books and give their own philosophy they can do that but if they are writing on Bhagavad Gita then they need to explain the Bhagavad Gita not push their own philosophy down others throats in the name of the Bhagavad Gita similarly if people want to write their own fiction stories they have to write those stories but when they take scriptural stories and scriptural characters and then change them in a way that misrepresents the essential teaching of those scriptures then that is misinterpretation so the person of Lord Shiva is describing various scriptures to be very important he is one of the three primary Devatas, in fact he is higher than Brahma and he is next only to Lord Vishnu he is almost slightly effectuated he is his position as a primary Devata is intrinsic with the creation itself because whenever the universe is created there are these three phases creation, eternal, destruction that occur and he is in charge of the destruction, the Bhagavatam describes how he appears and how he acts in the universe so the idea that he is an ordinary or extraordinary living being who is later on made into divine is not at all based on the scriptures and you can see rendition of the whole story it is very popular because people have fascination with these characters and when those characters are involved in a storyline that seems to be interesting, people get caught by that article this distorts the understanding of the various scriptures so now what is the reason for doing this, one reason of course as I said is that it is happening in the popularity of any story to deal with these characters in the religious and charismatic world of India another point is that the modern outlook which is centered on reductionism reductionism means to reduce everything complex to everything simple to reduce the spiritual to the material to reduce everything ultimately to the movements of atoms and molecules in accordance with impersonal forces and laws this reductionistic attitude assumes that there is no higher reality and if something is posited as a higher reality then that proposition that it is a higher reality must have come not from some pre-existing higher reality but just from the imagination of people in this world that there is a higher reality so this reductionistic idea is the cause of notions like you handled so the current world view assumes that there is no such beings like Shiva ultimately who are administrative beings and there was just one historical being a historical person and he was later on named God so such a idea is actually based on the default assumption that whatever we can experience at the material level in our limited experience is what reality is everywhere and that is certainly a presumption which is un-valid because we have not explored all of reality we have explored very little of reality there is much that is in reality which you don’t know how it is so it’s like what Prabhupada would say frog in the well the frog tries to extrapolate about the ocean based on limited experience in the well similarly we think based on our limited experience of the world that there cannot be any celestial or divine beings like Shiva and therefore if there is a description of these beings within the Vedic scriptures then that must have come not from up to down but it must have been projected, imagined from down to up now what is the problem with this for a philosophy of life actually we all feel the need for higher reality exists not just in emotional sense but also in a legal sense attraction to the supernatural is natural that’s why many people who reject the Vedic description of individuals with supernatural powers like Shiva, Vishnu, like Uma like Narasimha those same people come up with their own fictional characters they come up with characters like Batman, Spiderman and He-Man who are purely imaginary and those people have some supernatural attributes and then they enjoy those attributes so we have the current material reality and then there is a higher reality where people have powers which we don’t have and we ourselves belong to that higher reality and that’s why we are attracted to such powers because those kinds of extraordinary powers are natural to where we originally belong but now because we have disconnected ourselves from that higher reality, in our current reality there is no one with this extraordinary power and yet the heart longs for such extraordinary powers that’s why we having disconnected ourselves from the higher reality create a lower imaginary reality where with novels and movies and TV series where we create fictional beings with those kind of powers so essentially what is the higher reality, we reject it as mythology and then we create a lower reality and although we know at the back of our mind that it’s imaginary for all practical purposes often we just absorb ourselves in it as if it were a reality so we declare the half man half lion incarnation of the lord as mythology and then we worship a half man half man half man half spider as if that is an extraordinary being so people can find the spider man and bat man and treat them almost like worshiping them for all practical purposes so the books like Shiva’s Trilogy they assume that the higher reality has no actual grounding in fact and then they assume that all descriptions of supernatural beings must be imagined conceptions so when they say that there are certain beings who were there earlier and then they were exalted to divine status so that whole conception is based on reductionistic idea, reductionistic idea is very incompletely understood in India, so as devotees we should focus on the Vedic scripture, we will not understand the Vedic personalities, we should understand them from the authentic scriptures and not from unbalanced definitions