Hinduism: What Really Happenned in India (PDF) - Oration

Hinduism: What Really Happened in India – M. M. Ninan
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"To know oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God:
this is the secret of gnosis.... Self-knowledge is knowledge of God; the
self and the divine are identical." Elaine Pagels
“The Upanishads are Vedanta, a book of knowledge in a higher degree
even than the Vedas, but knowledge in the profounder Indian sense of
the word, JnanaJnana. And because it is only by an integral knowing of
the self that this kind of direct knowledge can be made complete, it was
the self of the Vedantic sages sought to know, to live in and to be one
with it by identity. And through this endeavor they came easily to see
that the self in us is one with the Universal Self of all things and that this
self again is the same as God and Brahman, a transcendent Being or
Existence, and they beheld, felt, lived in the inmost truth of man’s inner
and outer existence by the light of this one and unifying vision. The
Upanishads are epic hymns of self-knowledge and world-knowledge and
God-knowledge” Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)
3. The third characteristics is “its reverence for texts and scriptures
unaccepted by the orthodox fold. The Gnostic experience was
mythopoetic -- in story and allegory, and perhaps also in ritual
enactments, Gnosticism sought expression of subtle, visionary insights
inexpressible by rational proposition or dogmatic affirmation.“
“Every one of them generates something new, day by day, according to
his ability; for no one is deemed perfect [or, mature], who does not
develop...some mighty fiction” Ireneaus
This developed an intricate mythology, system of allegory wherein the
ideas of God were expressed in vivid images and icons and
corresponding rituals. Thus gods of India are made superhuman with
many heads and many hands carrying varying mythical instruments of
destructions and protection.
4. The fourth characteristic is that God is a diad or duality. Manichaean
Gnostics, introduced the idea that both matter (hyle) and the divine spirit
are uncreated and coeternal”