O you the creator, you the destroyer,

you who sustain and make an end,

Who in sunlight dance among the birds and the children at play,
Who at midnight dance among the corpses in the burning grounds,
You, Shiva, you dark and terrible Bhairava,
You Suchness and Illusion, the Void and All Things,
You are the lord of life, and therefore I have brought you flowers;
You are the lord of death, and therefore I have brought you my heart This
heart that is now your burning ground.
Ignorance there and self shall be consumed with fire.
That you may dance, Bhairava, among the ashes.
That you may dance, Lord Shiva, in a place of flowers, And I dance with you.
-

Aldus Huxley.

The French Nobel laureate, Romain Rolland once wrote that religious faaith in the case of the Hindus has never
been allowed to run counter to scientific laws. That compatability with the scientific method and scientific
discoveries, from Darwin to Einstein and beyond, has been a prime reason so many of the Western intelligentsia
have admired, studied, and in many cases drawn from, Vedanta. The Shiva Nataraja statues on the grounds of
nuclear accelerators CERN in Switzerland and Lawrence Livermore in California are symbolic of that
meeting ground of Eastern and Western sciences.
Theoretical physicists from Schrodinger to Heisenberg to Oppenheimer to Fritjof Capra, author the seminal Tao
of Physics, to current theorists Amit Goswami and John Hagelin, have postulated links between Vedantic
cosmology and cutting edge physics. Is it possible that the unified field that physics has been searching for will
turn out to be what the Vedic seers called Brahman?

Vedantic models of higher consciousness and models of development influenced Abraham Maslow and other
early pioneers of humanistic and transpersonal psychology. And meditation and other yogic practices added
power to the repertoire of therapists. As a result, the spiritual dimension of life was finally taken seriously by
psychologists and became an acceptable subject for rigorous inquiry.
In recent years, neuroscientists have made quantum leaps in understanding the brain mechanisms involved in
spiritual experience and a small but significant number of them have begun to investigate consciousness in new
ways, postulating that perhaps as Indian sages always maintained awareness is not just the result of brain
activity but is rather non-localized and the brain is analogous to a TV set.