The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

What is a human being? What is life? Can science give us reliable answers to such questions? The electricity of life. The meaning of human consciousness. Are we alone? Are the traditional contests between science and religion still relevant? Does the word "spirit" still hold meaning today?

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bboyer
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by bboyer » Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:48 am

I'd have to agree with Dave Smith on this, polarity, in that I think you went a little far afield. My question to you was about the various Greek words for mind; I hadn't realized there were so many - I'll do a little personal research on it, but just thought you might have some type of reference off-hand that goes into it a bit without my having to learn ancient Greek to get an idea of their concept of the mind-field. :)
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else. [---][/---] Maitri Upanishad

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polarityparadox
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by polarityparadox » Sat Apr 26, 2008 5:02 am

sorry admin,

It was not my intention at all to push "religious" themes but only to illuminate an answer to a question related to the use of greek :oops: . It just so happens that western culture is dominated by the bible and so examples from its greek translation just popped into my mind...

I am somewhat new to forum posting and I am learning as I am going the proper etiquette, please bear with me. I appreciate your pointers and will take them to heart :)
Truth is higher than everything but higher still is true living.

- Nanak

Complexity leads to perplexity and simplicity leads to Eternity.

- Kirpal Singh

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bboyer
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by bboyer » Sat Apr 26, 2008 5:16 am

Polarity - well, actually I see you did give me a reference that I was too quick to overlook, the one at Google Books. Looks very interesting, I'm looking through it now. Thanks, and my apologies.
There is something beyond our mind which abides in silence within our mind. It is the supreme mystery beyond thought. Let one's mind and one's subtle body rest upon that and not rest on anything else. [---][/---] Maitri Upanishad

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polarityparadox
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by polarityparadox » Sat Apr 26, 2008 9:45 pm

no worries :lol:
Truth is higher than everything but higher still is true living.

- Nanak

Complexity leads to perplexity and simplicity leads to Eternity.

- Kirpal Singh

sketch1946
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by sketch1946 » Thu Feb 16, 2017 3:30 am

mmm trying to keep this as scientific as possible, etymology=the science of the history, meaning and derivation, temporal and cultural significance of ***words... essential to understanding and interpreting old literature, books, myths, legends...

I was living in New Guinea once.... the local expression there for the seat of feeling in a person is 'bel' aka belly... 'bel bilong me hamamas' my bel feels happy... bel hevi (belly heavy) – the heavy sinking feeling that often accompanies extreme sadness... bel hat angry...

about agape, (with respect):
The common story about the differentiation of divine love as 'agape' and brotherly love as 'phileo' isn't accurate:

LXX =[translation of the Old Testament into Greek by the '70' scholars, about 200BC]
"Seventy-two Jewish scholars were asked by the Greek King of Egypt Ptolemy II Philadelphus to translate the Torah from Biblical Hebrew into Greek, for inclusion in the Library of Alexandria."

"This narrative is found in the pseudepigraphic Letter of Aristeas to his brother Philocrates, and is repeated by Philo of Alexandria, Josephus and by various later sources, including Augustine of Hippo. The story is also found in the Tractate Megillah of the Babylonian Talmud:"

"King Ptolemy once gathered 72 Elders. He placed them in 72 chambers, each of them in a separate one, without revealing to them why they were summoned. He entered each one's room and said: Write for me the Torah of Moshe, your teacher"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint

The relevance of this post is to suggest it is important to realise that word usage can and does change with time, so translators need to know and study and cross-reference idiom and usage as well as the meaning of words. The Septuagint as a critical translation from Hebrew into Greek in the third century BC is a valuable source for the study of the meaning of words, and idiom in the Greek world which affects the study of history and ancient documents, and thus the myths and legends.

It [agape] appears in the LXX almost as many times as other words commonly meaning “love,” frequently translating the most common Hebrew word for “love” which isn’t usually supposed to have any special connotations. It appears elsewhere in Greek literature predating the [bible] New Testament. And it appears to mean “love” in a fairly generic sense, not in a special divine sense. It is worth noting what Don Carson has written of the verbal cognate to this word:

"Convincing evidence has been advanced that the verb agapao was coming into prominence throughout Greek literature from about the fourth century BC onward, as one of the standard verbs for ‘to love’. One of the reasons for this change is that phileo has taken on the additional meaning ‘to kiss’, in some contexts."

"Second, even within the NT the word is not exclusively used of some type of divine love — in 2 Tim 4:10 it is used to describe Demas’ love [agape] for the world which leads him to abandon the Way. Similar examples of non-divine, selfless contexts can also be added from the LXX and other ancient Greek literature."

Matthew 5:46 "For if ye love [agape] them that love [agape] you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?

Luke 11:43 "Woe to you Pharisees! For you love [agape] the chief seats in the synagogues and the respectful greetings in the market places.

"Where I think readers have gone astray is in failing to note that most of the references to love in the Bible are in reference to God’s love, or at least to love derived from or reflecting God’s love. So it ought to be unsurprising that agape mostly refers to divine love in the Bible. This does not, however, substantiate the claims frequently made for the term itself.

Ultimately it is best understood as a generic word for ‘love’ in the NT. To be sure, it is invested with special significance in many of the contexts in which it is employed by the content of those contexts, but it is illegitimate to then transfer those nuances into all contexts in which the term appears. To do so is to impute meanings to texts which are not necessarily present.

Carson footnotes that this semantic shift occurred as a result of the decline of an older verb for ‘to kiss’ (kuneo) due to that verb’s similarity to the verb (kuno) which meant ‘to impregnate’ which could have resulted in “salacious puns” and so prompted the adoption of a term less open to double entendre. See D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, p. 676; cf. D. A. Carson, Exegetical Fallacies (Baker, 1984) 51–54; Robert Joly, Le vocabulaire chrétien de l’amour, est-il original? fileo et agape dans le grec antique (Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1968).

http://blog.shields-online.net/?p=313

sketch1946
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by sketch1946 » Thu Feb 16, 2017 5:44 am

How Greek words are a part of science... and art, history and science are interrelated:

Pythagoras was the founder and leader of a sect where philosophy, religion, art and mysticism were all fused together. In ancient times, Greeks did not make a clear distinction between science and non-scientific disciplines. There is a widespread argument which states that the coexistence of philosophy, art, mysticism, and other non-scientific disciplines interacting together with science has interfered with the development of scientific ideas.

This seems to show a misconception of how the human spirit works. It is true that in the past moral and mystic bias has either delayed or led some knowledge up a blind alley and that the sharp limits of scientific knowledge were not clear.

However, it is equally true that non-scientific disciplines have enhanced the imagination of the human mind, provided inspiration to approach problems that seemed impossible to solve and triggered human creativity to consider counter-intuitive possibilities (such as a spherical earth in motion) that time proved to be true.

To get clues in ancient legends and myths about floods, meteors, events in the earliest times, its necessary to sift through early texts that are in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Heiroglyphics, Demotic etc... so a good understanding of languages is a great help...

"Thales of Miletus is regarded by many as the father of science; he was the first Greek philosopher to seek to explain the physical world in terms of natural rather than supernatural causes. accurately predicted a solar eclipse, according to The Histories of Herodotus. If Herodotus's account is accurate, this eclipse is the earliest recorded as being known in advance of its occurrence. Many historians believe that the predicted eclipse was the solar eclipse of May 28, 585 BC. ....there are other accounts of it besides that of Herodotus."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_of_Thales

Understanding Greek, and especially the description of this event is crucial for synchronising dates in history...

Diogenes Laertius says that Xenophanes, who lived in the same century as Thales, was impressed with the prediction, and he also gives additional testimonies from the pre-Socratics Democritus and Heraclitus."

"Science in Ancient Greece was based on logical thinking and mathematics. It was also based on technology and everyday life. The artists in Ancient Greece were sculptors and painters. The Greeks wanted to know more about the world, the heavens and themselves. People studied about the sky, sun, moon, and the planets. The Greeks found that the earth was round."
http://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Science/

"Eratosthenes of Alexandria, who died about 194 BC, wrote on astronomy and geography, but his work is known mainly from later summaries. He is credited with being the first person to measure the Earth's circumference."

An example of learning from ancient stories:
Herodotus wrote in Greek about 450 BC [that the Egyptians told him]
"This pyramid was built like this, tier after tier ... they raised the stones ... with machines made of short wooden lengths, lifting the stones from the ground up to the first tier of steps.”

"The short plank machine described by Herodotus had been used to raise the stones used in building the Egyptian pyramids. As the machine was very light, it could easily be moved by the workers from one stone tier to the next...."

Leonardo da Vinci (an artist, engineer and inventor) drew this machine after reading Herodotus in about 1480.. then people studying da Vinci's drawings rebuilt the machine in Italy in 2011:

"A scale model of a machine similar to that designed by Leonardo was made and tested in February 2011, with a reinforced concrete block weighing about 300 kg. Contrary to all expectations, not only did the scale model manage to lift the block of concrete, but it reduced its weight so much that a child of just 6 years old was able to make it rise up."

http://www.renouveau-democratie.eu/wp-c ... 14-LR1.pdf

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GaryN
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by GaryN » Thu Feb 16, 2017 12:26 pm

"The short plank machine described by Herodotus had been used to raise the stones used in building the Egyptian pyramids.
There is no proof the Egyptians built the pyramids. They kept lots of records about the most mundane of goings-on, but not about building the pyramids. And this Herodotus chap, who little is known about, the "Father of History", seems like he might not have been a too reliable source:
Some of his stories were fanciful and others inaccurate; yet he states that he was reporting only what he was told; a sizable portion of the information he provided was later confirmed by historians and archaeologists. Despite Herodotus' historical significance, little is known of his personal life and academic history.
Reporting only what he was told. From who, and where did they hear it?

The short plank machine experiment I can find no photos or video of, or reference to, the only drawing I could find makes it look extremely precarious, more of a party trick than a useful production tool. And was this invention somehow known all around the world wherever there are megalithic structures? Doesn't sound credible to me.
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Thu Feb 16, 2017 1:44 pm

Gary,
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=EGYPT ... lNUltz-IOM:

There is no 'proof' but there is plenty of evidence that the Egyptians built the pyramids. You have neither proof nor evidence that they didn't. Most of what the Egyptians considered important information was kept in the temples and would have been a prime target for the destructive predilictions of the Christians. For all we know the relevant information may well be rotting away in some Vatican archive. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus is well-known both in antiquity and today. If you read his 'Researches' (a.k.a. 'Histories') you will find out who told him, and about his methodology in general.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

sketch1946
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by sketch1946 » Thu Feb 16, 2017 5:55 pm

GaryN wrote:The short plank machine experiment I can find no photos or video of, or reference to, the only drawing I could find makes it look extremely precarious, more of a party trick than a useful production tool. And was this invention somehow known all around the world wherever there are megalithic structures?
Hi Gary,
I guess the point of my post was the benefit of studying ancient literature, history and languages to find out things... in the context of the EU paradigm, finding out what people in antiquity saw, and then wrote down, and then sorting fact from fiction, which is always going to be essential.

IMHO Herodotus is criticised by people who can't have read his caveat at the beginning of the Historia, that he set out to report not what ***he thought was 'true' but what he was ***told by the people in the various places he visited, he sometimes says something like, "the so-and-so's say that this is such, and the other so-and-so's say this other thing... but I think...."

The 'Flood of Decalion' or Plato's Atlantis story of how it 'was destroyed overnight', 'sank beneath the sea' in the Timaeus, or Greek 'historia' like Herodotus, or how Eratosthenes measured the earth, and how big it was according to his calculations based on the ancient 'stadium' measurement, etc, can give modern scientists clues to things if they're interested in catastrophism or reliability ancient reports of eclipses, or 'pillars of fire' by night, or 'rain of fire and rock' etc

I read some old Greek and Roman geographical accounts where the author described how they were aware of how to use the angle of the shadow on a stick at midday to determine latitude etc

This guy in Michigan has shown it is indeed feasible to move huge stones with limited resources,
He apparently studied old books, including descriptions of magical 'balancing stones', the guy is very down-to-earth and sensible, no-nonsense sort of person:
"A builder from Michigan USA has discovered some amazing techniques of how to move and lift huge stones onto one another."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5pZ7uR6v8c

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GaryN
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by GaryN » Fri Feb 17, 2017 1:48 pm

GC:
There is no 'proof' but there is plenty of evidence that the Egyptians built the pyramids.


To me, the difference between what the Egyptians built and what some previous civilisation built are very obvious. The Egyptian stuff is very amateurish in comparison. Around the world we see that later structures, less precise and using smaller stones, are found atop much more impressive and engineeringly superior base structures. The Pyramids themselves, and structures at Aswan, are in a class by themselves, but proof, well, we will likely never agree on the definition of such.
For me, at present, my research is pointing quite clearly to the source of all the science, engineering and architectural abilities used around the world as having originated with the Indus valley civilisation, and that people came from around the world, sometimes, according to Vedic texts, by aircraft, to learn these skills. Such knowledge has been lost over time, or intentionally kept from us by those not of noble inclination, and such knowledge is only to be found by those looking to the esoteric realms.
..rotting away in some Vatican archive
I won't argue with you there.
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Fri Feb 17, 2017 3:57 pm

Gary,
The Egyptian paintings clearly show Egyptians hauling one of their beautifully carved statues. There are lots of other beautifully built temples that were undeniably built by the Egyptians. There are records of various temples being built and also temples repaired and upgraded.
I would be very interested in what you have found about the Indus Valley civilisation.
The IV civ did not appear to go in for the huge block type architecture that the Egyptians favoured.
https://uk.pinterest.com/waltermachate/ ... ilization/
Their iconography looks like a cross between Sumerian and NW European.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

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GaryN
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by GaryN » Mon Feb 20, 2017 2:20 pm

The Egyptian paintings clearly show Egyptians hauling one of their beautifully carved statues.
Not saying they couldn't, and if they had lost the earlier knowledge of how to do it in a much easier way, then they had to do it the hard way. Here's a web page that examines the practicalities of various proposed methods:
Real life experiments that reveal the ancient art and techniques of building Egyptian pyramids
http://www.catchpenny.org/mmbuild.html
The IV civ did not appear to go in for the huge block type architecture that the Egyptians favoured.
Doesn't appear so does it, but I am still not convinced the Egyptians built the pyramids, only the less impressive structures. But I know Out Of Time TECHnology (new word-OOTTECH)when I see it in other lands:
Image
Plug cutting with some large machinery, what other method might you suggest? Le Cave di Cusa,Italy.
I would be very interested in what you have found about the Indus Valley civilisation.
Only a discovery to me it seems. I had always though of the flow of science and technology going TO India, but the other way around would seem to make more sense now.
India and the Cradle of Civilization
http://www.davidpratt.info/cradle.htm
Their iconography looks like a cross between Sumerian and NW European.
What are your views on Sanskrit as the "Mother of all languages"?
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by Grey Cloud » Mon Feb 20, 2017 4:34 pm

Gary,
I don't see anything 'hi-tech' in the stuff on the catchpenny site - real life experiments and real world explanations. Still requires lots of manpower and patience.
Cave di Cusa (meaning "Quarry of Accusation" in Italian) or Rocche di Cusa was an ancient stone quarry in Sicily. It is located 3 kilometers south of the town Campobello di Mazara in the province of Trapani, Italy. It is 1.8 kilometer long and is on a ridge that spans from east to west. This site was quarried beginning in the first half of the 6th century BC and its stone was used to construct the temples in the ancient Greek city Selinunte. It was abandoned in 409 BC when the city was captured by the Carthaginians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_di_Cusa

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selinunte
The blocks were cut by hand. See the photo on the Sellinute page. The fluting was done by hand.

Not had time to look at the Pratt site yet.
What are your views on Sanskrit as the "Mother of all languages"?
I don't bother with 'firsts' and 'originals'.
If I have the least bit of knowledge
I will follow the great Way alone
and fear nothing but being sidetracked.
The great Way is simple
but people delight in complexity.
Tao Te Ching, 53.

sketch1946
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by sketch1946 » Mon Feb 20, 2017 5:32 pm

Hi Gary
GaryN wrote:What are your views on Sanskrit as the "Mother of all languages"?
I think Sanskrit is a daughter language not the mother language, and came to India with the Aryans
Modern Indian nationalism of course wants to claim the mother lode...
“This theory [that Sanskrit and its ancestor Proto-Indo-European was indigenous to India], which resurrects some of the earliest speculations on the origins of the Indo-Europeans, has not a shred of supporting evidence, either linguistic or archeological”
https://scroll.in/article/737715/fact-c ... -was-syria

The initial success of the people who spoke the language which later developed into such a huge language group may have been genetic, not the sort of genetics that Hitler believed but a simple gene mutation that allowed humans to drink cow's milk:
"...Another innovation was biological: Indo-Europeans developed a gene mutation that allowed them to digest milk even after being weaned, thus providing these nomads with a continuous and mobile source of nutrition. We can see echoes of these historical facts in the culture of the early Vedic people who venerated horses and frowned upon the killing of milch cattle."

So Sanskrit wasn't born in India, and it wasn't even the first language of India.
As far as I understand, very little is known of the cultures that created Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, there was apparently a dried-up river there that crossed what is now desert.

The Indus Valley culture were probably later than the Sumerians. Possibly the Sumerians and this Indus Valley culture traded with each other, maybe there were other connections.
The invading Aryans possibly wiped out that culture about the time of Solomon or a bit later, or it was simple gone, dried up when the river it was built on dried up....

Since Hitler, it's extremely politically incorrect to even mention Aryan, because of the German spin the Nazis put on the word Aryan, with the concept of blue eyes and blond hair.. but the truth is it's the correct word for the people who spoke the original language that later developed into all sorts of daughter-languages... like Hittite, Greek, Persian, Hindi, Gaelic, Latin, Avestan etc

Alans were one example of a group who spoke another daughter-language from the same source as Sanskrit - they end up in France and Spain, (amongst other places)
"The Alans were an Iranian [Aryan] nomadic pastoral people of antiquity."

"The name Alan is an Iranian dialectical form of Aryan, a common self-designation of the Indo-Iranians. Possibly related to the Massagetae, the Alans have been connected by modern historians with the Central Asian Yancai and Aorsi of Chinese and Roman sources, respectively.

"Having migrated westwards and become dominant among the Sarmatians on the Pontic Steppe, they are mentioned by Persian and Roman sources in the 1st century AD. At the time they had settled the region north of the Black Sea, and frequently raided the Parthian Empire and the Caucasian provinces of the Roman Empire. In 215–250 AD their power on the Pontic Steppe was broken by the Goths."

"Upon the Hunnic defeat of the Goths on the Pontic Steppe around 375 AD, many of the Alans migrated westwards along with various Germanic tribes. They crossed the Rhine in 406 AD along with the Vandals and Suebi, settling in Orléans and Valence."

"Around 409 AD they joined the Vandals and Suebi in the crossing of the Pyrenees into the Iberian Peninsula, settling in Lusitania and Carthaginiensis"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alans


I think Sanskrit is a word meaning something like 'arranged' or 'put together in order' and its use dates from the about 300 AD, the grammar and written forms are a form of neo-classicism

The Indus Valley culture had a lot of water infrastructure, quite extensive water management, canals, ponds lakes all made with bricks rather than stone... like in Babylon/Mesopotamia, bricks because there was a shitload of sand and water but not much rock...

The Indus Valley language is unknown, but it definitely precedes Sanskrit:
"...unknown language or languages of the Bronze Age (2nd millennium BC) Harappan civilization (Indus Valley Civilization, or 'IVC'). The language being unattested in any readable contemporary source..."

Sanskrit was not the common language of India but a priestly late development which was forbidden on pain of death for ordinary commoners even to hear.

"The common language thus widely understood – used from the land of the Kurus in the west to Magadha in the east, northwards at Savatthi and Kusinara in the Nepal hills, and southwards in one direction as far as Ujjen – could not have been Sanskrit. Classical Sanskrit was not yet in existence"

"... and the language used in the Brahmanas was neither sufficiently known outside the widely scattered schools of the brahmins, nor of a nature to lend itself easily to such discussions. The very last thing one would say of it would be to call it a conversational idiom. Neither is it probable that each one could have spoken in the dialect of the peasantry of his own place of origin. It would have been impossible to use such a dialect for the discussion of such subjects as are described as the matter of these dialogues."

"...The question has been much complicated and obscured by the impressions derived from the Sanskrit dramas which early in the history of our acquaintance with Indian literature became known to Europeans. In them the men of any social standing speak Sanskrit, except occasionally when addressing women. And even the women, especially those of higher rank, are supposed to understand, and occasionally, mostly when verses are put into their mouths, to speak it. Otherwise in the dramas the characters talk, not the vernacular, but the literary Prakrit."

"It is probable, even at the time when the dramas were written, that as a matter of fact every one, in ordinary daily life, spoke neither Sanskrit nor Prakrit, but simply the vernaculars. It is only the authors, when addressing a cultured public at a date when Sanskrit had become the paramount literary language, who thought it proper, in their dramas, to divide up the speeches between Sanskrit and the equally unreal literary Prakrits."

"Another point is that though brahmins take part in the religious and philosophical conversations <...>The law-books and the epics represent the brahmins as the centre round which everything in India turns; and that not only because of the sacredness of their persons, but because of their marked intellectual superiority to the rest of the people. Or take the European books on Indian literature and religion. They treat these subjects as practically identical with literature and religion as shown in brahmin books. Surely, then, the brahmins must have been predominant in the intellectual life of the period you are considering.”

“These are not two independent testimonies,” one would reply. “The European writers would be perfectly willing to consider other texts, if they only had them. They have been perfectly right in using the material before them. And in editing texts they naturally chose first those nearest at hand. But even so, with practically only priestly books to judge by, they are by no means unanimous in accepting the views of those texts as to the exclusive supremacy of the brahmins in early times.”

Consider, for instance, the opinion of Professor Bhandarkar – himself, be it noted, a high-caste brahmin, <...>for the four centuries before that (that is to say, from 300 B.C. to 100 A.D.) no brahmin, no brahmin temple, no brahmin god, no sacrifice or ritualistic act of any kind is ever, even once, referred to. There is a very large number of gifts recorded as given by kings, princes, and chiefs, by merchants, goldsmiths, artisans, and ordinary householders; but not one of them is given in support of anything – of any opinion or divinity or practice – with which the brahmins had anything to do. And whereas the later inscriptions, favouring the brahmins and their special sacrifices, are in Sanskrit, these earlier ones, in which they are not mentioned, are in a sort of Pali – not in the local vernacular of the place where the inscriptions are found, but in a dialect similar, in many essential respects, to the dialect for common intercourse, based on the vernacular, which, I suggest, the Wanderers must have used, in their discussions, at the time when Buddhism arose."
https://www.ibiblio.org/britishraj/Rhys ... ter09.html

The Sumerians wrote of extensive sea voyaging and trade, they wore sheepskins, and had a language possibly like Chinese... maybe tonal like Chinese, lots of short syllables
in short, the Sumerians may have morphed into Chinese... :-)
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthr ... from-Sumer

"About 100 years ago, in 1913, a linguist at Oxford University, C.J. Ball, proposed that there were links between Sumerian and archaic Chinese. This was a little out there, because our knowledge of archaic Chinese isn’t spectacular, and when we get right down to it I doubt anyone would be prepared to argue that Sumerian and Chinese have a great deal of similarity. So, what can we say about this proposal?"

"I have to admit I’m intrigued by the idea. One reason is because, as I was looking into the Sumerian language, I immediately noticed its monosyllabic nature and wondered if, like Chinese, it had tonality. I also saw that, like Chinese, it tended to use aspects rather than tenses, and there were a few words with concepts tantalisingly reminiscent of ideas I have seen expressed in Chinese. But I was aware that any similarities I saw might have been coincidence, and I wanted to be wary of over-reading what I knew of the language. Professor Ball noted that Chinese has evolved and sought to find root Chinese vocabulary by comparing words in different Chinese languages, Mongol, Japanese and Korean."

"He proposed (a) there is evidence of common pictographic roots in the characters of Sumerian and Chinese, (b) there is evidence of common phonetic roots between Chinese and Sumerian vocabulary, and (c) there is evidence of shared concepts in the language."
http://jos-knotsuntied.blogspot.com.au/ ... ences.html

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GaryN
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Re: The polarity of knowledge and wisdom

Unread post by GaryN » Mon Feb 20, 2017 7:16 pm

The blocks were cut by hand.
I think I'd like an engineers opinion. Pretty awkward to swing a pick in the slot.
https://i.imgur.com/DME4rxV.jpg
In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

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