Rishies and the power of the mind

Hindu scriptures are divided into Shruti and Smriti, meaning "heard" and "remembered" respectively. Smritis are works of great men, who have passed on their wisdom to subsequent generations. The Smritis were composed by people. On the other hand, the Shruties, are as the name explains, "heard" by the Rishies as a result of their penance. When we chant Mantras which are taken from Shruti scriptures, we chant the name of the Rishi associated with the Manthra. The Rishi is saluted before the chanting of the Manthra because it is through him that we have come to know that Manthra. Thus, the Vedas, which are Shrutis, are not of human origin-they are "Apaurusheya".

How is this possible? How can a human being, regardless of how knowledgeable he/she is, "hear" divine revelations and give them to us? Does this make sense?

It does. Take the case of radio. An AM radio cannot play FM radio, and an FM radio cannot play TV-though the same AM, FM and TV signals are available to each of these. What is happening is, each object is perceiving only those signals which it understands. Similarly, while normal humans like us perceive stimuli like sight, smell, etc, only extraordinarily enlightened humans can receive these divine revelations.

This is my explanation for the fascinating prowess of our ancestors who were able to understand the working of the universe, the stars, the planets and the atom, without any hi-fi gadgets. "Rationalists" would sneer at this explanation, but it is not as impossible as it sounds.

Rishies may appear to be lazily sitting in one place while the world is busy working frantically to ensure the sustaining of life. However, the Rishi's mind is at a very advanced stage of development, and it is always doing so many things which we ordinary people cannot even imagine-Just like a duck, which appears to be idling on the water surface, but only if you see under the water surface will you realise how much the duck's feet are paddling to give that apparently graceful movement of the duck!

It would be easy to explain the mind of Rishies if we consider modern day examples of scholars. We can consider two immensely famous ones-Srinivasa Ramanujam and Albert Einstein.
While we would universally agree that an hour of practical experimentation is better than days of classroom teaching, Albert Einstein was a genius who did most of his work only on paper. Many of his theories were experimentally verified and found to be true only very recently, decades after his death, using sophisticated apparatus which were not available when he was around. How ???

Similarly, Ramanujam gave to the world stellar works in mathematics though he didn't even have access to good mathematics books in the small town of Kumbakonam, where he grew up. How??

The answer is -they had advanced minds which could read natural phenomena in a way so different from how we read them.
When asked how he managed to do what he did, Ramanujam used to say that Goddess Namagiri (Lakshmi), whose faithful devotee he was, would come and teach him lessons in maths mentally!

This is the power of the human mind-It can do virtually anything. Devotion is just the acceptance of this universal consciousness which we can tap if we are in the constant pursuit of knowledge.
This also explains how our Rishies discovered profound truths with just their minds as the apparatus-while we tend to break down events to minute detail to understand them, these geniuses do the opposite-they see the bigger picture by mapping events to cosmic law.

More on this some time later-we will deal with the name "Krishna". While it is the name of one of Vishnu's Avataras, it has so much scientific meaning as well-Krishna was not named so just like that.
Shruti