A Mind Fully Engaged: Intellectual Curiosity, Precision, and the Ease of Explaining the Complex

(from "The Goddess and the Guru"):

Even while cultivating such spiritual mentorships and continuing to develop his personal sadhana, Guruji remained fully engaged with the outer world, often impressing visitors with his ability to focus entirely on whatever person or topic happened to come before him. Though somewhat hyperbolic, one disciple’s paean to Guruji during this period captures the impression he made on many who encountered him:

He is a scientist, a perfectionist, a walking encyclopedia. If you ask him how an aircraft’s landing gear works, you’ll get an answer detailed down to the last nut and bolt. If you ask him about the practical application of the Fourier Transform in mathematics, he’ll explain it to you. But above all he is an authority on Sri Vidya and Tantra. If you ask him about the deepest significance of Maha Shodasi Mantra, he’ll draw a few diagrams and explain it to you as if you were a kid in first grade and he was teaching you addition and subtraction.

Of course, Guruji would probably have been the first to assert that he was no expert on either landing gears or the Fourier Transform—but he did possess a vivid intellectual curiosity and he was remarkably well-read and well-informed, conversing with ease and enthusiasm on an extraordinarily diverse array of topics.

“One day we were chatting and I asked Guruji, ‘Is the universe elliptical like a banalinga?’” Sundhara recalled. “Guruji went silent for a couple of minutes, then took a piece of paper and explained in basic coordinate geometry theory why it probably is elliptical. It was amazing to watch him simplify this aspect of cosmology in a way almost anyone could understand.”

On another occasion, he mused that ordinary reality as we perceive it is probably akin to a simple hologram, liable to collapse at any moment. “This was many years ago, and yet recently I read a scientific article theorizing that all forms in the universe are holograms, which collapse into two dimensions when absorbed into black holes!” Sundhara said. “My inference was that Saraswati showed him these intricacies well before mainstream science discovered and shared them.”

A more mundane possibility is that Guruji, who regularly perused scientific journals, came across an early article on holographic theory and simply explored it more deeply through the prism of his own meditation.