Ancient India was much vaster than at present, reaching from Afghanistan in the west to incorporating and influencing much of further Southeast Asia along the entire border of China and beyond. The culture of the indigenous people of present India, where modern Sanskrit was developed, is spiritually and practically oriented, whereas the Aryans invading from the northwest brought with them a ritualistic, dogmatic culture. The science of the mind, which is a synthesis between Aryan intuitional science and the practicalities of India’s own age-old Tantra, is 99% practice and 1% theory.
The oldest parts of the Vedas had originated in areas northwest of India, from what is today central Asian areas under Russia and Iran. Still, today the Vedas are thought of as Hindu despite the fact that only later material was composed in India. It is only in India that the Vedas and Sanskrit have been conserved and live on. We may speculate that they increasingly extroversial outlook and life-style of the Aryans led to them losing interest in the subtler wisdom of their ancient sages. It was only in India, the homeland of spiritual practices, that Vedic wisdom and knowledge found genuine interest and not only survived but was developed even further.
In addition to nature worship, most of the early Vedas were about rituals and societal structure. To the authoritarian, class-conscious Aryans, their scriptures were a means with which they could rule. Aryan society consisted of three classes: priests, warriors, and merchants. After invading India, the Aryans were in no mood to include the indigenous population in their social system. Instead, they preferred to keep their society white, and left the darker-skinned Indians to a life outside of Aryan society (“outcaste”).
With time, many Indians became members of a new, fourth workers class who were to serve the three higher classes as assistants, servants and slaves. As this dogmatic social system evolved into the modern caste system of India, many indigenous Indians were still left to languish as outcastes outside of the new four-tiered system, with no social recognition at all. With the revival of Hinduism, following the collapse of Buddhism in India, the caste system, originally based on vocation, evolved into a ridiculously hierarch exploitative machinery consisting of some 3000 castes and 35,000 sub-castes.[1] Before the Aryans entered, there was no caste system in India. The indigenous Indian culture was, and still is, egalitarian and spiritually oriented at core, and not ritualistic or authoritarian.
Tantra is discussed on page 293 in the book (2nd edition).
Note
1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India (accessed 26.08.2022).