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The Vedas have guided Indian civilization
for thousands of years. They are the pillars of Hinduism. "Veda is the
source of all Dharma" declares Manusmirti (2.6.) There is no major religion
on the planet, which has not been influenced by the Vedas. The creation stories
of all major religions are based on Vedas. Though all other religions have
forgotten their Vedic root or have been forgotten, there is one religion,
Hinduism, that has kept the flame of the Vedic wisdom burning
continuously. Vedas which means ' knowledge' contain a good deal of
scientific knowledge that was lost over millennia, which needs to be
recovered. The Vedic sages had discovered the subtle nature of reality, and
had coded it in the form of the Vedas.
According to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, author of Vedic Physics, "The
knowledge contained in the Vedas is very abstruse, and is well beyond the
comprehension of ordinary human beings. Therefore Vedic sages coded the
knowledge in a simple form in which it could be understood by everyone. The Rig
Veda itself testifies that it has a hidden meaning in verse 4.3.16. Sage Bharata
in his Natyasastra 2.23 refers to the sages who knew the hidden meaning of
the Vedas. This coding of knowledge proved to be very successful in
disseminating the knowledge to common folks. This would also explain why
extraordinary steps were taken to preserve the Vedas, and the honor given to the
Vedas by Hindus, even though its meaning is little understood today. "On
the eve of the "Mahabharata War" our ancestors believed that their
knowledge was in danger of being lost. They could have written it down, but
writings could be destroyed. Therefore, it was memorized and passed on orally.
Today, the Avesta, religious scripture of ancient Iranians, only a fraction of
it is available. Alexander captured Iran in 326 B.C. and after a bloody war,
destroyed each copy of the Avesta available."
As in modern
physics, Hindu cosmology envisaged the universe as having a cyclical nature. The
end of each kalpa brought about by Shiva's dance is also the beginning of the
next. Rebirth follows destruction.
Author Dick Teresi says "Indian cosmologists, the first to
estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years. They
came closest to modern ideas of atomism, quantum
physics, and other current theories. India developed
very early, enduring atomist theories of matter. Possibly Greek
atomistic thought was influenced by India, via the Persian
civilization."
Introduction
Advanced Scientific Concepts in Hindu Literature:
Sphericity of Earth, Earth as Flat at poles, Sun the center of the Solar
System, Atoms, Universal Time Scale, The Expanding Egg, Concept of Trinity,
Hundred thousandths
of a second, Airplanes,
Description of Tides,
Botany
and Biology, Electricity and others.
Rediscovering Vedic Science
Legend of Vikramaditya
Articles
Introduction
Grandiose time scales
Hinduism’s
understanding of time is as grandiose as time itself. While most cultures base
their cosmologies on familiar units such as few hundreds or thousands of years,
the Hindu concept of time embraces billions and trillions of years. The
Puranas describe time units from the infinitesimal
truti, lasting 1/1,000,0000 of a second to a mahamantavara of 311 trillion
years. Hindu sages describe time as cyclic, an endless procession of
creation, preservation and dissolution. Scientists such as Carl Sagan have
expressed amazement at the accuracy of space and time descriptions given by the
ancient rishis and saints, who fathomed the secrets of the universe through
their mystically awakened senses.
(source: Hinduism Today April/May/June 2007
p. 14).
Friedrich
Maximilian Müeller
(1823-1900) German philologist and Orientalist. He repeatedly drew attention to
the uniqueness of the Vedas and awakened interest in his book In History of Ancient Sanskrit
Literature' (p.
557) observed:
"
In the Rig-Veda we shall have before us more real antiquity than in all the
inscriptions of Egypt or Ninevah....the Veda is the oldest book in
existence...."
 Louis Jacolliot
(1837-1890), who worked in French India as a
government official and was at one time President of the Court in Chandranagar, translated
numerous Vedic hymns, the Manusmriti,
and the Tamil work, Kural His masterpiece, La Bible dans
l'Inde,
stirred a storm of controversy. He praised the Vedas in his Sons of God, and said,:
"The Hindu
revelation, which proclaims the slow and gradual formation of worlds, is of all
revelations the only one whose ideas are in complete harmony with modern science. "
Jacolliot
feels India has given to the West much more than she is credited with when he
says:
" Besides the discoverers of geometry and algebra, the constructors
of human speech, the parents of philosophy, the primal expounders of religion,
the adepts in psychological and physical science, how even the greatest of our
biological and theologians seem dwarfed! Name of us any modern discovery, and we
venture to say that Indian history need not long be searched before the
prototype will be found on record. Here we are with the transit of science half
accomplished, and all our Vedic ideas in process of readjustment to the theories
of force correlation, natural selection, atomic polarity and evolution. And
here, to mock our conceit, our apprehension, and our despair, we may read what
Manu
said, perhaps 10,000 years before the birth of Christ:
' The first germ of life was
developed by water and heat.'
(Manusmriti - Book I, sloka 8,9)
' Water ascends towards the sky in vapors; from the sun it descends in rain, from the rains
are born the plants, and from the plants, animals.' (Manusmriti
- Book III, sloka 76)
(source:
Krishna and Christ - By Louis Jacolliot
p. 15).
 Sir John Woodroffe
(1865-1936) the well known scholar, Advocate-General of Bengal and sometime
Legal Member of the Government of India. He served with competence for eighteen
years and in 1915 officiated as Chief Justice. He has said:
"Ages before Lamarck and Darwin it was held
in India that man has passed through 84 lakhs (8,400,000) of birth as plants,
animals, as an "inferior species of man" and then as the ancestor of
the developed type existing to-day. The theory was not,
like modern doctrine of evolution, based wholly on observation and a scientific
enquiry into fact but was a rather (as some other matters) an act of brilliant
intuition in which observation may also have had some part."
(source: Is
India Civilized - Essays on Indian Culture - By Sir John Woodroffe
Ganesh & Co. Publishers Date of Publication: 1922 p. 22).
"To the philosophers of
India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light
years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in
millions of kalpas, (A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise
men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this
knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable
ways of applying it."
It is, indeed, a remarkable
circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it
to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to
the development of new states of consciousness."
(source: Spiritual
Practices of India - By Frederic Spiegelberg
Introduction by Alan Watts
p. 8-9).
Lord
Vishnu is said to rest in the coils of Ananta, the great serpent of Infinity,
while he waits for the universe to recreate itself.
"he falls back upon the
earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India with a
Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed."
"While the West was still thinking, perhaps, of
6,000 years old universe – India was already envisioning ages and eons and
galaxies as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast that
modern astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple.”
(image
source: Under Western Eyes - By Balachandra Rajan).
***
 Count Maurice
Maeterlinck (1862-1949) was a Belgian writer of poetry, a wide
variety of essays. He won the 1911 Nobel Prize for literature. In his book Mountain
Paths, says:
"he falls back upon
the earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India
with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed."
(source: Mountain
Paths - By Maurice Maeterlinck).
Mr. Thorton,
in his book History of British India, states:
" Hindus
are indisputably entitled to rank among the most ancient of existing nations, as
well as among those most early and most rapidly civilized....ere
yet the Pyramids looked down upon the Valley of the Nile... when Greece and
Italy, these cradles of modern civilization, housed only the tenants of the
wilderness, India was the seat of wealth and grandeur..."
(source: Proof
of Vedic Culture's Global Existence - By Stepehn
Knapp
p. 7). Refer to
Sciences of the Ancient Hindus: Unlocking Nature in
the Pursuit of Salvation – By Alok Kumar
 Dr.
Carl Sagan in his book Broca's
Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science,
remarks:
"Immanuel
Velikovsky
(the author of Earth in Upheaval)
in his book Worlds
in Collision, notes that the idea of four ancient ages terminated
by catastrophe is common to Indian as well as to Western sacred writing.
However,
in the Bhagavad
Gita and in the Vedas,
widely divergent numbers of such ages, including an infinity of them, are given;
but, more interesting, the duration of the ages between major catastrophes is
specified as billions of years. .. "
"The
idea that scientists or theologians, with our present still puny understanding
of this vast and awesome cosmos, can comprehend the origins of the universe is
only a little less silly than the idea that Mesopotamian astronomers of 3,000
years ago – from whom the ancient Hebrews borrowed, during the Babylonian
captivity, the cosmological accounts in the first chapter of Genesis – could
have understood the origins of the universe. We simply do not know.
The
Hindu holy book, the Rig
Veda (X:129), has a much more realistic
view of the matter:
“Who
knows for certain? Who shall here declare it?
Whence was it born, whence came creation?
The gods are later than this world’s formation;
Who then can know the origins of the world?
None knows whence creation arose;
And whether he has or has not made it;
He who surveys it from the lofty skies,
Only he knows- or perhaps he knows not."
(source:
Broca's
Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science - By Carl Sagan
p. 106 - 137). Watch
Carl
Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video
The earliest and greatest of Revelations, those of the Sacred Books of India
with a Cosmogony which no European conception has ever surpassed.
Despite
the dawn of Enlightenment and advent of modern science, the Semitic religions
have still not matured enough to respect, tolerate and understand a simple
notion that “All paths lead to the same summit (God).”
Refer
to Indian
Institute of Scientific Heritage
and Watch
Carl
Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video
***
 Huston Smith
( ? ) born in China to Methodist missionaries, a philosopher, most
eloquent writer, world-famous religion scholar who practices
Hatha Yoga. He has said in Hinduism:
“The invisible excludes nothing, the invisible that
excludes nothing is the infinite – the soul of India is the infinite.”
“Philosophers tell us that the Indians were the first ones
to conceive of a true infinite from which nothing is excluded. The
West shied away from this notion. The West likes form, boundaries
that distinguish and demarcate. The trouble is that boundaries also imprison –
they restrict and confine.”
“India saw this clearly and turned
her face to that which has no boundary or whatever.” “India anchored
her soul in the infinite seeing the things of the world as masks of the infinite
assumes – there can be no end to these masks, of course. If they express a
true infinity.” And It is here that India’s mind boggling variety links up
to her infinite soul.”
“India includes so much because her soul being infinite
excludes nothing.” It goes without saying that the universe that India saw
emerging from the infinite was stupendous.”
While the West was still thinking,
perhaps, of 6,000 years old universe – India was already envisioning ages and
eons and galaxies as numerous as the sands of the Ganges. The Universe so vast
that modern astronomy slips into its folds without a ripple.”
(source: The
Mystic's Journey - India
and the Infinite: The Soul of a People – By Huston Smith).
 Dr.
Alok Kumar professor of Physics at the State University of New York
at Oswego and author of the new book, Sciences of the
Ancient Hindus has observed:
"What would
you say about the people or culture who gave us the place-value system of
numerals, the numerical zero, the trigonometric function “sine” and several
trigonometric formulae, and set standards for mass, length, and time? What about
those who developed a sophisticated system of medicine with its mind-body
approach known as Ayurveda, detailed anatomical and surgical knowledge of the
human body, metallurgical methods of extraction and purification of metals
including the so called Damascus blade, chemical techniques to transform
compounds, knowledge of various constellations and planetary motions that was
good enough to assign motion to the Earth in the fifth century A.D. and the
science of self-improvement (Yoga)?
The ancient Hindus used a complex
calendar that used the sun and the moon in defining the day, month and year.
While days and months were defined by the moon, the year was defined by the sun.
Regarding the Earth’s motion, Aryabhatta I suggested about one millennium before
Copernicus a theory in which the Earth was in axial rotation. All stars, but not
planets, were at rest in this theory. Aryabhata I’s hypothesis of the Earth’s
rotational motion is clearly explained by the analogy of a boatman who observes
objects on the shore moving backward.
Science was institutionalized
among the ancient Hindus. It was considered sacred and as good as their moral
codes for society. Scientific activities had important functions that were
valued in society. The role of astronomers to fix the calendar, to set dates of
religious festivals, and to predict eclipses or other astronomical events became
as important as their moral codes.
"There is no scholarly tradition
in India to visit foreign lands for learning. On the contrary, India attracted
scholars from China, the Middle East, and even from the Mediterreanean. This is
in contrast to the Greek tradition in which many young Greek scholars undertook
arduous
journeys to Egypt, Babylon,
Persia, and even to India for learning. "
(source:
Sciences of the Ancient Hindus - by Alok Kumar p. 12 - 13 and p. 24 -31).
 Nancy
Wilson Ross (1901 -1986)
made her first trip to Japan, China, Korea and India in 1939. She
was the author
of several books including The World of Zen and
Time's Left Corner. Miss Ross lectured on Zen Buddhism at the Jungian
Institute in Zurich. She served on the board of the Asia Society
of New York which was founded by John D. Rockefeller III since
its founding in 1956 and was on the governing board of the India
Council. In private life she was known as Mrs. Stanley Young.
She
has written:
"Anachronistic as
this labyrinthine mythology may appear to the foreign mind, many
of India’s ancient theories about the universe are startlingly
modern in scope and worthy of a people who are credited with the
invention of the zero, as well as algebra and its application of
astronomy and geometry; a people who so carefully observed the
heavens that, in the opinion of Monier-Williams, they determined
the moon’s synodical revolution much more correctly than the
Greeks."
" Many hundreds of years before those
great European pioneers, Galileo and Copernicus, had to pay
heavy prices in ridicule and excommunication for their daring
theories, a section of the
Vedas known as the Brahmanas
contained this astounding statement:
“The sun never sets or rises. When people think the sun is
setting, he only changes about after reaching the end of the day
and makes night below and day to what is on the other side.
Then, when people think he rises in the morning, he only shifts
himself about after reaching the end of the day night, and makes day below and night to what is on the
other side. In truth, he does not see at all.”
"The Indians, whose theory of
time, is not linear like ours
– that is, not proceeding consecutively from past to present
to future – have always been able to accept, seemingly without
anxiety, the notion of an alternately expanding and contracting
universe, an idea recently advanced by certain Western
scientists. In Hindu cosmology, immutable Brahman, at fixed
intervals, draws back into his beginningless, endless Being the
whole substance of the living world. There then takes place the
long “sleep” of Brahaman from which, in course of countless
aeons, there is an awakening, and another universe or
“dream” emerges. "
"This notion of the
sleeping and waking, or contracting and expanding, of the Life
Force, so long a part of Hindu cosmology, has recently been
expressed in relevant terms in an article written for a British
scientific journal by Professor
Fred Hoyle, Britain’s foremost
astronomer. "
Lord
Vishnu sleeping on a coiled serpent. Chalukya Period. Relief in
Sanctuary # 9, Aihole, 6th century A.D.
Lord
Vishnu is said to rest in the coils of Ananta, the great serpent of Infinity,
while he waits for the universe to recreate itself.
Refer
to Indian
Institute of Scientific Heritage
***
"Plainly, contemporary Western science’s description of an
astronomical universe of such vast magnitude that distances must
be measured in terms as abstract as light-years is not new to
Hinduism whose wise men, millennia ago, came up with the term
kalpa to signify the inconceivable duration of the period
elapsing between the beginning and end of a world system.
It is clear that Indian religious
cosmology is sharply at variance with that inherited by Western
peoples from the Semites.
On the highest level, when
stripped of mythological embroidery, Hinduism’s
conceptions of space, time and multiple universes approximate in
range and abstraction the most advanced scientific thought.
(source:
Three Ways of Asian Wisdom – By Nancy
Wilson Ross p. 64 - 67 and 74 - 76).
 Dick Teresi
( ? ) author and coauthor of several books about
science and technology, including The
God Particle. He is cofounder of Omni
magazine and has written for Discover, The New York Times
Magazine, and The Atlantic Monthly.
"The big
bang is the biggest-budget universe ever, with mind-boggling
numbers to dazzle us – a technique pioneered by fifth-century
A.D. Indian cosmologists, the first to
estimate the age of the earth at more than 4 billion years.
The cycle of
creation and destruction continues forever, manifested in the Hindu
deity Shiva, Lord of the Dance, who holds the drum
that sounds the universe’s creation in his right hand and the
flame that, billions of years later, will destroy the universe
in his left. Meanwhile Brahma is but one of untold numbers of
other gods dreaming their own universes.
The 8.64
billion years that mark a full day-and-night cycle in Brahma’s
life is about half the modern estimate for the age of the
universe. The ancient Hindus believed that each Brahma day and
each Brahma night lasted a kalpa, 4.32 billion years, with
72,000 kalpas equaling a Brahma century, 311,040 billion years
in all. That the Hindus could conceive of the universe in terms
of billions.
The
similarities between Indian and modern cosmology do not seem
accidental. Perhaps ideas of creation from nothing, or
alternating cycles of creation and destruction are hardwired in
the human psyche. Certainly Shiva’s
percussive drumbeat suggests the sudden energetic
impulse that could have propelled the big bang. And if, as some
theorists have proposed, the big bang is merely the prelude to
the big crunch and the universe is caught in an infinite cycle
of expansion and contraction, then ancient Indian cosmology is
clearly cutting edge compared to the one-directional vision of
the big bang. The infinite number of
Hindu universes is currently called the many world hypothesis,
which is no less undocumentable nor unthinkable.
 The
Indians came closest to modern ideas of atomism, quantum
physics, and other current theories. India developed
very early, enduring atomist theories of matter. Possibly Greek
atomistic thought was influenced by India, via the Persian
civilization. The Rig-Veda, is the
first Indian literature to set down ideas resembling universal
natural laws. Cosmic law is connected with cosmic light, with
gods, and, later, specifically with Brahman.
It was the Vedic Aryans... who gave the world some
of the earliest philosophical texts on the makeup of matter and the theoretical
underpinnings for the chemical makeup of minerals. Sanskrit Vedas from thousands
of years before Christ implied that matter could not be created, and that the
universe had created itself. Reflecting this, in his Vaiseshika
philosophy, Kanada (600 B. C) claimed that
elements could not be destroyed. Kanada's life is somewhat a mysterious, but his
name is said to mean "one who eats particle or grain" likely referring
to his theory that basic particles mix together as the building blocks for all
matter. Two, three, four, or more of these elements would combine, just as we
conceive of atoms doing. The Greeks would not stumble on this concept for
another century."
"In India,
we see the beginning of theoretical speculation of the size and
nature of the earth. Some one thousand years before Aristotle,
the Vedic Aryans asserted
that the earth was round and circled the sun. A translation of
the Rig Veda goes: " In
the prescribed daily prayers to the Sun we find..the Sun is at
the center of the solar system. ..The student ask, "What is
the nature of the entity that holds the Earth? The teacher
answers, "Rishi Vatsa holds
the view that the Earth is held in space by the Sun."
"Two
thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers
in northern India had understood that gravitation held the solar
system together, and that therefore the sun, the most massive
object, had to be at its center."
"Twenty-four
centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda
asserted that gravitation held the universe together. The
Sanskrit speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical
earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one. The
Indians of the fifth century A.D. calculated the age of the
earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in 19th century England
were convinced it was 100 million years."
(source: Lost
Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick
Teresi p.
159 and 174 -212). For more refer to chapter Hindu
Cosmology).
 Mark
Morford is an
award-winning columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
He
has recently observed that:
"I
believe the Earth actually (and obviously) resonates, quite literally, with the
Hindu belief in the divine sound of OM
(or more accurately, AUM),
that single, universal syllable that contains and encompasses all: birth and
death, creation and destruction, being and nothingness.."
(source:
Scientists
Say The Earth Is Humming Not just noise, but a deep, astonishing music. Can you
hear it? -
By Mark Morford - rense.com).
India had a thriving civilization capable of sophisticated astronomy
long before Greece, Egypt, or any other world culture. For more than a century
scholars have debated the antiquity of the Vedas and their related literature,
the Brahmanas and Puranas. Incontrovertible evidence that such
"advanced" astronomical concepts as precession, heliocentrism, and the
eclipse cycle are encoded in these ancient texts, passages of which make perfect
sense only if these astronomical keys are known. Based on internal evidence in
the Mahabharata and Ramayana, it is likely to establish dates--and even
places--for the events described in these famous epics and thus place India, or
the roots of civilization.
 A Rg Vedic hymn to the
Asvins (Mercury and Venus), quoted in the Mahabharata, also refers to the twelve
zodiacal signs. Zodiacal signs are mentioned in the Rig Veda, thus, they precede
Greco-Babylonian astronomy. The earliest reference to the zodiacal signs is,
therefore, in the Rig
Veda, not in Babylonian literature. This completely upsets
the rather smug history of astronomy as conceived by the western scholars of the
past couple of centuries. It is obvious that the Rig Vedic seers were not mere
observers in the sense the Babylonian were. They had theorized about their
observations, beating the Greeks by over a thousand years in this process.
By deciphering the astronomical events and alignments
contained in symbolic form in these ancient texts, question
many if not all of the assumptions governing Indo-European prehistory. The
astronomical significance of many Hindu deities, the system of lunar
asterisms used to mark time, the identity of the Asvins, and the sophisticated
calendar of the ancients that harmonized solar and lunar cycles.
With the rise of modern science it should have been feasible to crack
the Vedic code at least three decades earlier, but here lies the greatest
tragedy of India. Under the Marxist grip Indian intellectuals have been made
ashamed of their heritage, and most educated Hindus are ready to parade with the
banner " We are ashamed of being Hindus" at the drop of a hat. Most
educated Indians - including scientists have no clue as to what is in the Vedas.
The Vedas are written in Sanskrit and most educated Indians can not understand
it as there is a conspiracy to finish Sanskrit and everything else that Hindus
should be proud of. There are very few Vedic scholars left in India.
***
Vedic India and the Primordial Tradition
Vishnunabhi
is the navel of Lord Vishnu, the emanation point of the cosmos.
According to John Major Jenkins,
a leading independent researcher of ancient cosmology:
 "Our
understanding of the true age of the ancient Vedic civilization has undergone a
well-documented revolution. Feuerstein, Frawley, and
Kak have shown conclusively (In
Search of the Cradle of Civilization) that the long-accepted
age of the Vedic culture—erroneously dated by scholars parading a series of
assumptions and unscientific arguments to roughly 1500 BC—is much too recent.
Evidence comes from geological, archaeological, and literary sources as well as
the astronomical references within Vedic literature. The corrected dating to
eras far prior to 1500 BC was made possible by recognizing that precessional
eras are encoded in Vedic mythology, and were recorded by ancient Vedic astronomers. As a result, the Indus Valley
civilization appears to be a possible cradle of civilization, dated
conservatively to 7000 BC.
Western
India may thus be a true source of the civilizing impulse that fed Anatolia in
Turkey, with its complex Goddess-worshipping city-states of Çatal Hüyük and
Hacilar. However, there are layers upon layers of even older
astronomical references, and legends persist that the true “cradle” might be
found further to the north, in Tibet or nearby Central Asia.
The work of these three writers shows that biases and
assumptions within scholarly discourse can prevent an accurate modeling of
history and an underestimation of the accomplishments of ancient cultures. The
analogous situation in modern Egyptology and Mesoamerican studies also requires
that well-documented new theories — often exhaustively argued,
interdisciplinary, and oriented toward a progressive synthesis of new data —
should be appraised fairly and without bias.
Next to the Australian aborigines,
the Vedic civilization
is perhaps the oldest continuous living tradition in the world. Its extremely
ancient doctrines and insights into human spirituality are unsurpassed. We might
expect that its cosmology and science of time has been as misunderstood as its true antiquity. In
looking closely at Vedic doctrines of time, spiritual growth, calendars, and
astronomy, we will see that a central core idea is that of our periodic
alignment to the Galactic Center. And, according to these ancient Vedic beliefs,
the galactic alignment we are currently experiencing heralds our shift
from a millennia-long descent of deepening spiritual darkness to a new era of
light and ascending consciousness. "
Lord Vishnu
is the infinite ocean from which the world emerges - Lord is shown lying down on
a thousand-headed snake (named Shesha or Ananta Nag - Timeless or Ageless
snake).
According to ancient Vedic beliefs,
the galactic alignment we are currently experiencing heralds our shift
from a millennia-long descent of deepening spiritual darkness to a new era of
light and ascending consciousness. "
Refer
to Indian
Institute of Scientific Heritage
and Watch
Carl
Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video
***
 Josh
Schrei
(?) is a
Marketing Director, Strategist, Producer, Writer, Critic, Activist. 
He has written most eloquently about
Hinduism's
open source and staggering contribution to the our spiritual
world:
"Modern-day atheists, however, have come to assume that if one is “rational” or
“scientific” it means that one does not believe in god. Victims of the western
Church-Science split, these atheist casualties are so spooked by the atrocities
of religious power structure that they are unable to do any serious study of the
history of human thought on God."
"Any
two-bit religious scholar knows that Buddhists and Hindus count time in
Kalpas,
or segments of millions of years, and that they firmly believe the earth was
created billions of years ago. There are many prominent Hindu scholars, in fact,
who posit that some of the best loved Hindu legends from the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana are in fact tales from Neanderthal times."
"Indian
history, for example, contains a vast body of incredibly sophisticated
scientific/academic literature on god, concepts of god, consciousness at it
relates to god, the human body and human thoughts and emotions in relation to
god… and, in the case of Kashmiri Shaivism for example,
quantum
physics as it relates to god. The concept of spanda in
Kashmiri cosmology is one of the most intellectually complex and sophisticated
views on divinity ever put forth. Abhinavagupta
— the brilliant architect of much of Indian thought– penned theistic texts over
1,000 years ago that contain scientific truths that physicists are just now
confirming."
(source:
The God Project: Hinduism as Open-Source Faith - By Josh Schrei -
huffingtonpost.com
and
Christopher Hitchens is absurd - By Josh Schreiy).
 Philip Goldberg ( )
is a spiritual counselor, Interfaith Minister, and author or coauthor of
numerous books, including Roadsigns on the Spiritual Path. His latest work,
American Veda: From Emerson and the Beatles to Yoga and Meditation How Indian
Spirituality Changed the West.
He has
observed:
"Their ancient philosophies have also influenced physicists, among them
Erwin Schrödinger,
Werner Heisenberg and
J. Robert Oppenheimer, who read from the
Bhagavad Gita
at a memorial service for
President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "
"In his landmark
TV series
Cosmos,
Carl Sagan
called Hinduism the only religion whose time-scale for the universe matches the
billions of years documented by modern science. Sagan filmed that segment in a
Hindu temple featuring a statue of the god Shiva
as the cosmic dancer, an image that now stands in the plaza of the
European
Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva."
"Western religions would do well to emulate this history. Their historical and
faith-based claims conflict with empirical science and probably always will; but
to the extent that their practices directly impact human life, they can be
treated as testable hypotheses."
"Ages ago, the vast subcontinent of India birthed
explorers and innovators who focused on the inner realm. Those geniuses -
spiritual sages or scientists of consciousness, depending on your perspective -
gave us, through a series of modern translators and adapters, insights that have
profoundly influenced religion, healthcare, psychology, the arts and other areas
of life. The way we understand ourselves and the universe has been shaped by
India more than we can readily appreciate.
(source:
Are
Eastern Religions More Science-Friendly? - By Philip Goldberg -
huffingtonpost.com and
Obama should have thanked India -
By Philip Golberg - huffingtonpost.com).
Refer to
The Christian propaganda in Stephen Hawking’s
work
- By
C K Raju
 Jeffrey
Armstrong ( ? )
worked as a sales manager with Apple Computer for six years and who shares his passion for all things Indian
and has
founded an educational institute called the Vedic
Academy of Science and Arts (VASA), is now working on creating a
permanent library of Hindu and Vedic culture in Vancouver.
"Indians of pre-modern history calculated the age of
the universe in trillions of years.
This is also the
culture that gave us
zero, the numerals that we
use – so-called Arabic have their roots in India – as do trigonometry and
calculus, astronomical calculation and a view that says the universe is not only
billions, but trillions of years in age and that we are eternal beings who are
simply visiting the material world to have the experience of being here.
So, the point is,
India holds a massive cosmological view of
us – and that humans have existed for trillions of years, in varying stages of
existence. And further, over time humans will continue to populate the many
universes again and again.
There is a lot of evidence that ancient Indian
civilization
was global and as I mentioned many were seafaring and using extremely accurate
astronomical, heliocentric calculations for both Earth and celestial motions,
indicating an understanding that the Sun is at the center of the solar system
and that the Earth is round. Elliptical orbits were also calculated for all
moving celestial bodies. The findings are remarkable. What India calculated
thousands of years ago, for example the wobble of the Earth's axis, which
creates the movement called precession of the equinoxes – the slowly changing
motion that completes one cycle every 25,920 years – has only recently been
validated by modern science.
The cosmology of India describes our universe as having
fourteen parallel realities on multiple levels,
all existing and intersecting within the material realm in which we are
currently living.
Was this knowledge given to them by divine beings as they claim? Was there
inter-galactic travel? Did the people in
India have contact with beings or knowledge from other planets? We don't know,
but what is certain is that they had mathematical/astronomical understanding
that is extremely precise and agrees with many of the results of astronomy
today. There is no other way to explain why India and these ancient cultures
would have such precise knowledge other than the fact that they were in a period
of impressive technology and culture beyond our present understanding."
(source:
Jeffrey Armstrong on the Mysteries of Indian Culture, the Relevance of Hindu
Vedas and the Reality of Ancient Flying Machines - thedailybell.com).
Refer to
The Christian propaganda in Stephen Hawking’s
work
- By
C K Raju
 Alexander
Gorbovsky (1930
- 2003) an expert at the
Russian
Munitions Agency
has written:
“The
Mahabharata - an ancient Indian epic compiled 3000
years ago - contains a reference to a terrible weapon. Regrettably, in our age
of the atomic bomb, the description of this weapon exploding will not appear to
be an exaggeration:
".... a blazing shaft possessed of the effulgence
of a smokeless fire (was) let off...'. That was how this weapon was perceived.
The consequences of its use also evoke involuntary associations. '... This makes
the bodies of the dead unidentifiable. ... The survivors lose their nails and
hair, and their food becomes unfit for eating. For several subsequent years
the
Sun, the stars and the sky remain shrouded with clouds and bad weather'.
"This
weapon was known as the Weapon of Brahma or the Flame of Indra......".
(source:
Riddles of Ancient History -
Alexander
Gorbovsky, The Sputnik Magazine, Moscow, Sept. 1986, p. 137).
Vishnunabhi:
Yugas and Galactic Center
 One of the oldest writings in Vedic literature comes from a
pseudo-historical god-man called Manu. René Guénon
pointed out that Manu belongs to a family of related archetypal figures, which
include Melchezidek, Metatron, St Michael, Gabriel, and Enoch. As an angelic
inspiration for the rebirth of humanity at the dawn of a new era, or Manvantara, Manu
is the primal law-giver, and his laws were recorded in the extremely ancient
Vedic text called the Laws of Manu. Much of its contents describe
moral and ethical codes of right behavior, but there is a section that deals
with the ancient Vedic doctrine of World Ages - the
Yugas. Manu indicates that a period of 24,000 years — clearly a
reference to precession — consists of a series of four yugas or ages, each
shorter and spiritually darker than the last.
In one story this process of increasing limitation is envisioned as a
cosmic cow standing with each leg in one quarter of the world; with each age
that passes a leg is lost, resulting in the absurd and unstable world we live in
today—a cow balancing on one leg.
According to the information in the Laws of Manu, the
morning and twilight periods between the dawn of each new era equals one-tenth
of its associated yuga, as shown in the following table:
Dawn
Era Dusk
Total Name
400 + 4000 + 400 = 4800 years. Satya Yuga (Golden Age)
300 + 3000 + 300 = 3600 years. Treta Yuga (Silver Age)
200 + 2000 + 200 = 2400 years. Dwapara Yuga (Bronze Age)
100 + 1000 + 100 = 1200 years. Kali Yuga (Iron Age)
12,000 years
In
Vedic mythology, a fabled dawn time existed in the distant past, when human
beings had direct contact with the divine intelligence emanating from
Brahma—the seat of creative power and intelligence in the cosmos. This archaic
Golden Age (the Satya Yuga) lasted some 4800 years. After the Golden Age ended,
humanity entered a denser era, that of the Silver Age, lasting only 3600 years.
In this age, humanity’s connection with the source was dimmed, and sacrifices
and spiritual practices became necessary to preserve it.
The Bronze Age followed, and humanity forgot its divine nature. Empty
dogmas arose, along with indulgence in materialism. Next we entered the Kali
Yuga—in which we remain today—where the human spirit suffers
under gross materialism, ignorance, warfare, stupidity, arrogance, and
everything contrary to our divine spiritual potential.
As
the teachings tell, Kali, the creator-destroyer Goddess, will appear at the end
of Kali Yuga to sweep away the wasted detritus of a spirit-dead humanity, making
way for a new cycle of light and peace. Notice that the Manu text takes us from
a pinnacle of light to the ultimate end-point of the process—the darkness of
Kali Yuga. And notice that the four ages, when the overlap period is added,
amounts to only half of the 24,000-year period of the Vedic Yuga cycle.
(source:
Galactic Alignment - By
John Major Jenkins).
Lord Vishnu - 5th century.
The
Indian astronomers went even further, giving a physical reason for how the dual
star or binary motion might allow the rise and fall of human consciousness to
occur. They said that the Sun (with the Earth and other planets) traveled along
its set orbital path with its companion start, it would cyclically move close
to, then away from, a point in space referred to as Vishnunabhi,
a supposed magnetic center or "grand center".
Refer
to Indian
Institute of Scientific Heritage
***
The
Indian astronomers went even further, giving a physical reason for how the dual
star or binary motion might allow the rise and fall of human consciousness to
occur.
They said that the Sun (with the Earth
and other planets) traveled along its set orbital path with its companion start,
it would cyclically move close to, then away from, a point in space referred to
as Vishnunabhi,
a supposed magnetic center or "grand center". They implied
that being close to this region caused subtle changes in human consciousness
that brought about the Golden Age, and conversely, our separation from it
resulted in an age of great darkness, the Kali Yuga or Dark Age. "When the
Sun in its revolution around its dual comes to the place nearest to this grand
center, ... (an event which takes place when the autumnal equinox comes to the
first point of Aries), dharma, the mental virtue, becomes so much developed that
man can easily comprehend all, even the mysteries of the Spirit."
(source:
Lost
Star of Myth and Time - By Walter Cruttenden). Also refer to Hamlet's
Mill - By Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend.
(For
more refer to chapter on Greater
India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred
Angkor).
Top
of Page
Advanced Scientific Concepts in Hindu Literature
The
revolutionary contents of the Vedas
For
a quick glimpse at what unsung surprises may lie in the Vedas, let us consider
these renditions from the Yajur-veda and Atharva-veda, for instance.
"
O disciple, a student in the science of government, sail
in oceans in steamers, fly in the air in airplanes, know God the
creator through the Vedas, control thy breath through yoga, through astronomy
know the functions of day and night, know all the Vedas, Rig, Yajur, Sama and
Atharva, by means of their constituent parts."
" Through astronomy, geography,
and geology, go thou to all the different countries of the world under the sun.
Mayest thou attain through good preaching to statesmanship and artisanship,
through medical science obtain knowledge of all medicinal plants, through
hydrostatics learn the different uses of water, through electricity understand
the working of ever lustrous lightening. Carry out my instructions
willingly." (Yajur-veda
6.21).
" O royal skilled engineer, construct sea-boats,
propelled on water by our experts, and airplanes, moving and flying upward,
after the clouds that reside in the mid-region, that fly as the boats move on
the sea, that fly high over and below the watery clouds. Be thou, thereby,
prosperous in this world created by the Omnipresent God, and flier in both air
and lightning." (Yajur-veda 10.19).
" The atomic energy fissions
the ninety-nine elements, covering its path by the bombardments of neutrons
without let or hindrance. Desirous of stalking the head, ie. The chief part of
the swift power, hidden in the mass of molecular adjustments of the elements,
this atomic energy approaches it in the very act of fissioning it by the
above-noted bombardment. Herein, verily the scientists know the similar hidden
striking force of the rays of the sun working in the orbit of the moon."
(Atharva-veda 20.41.1-3).
(source: Searching
for Vedic India - By Devamitra Swami p. 155 - 157). For
more refer to chapter on Hindu
Culture and Vimanas).
***
The Rig Veda is the oldest Indian text and one of the
oldest surviving in the world.
This collection of hymns of sages like Vasistha,
Visvamitra, Agastya, Dirghatmas, and others was compiled over a span of a few
hundred years. The verses of the Rig Veda form a code that, properly
interpreted, reveals an amazing amount of astronomical knowledge, which is
unbelievable when we consider their antiquity - 1500 B. C. being a conservative
estimate. In fact, the Rig Veda shorn of its allegory and metaphorical
camouflage, is the oldest textbook of modern astronomy.
The Rig Veda is the oldest Indian text and one of the
oldest surviving in the world.
The Rig Veda is according
to astronomical grounds, more than five thousand years old.
The verses of the Rig Veda form a code that, properly
interpreted, reveals an amazing amount of astronomical knowledge, which is
unbelievable when we consider their antiquity - 1500 B. C. being a conservative
estimate. In fact, the Rig Veda shorn of its allegory and metaphorical
camouflage, is the oldest textbook of modern astronomy.
Watch
Carl
Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video
***
From this approach it follows that the Rig Veda seers
were scientists in the modern sense. Pre-Rig Veda astronomers, had, in fact
measured the sphericity of the Earth, established the heliocentric theory in its
modern form, and explained the seasons astronomically. Advanced concepts like
the causes of auroral displays were also understood. The Rig Veda is according
to astronomical grounds, more than five thousand years old. The Rig Veda
repeatedly refers to Earth and the heavens as "bowls" thus suggesting
that the sphericity of Earth was recognized. This can be confirmed by several
hymns as well. Several hymns are attributed to the Aswins, which are the planets
Mercury and Venus. A Rig Veda hymn to the Asvins, quoted in the Mahabharata,
also refers to the twelve zodiacal signs. Undoubtedly, the twelve zodiacal signs
were known. Thus, the earliest reference to the zodiacal signs is, therefore, in
the Rig Veda, not in the Babylonian literature.
Sphericity of Earth:
The existence of rather advanced
concepts like the sphericity of Earth
and the cause of seasons is quite clear in Vedic literature. For example, the
Aitareya Brahmana (3.44) declares:
 “The
Sun does never set nor rise. When people think the Sun is setting (it is not
so). For after having arrived at the end of the day it makes itself produce two
opposite effects, making night to what is below and day to what is on the other
side…Having reached the end of the night, it makes itself produce two opposite
effects, making day to what is below and night to what is on the other side. In
fact, the Sun never sets….”
Earth as Flat at Poles:
"Twenty-four centuries
before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the
universe together. The Sanskrit speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a
spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one. The Indians of
the fifth century A.D. calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years;
scientists in 19th century England were convinced it was 100 million
years."
(source: Lost
Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick
Teresi p. 7 - 8).
It
is quite remarkable that the
Markandeya Purana
(54.12) speaks of Earth as being
flattened at the poles and bulging at the equator, that is, not perfectly
spherical.
 The
Vishnu Purana,
in an obvious elaboration of the above quotation from the
Aitareya Brahmana, also speaks of antipodes of Earth and indeed implies the
existence of Earth’s rotation. In addition, even more elementary concepts like
the phases of Moon and the cause of twilight were well understood, as was the
fact that the blue sky is nothing but scattered sunlight. (cf.
Markandeya Purana,
78.8, or 103.9)
Sun the center of the Solar
System:
Dick
Teresi has observed that:
"The Vedas recognized the
sun as the source of light and warmth, the source of life, and center of
creation, and the center of the spheres. This perception may have planted a
seed, leading Indian thinkers to entertain the idea of heliocentricity long
before some Greeks thought of it. An ancient Sanskrit couplet
also contemplates the idea of multiple suns:
"Sarva
Dishanaam, Suryaham Suryaha, Surya."
Roughly translated this means,
"There are suns in all directions, the night sky being full of them,"
suggesting that early sky watchers may have realized that the visible stars are
similar in kind to the sun. A hymn of the Rig Veda,
the Taittriya Brahmana, extols,
nakshatravidya (nakshatra means stars; vidya, knowledge)."
"Two
thousand years before Pythagoras, philosophers in northern India had understood
that gravitation held the solar system together, and that therefore the sun, the
most massive object, had to be at its center. "
(source: Lost
Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science - By Dick
Teresi p. 1
and 130).
 One frequently encounters the concepts of the Sun being at the center of the
solar system (cf Markandeya Purana, 106. 41). All this pales, however, before
the concept, startlingly similar to the twentieth-century model, of an
oscillating universe, or more accurately, a universe being cyclically created
and destroyed, with just about the right time period of about 10,000 million
years.
(cf. Mahabharata Santi Parva, or Markandeya Purana,
81, 57-58).
The
Rig Veda
repeatedly asks, "How is it that
though the Sun is not bound and is directed downwards, it does not fall?"
A question asked by Isaac Newton more than three thousand years later, and no
one else, because the Greeks had furnished the crystal spheres to which these
objects were attached!
When we talk of gravity, Newton comes to our mind, but in the text Surya
Sidhantha dated around 400 AD,
Bhaskaracharya
described it stated. "objects fall on the earth due to one force. The
Earth, planets, constellations, moon and sun are held in orbit because of that
one force".
 "Seven horses draw the
chariot of Surya". Rg Veda 5. 45. 9
These seven horses are the seven colors compromising light. These seven colors
become visible in a rainbow or when light passes through a prism.
Vedic
literature used large numbers and employed modern decimal enumeration, compared
with the primitive Greek and Roman arithmetic. The first recorded evidence of
"Hindu" numerals is at least as old as the Ashoka's edicts, circa 250
B. C.
Not
just astronomy, but other physical concepts appear in quite a developed form in
ancient Indian literature. These include atomism, superposition of various sound
notes, the division of time into very small units of the order of a 100,000th
of a second, and so on.
The Laya Yoga Samhita
stated that just as the beams of sunlight entering a room reveal the presence of
innumberable motes, so infinite space is filled with countless brahmandas (solar
systems). The atomic structure of matter was discussed in the ancient Vaisesika
treatises. And in the Yoga Vashista it was stated, in a passage very similar to
the foregoing: "There are vast worlds all placed way within the hollows of
each atom, multifarious as the motes in a sunbeam."
(source: Crises
in Modern Thought: The Crises of Reason - By Swami Kriyananda (J.
Donald Walters) vol. 1 p - 95).
Modern physics confirmed that the sun's rays
travel in a curved way, but not in a straight line. Our ancestors told that the
sun's chariot was drawn by seven horses tied by snakes. As the movements of the
snakes are crooked and curved, so also the sun's ray. The phenomenon is
described in a metaphysical poetic line bhujagana mita sapta turaga. The chapter
on light says that there are seven colors in the white ray of the sun.
Artharveda says that there are seven types of sun's rays, sapta surayasya
rasmayah.
The law of gravitation
discovered by Brahmagupta anticipated Newton by declaring "all
things fall to the earth by law of nature; for it is the nature of the earth to
attract and keep things."
(source:
Hinduism
and Scientific Quest - By T R. R. Iyengar p.
153-154 South Asia Books ASIN 8124600775).
 Marquis Pierre
Simon de Laplace
( 1749-1827) French mathematician, philosopher,
and astronomer, a contemporary of Napoleon. Laplace
is best known for his nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar
system. wrote:
"Nevertheless the ancient reputation of the Indians does not permit
us to doubt that they have always cultivated astronomy, and the remarkable
exactness of the mean motions which they assign to the Sun and the Moon
necessarily required very ancient observation."
Yaqubi,
Shiite historian, wrote in the ninth century:
"Hindu are more exact in astronomy and
astrology than any other people.
Atoms:
In the realm of physics, remarkable contributions
have been made by Indian scientists. Kanada,
the founder of the Vaisesika system of philosophy,
expounded that the entire matter in this world consists of atoms as many in kind
as the various elements. Kanada's atom would then correspond to the modern atom.
Some Jain thinkers went a step further. They thought that all atoms are the same
kind and variety emerged because they entered into different combinations.
Kanada taught that light and heat are variations of the same reality. Vacaspati
interpreted light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances and
striking the eyes. This is a clear anticipation of the corpuscular theory of
light, which was proposed by Newton but rejected till the discovery of the
proton.
(source:
Hinduism
and Scientific Quest - By T R. R. Iyengar p.
153-154 South Asia Books ASIN 8124600775).
Other discoveries of modern
technology is that of atomic energy and its by-products. Most people agree that
no civilization before us had knowledge of such things. But time and time again
we find in the Vedic literature descriptions of weapons that had a similar
amount of energy as the atomic bombs we use today. And to what else would these
next few verses from the Artha-veda be referring if they are not a description
of the basic principles of atomic energy?
"The Atomic energy fissions the
ninety-nine elements, covering its path by the bombardments of neutrons without
let or hindrance. Desirous of stalking the head, i.e. the chief part of the
swift power, hidden in the mass of molecular adjustments of the elements, this
atomic energy approaches it in the very act of fissioning it by the above-noted
bombardment. Herein verily the scientist know the similar hidden striking force
of the rays of the sun working in the orbit of the moon. " (Artha-Veda,
20.41.1-3)
J. Robert
Oppenheimer, (1904-1967)
Scientist,
philosopher, bohemian, and radical. A theoretical physicist and the Supervising
Scientist Manhattan Project, the developer of the atomic bomb said: He is most
remembered for his work with Albert Einstein on the first atomic bomb.
 Only
seven years after the first successful atom bomb blast in New Mexico, Dr.
Oppenheimer, of
The Manhattan Project,
who was familiar with ancient Sanskrit literature, was giving a
lecture at Rochester University. During the question and answer period a student
asked a question to which Oppenheimer gave a strangely qualified answer:
Student: Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to
be detonated?
Dr. Oppenheimer:
"Well -- yes. In modern times, of course.
"Berlitz goes on to quote a number of passages from the
Mahabharata
that describe the
impact of a weapon that I suspect must be the
brahmaastra,
although he neither names
the weapon nor cites those sections of the text from which his quotations are drawn (he
lists Protap Chandra Roy's translation of 1889 in his bibliography):...a single projectile
Charged with all the power of the Universe.
An incandescent column of smoke and flame As bright as ten thousand Suns Rose in all its
splendor......it was an unknown weapon, An iron thunderbolt, A gigantic messenger of
death, Which reduced to ashes. The Entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas....the
corpses were so burned As to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out; Pottery
broke without apparent cause, And the birds turned white. After a few hours all foodstuffs
were infected......To escape from this fire. The soldiers threw themselves in streams to
wash themselves and their equipment...
One is reminded of the yet
unknown final effect of a super-bomb when we read in the Ramayana of a
projectile:
...So powerful that it could
destroy
The earth in an instant -
A great soaring sound in smoke and flames...
And on it sits Death...
(source:
Doomsday 1999
A.D.
- By Charles Berlitz
Doubleday; March 1981
ASIN 038515982X p. 118-122).
(Refer
to Visions
of the End of the World - By Dr. Subhash Kak - sulekha.com).
Oppenheimer
described the thoughts that passed through his mind when he witnessed the first
atomic test explosion.
"Of a thousand suns in
the sky if suddenly should burst forth the light, it would be like unto the light of that
Exalted One. (Bhagvad Gita
XI,12)
" Death am I, cause of destruction of the worlds, matured and set out to gather in
the worlds there" (Bhagvad Gita
XI 32)
For
example, the
Vishnu Purana
in an insightful passage declares,
“How can reality
be predicated of what is subject to change, and reassumes no more of its
original character? Earth is fabricated into a jar; the jar is divided into two
halves; the halves are broken to pieces, the pieces become dust; the dust
becomes atoms….”
Universal Time Scale:
The late scientist,
Carl
Sagan, in his book, Cosmos
asserts that the Dance
of Nataraja (Tandava)
signifies the cycle of evolution and destruction of the cosmic universe (Big
Bang Theory).
"It is the clearest image of the activity of God which any
art or religion can boast of." Modern physics has shown that the rhythm of
creation and destruction is not only manifest in the turn of the seasons and in
the birth and death of all living creatures, but also the very essence of
inorganic matter.
For modern physicists, then, Shiva's dance is the dance of subatomic matter.
Hundreds of years ago, Indian artist created visual images of dancing Shiva's in
a beautiful series of bronzes. Today, physicist have used the most advanced
technology to portray the pattern of the cosmic dance. Thus, the metaphor of the
cosmic dance unifies, ancient religious art and modern physics. The Hindus,
according to Monier-Williams, were Spinozists more than 2,000 years before the
advent of Spinoza, and Darwinians many centuries before Darwin and Evolutionists
many centuries before the doctrine of Evolution was accepted by scientists of
the present age.
"The Hindu religion
is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the
Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and
rebirths. It is the only religion in which
the time scales correspond, to those of modern scientific cosmology.
Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma,
8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about
half the time since the Big Bang. And there are much longer time scales
still."
The Cosmic dance of Lord Shiva
in bronze.
The
most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the
creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a
motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in
this manifestation Nataraja, the
Dance King.
(For
more refer to chapter on Greater
India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred
Angkor).
Refer
to Indian
Institute of Scientific Heritage
and Watch
Carl
Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video
***
" The
most elegant and sublime of these is a representation of the
creation of the universe at the beginning of each cosmic cycle, a
motif known as the cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in
this manifestation Nataraja, the
Dance King. In the upper right
hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of creation. In the upper
left hand is a tongue of flame, a reminder that the universe, now
newly created, with billions of years from now will be utterly
destroyed."
(source: Cosmos
- By Carl Sagan Random House ISBN
0375508325 p. 213 -214).
 Fritjof
Capra (1939 - )
Austrian-born famous theoretical high-energy physicist and ecologist wrote:
"Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic
particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is
an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance
of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an
infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’.For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance
is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance
of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all
existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists
created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our
times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns
of the cosmic dance."
(source: The
Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and
Eastern Mysticism - By Fritjof Capra p.
241-245).
Watch
Carl
Sagan and Hindu cosmology – video
 Jawaharlal Nehru
(1889-1964) first
prime minister of free India, was more than a deeply moral human
being. He yearned for spiritual light. He was particularly drawn
to Swami Vivekananda and the Sri Ramakrishna Ashram. In his book
- A Discovery of India he
wrote:
"The statue of Nataraja (dance pose of
Lord Shiva) is a well known example for the artistic, scientific and
philosophical significance of Hinduism."
(source:
A Discovery of India
- By Jawaharlal Nehru p.
214).
Hinduism is the only religion that propounds the idea
of life-cycles of the universe. It suggests that the universe undergoes an
infinite number of deaths and rebirths.
Hinduism, according to Carl
Sagan, "... is the only religion in which the time
scales correspond... to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run
from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of the Brahma, 8.64 billion
years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time
since the Big Bang"
Long before Aryabhata
(6th century) came up with this awesome achievement, apparently there was a
mythological angle to this as well -- it becomes clear when one looks at the
following translation of Bhagavad Gita (part
VIII, lines 16 and 17),
"All the planets
of the universe, from the most evolved to the most base, are places of
suffering, where birth and death takes place. But for the soul that reaches my
Kingdom, O son of Kunti, there is no more reincarnation. One day of Brahma is
worth a thousand of the ages [yuga] known to humankind; as is each
night."
Thus each kalpa is worth one day in the life of
Brahma, the God of creation. In other words, the four ages of the mahayuga
must be repeated a thousand times to make a "day ot Brahma", a unit of
time that is the equivalent of 4.32 billion human years, doubling which one gets
8.64 billion years for a Brahma day and night. This was later theorized
(possibly independently) by Aryabhata in the 6th century. The cyclic nature of
this analysis suggests a universe that is expanding to be followed by
contraction... a cosmos without end. This, according to modern physicists is not
an impossibility.
(source: Astronomy
and Mathematics in Ancient India).
 Professor Arthur Holmes
(1895-1965) geologist, professor at the University of Durham. He
writes regarding the age of the earth in his great book, The
Age of Earth (1913) as
follows:
"Long before it became a
scientific aspiration to estimate the age of the earth, many elaborate systems
of the world chronology had been devised by the sages of antiquity. The
most remarkable of these occult time-scales is that of the ancient Hindus, whose
astonishing concept of the Earth's duration has been traced back to Manusmriti,
a sacred book."
When the Hindu calculation of
the present age of the arth and the expanding universe could make Professor
Holmes so astonished, the precision with which the Hindu calculation regarding
the age of the entire Universe was made would make any man spellbound.
(source: Hinduism
and Scientific Quest - By T. R. R. Iyengar
p. 20-21).
Sir Jacob Epstein has written about
Shiva Nataraja:
"Shiva
dances, creating the world and destroying it, his large rhythms conjure up vast
aeons of time, and his movements have a relentless magical power of incantation.
Our European allegories are banal and pointless by comparison with these
profound works, devoid of the trappings of symbolism, concentrating on the
essential, the essentially plastic."
(source: Let
There Be Sculpture - By Sir Jacob Epstein 1942 p. 193).
Swami Kriyananada (J.
Donald Walters) World renowned as a singer, composer, and lecturer,
founder of the Ananda Village is perhaps the most successful intentional
community in the world writes:
"Hindu cosmography,
for example born in hoary antiquity, strikes one in certain ways as surprisingly
modern. India has never limited its conception of time to a few crowded millennia.
Thousands of years ago India's sages computed the earth's age at a little over
two billion years, our present era being what is called the seventh Manuvantra.
This is a staggering claim. Consider how much scientific evidence has been
needed in the West before men could even imagine so enormous a time
scale."
(source: Crises
in Modern Thought: The Crises of Reason - By Swami Kriyananda (J.
Donald Walters) vol. 1 p - 94).
 Princeton
University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge
University’s Neil Turok, have recently
developed The Cyclical Model.
They
have just fired their latest volley at
that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of
expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the
21st century.
The
theorists acknowledge that their cyclic concept draws upon religious and
scientific ideas going back for millennia — echoing the "oscillating
universe" model that was in vogue in the 1930s, as well as the Hindu belief
that the universe has no beginning or end, but follows a cosmic cycle of
creation and dissolution.
(source: Questioning
the Big Bang
- msnbcnews.com). (For more on yugas, refer to One
Cosmic Day of Creator Brahma).
" Another point illustrating the
advanced nature of the Vedic Aryan civilization is their conception of the
universal time scale. The time factor is calculated as affecting various levels
of the universe differently. For example, a day for the demigods is equal
to six months for humans on planet earth. And a year is calculated as 360 human
years, while 12,000 years of the gods is said to be but one blink of the eye of
Maha Vishnu. For Lord Brahma, the highest of all the demigods, his day equals
one thousand cycles of the combined four ages of Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and
Kali-yugas. This amounts to 4.3 billion years,
at the end of which is his night when there is a partial annihilation of the
universe, which includes the earth. After an equal number of years, Brahma's day
begins again, and that which is destroyed is again created or revived.
For
example in the Bhagavad Gita,
Lord Krishna tells Arjuna:
"All the worlds from Brahma's
world (the universe) are periodic. Arjuna.
They, those who know the day and night, know that the day of Brahma is a
thousand yugas long and a night is a thousand yugas long.
From the unmanifested, all the manifest things spring forth on the arrival of
the day (of Brahma). On the onset of night all these sink into what is called
the unmanifested.
Partha, (Arjuna), this multitude of created things having existed over and over
again and helplessly destroyed at the onset of night, spring forth on the onset
of day."
 All
this sounds a little like the modern theory of an oscillating universe that
begins with a big bang that all matter flying out until the outrushing matter
comes to a halt and collapses back into a tiny speck, leading to another big
bang, and so on. An entire cycle according to present-day cosmological ideas
could take 10,000million to 20,000 million years. It
seems incredible that the ancient Hindus could hit upon this idea thousands of
years ago. Some biased scholars have tended to
dismiss this agreement of the order of length of the cycle as a mere
coincidence.
"Interestingly, modern science has
estimated that the age of the earth is about 4 billion years. Scholars feel it
is uncanny that the Vedic Aryans could have conceived of such a vast span of
time over 3,500 years ago that would be similar to the same figure estimated by
science today."
(source: The Secret Teachings of the Vedas
- By Stephen
Knapp p. 25).
(Refer
to Visions
of the End of the World - By Dr. Subhash Kak - sulekha.com).
(Artwork
courtesy of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. www.krishna.com).
Speed
of Light:
One
such book is the celebrated commentary on the Rig Veda
by Sayana (c. 1315-1387), a minister in the
court of King Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in
South India. In his commentary on the 4th verse of
the hymn 1.50 of the Rig Veda on the sun, he says:
Tatha
cha smaryate yojananam sahasre dve dve shate dve cha yogane ekena nimishardhena
kramamana namo ‘stu ta iti
Thus
it is remembered: O Sun, bow to you, you who travers 2,202 yojanas in half a
minute.
The
Puranas define 1 nimesha to be equal to 16/75 seconds. 1 yojana is about 9
miles. Substituting in Sayana’s statement we get 186,000 per second.
Sayana’s
statement was printed in 1890 in the famous edition of Rig Veda edited by Max
Muller, the German Sanskritist . He claimed to have used several three or four
hundred year old manuscripts of Sayana’s commentary, written much before the
time of Romer. Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the
ancient book comes from one of the earliest Puranas, the Vayu, conservatively
dated to at least 1,500 years old. The Puranas
speak of the creation and destruction of the universe in cycles of 8.64 billion
years, that is quite close to currently accepted value regarding the time of the
big bang.
(source:
The
Wishing Tree - By Subhash Kak p. 75 - 77).
Top of Page
Zero
to Infinity in Indian Mysticism
Ananta
is Sanskrit for infinity.
It is equated with the Supreme Brahman —
infinitely powerful and so infinitely free. It is bigger than any quantity that
can be imagined; it is bigger than any finite number. Infinity is one of the
fundamental axioms upon which contemporary mathematics is based.
Sanskrit grammar and
interpretation in ancient India were closely linked to the handling of high
value numbers. Studies relating to poetry and metrics initiated sastragnaas or
scientists to both arithmetic and grammar. Grammarians were just as competent at
calculations as professional mathematicians. Indian sastragnaas or scientists,
philosophers, astronomers and cosmographers — in order to develop their
arithmetical, metaphysical and cosmological speculations concerning ever higher
numbers — became at once mathematicians, grammarians and poets. They gave
their spoken counting system a truly mathematical structure which had the
potential to lead directly to the discovery of the decimal place-value system.
Negative numbers had been
rejected as solutions of problems in early times. They were eventually admitted
in Hindu practical mathematics through problems involving money transactions,
since the idea of receiving and owing money was a simple and obvious one — a
negative number could be interpreted as a debt. Objection to negative numbers
continued up to the early 19th century. Negative numbers are the mirror image of
positive numbers. The invention of Cartesian geometry brought the X, Y
co-ordinates and numbers came to be represented on a graph. Today, the series of
negative natural numbers go up to infinity.
In
Indian mysticism, the concept of infinity and zero are very closely linked. In
the Isavasya Upanishad, there’s a line: “Poornasya poornam aadaya poornameva
visish-yate”. To mathematically explain this, we have to assume that the first
poornam represents infinity and the second, zero. In Sanskrit, poornam means
both full and zero. Indian mathematicians knew perfectly well how to distinguish
between these two notions which are mutually contradictory and which are the
inverse of each other. They knew that division by zero gave them infinity.
 
The symbol is that
of Ananta, the great Adisesha of infinity and eternity, which is always
represented, coiled up in a horizontal figure of 8 just like the leminiscate.
Lord
Vishnu is said to rest in the coils of Ananta, the great serpent of Infinity,
while he waits for the universe to recreate itself.
(image
source: Indian Art - By Vidya Dehejia p.
99).
***
The symbol for infinity is
called the leminiscate. English mathematician John Wallis introduced this symbol
for the first time in 1655. Hindu mythological iconography contains a similar
symbol representing the same idea. The symbol is that
of Ananta, the great Adisesha of infinity and eternity, which is always
represented, coiled up in a horizontal figure of 8 just like the leminiscate.
 Wallis
was not aware that this symbol, in Indian mythology, referred to infi-nity and
eternity. How did two diverse civilisations use the same symbol to denote
infinity, without either of them realising its use by the other? In many
cosmogenics the interlace symbolises the very nature of creation, energy and all
existence. It evokes samsara or the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth. Eternal
and infinite (ananta) are symbols of non-thought. Their value is entirely
emotional. They act on our sensitivity. They invoke the peculiar sensation of
the inability to imagine.
The
concept of infinity has always remained an enigma. The Taittiriya Upanishad
says: yatho vacho nivartante, apraapya manasa saha — where mind and speech
return (being) unable to comprehend. In Indian cosmology, Ananta refers to the
Adisesha or the great serpent on which Lord Vishnu reclines, taking His yoga
nidra or anantasayanam. A Tamil azhwar paasuram (verse) says that Ananta acts as
an umbrella when Vishnu walks, as a simhasana (throne) when He sits, as sandals
when He stands, and as a bed when He reclines.
***
"
I am the nucleus of every creature, Arjuna; for without me nothing can exist,
neither animate nor inanimate."
- Bhagavad
Gita 10.39
"Vishnu
is the highest and most immediate of all the energies of Brahman, the embodied
Brahman, formed of the whole of Brahman. On him this entire universe is woven
and interwoven: from him is the world, and the world is in him; and he is the
whole universe.
Vishnu,
the Lord, consisting of what is perishable as well as what is imperishable,
sustains everything, both spirit and matter, in the form of his ornaments and
weapons. "
- Vishnu
Purana 1.22
(source:
Zero
to Infinity in Indian Mysticism - by T
R Rajagopalan
- timesofindia.com).
For more refer
to The
Infinitesimal Calculus: How and Why it Was Imported into Europe - By C. K.
Raju and
Computers, mathematics education, and
the alternative epistemology of the calculus in the Yuktibhâsâ
- By C. K. Raju
 The concept of time used by modern historical
scientists, including archeologists, strikingly resembles the traditional
Judeo-Christian concept. And it strikingly differs from that of the ancient
Indians and Greeks
It can nevertheless be safely said that the cosmological concepts of several of
the most prominent Greek thinkers involved a cyclic or episodic time similar to
that found in the Puranic literature of India.
For example, we find in Hesiod's
(lived 8th century
BC - Greek
poet), Works and Days a series of ages (gold, silver, bronze, heroic,
and iron) similar to the Indian yugas. He traces the history of the world
through five stages, from the Golden Age to his own age of iron, which according
to Hesiod was characterized by suffering and lawlessness. In both systems the
quality of human life gets progressively worse with each passing age.
In
On Nature Empedocles
speaks of cosmic time cycles. In Plato's dialogues there are descriptions of
revolving time and recurring catastrophes that destroy or nearly destroy human
civilization.
Aristotle
said in many places in his works that the arts and sciences had been discovered
many times in the past. In the teachings of Plato, Pythagoras, and Empedocles on
transmigration of souls, the cyclical pattern is extended to individual
psychophysical existence. According
to Voltaire, " The Greeks, before the
time of Pythagoras, traveled into India for instruction." (The
Philosophy of History, p. 527).
Ancient literature like the Puranas
and Vedas do contain allegory. In some passages, it is transparent. For
instance, in Mahabharata, refers to an old lady who spins a fabric with 360
black threads and 360 white threads while a white horse stands by. The old lady
is of course time. The black and white threads are night and day, and the white
horse is the Sun. Incidentally, the origin of this symbolism is in the Vedic
hymns of the Rig Veda. (1.64).
 Unless
we recognize the fact that the Vedic hymns and the Puranic story of Vedic origin
are deliberate camouflage and allegory - a code, in fact - we cannot interpret
them or understand their true meaning.
To do
otherwise would lead us to the same kind of ridiculous
conclusion reached by British astronomer,
Patrick Moore, who wrote, "The Vedic priest in India believed that the
world to be supported upon twelve massive pillars, during the hours of darkness,
the Sun passed underneath, somehow managing to thread its way between the
pillars without hitting them. According to the Hindus, Earth stood on the back
of four elephants, the elephants in turn rested upon the back of a huge
tortoise, while the tortoise itself was supported by a serpent floating in a
limitless ocean. One cannot help feeling sorry for the serpent.!"
In fact, after the chaff is removed,
the Puranas have a kernel and exhibits what may be termed a
reverse symbolism. The twelve pillars that support the world are evidently the
twelve months of the year, and they are specifically mentioned in the Vedic
hymns. The four elephants on which Earth rests are the Dikarin, the sentinels of
the four directions. These in turn rest, in turn, on a tortoise and a serpent.
The tortoise is Vishnu's Kurma or tortoise avatar and symbolizes the fact that
the Earth is supported in space in its annual orbit around the Sun. Finally, the
coiled serpent represents Earth's rotation. Vishnu, or the Sun, himself rests
upon a coiled snake - the Ananta, or Adisesha, which represents the rotation of
the Sun on its own axis.
(Refer
to Visions
of the End of the World - By Dr. Subhash Kak - sulekha.com).
(Artwork
courtesy of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. www.krishna.com).
Top of Page
The Expanding Egg
 Sanskrit is a beautiful language. Each word in Sanskrit tells its meaning
itself. Each word has been thought carefully. Sanskrit is not a product of
evolution from an earlier language. It has been designed to be what it is. When
Vedic sages coded the knowledge of particle physics and cosmology, they were
well aware of the possibility that one day the code may be lost due to the
decline of their civilization. Therefore they chose the words carefully to
provide vital clues about the code. (Note: To learn more about Sanskrit refer to
the chapter on Sanskrit)
Take the example, the expanding universe. The word for universe in Sanskrit is
"Brahmanda", which is made by joining of words "Brahma" and
"Anda". Brahma is derived from root "Brha" meaning to expand
and "Anda" means egg. Thus " Brahmanda" means expanding
egg.
A 9th century Hindu scripture, The Mahapurana
by Jinasena claims the something as modern as the following:
(translation from [5])
"Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that
the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the
world, where was he before creation?... How could God have made the world
without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you
are faced with an endless regression... Know that the world is uncreated, as
time itself is, without beginning and end. And it is based on principles."
(source:
Astronomy
and Mathematics in Ancient India).
Concept of Trinity
 In
Hinduism, Brahma, Vishnu, and Mahesa form a trinity. Brahma is the creator of
the universe, Vishnu the protector and Mahesa (Shiva) the destroyer. Brahma
means expansion, and expansion of the universe takes place with the creation of
matter and energy, thus Brahma is creator. Vishnu is the life-principle of the
universe, who is not different from the universe, thus he is the protector.
Mahesha or Mahadeva or Shiva is Vedic god Rudra representing radiation. As
radiation is the result of annihilation of particles, he is related to
destruction. But what is annihilated is born again as another set of particles,
and this dance of creation and annihilation continues. This is the cosmic dance
of Shiva, and therefore he is called Nataraja, Lord of the dancers.
Hundred thousandths
of a second:
So
also, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
(2.4.7ff.) dwells at length on the following
theme,
“ As when a drum is beaten, one cannot distinguish its various
particular notes, but they are included in the general note of the drum or in
the general sound produced by different kinds of strokes…” Similarly, the
Puranas define the
paramanu, which is on the order of a few hundred thousandths
of a second.
Airplanes:
 Among
all the different sciences mentioned, it may be surprising to find a reference
to airplanes. But actually, the mention of airplanes is found many times
throughout Vedic literature, including the following verse from the Yajur-Veda
describing the movement of such machines:
"
O royal skilled engineer, construct sea-boats, propelled on water by our
experts, and airplanes, moving and flying upward, after the clouds that reside
in the mid-region, that fly as the boats move on the sea, that fly high over and
below the watery clouds. Be thou, thereby, prosperous in this world created by
the Omnipresent God, and flier in both air and lightening." Yajur
Veda, 10.19).
For more on airplanes refer to chapter on Vimanas).
(Artwork
courtesy of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust International, Inc. www.krishna.com).
Description of Tides:
The
Vishnu Purana gives a quite an accurate description of tides:
 "In all the
oceans the water remains at all times the same in quantity and never increases
or diminishes; but like the water in a cauldron, which in consequence of its
combination with heat, expands, so the waters of the ocean swell with the
increase of the Moon. The waters, although really neither more nor less, dilate
or contract as the Moon increases or wanes in the light and dark
fortnights…..”
India has left a universal legacy
determining for instance the dates of solstices, as noted by 18th century French
astronomer Jean-Sylvain Baily,
(1736–93) 18th century French astronomer and politician. His works on
astronomy and on the history of science (notably the Essai sur la théorie
des satellites de Jupiter) were distinguished both for scientific interest
and literary elegance and earned him membership in the French Academy, the
Academy of Sciences, and the Academy of Inscriptions. Bailly
said:
"The movement of stars which was
calculated by Hindus 4,500 years ago, does not differ even by a minute from the
tables which we are using today." And he concludes: "The Hindu systems
of astronomy are much more ancient than those of the Egyptians - even the Jews
derived from the Hindus their knowledge."
Botany
and Biology:
In
addition to the physical sciences, very interesting and modern concepts of
botany and biology, including the concepts of micro-organisms, are also
encountered in these ancient texts, for example, in the
Mahabharata:
“They
(trees) drink water by their roots. They catch diseases of diverse kinds. Those
diseases again are cured by different operations… as one can suck up water
through a bent lotus stalk, trees also, with the aid of the wind, drink thorough
their roots. They are susceptible to pleasure and pain, and grow when cut or
chopped… they are not inanimate…
Vrihi
and other so-called seeds of rice are all living organisms…again (men)
…while walking about hither and thither kill innumerable creatures hidden in
the ground by trampling on them; and even men of wisdom and enlightenment
destroy animal life, even while sleeping or in repose themselves… the Earth
and the air all swarm with living organisms.”
Electricity
The ancient text of
Agastya Samhita
describes the method of making electric battery, and that water can be split
into oxygen and hydrogen.
(Source:
The
Celestial Key to the Vedas: Discovering
the Origins of the World's Oldest Civilization - By Dr. B. G. Sidharth is director of India's
B. M. Birla Science Center. He has over 30 years of experience in astronomy and
science education and is a frequent consultant to astronomy journals and science
centers around the globe. He lives in Hyderabad, India.
Vedic
Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism
- By Raja Ram Mohan Roy p- 198-199).
The Secret Teachings of the Vedas -
By Stephen
Knapp).
Hinduism
and Scientific Quest - By T R. R. Iyengar).
Top of Page
Shri 108 & Other Mysteries
The
number 108 is very auspicious for Hindus. It is the number of beads of a rosary
and of many other things in Indian cosmology. But why is this number considered
to be holy?
The
answer to this mystery may lie in the fact that the ancient Indians took this to
be the distance between the earth and the sun in sun-diameter units and the
distance between the earth and the moon in moon-diameter units.
Two
facts that any book on astronomy will verify :
Distance
between earth and sun = 108 times sun-diameter
Distance
between earth and moon = 108 times moon-diameter
Indian
thought takes the outer cosmology to be mirrored in the inner cosmology of the
human. Therefore, the number 108 is also taken to represent the 'distance' from
the body of the devotee to the God within. The chain of 108 'links' is held
together by 107 joints, which is the number of marmas, or weak spots, of the
body in Ayurveda.
We
can understand that the 108 beads of the rosary must map the steps between the
body and the inner sun. The devotee, while saying
beads, is making a symbolic journey from the physical body to the heavens.
108
is a number which resonates throughout the universe, as this shows. There are
also several other numbers which are repeated throughout creation.
The reason why we do our mantra jap 108 times is because its a symbol of our
journey towards our higher/spiritual self (sun) from our material self (earth).
(source:
Shri
108 & Other Mysteries - By Subhash Kak - sulekha.com
and http://www.cycleoftime.com/articles_view.php?codArtigo=58).
Top of Page
Rediscovering Vedic Science:
 According to
Romain Rolland,
(1866-1944) French Nobel laureate, professor of the history of music at
the Sorbonne and thinker. He authored a book on the " Life
of Ramakrishna".
" Religious faith in the case of the Hindus has never been allowed to run
counter to scientific laws, moreover the former is never made a condition for
the knowledge they teach, but there are always scrupulously careful to take into
consideration the possibility that by reason both the agnostic and atheist may
attain truth in their own way. Such tolerance may be surprising to religious
believers in the West, but it is an integral part of Vedantic
belief."
Not only do the Vedas contain a high
level of philosophical and spiritual knowledge, but they also hold information
on material science. The Vedic literature includes such works as the Ayur-Veda,
the original science of wholistic medicine as taught by Lord Dhanvantari;
Dhanur-veda, the military science as taught by Bhrigu; Gandharva-veda, which is
on the arts of music, dance, drama, etc.. by Bharata Muni, Artha-sastram, the
science of government, and the Manu-samhita, the Vedic lawbook.
There is also the
Sulbha sutras,
which contains the Vedic system of mathematics. These sutras are a supplement of
the Kalpasustras, which shows the earliest forms of algebra. The Vedic form of
mathematics is much more advanced than that found in early Greek, Babylonian,
Egyptian, or Chinese civilizations. In fact, the geometrical formula known as
the Pythagorean theorem can be traced to the Baudhayana, the earliest form of
the Shulba Sustras prior to the 8th century B. C. It was this Indian system that
originated the decimal system of tens, hundreds, etc., and the procedure of
carrying the remainder of one column over to the next. It also provided a
means of dividing fractions and the use of equations and letters to signify
unknown factors. These Indian numbers were used in Arabia after 700 AD. and then
spread to Europe where they were called the Arabic numerals. It is only because
Europe changed from Roman numerals to these Arabic numerals that originated in
India that many of the developments in Europe in the fields of science and math
were able to take place. (source: The Secret Teachings of the Vedas
- By Stephen
Knapp p. 25) Stephen Knapp a Vedic scholar,
has also been to India several times and traveled extensively throughout the
country.
Ancient Inscriptions:
 A
German linguist Kurt Schildmann,
a native of Heiderhof, says his study of ancient inscriptions discovered in the
caves of Peru and the United States shows that they are similar to ancient Indus
Valley Sanskrit, suggesting that seafarers from India may have reached the
Americas thousands of years ago. He describes the Indus civilization as a
forerunner of other world civilizations. While doing "epigraphic
research" on the Crespi collection of Cuenca, Peru, Schildmann discovered
Sanskrit in inscriptions found in Peru and in the Burrows cave in southern
Illinois. Russel Burrows accidentally discovered the cave, a retired colonel of
the U.S. armed forces, on April 2, 1982.
Schildmann had noticed the similarity
between the language of the inscriptions in Peru and the Burrows' cave after
having deciphered the inscriptions in the Indus Valley. He also deciphered an
icon found in the Burrows' cave, on which he said many details depicted the
"wisdom of the Indus culture". Schildmann was struck by the drawing of
an elephant on top of a "Pyramid", with three lines of a legend. He
deciphered the legend as "PIL", that was 6000 years old ancient
Sanskrit word for an elephant. He concluded, the ancient Indian engraved texts
on gold plates and hid them to honor the gods and address the succeeding
generations. (source: http://members.aol.com/coorg777/india9.html
)
Conclusion:
Ella
Wheeler Wilcox, (1850-1919), famous American
poet and journalist. Wilcox
poems have been collected in volumes such as Poems
of Pleasure (1897) and Maurine
and Other Poems (1888) states:
" India - the land of Vedas, the remarkable
works contains not only religious ideas for a perfect life, but also facts which
science has proved true. Electricity, radium, electronics, airship, all are
known to the seers who founded the Vedas."
Top of Page
Legend of
Vikramaditya:
Ujjain is a city in the state of Madhya
Pradhesh. City of Ujjain (one who conquers with pride) was once ruled by the
legendary king Vikramaditya.
 King Vikramaditya was known for his valor and impeccable justice. His court was
adorned by nine famous courtiers called Navaratna (nine gems), who were great
scholars in different fields of knowledge. ( Kalidasa became the most brilliant
of the `nine gems' at the court of Vikramaditya of Ujjain.) Despite extensive
effort, Vikramaditya can not be identified with any known historical king.
Ujjain is famous for the temple of Mahakala. There is no temple in India, where
Mahakala is worshipped.
Is there a meaning behind the legend of
Vikramaditya and the worship of Mahakala? The real meaning is revealed by
considering the meaning of these words. Vikramaditya is made by joining prefix
"Vi" to words "Krama" and "Aditya". "Krama"
means order, "Aditya" means sun and prefix "Vi" means
deviation. Therefore, etymologically Vikramaditya means the change in the course
of the sun. What is significant is Ujjain is located on the tropic of cancer.
Thus, sun comes to Ujjain during its northward journey, changes its course, and
starts its southward journey. Vikramaditya is sun itself changing its journey at
Ujjain. Nine gems in the court of Vikramaditya are nine planets of Solar
system.
 Mahakala
is made by joining words, Maha, great, and Kala, time. Thus, Mahakala means Time
the great. Ujjain was known as Ujjayini in ancient times and was the capital of
ancient empire Avanti. Ujjayini was the center of Indian civilization for
several centuries and famous for its astronomical observatory. Ujjayini was
equivalent of Greenwich, from where time was synchronized all over India and
even abroad. New day commenced when it was six a.m. in Ujjayini. When it is six
in the morning in Ujjain, it is midnight in Britain. It is from this ancient
system of changing date in the morning in Ujjain that changing date at midnight
has been arrived at.
As time was synchronized in a large
part of the world according to Ujjayini standard time, it was only natural to
designate the god of Ujjain as god time himself, and therefore the name Mahakala,
Time the great.
The rise and fall of Hinduism is
connected to the rise and fall of science. The spirit of Hinduism is logic and
skepticism. Hinduism was raised on the foundation of science and freedom of
inquiry. There is not a single incident of a scientist being persecuted by
religious authorities in India as was the case in the West. Hinduism has
never indulged in suffocation of scientific thoughts, instead it has
incorporated science in religion.
(source: Vedic
Physics - By Raja Ram Mohan Roy p- 198-199).
(For more
refer to chapter on Greater
India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred
Angkor).
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Articles
Indian Idealist Metaphysics
- By Paul Brunton
The ancient Hindus took their
philosophic statements in the nature of a revelation from on high, as issuing
forth from their seers as a result of a personal self-experience in the
spiritual domain. Our Western scientists have no such experience, and if they
are approaching similar conclusions, it is because they are working their way
from the profoundest depths of this material world up to its farthest frontier
where the ions elude them and vanish into mystery……the wisest men of the
ancient East and the modern West…are beginning to arrive at precisely the same
conclusions.
This Indian
doctrine declares human cognition of the entire manifold universe to be
illusionary in character. The vast multitude of tangible objects and
tangible creatures which we so plainly witness around us were said to be the
product of the constructive imagination of the One Hidden Self. Man and his
material environments were but finite dreams passing through the mind of the
Infinite Dreamer. Consequently all that we know of the world is nothing more or
less than a series of idea held in our consciousness. Thus we arrive at a
completely idealistic metaphysics which, because of its very nature, must
apparently remain for ever purely speculative and beyond the scope of the finest
instruments which can be devised to prove or disprove. Nevertheless
the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the doctrine fascinated the Indian mind to
an amazing extent. That this early foreshadowing of modern idealistic
philosophy was not merely a worthless superstition is evidenced by the fact that
some brilliant minds of the West have been equally fascinated and perplexed.
This doctrine, curiously
enough, hardly rears its head in The Vedas but appears with strong bold outlines
in the post-Vedic books such as The Yoga Vasishta,
in the Buddhist philosophical scriptures, and in the numerous writings of Shankara,
the father of the grandest Hindu philosophical revival of ancient times.
The earliest Vedic mention is
in the Svetasvarara Upanishad, where the
following lines occur:
“Now one should know that
Nature is illusion,
And that the Mighty Lord is the illusion-maker.”
The Aitareya Upanishad says:
“Creatures, plants, horses,
cows, men, elephants, whatsoever breathes, whether moving or flying and, in
addition, whatsoever is immovable – all this is led by mind and is supported
on mind. Mind is the final reality.”
The basis of this doctrine is
that things cannot exist independently of the perceiver's mind, that the entire
phenomenal world of experience is a creation within the perceiving mind, as is a
dream, and hence, from the highest metaphysical standpoint, an idea or mental
appearance. The author of The Yoga Vasishta
presents the teaching in another way, asserting that the world is relative to
the mind and must therefore be mental in character if the possibility of its
being known is to be achieved.
"The subject cannot be
aware of the object unless they are related. And there cannot exist any relation
between two heterogeneous things. Relation implies identity, for it cannot be
possible between two utterly different objects. The cognition of the object by
the subject therefore establishes their substantial identity. If they were
utterly different from each other, knowledge would not have been possible; the
subject would ever remain unaware of the object as a stone of the taste of
sugar." "The whole world is merely ideal. It does not exist except in
thought. It arises and exists in the mind. The whole universe is the expansion
of the mind. It is a huge dream arisen within the mind. It is imagination alone
that has assumed the forms of time, space and movement."
"The reality of things
consists in their being thought. The objective world is potentially inherent in
the subject, as seeds of a lotus exist in the flower, as oil in sesamum seeds.
All objects are related to the subject from which they proceed. They appear to
be different from it, but are not so in reality. The world experience is nothing
in reality but a dream."
The author of Yoga Vasishta
realizes that such a solipsism is difficult to maintain and so lends his support
to the Upanishadic assertion that "the Mighty Lord", God, is the true
illusion-maker, and that the idea of the created world is put into our minds by
the Divine One.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson, who wrote the following verse:
“Illusion works impenetrable,
Weaving webs innumerable,
Her gay pictures never fail,
Crowds each other, veil on veil,
Charmer who will be believed
By man who thirsts to be deceived.”
Bishop
George Berkeley (1865-1753) Famous Irishman and bishop of the Church
of England and a prominent empiricist philosopher, in The
Principle of Human Knowledge, proceeds to claim that the
universal creation being mental, must have been brought into being within the
mind of a Cosmic Thinker, thus strangely echoing a
passage already quoted from the Indian Yoga
Vasishta.
Arthur Schopenhauer, who in his turn developed the same theme in the
vigorous volumes of The
World as Will and Idea. He says:
“He to whom men and all
things have not at times appeared as mere phantoms of illusions has no capacity
for philosophy…”
“The world is my idea –
this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man
alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness…”
Coming to more recent times, we
find echoes of the familiar Hindu comparisons of the
dream and waking worlds in the writings of F.
H. Bradley, E. Douglas Fawcett, Dr. F.C. Schiller, and Lord
Bertrand Russell.
One of the greatest 19th
century scientists was Thomas Henry Huxley
(1825-1895) physiologist, anatomist, anthropologist, agnostic, educator,
distinguished zoologist and advocate of Darwinism, the following quotations from
his work, Collected
Essays vol. VI, serve to show how much
ancient Indian philosophy anticipated modern Western thought.
"To sum up. If the
materialist affirms that the universe and all its phenomena are resolvable into
matter and motion, Berkeley replied, 'True; but what you call matter and motion
are known to us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived
or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart from a thinking
mind, is a contradiction in terms. I conceive that this reasoning is
irrefragable.
“…the simple ideas we
receive from sensation and reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts, beyond
which the mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one
jot.”
Sir
Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) important astrophysicists of his time,
wrote in Time,
Space and Gravitation:
“All through the physical
world runs that unknown content, which must surely be the stuff our
consciousness. Here is a hint of aspects deep within the world of physics, and
yet unattainable by the methods of physics. And, moreover, we have found that
where science has progressed the furthest, the mind has but regained from
Nature, that which the mind has put into Nature.
Sir
James Berkeley writes:
“The Universe can be best
pictured as consisting of pure thought, the thought of what, for want of a wider
world, we must describe as a mathematical thinker.”
Hyman Levy
(1889-1975) Mathematician, philosopher and humanist, in The
Universe of Science, declares that “the underlying reality of the
universe is never perceived. A mere appearance is experienced so that what the
mind pictures is not reality but its superficial structure.”
While Western psychologists
carry out most of their experiments upon other persons, the proponents
and exponents of Indian system are expected, and do, carry out their experiments
upon themselves first and foremost. And because man is a key to the
universe, because the mind of man is somehow linked with the Mind behind
creation, the way to understanding of the universe must finally embrace the
thorough understanding of the mystery behind man.
(source: Indian
Philosophy and Modern Culture - By Paul Brunton London Rider
& Co. Paternoster House, E. C p 1-92).
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of Page
Back to the Vedas: Gateway to Peace
By Narayani Ganesh
http://www.timesofindia.com/today/15edit5.htm
' WHY do birds prefer to stay on treetops during the
night? Why aren't they seen on the ground after nightfall? According to ancient
Hindu scriptures, birds possess special and sensitive powers of perception. At
night, they `see' the surface of the earth in flames. These flames reflect the
intense energy trapped by the planet as a result of absorbing heat from the
sun's rays all day long.
The Vedas are replete with such tidbits, encapsulating
a heady mix of science, logic, deduction and belief, claim Vedic scholars.
Here's another piece of information that is expressed in beautiful verse: What
can one do when faced with a dry season, when rains are eagerly awaited; when
farmers look skywards, pleading with an unseen Power, praying for a good
harvest? Get to the bottom of a dried up water body. Plough your fields with the
rich natural fertiliser that can be easily accessed from these water beds. The
soil from here is saturated with the dung and dirt from animals which frequented
the place; with compost from leaves, twigs and natural wastes that have sunk and
have been assimilated into this soil.
Therefore, Vedic tips on how to deal with real-life
situations may not all be outdated. Modern environmentalists and ecologists
sometimes advocate what has already been talked about in Vedic scriptures.
though couched in sophisticated technical and scientific terms. The Vedas are
peppered with numerous tips on how to achieve welfare for all by working in
conjunction with nature. `Vedathil illadhadhu logathil illai' -- You can
discover nothing on this earth that is not already present in the Vedas -- so
goes a popular Tamil saying
which is seconded by Vedic scholars who have studied these scriptures in great
depth and detail.
Vedic pundits aver that slokas or verses are composed
and structured in a manner that their correct rendition can evoke rains in times
of drought. Conversely, there are special slokas which when chanted with
precision and in the right spirit can actually make the rains cease when there
is too much of it. There's more. Slokas like the aprathiratha sooktam mantra
chanted repeatedly right at the battle front, can actually will the enemy to
retreat, never to return, claim Vedic pundits.
Waxing eloquent on the power of Vedic chanting for
universal welfare, a group of 12 eminent Vedic pundits have congregated at the
Sri Krishna temple in the Capital from different parts of the country. They are
participating in a Sampoorna Yajurveda Ghana Parayanam, an event that has been
organised for the first time in Delhi. The Parayanam is a 29-day,
eight-hours-a-day rendition of the verses of the Yajur Veda in the Ghana style,
which is the most difficult of the five traditional methods of recitation.
Handed down from generation to generation since the
Vedic age through the guru-shishya parampara, committing to memory and reciting
these verses comes from years of arduous practice. The five methods of
recitation are Mula or Samhita, Pada, Krama, Jata and Ghana. Ghana, the last
one, requires rendition in a complicated combination set to a rhythmic tone and
is believed to possess high potency when chanted by Ghanapatins. The tempo goes
like this: For Ghana, it is 1-2, 2-1, 1-2-3, 3-2-1. The five methods are
progressive in scale of difficulty. For example, the tempo for Jata is: 1-2,
2-1, 1-2 following the pattern of a braid, as the name suggests. Also important
is the timbre and tone. The number of students opting for the study of the Vedas
up to the Ghana stage is dwindling. Hence this form of Vedic recitation is rare.
Sri S Krishnamurthy Ghanapatigal from
Sathanur, Tamilnadu, says: ``The Vedas inform humankind about what is needed and what is
not. They convey what is not observable with the eyes or the mind. They address
not just brahmins and kings; they are equally applicable to the army, to
students, to agriculturists -- in short, entire humankind. It is structured for
the well-being of entire humanity, of all life. If they spell out ideas to
improve agriculture, they also talk about behavioural psychology''.
``At the UN Millennium Summit, we are happy that
religious leaders from different faiths and regions converged to talk about
peaceful conflict resolution. In fact, the Vedas have a formula for conflict
resolution, too. The aikamathya sooktam is a mantra in verse which when recited
wherever there is conflict, can actually create an atmosphere conducive for
peaceful and lasting resolution''.
(The scholars can be contacted at the Alakananda
Dharmik Samaj, Sri Balavenugopalakrishna Temple till 17 September, R-2,
Institutional Area, Alaknanda, New Delhi 110 019, Phone 6282730).
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of Page
The Different Routes of Modern Science and
Indian Ancient Science (excerpts)
Indian Ancient Science – BARC
Newsletter
http://www.barc.ernet.in/webpages/letter/newsletter_year_2000/
Mathematics
The science of
mathematics starts from counting of numbers. The present versatile system of
decimal numbers needed two fundamental discoveries: the concept of zero
and the principle of place value in powers of the radix. And both
of these were discovered in India. The place value system made the sexagesimal
numbers of Babylonians obsolete (its only remains are 1 hour=60 minutes, and 1
minute=60 seconds). And now the Roman numbers are also getting gradually
replaced by Arabic numerals on the place value pattern. The present numerals are
called Arabic not because they were invented in Arab but because Indian things
had to go via Arabian countries to Europe.
Similar to
these two concepts, there is a very fundamental concept of infinity. In modern
mathematics, infinity has been taken as an infinite extension of large numbers. In India, the
concept of infinity was given deep attention in ancient times. It was found that
infinity is not just a number but it is as tangible as any reality of general
experience, and many of its properties were enumerated. In mathematical
language, it can be defined as a universal set which is a proper subset of its
every proper subset. Modern mathematics may enrich itself by working out the
implications of such a definition of infinity.
Phonetics
Very extensive
work was done in the science of phonetics in ancient India, and finer shades of
sounds produced in the pronunciation were standardized. The entire Panini’s
Shiksha and most of his grammar is phonetics only. However, in the West, the
science of phonetics came up only recently. The application of sound recording
systems and techniques of observing vocal organs in action through X-rays, have
given a good deal of clarity to its concepts. The Indian ancient phonetics can
benefit significantly if it employs some modern concepts and terminology. For
example, many ancient Acharyas struggle with words to define what is Udatta
vowel, and Un-Udatta vowel. Their round- about definitions do not
accurately communicate what they intend. Following modern terminology, we can
define simply that Udatta is high frequency vowel sound and Un-Udatta
is low frequency vowel sound.
Similarly in Shastriya
Sangeet, the relations of Saptak and the change of sound from sa to
ni can be more clearly explained as ascending frequency in geometric
progression; and the various Tals can be described as chrono-patterns of
sound pulses with partial symmetry. Such applications of modern scientific
terminology, instead of the vague and round-about old descriptions, can simplify
the comprehension of this valuable Indian ancient art which also has scientific
foundations.
The unification
of Indian ancient science of Phonetics with modern information theory and the
binary computer logic has led this author to evolve the Phonetic Number
System of radix 128 with mono-sound numerals and word-like numbers. Based on
this system, a merely six digit self-checking Phonetic Code, pronounced though
six soft sound characters, can identify about 6000 crore population, uniquely
and perpetually.
Metaphysics and Philosophy
In modern
times, the subject of philosophy is considered to be speculation into the unseen
and mostly unknown or unknowable. It has very little concern with tangible
things of relevance. But in ancient India, philosophy (Darshan) was
treated at par with science. Its study was supposed to give clear vision of life
and nature as a whole, leading to a more coherent theoretical knowledge and
harmonious practical living. The culmination of Indian philosophy is said to be
Vedanta. Its sources are Brahma Sutras, Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads,
and the voluminous book Yoga Vasishtha. Vedanta claims to have reached
such a high state of unification of nature beyond which no further unification
is possible.
In physics,
unified theories, with tremendous efforts, have got only partial success in
unifying some forces of nature. In this background, it may be asked if the ideal
of Vedanta, the highest state of unification, is ever achievable. Such an
objection can be circumvented by redefining Vedanta, that it is Asymptote to
Knowledge. It describes that most fundamental concept towards which all the
basic concepts of various branches of knowledge approach and meet at infinity.
But that state of unification can be intuitively grasped in a finite life-span.
It is like the asymptote to an open curve which is tangent to the curve at
infinity but remains at a finite distance from the origin.
Much of the
confusion in Vedanta, employing mostly contradictory statements, can be removed
by developing it as an axiomatic theory starting from a single postulate. In
respect of its relation with the empirical world, Vedanta is supported by Sankhya.
It represents the practical limit of unification in terms of two basic elements:
Consciousness (Chetan) and Inertness (Jada). These
two concepts make it possible to design binary computerizable models of basic
physical or metaphysical entities.
The
interrelationship of these concepts has a good deal of analogy with the modern
field theory. There is one basic abstract field of the ultimate entity which has
two states, consciousness and inertness. These different states behave as two
distinguishable entities. Their interplay has dispersed as well as localized
aspect. Its dispersed aspect is mind, and the localized aspect is
body-consciousness. The system is incessantly dynamic and is represented by
repetitions of many processes. Analogous to this is the electromagnetic field
which has two kinds of forces: electrical and magnetic. Its dispersed aspect is
undulations of wave and localized aspect is photon which is always dynamic. Now
arises a question, whether photons have consciousness? However, experiments done
in the University of Denver, Colorado, to test this have remained inconclusive.
Life Sciences
According to the Indian ancient science,
in the field of consciousness, there are many levels. Every material system,
whether apparently living or non-living, is at some level of consciousness. The
so- called inanimate matter occupies the lowest level at which there is a very
small zero-point consciousness. The direction of evolution is towards higher and
higher freedom. Its manifestation starts from freedom of movement, and
culminates in the freedom of selection of one’s own destiny.
Medical Sciences
Modern
traditional medical science studies the physical and chemical patterns in a
large number of people and makes a broad standard for healthy people. For
example, after the measurement of the blood pressure of large number of people,
a broad standard can be made. Ailments are associated with departure from these
standards, and they can be corrected by appropriate physical and/or chemical
means.
According to
Indian medical science, called Ayurveda, life is a dynamical system in which in
the healthy state, there is a harmony of many chemical and physical processes.
The number of these processes have been broadly classified into three called Dosh:
Kaph, Pitta, and Vata. Every food and eatable can be
classified into many categories depending upon which Dosh or combination of
Doshas, it decreases or increases or maintains in balance. The symptoms of
disease indicate which of the Doshas have increased or decreased. The
administration of the compensating remedy gives the cure. Ayurveda claims to
have discovered the basic principles of many other systems of treatment like
allopathy, homeopathy, acupuncture, etc. But these systems were not developed to
higher levels in ancient India.
The surgery
described by Dhanvantari and Sushrut has become obsolete with the advent of
sophisticated tools and equipment in modern surgery. But the basic principles of
Ayurveda hold. They are like phenomenological theory of matter. For example, the
mechanical and thermal properties like elasticity, density, specific heat, etc
of gold are determined by the atomic structure of gold atoms. But a goldsmith
need not go into all these details. For him the bulk properties are sufficient
to make a beautiful ornament. In the same way, simplifying all the chemical
process of the body in terms of increase, decrease, or balance of three Doshas
suffices to restore health in a large number of cases. That is why the medical
formulations of Charak Samhita still have relevance. But, in the light of
changed environment, many of the ancient formulations need verification and
standardization. However, Ayurvedic thumb rules for longevity and good health
have withstood the test of time.
Cosmology
Modern
theoretical cosmology begins with the application of general relativity to the
universe as a whole by Einstein in 1917. The experimental cosmology begins with
observation of red shift, proportional to distance, in the light of galaxies by
Hubble in 1929. The red shift has been explained in terms of Doppler’s shift
of receding galaxies. This explanation means that the universe is expanding
isotropically. It implies that if we go backwards in time, then the universe was
smaller, and at a certain time, the entire mass energy was concentrated at a
point. G. Gamow in 1946 postulated that the universe was not only smaller but
also hotter in the past. In the point like state, the temperature was infinite.
With a sudden big bang, the energy was thrown out which subsequently led to the
formation of stars and galaxies. What was prior to big bang, cannot be answered
by physics.
To eliminate
the big bang singularity, a steady state cosmology was put forward by Bondi and
Gold in 1948, in which it was postulated that the universe has been like this
all the time. But to maintain a constant density of matter in spite of the
expansion, creation of matter as hydrogen atom into free space was postulated. A
comprehensive C-field cosmology and a new theory of gravitation was developed by
Fred Hoyle and J. V. Narlikar.
However, the
steady state cosmology, though intellectually satisfying, did not satisfactorily
explain the cosmic background radiation, predicted earlier by G. Gamow, and
experimentally detected by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. Since then the steady
state cosmology has gone into oblivion. The present standard cosmology is that
of the hot big bang. It explains three main cosmological observations: receding
galaxies, thermal background radiation, and nucleosynthesis of light elements.
But suffers from the problem of singularity and many other inconsistencies.
Turning to the
Indian ancient view on this subject, Mahabharat says (Adi-Parva, 1st
Chapter, 40-41): "This beginningless and endless time cycle (Kal-Chakra)
moves externally like a perpetual flow in which beings take birth and die but
there is never birth or death for this. The creation of gods is briefly
indicated as thirty-three thousand, thirty-three hundred, and thirty-
three."
Again in Mahabharat
itself, Bhagwad Gita describes a cyclic universe as (VIII-18): "All
embodied beings emanate from the Unmanifest at the commencement of Brahma’s
day; at the commencement of his night, they merge in the same subtle body of
Brahma, known as the Unmanifest."
These and many
other statements imply that the Indian ancient view is that the universe is
eternal as well as of finite age. The inference depends upon the point of view
of the observer. If one observes the universe as a contemporary observer, then
on the whole the universe is found to be like this only. But, if it is explored
archaeologically, then it will be found to have a beginning at a point of time.
Hence a unified cosmology, integrating the essential elements of steady state
and big bang cosmologies, conforms better with the Indian view.
In ancient
India, this integration was achieved by the concept two extra time-like
dimensions. Thus the universe is a six dimensional continuum of three space, one
time, and two time-like dimensions. This concept gives a logical symbol for the
universe: that is two interpenetrating triangles. This figure has been verbally
indicated in the above statement of Mahabharat that the creation is
briefly indicated as thirty-three thousand, thirty-three hundred, thirty-three.
Six times repetitions of three is the indirect technique of communication of Ved
Vyas. The 5th and 6th dimensions have been called Chittakash
and Chidakash in Yogavasishtha. The six dimensional universe
represents higher symmetry in the two basic extensions of nature, space and
time.
Physics
The Indian
ancient view classifies the visible world into five elements: space, light or
fire, and three states of matter (solid, liquid, and gas) represented by earth,
water, and air. They are related to five senses and their five subtle forms
called Tanmatra through a process called Panchikaran. Everything,
irrespective of size and shape, has besides its physical body, a subtle body
which is a bundle of abstract qualities and exists conceptually in the
non-physical space called Chittakash. The subtle body in the Chittakash
behaves like mind, and is free from many limitations of the physical space.
It is obvious
to see many conceptual analogies in the two views of matter at the fundamental
level. In quantum mechanics, the dynamics of a system is conceived in the
abstract Hilbert space; in ancient India, it was conceived in the abstract Chittakash.
Near the limit of fineness, inferences of the horizontal route
(space-light-matter) and the vertical route (time-sound-mind) come very close to
each other. Some experimental investigation into the interrelation of
consciousness, mind, matter and light have been reported from Princeton
University, Standford University (California), and University of Denver
(Colorado).
Chemistry
The science of
chemistry in India has been a great sufferer due to the destruction of the
Indian ancient literature. The long heavy iron pillar near the Kutub Minar at
Delhi, standing in the sunshine and rain for more than about 2000 years without
getting rusted, is ample proof that chemistry and metallurgy were sufficiently
advanced in ancient India. Similarly, the long and heavy statue of Buddha in the
lying pose at Kushinagar near Gorakhpur, which still shines like gold in spite
of remaining buried for many centuries, is a challenge to metallurgy. Similarly,
many other monuments also hide great chemical secrets.
Much of the chemical knowledge is
empirical rather then deductive. This is true of modern chemistry as well. Hence
simply knowing a few basic principles is not enough to arrive at the process of
producing the desired material. The actual method has to be either rediscovered,
or may possibly be found in some hidden literature after extensive and minute
survey.
Military Science
The biggest
loss of ancient skills have been in the field of military science. The main
reason for this loss was perhaps the Mahabharat war. There was so much
loss of life in that war that people became allergic to things related to war. A
large number of warriors were killed. Those who survived were demoralized.
Almost the entire war skills, which needed regular practice and refinement, died
out. Now we can get only very superficial descriptions of those weapons from Ramayan
and Mahabharat which are basically literary works, and not
scientific.
The weapons of
ancient India can be put up into three broad categories. First is that of
conventional weapons like swords, spears, bows and arrows, etc. Being simple,
they survive to this age. The second were explosive based, delivered either
through some projective system, or other means. They were called Agniban. The
third were super weapons called Brahmastra, etc. Brahmastra was a
sure hit weapon from which there was no escape. It had to be used in the rarest
of the rare circumstances.
Brahma
means
creator of the universe. In the context of the war, it indicates a weapon
designed through the knowledge of the creation of matter. According to Yogashashtra
and some other writings, every particle of a block of matter is being
incessantly created and dissolved. In between two occasions of creation, it
remains momentarily in Chittakash in its subtle form. There its properties are
more mind-like. Hence it can be acted upon by the mind of an aspirant provided
it can go to that subtle state at which the matter particle has reached.
In any lump of
inorganic matter, the creation and annihilation of particles is random. By
mental command, they can be brought into coherence. The coherent lump can behave
as a single quantum particle. With the coherence, all the constituent particles
of the lump are created or annihilated simultaneously. They go to the Chittakash,
and appear in the physical space, collectively. When they are in the mental form
in Chittakash, they can be induced to have their next appearance in the physical
space at the desired location, may be the body of an enemy. This travelling of
the lump of matter is through non-physical space, so physical obstructions of
walls and bunkers or long distances are no protection against this weapon.
Quantum
teleportation recently reported by some physicists, is the nearest analogue to
the working of Brahmastra. It is speculated by physicists that perhaps
quantum teleportation may be the ultimate process in the control of dynamics of
matter. However, so far the technique of quantum teleportation has reached the
level of transmitting only states of photon. But even that has generated much
excitement among physicists and has become a hot topic of research. It is
anticipated to have applications in developing extremely fast computers, and
communication of secured information making eaves dropping almost impossible.
In ancient
India, some similar process seems to have been realised to the level of
transmitting bigger masses through the phenomena of matter coherence. Just as
coherence of electromagnetic waves produces very powerful laser light with
unusual properties, in the same way coherence of matter can produce objects with
unusual properties.
(please refer to the full text at the site given above)
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 Did you Know?
How the Grand Canyon
became Indian?
 Clarence Edward Dutton, a captain of
ordinance in the U.S. army, geologist-poet and a Yale man, Dutton was deeply
influenced by the philosophies of India. It was Dutton who likened the
snow-covered peaks of the canyon walls to the Hindu gods, Brahma, Vishnu and
Shiva. There is even a Hindu amphitheatre which Dutton likened to the
"profusion and richness which suggests an Oriental character." Dutton
found the Shiva Temple the grandest of all, and most majestic in aspect....All
round it are side gorges sunk to a depth nearly as profound as that of the main
channel...In such a stupendous scene of wreck, it seemed as if the fabled
'destroyer' might find an abode not wholly uncongenial."
For Geologist Clarence Dutton, the harsh landscape of the Grand
Canyon would come to be regarded as "the coliseums, temples, and statuary
of an inspired nature," a place of divine presence. It's thanks largely to
Dutton that so many of the Canyon's features are named after figures in world
religion)
According to Professor Stephen J. Payne, professor of history at the Arizona
State University and author of the book - How the Canyon Became Grand - there is
" no explicit explanation for naming the peaks after Hindu gods, only
implicit." He likens the naming the peaks to the historical fact of the
time. "When there was a growing awareness and respect in the West,
particularly Europe, towards Indian philosophies, not economies of the
past."
India's Big Old Dam?
THE GRAND ANICUT, KALLANAI, is the Oldest Dam in the
World that is still in use
today. It is located on the Cauvery River, 24 km from Tiruchirapalli, Tamil Nadu.
This masonry dam was built in the 2nd Century by Chola King Karikalan and is
1,082 feet long with a maximum height of 18 feet and is 40-60 feet wide. It was
remodeled and fitted with sluice gates in 1899-1902. For nearly two millennia it
has irrigated a million acres of land. India had more land under irrigation in
ancient times than it does today.
(Source: Hinduism Today
May/June 2000)
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