Colonization was modeled after the previous Islamic conquest of the Middle East and the Roman Catholic conquest of Europe. When colonialism ended, it wasn’t because the colonialists had a change of heart. It was because they did not have the power to continue. Their armies were dead. Their coffers were empty. Their will was broken. But as they rebuilt their military...
I don’t like telling personal stories, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Almost by serendipity, or shall we say cosmic design, I came to study the deeper and broader history of Abrahamic religions, and what I found stunned me. This is the story of what sent me in that direction, what I learned about Abrahamic faiths, and how that...
Modern science uses a model of knowledge based on axioms, logic, objectivity, mathematics, and mechanism. Axioms are the basic truth. From it, other truths are derived by logic. To test these against reality, each thing must be exactly one thing, called objectivity. To avoid subjective opinion, objects must be reduced to numbers through a measurement, called mathematization. Objects can be divided...
Plato is credited with the idea of a world of pure forms, of which the present world is an imperfect reflection. For example, there is a pure form of man, after which ordinary men are modeled as imperfect reflections. Thus, according to Plato, we compare ordinary men to the pure form, and due to the similarity between the pure form of...
We can scan the length and breadth of Vedic literature, but we won’t find the term “Universal Truth”. Everywhere, we find the term Param-Satyam, which has three meanings—(a) Highest Truth, (b) Original Truth, and (c) Best Truth. The highest truth controls everything. The original truth creates everything. The best truth enjoys everything. Param-Satyam is the creator, controller, and enjoyer of everything....
The separation of religion and economics, like so many other separations in modern thinking, is the gift of the Western reductionist methodology of drawing arbitrary boundaries within reality and treating them as isolated systems. These separations never occurred in Vedic thinking. Wealth, for instance, is one of the qualities of Lord Viṣṇu, personified as Lakśmi. Thus, when Viṣṇu is worshipped, Lakśmi...
A “realization” is that which takes us closer to God. It can be progress from tamo-guna to rajo-guna, rajo-guna to sattva-guna, or sattva-guna to transcendence. It can include a better understanding of various qualities. It can be something that allows us to reconcile seemingly contradictory claims. It may be a new way to improve our spiritual practice. Anything progressive is a...
There are widespread misconceptions about the various yoga systems: (a) they are mutually exclusive, (b) everyone can choose their yoga, and (c) each yoga system is optional. This misconception can be easily dissipated by reading Bhagavad-Gita, where Kṛṣṇa describes six yoga systems in a hierarchy. In this post, I will discuss this ladder of yoga systems, how they represent four principles...
There are several ways in which the soul in Vedic philosophy differs from the soul in other religions: (a) It establishes unity in diversity, and it is detected by that unity, (b) Its immortality is exactly the same as the immortality of matter, (c) It goes from body to body every moment, not merely at death, (d) Matter is treated as...
The following is a response to a friend I sent today, describing progressively more detailed and varied ways to understand cosmic entities. One-Line Version The Moon we see is a reflection of the real Moon within the Earth, quite like a picture of an apple in the mind. Short Paragraph Version When someone stands next to you, your body becomes aware...
Contrary to common belief, “monotheism” is not a comprehensible word and every translation of this word given by monotheists (i.e., the followers of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism) results in self-contradiction. In this post, I will discuss the contradictions resulting from translating monotheism as “one God” or “God is one”, by successively applying first-order logic, second-order logic, set theory, operator theory, and...
In the previous post, I talked about how the distinction between space, time, and motion was created in Newtonian mechanics, and why it required space, time, and motion to be continuous and smooth. I also discussed how this concept of continuity and smoothness in modern science is false (because both are properties of consciousness, not contradictory to the discreteness of choices)....
