A friend today pointed out to me a seeming anomaly between two descriptions of the Mahattattva. The first description appears as the second covering of the universe in Vedic cosmology, where the first covering is the Ahaṃkāra or ego. The second description appears in Sāñkhya where the Ahaṃkāra is said to be a byproduct of …
According to a recent Gallup survey, only 15% of the global workforce is “engaged” as most people “hate their job and especially their boss”. The reason for this disenchantment with people managers is not hard to find: Leadership requires character development but that is not on the curriculum of any management school. If you search …
There is a popular narrative in India at present that Islamic Invaders and British Colonialists destroyed India’s traditional culture and civilization. That is not entirely false. But any serious student of history is led to ask: Why did these invaders succeed in conquering India when numerous such invasions were repelled previously? The Mauryan Empire in …
In all Vedic texts, nature is described as comprising three fundamental qualities from which all other experiences and realities are constructed. In this post, I will describe the peculiar properties of quality addition to show how they are different from quantity arithmetic. Since modern science grew out of the idea that matter is res extensa—i.e., …
Many people say that the God of Abrahamic religions is a “jealous” God. However, they don’t ask: If we can be jealous, then why can God also not be jealous? Similarly, if we can be non-jealous, therefore, God must also be non-jealous. This contradiction makes it very hard to understand God’s nature.
In Vedic cosmology, the universe is comprised of Grahas which means “houses”. In modern cosmology, the universe is comprised of planets, which are balls of matter. This difference manifests in the English language, where it is appropriate to say that a person is in the house, whereas it is stated that people are living on …
There are many words in Sanskrit that do not have direct equivalents in other languages. Ardent supporters of Sanskrit, therefore, makes two controversial claims. First, that any translation into another language must distort the meaning. Second, to preserve the meaning we must either introduce the same words into the lingua franca of that language, or …
Recently, while preparing for a presentation, I started looking up Bhagavad-Gita translations and found some curious discrepancies, which make the translations scientifically inaccurate. On finding these in the select verses that I was looking up (i.e., not an exhaustive study), I went back to the original translations and found that these scientific inaccuracies do not …
Many of us have become accustomed to impersonal interpretations of Vedanta, where Brahman is identified as a transcendental state of Oneness, and the soul is the Brahman, in that transcendental state. However, a closer look at Vedanta Sutra reveals that Brahman actually doesn’t refer to the impersonal state. Rather, Brahman refers to the Supreme Lord, …
