In a recent post, I discussed the four tiers of reality, called waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and transcendent. Each successive stage of reality is given greater importance, which means that dreaming is more important than waking. This surprises people—We dream when we sleep; how can sleeping be more important than waking? In this post, I will discuss why dreaming is more...
Recently an Indian politician commented that Bhagavad-Gita also teaches Jihad (a religious war). This post lists the differences between what Lord Kṛṣṇa teaches in Bhagavad-Gita (and what happened during the Mahabharata war) and religious war. It is important to have detailed answers to such questions. We will go through the historical background, the events that led to the Mahabharata war, how...
It is often said that Indians invented the zero, which then allowed the invention of negative numbers, complex numbers, and then modern mathematics and physics. The Roman numeral system (which followed the Greek system of counting) did not have zero. After all, zero represented “nothing”, which was purely conceptual but not physical. When zero is defined as nothing, then negative numbers...
I got invited to an atheist podcast. I’m reluctant to engage because my previous attempts have revealed gross levels of (a) ignorance about the fundamentals of modern science, (b) ignorance about the historical chain of events that led to current science, (c) ignorance of anything other than current mainstream Western thinking, (d) inability to grasp new concepts that are not based...
Truth in Vedic philosophy is defined quite differently than in Western philosophy. While Western philosophy talks about empirical and rational proofs of truth, Vedic philosophy gives the following peculiar conception of truth. If you reject the truth, then you will commit bad deeds; due to those bad deeds, you will suffer; when you suffer, then you will change what you call...
In an earlier forum response, I described some chicken and egg problems that arise while trying to construct the notions of space, time, and objects. I will use this post to elaborate on these problems further and then illustrate how they are solved in Sāñkhya philosophy, leading to the conclusion that whatever we call the “body” springs out of a succession...
