There are several ways in which the soul in Vedic philosophy differs from the soul in other religions: It establishes unity in diversity, and it is detected by that unity, Its immortality is exactly the same as the immortality of matter, It goes from body to body every moment, not merely at death, Matter is treated as a state of the...
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)....
Underlying every kind of scientific theory is a fundamental conundrum between change and constant. For example, if we want to do sociology, we must talk about how society is changing. But in so talking, we have to say that there is a thing called “society”, which changes in some ways but remains the same society. The new and old societies are...
Before you read this article, I will urge you to read the Scientific American article No One Can Explain Why Planes Stay in Air. Comments or counterarguments about this article should be directed to Scientific American, and not to me. With that out of the way, in this article, I will talk about an alternative theory of flight, which involves the...
Buddhism had four successive goals—(a) reject deities as representations of the ultimate truth, (b) end all rituals and sacrifices performed for these deities, (c) dethrone the status position of the Brahmanas who were performing these rituals, and (d) reject all Vedic texts as sources of knowledge of the truth. Shankaracharya is revered as one who defeated Buddhism in India. But he...
One of the comments after the last post—which spoke about the polytheistic origins of monotheism—was that these narratives are an academic’s opinion, different from the believer’s viewpoint. The believers have an orthodox view of their religion while the academics have a heterodox view of the same religion. This deviation between the orthodox and the heterodox views, the commenter alleged, is a...
There are widespread misconceptions about monotheism at present—(a) that it is about a transcendent God, (b) that it has had no connections to polytheism, and (c) that it has always been monotheistic. These are far from the truth. The truth is that monotheism emerged out of polytheism, that its “God” was originally a low-level demigod but later transformed into an all-powerful...
A few months ago, I was invited to participate in a live discussion. During the conversation, I could see a stream of user comments coming from viewers talking to each other about barely related matters. One such comment was that people in India lead miserable lives. It seemed to imply that listening to the conversation is pointless because it is not...
In Chaitanya Caritāmrita 20.117, Lord Chaitanya instructs Sanātana Goswami as follows: kṛṣṇa bhuli’ sei jīva anādi-bahirmukha ataeva māyā tāre deya saṁsāra-duḥkha. Śrila Prabhupāda translates this verse as “Forgetting Kṛṣṇa, the living entity has been attracted by the external feature from time immemorial. Therefore, the illusory energy [māyā] gives him all kinds of misery in his material existence”. The contentious issue here...
