It is well-known that the material energy is personified in Vedic texts as Durga. And yet, starting with Advaita, the Vedānta doctrines have designated matter as achit—inert, inanimate, or insentient. Descartes, of course, designated matter as being distinct from the mind in his famous mind-body dualism. Christian theologians have also treated matter as dead and …
There are occasional rumblings against my Vedānta Sūtra commentary entitled Conceiving the Inconceivable: A Scientific Commentary on Vedānta Sūtras. I understand that many people come to religion with a sense of finality: Worldly knowledge changes, but spiritual knowledge is eternal. In their view, a new commentary breaks that finality. They may view the commentary as …
One of the key differences between quality and quantity thinking is that quality thinking breaks ordinary logic. In ordinary logic, there are always two opposites. Only one of these could be true, and one of them must be true. The former condition forbids both opposites from being true, and the latter condition forbids neither of …
In the last post, I described the sense in which Vedic philosophy is realist—a soul moves in a space of meaning-states called childhood, youth, and old age (higher) and hungry, thirsty, lusty (lower). All these states are fixed and eternal, but the soul’s connection to these states is temporary. Western material realism instead claims that …
In the Vedic system, the eternal spiritual principles are often contextualized according to time, place, situation, and the people involved to assist their realization. This contextualization is often mischaracterized as pragmatism where the potential for successes (measured by the number of people who start following such contextualized principles) seems to naturally justify the adaptation of …
For several years now, I have been describing a semantic conception of reality in which all reality is like a book, comprising symbols of meaning. The book expands out of an idea, and the individuality of the idea divides into the individuality of chapters, paragraphs, sentences, words, and phonemes. Once this expansion has occurred, we …
It is commonly believed that Descartes was the first modern philosopher, but the fact is that philosophy was an afterthought for Descartes. His initial work was on analytical geometry, which created a relation between geometry and algebra through the use of a coordinate system. Descartes intended to construct a “physics” from it—a rational and empirical …
Modern society is based upon the idea of “laws”. These laws exist in religions, social organizations, and sciences, and they are considered “universal”. For instance, the laws of a nation apply to all citizens of a nation. The laws of a religious institution or business apply to all the members of the institution or business. …
