The world is today gripped by the CoVID pandemic. Every few days new vaccines and virus variants are talked about. The governments are pressured into vaccination, the doctors have no time (and limited ability) to test if a person is already immune to CoVID before administering a vaccine. And nobody can say if a vaccine …
One, Oneness, and Separateness
The following is an excerpt from the Vaiśeṣika Sutras, that describes the three principles of One, Oneness, and Separateness, which create two paradoxes—unity in diversity and diversity in unity. Many things emerge out of the One, therefore, they must have existed in the One previously; this is the paradox of diversity in the unity. Similarly, …
The Aspected Nature of the Absolute Truth
Below are some verses from the Nyāya Sutra that discuss the nature of the Supreme Lord, and describe how He is one and many, how He is attained by devotees and yet never truly attained by anyone, and how the varied aspects of His personality are hidden inside the other aspects, such that knowing any …
Why Dreams Feel Just Like Waking
If you lift a ball in your hand while awake, you feel downward pressure. If you ask a physicist why that is the case, then he will say: This pressure is felt because of Newton’s gravitational law – GM1M2/R2 – where G is the Gravitational constant, M1 and M2 are the masses of Earth and …
The Nyāya Philosophy of Presence and Absence
The Nyāya system of philosophy describes a category called abhāva or ‘absence’ and then explains how bhāva or ‘presence’ manifests from the absence. This is a very long discussion in Nyāya Sutra (which I’m translating presently) and has many nuances. It is hard to capture all these details here, but I thought that instead of …
Is the Material World an Illusion or Reality?
Several people have asked me in recent days about the nature of māyā. This made me realize how little this concept is understood and prompted me to write the following long post describing the problem of illusion, the various problems arising from its solution, and the nature of the correct solution.
The Nyāya Conception of a Scientific Theory
Below is the translation and commentary on some of the Nyāya Sutras, which describe the nature of a scientific theory as comprised of four aspects. The first aspect represents the purpose of the system; the second, the functional parts that execute this purpose; the third, a mechanism of control that translates the purpose into functional …
The Scientific Study of Consciousness
Vedic texts divide experience into the seer, the seen, and the seeing. We can also call these the knower, the known, and the knowing. What we commonly call ‘consciousness’ is the process of seeing or knowing. This seeing or knowing is a property of the soul—the seer or the knower—but it operates under the knower’s …
God and Mathematics
The following is a somewhat extended version of a reply to some questions that I sent today to an interested reader. I thought this description would be relevant and useful even to others, and hence I decided to post it.