Posts

Prabhupāda’s Commentary on Rape In the purport to Śrīmad Bhāgavatam 4.25.41, Prabhupāda makes the following remarks about rape that have led to much controversy: In this regard, the word vikhyātam is very significant. A man is always famous for his aggression toward a beautiful woman, and such aggression is sometimes ...

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The Process of Creation in Bhāgavata Purāṇa The Three Stages of Material Creation The 3rd Canto of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa describes a process of creation that is almost never discussed and hence it can be said that it is almost never understood. In this post, I will describe this process ...

Two Distinct Flavors of Mythology Analytic vs. Synthetic Mythologies Mythology means the science of lies. It can have two further flavors—Analytic and Synthetic. Analytic mythology is the scientific study of how rational arguments are used to justify lies. Since most people like rationality, they can be made to think that ...

The Basic Problem of Universalism Vedic Texts vs. an AI Chatbot Someone recently asked me a question about AI. The specific request was to convert Vedic knowledge into an AI chatbot so that people could easily ask it questions. As and when a question would arise, they would enter the ...

What is measured is improved. Economic progress is currently measured using GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and PPP (Purchasing Power Parity). In this article, we will discuss how the methods of growing GDP and PPP simply grow the debt. We will then describe three alternative measures that grow the economy without ...

The Nature of Industrialized Society The Problem of Industrialization Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, every new generation in industrial society has, on average, enjoyed more comfort than the previous one. As people get more comfort, they begin to believe that a comfortable life is just a normal thing ...

The Fear of Missing Out on Religion There is a new internet slang called FOMO. It means fear of missing out. It arises because of jealousy. We see someone else doing something and we fear that they will get something good that we will not. That jealousy makes us want ...

Treacherous Translations We can ask anyone walking the street what intelligence is, and he will probably equate it to the result of an IQ test measured in various college undergraduate and postgraduate aptitude test examinations. Women do well in these tests. In fact, most women do better than men in ...

There is general opposition to all kinds of elitism at present. This is due to the exclusivist nature of Western elitism. The bad attributes of Western elitism are applied even to Vedic elitism when it is inclusivist. In this short post, I will briefly discuss the nature of two different ...

Consciousness vs. Content Distinction One of the hardest problems in the scientific study of consciousness is to distinguish consciousness from its contents. In the simplest sense, consciousness is the knower, and content is the known. However, in an experience, we cannot distinguish the knower from the known because the two ...

Nearly all great civilizations have a flood story. It is almost always the precursor to a new age or a new civilization. Nearly all big civilizations talk about their advent after a flood. Some of these are stories about floods in rivers. Their cataclysmic effects are not anywhere close to ...

There are numerous and widespread misconceptions about Advaita Vedānta at present. Most people in the West dismiss it as Solipsism or Idealism in which the external world doesn't exist when Advaita clearly states that the world does exist as a myth, a false story, a sort of TV imagery, or ...

Troubles of the Bhaktivedānta Institute History of the Bhaktivedānta Institute The Bhaktivedānta Institute (BI) was created by His Divine Grace A. C. Bhaktivedānta Swami Prabhupāda to function as the intellectual arm of ISKCON. It had three primary goals—(a) refute the materialism of modern science, (b) refute the blind faith assumptions ...

There is a common belief that everyone can know everything. It is false. This false dogma was created at the dawn of modern science to take away the privileged position of Catholic priests and emperors. In Roman times, the emperor was said to be in direct communion with the gods ...

This is the third of a three-part series in which I cover sexuality. In the first part, I discussed the nature of perverted sexuality whose hallmark is shame. In the second part, I discussed various types of sexuality found in the Vedic texts, leading to a perfectional stage whose mark ...

This is the second of a three-part series in which I cover sexuality. In the first part, I discussed the nature of perverted sexuality whose hallmark is shame. In the second part, I will discuss various types of sexuality found in the Vedic texts, leading to a perfectional stage whose ...

This is the first of a three-part series in which I cover sexuality. In the first part, I talk about perverted sexuality whose hallmark is shame. The second part discusses various types of sexuality found in the Vedic texts, leading to a perfectional stage whose mark is shyness, rather than ...

Colonization was modeled after the previous Islamic conquest of the Middle East and the Roman Catholic conquest of Europe. When colonialism ended, it wasn't because the colonialists had a change of heart. It was because they did not have the power to continue. Their armies were dead. Their coffers were ...

I don't like telling personal stories, but in this case, I'll make an exception. Almost by serendipity, or shall we say cosmic design, I came to study the deeper and broader history of Abrahamic religions, and what I found stunned me. This is the story of what sent me in ...

We can scan the length and breadth of Vedic literature, but we won't find the term "Universal Truth". Everywhere, we find the term Param-Satyam, which has three meanings—(a) Highest Truth, (b) Original Truth, and (c) Best Truth. The highest truth controls everything. The original truth creates everything. The best truth ...

The separation of religion and economics, like so many other separations in modern thinking, is the gift of the Western reductionist methodology of drawing arbitrary boundaries within reality and treating them as isolated systems. These separations never occurred in Vedic thinking. Wealth, for instance, is one of the qualities of ...

A "realization" is that which takes us closer to God. It can be progress from tamo-guna to rajo-guna, rajo-guna to sattva-guna, or sattva-guna to transcendence. It can include a better understanding of various qualities. It can be something that allows us to reconcile seemingly contradictory claims. It may be a ...

There are widespread misconceptions about the various yoga systems: (a) they are mutually exclusive, (b) everyone can choose their yoga, and (c) each yoga system is optional. This misconception can be easily dissipated by reading Bhagavad-Gita, where Kṛṣṇa describes six yoga systems in a hierarchy. In this post, I will ...

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 ...

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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 ...

Standards For Different Religions My criticisms of other religions are sometimes dismissed not by a counterargument but simply by calling it an outsider's opinion, different from the believer's viewpoint. The critic says: Believers have an orthodox view of their religion while academics have a heterodox view of the same religion ...

A few months ago, I was participating in a live discussion where I could see a stream of user comments. One such comment was that people in India lead miserable lives. The implication was that Western thinking is better because the West is more prosperous. People today see poverty in ...

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 ...

I came across a denigrating portrait of Mahābhārata, written by Audrey Truschke, an associate professor of South Asian history at Rutgers University, Newark. Reading through, I noticed three things—(a) ignorance of Mahābhārata in particular and Vedic philosophy in general, (b) laziness to resolve the obvious contradictions in the article's narratives, ...

Lord Kṛṣṇa describes four classes of Duṣkṛti (those who have done bad deeds) and Sukriti (those who have done good deeds) one after another in Bhagavad-Gita. They are defined by a single criterion—surrender to Lord Kṛṣṇa. Four kinds of good people surrender to Kṛṣṇa, and four kinds do not. Since ...

For the last several centuries, the Western academic discourse on Vedic civilization has been applying Western categories to the Vedic culture, but the Vedic culture hasn’t applied its categories to the West. If we don't apply our categories to others, we are molded by their categories. If we don't respond ...

Every now and then there are stories about a spiritual leader "falling down". These are not limited to one religion or religious organization. They are known to occur across all religions and organizations. The reasons are simple—The spiritual journey is long, every successive stage leads to more hardship, and one ...

There is a widespread misconception at present that those who adhere to the Bhakti tradition do not criticize others. This misconception arises because Bhakti is equated to "love", which is then equated to non-violence and acceptance of others, which is then mixed up in the pseudo-secular woo of tolerance and ...

There are many misconceptions about what constitutes a religion and a religious person and how we should evaluate them. In this post, I will discuss two such criteria—(a) the method of judging three symptoms of love of God—morality, knowledge, and bliss, and (b) the method of two negations due to ...

Everything in Vedic philosophy is based on qualities. Since the advent of modern science, everything in modern thinking is based on quantity. The focus on qualities needs the distinction between better and worse. The focus on quantities needs the distinction between more and less. Under the influence of quantity thinking, ...

Most people think that macroeconomics is a legitimate subject because its experts are employed by prestigious organizations like central banks, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, treasury departments, investment funds, and universities. They don't know that macroeconomics is colonialism by another name. In this post, I will describe what macroeconomics is, ...

A profound illusion of simplicity arises in studying Vedic philosophy when we speak of the whole without dwelling on its parts. In the elephant and the five blind men analogy, the elephant is the whole, while the legs, ears, tail, trunk, and stomach are the parts. We can talk about ...

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 ...

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 ...

If we make a claim, its rationality can be judged by checking its consistency against our assumptions. Reasoning is the connection between my claim and my assumptions. If my claim is consistent with my assumptions, then it is well-reasoned. It may still not be true. To establish the truth, we ...

A US Supreme Court ruling recently overturned abortion as a fundamental right and it has brought the issue of abortion to the forefront. In this article, I will discuss the problems with rights and freedoms, why they can never form a coherent legal doctrine, and how society is lost in ...

I have many amusing and yet frustrating exchanges where people tell me: So, you are saying <something which I never said>. Then I refute that claim and clarify it. But then I get even more amusing and frustrating answers: So, you are saying <some new concoction which I never said> ...

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Śrila Prabhupāda described the Western worldviews as nirviśeśa and sūnyavāda, which are translated as impersonalism and voidism. This has always perplexed me because the West is rooted in Christian Personalism. How can a worldview based on Personalism be called voidism or impersonalism? The problem compounds with the Indian versions of ...

There is a widespread myth that all questions must be answered. Practical experience, however, shows that most questions go unanswered. Then the cynic says: Truth cannot be known. In this post, I will analyze this myth, to update it to something precise: All good questions can be answered and there ...

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I recently came across a book with the same title as this post, by a British historian Ian Morris, that tells an obscurantist history of the West, attributing its successes to geography. There have been similar books (e.g., Collapse by Jared Diamond) that attribute the rise and fall of empires ...

Democracy is defined as the government of the people, by the people, and for the people. In practice, however, all three conditions are seldom satisfied. Many democratic governments at present are of the people, but by the corporations and for the corporations. Some puppet governments are of the people but ...

The Varṇāśrama system is divided into four classes—Brahmana (priests), Kshatriya (rulers and warriors), Vaisya (farmers and businessmen), and Sudra (workers). If these classes follow their prescribed duties and are not misguided by greed, lust, and envy, then society is free of class clashes. If, however, people in these classes neglect ...

The physical dogma about the world is that as you look deeper inside things, you get to know smaller and smaller parts of the world. As a result, by looking deeper, you lose the big picture. Thereby, there is a contradiction between depth and breadth. You can be a jack ...

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 ...

God is the greatest, but it is not easy to live in the presence of greatness. When we encounter greatness, there are many different types of responses we can have. Those responses to greatness are also our responses to God. This post discusses how our acceptance of greatness, ability to ...

There is a difference between evolution and the theory of evolution. It’s the same difference as that between planetary motion and Newton’s theory of planetary motion. This distinction appears as that between facts and truths. They are not the same thing. Evolution is a fact, but the theory of evolution ...

The Dunning-Kruger effect is defined as the tendency in people with low abilities to be highly confident (to the point of arrogance) while people with high abilities to have low confidence (to the point of self-doubt). This post discusses how this effect results from the interaction between the dominant majority ...

The first important thing we learn from Bhagavad-Gita 2.13 is that “just as the soul passes from childhood, to youth, to old age, in the same way, the soul passes to a new body at the time of death”. Most people take this to mean that after death there will ...

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 ...

In the last post, I discussed the implementation of AI and its use for controlling markets, governments, and people. In this post, I will do the opposite: Talk about why AI is deficient. To reconcile these two seemingly contradictory positions, we will then discuss how AI becomes powerful if society ...

In classical economic theories, the “market” is an abstract entity, used by everyone, but owned by no one. It could be regulated by a government by enacting the rules and regulations of market transactions, but even the government did not own the market (unless it was the sole producer and ...

Many people realize at present that there are problems with capitalism, but opinion is divided on what should be done about it. This post explores the alternatives to capitalism and their problems. The reality is that there are no provably stable economic models today. Centuries of economic studies have failed ...

There is a popular but false dogma about Hinduism, that it is not a religion, but only a way of life. This dogma is misleading and toxic at many levels, and this post tries to uncover and examine the many flaws of this idea ...

Much discussion occurs on the internet about “guru-tattva”. I have watched these discussions for years but refrained from participation because I find these discussions don't understand or appreciate the true nature of hierarchy; most of these discussions think of a guru system as a linear succession of gurus. This post ...

My life has been uniquely blessed by the sheer number of narcissists that have entered into it. A narcissist destroys your self-esteem and manipulates you emotionally. If you feel strong, their first tactic is to make you feel weak. Under that weakness, they have a greater chance to gain control ...

Here’s a meditation: My greatest friend is the intelligence to find the truth, and my greatest enemy is the ego due to which I reject the truth. This post carries forward the discussion of the last one and describes the harmful effects of the ego, which are primarily two: (a) ...

What we colloquially call the "ego" is a very complex covering of the soul in Vedic philosophy. It comprises four components, namely, (a) the idea that I'm a master called Pradhāna, (b) the desire to exercise mastery in a particular way called Prakṛti, (c) the idea that I possess great ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the Śrīmad Bhagavatam, two verses—nearly identical in the text—are present in two places. They talk about the destruction of the knot in the heart, and the realization of mastery ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

All students of epistemology cite many categories of experience that are not knowledge, in order to distinguish them from knowledge. These categories are different in Western and Vedic systems of philosophy. In particular, in the latter, dreams are not considered false, although there are other categories that are false. This ...

In an earlier post (which now seems ages ago), I had described the meaning of “flat earth”. The simple idea was that the flatness was an artifact of the model rather than our observation. This point has oft been repeated in my book Mystic Universe as well. I will use ...

In practically every religion of the world God is said to be the creator of the universe. And this leads atheistic people to say: "No, the universe came from the Big Bang; no God was involved". But Kṛṣṇa says in the Bhagavad-Gita (10.8), that He is not just the creator; ...

Much has been said about Prabhupāda’s visionary leadership and scholarship in bringing India’s authentic culture, civilization, philosophy, and practice to the Western world. But very little is said about his vision for the future of the world as seen through the lens of science. In this post, I will try ...

The following is a response to some questions that have arisen regarding the 7th chapter in the book Mystic Universe. The central problems pertain to the following key issues:

1. I have shown Jambudvīpa as a stepped structure, while others take it as flat
2. I have shown that the mountains ...
   
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Most religions speak about the Supreme Person simply as “God”. In Vedic texts, He is described as Īśvara. But in the Gaudīya Vaishnava literature, since the time of Śrīla Bhaktisiddhānta Sarasvati Thakur, the term “Supreme Personality of Godhead” is often employed to describe what is otherwise simply referred to by ...

Secularism arose during the era of Enlightenment in Europe with the aim to relegate religion to the private realm and determine the public sphere by reason and experience. Europe wasn’t arguing for the equality of all religions in the eyes of the government. It was arguing for the rejection of ...

I have recently received several questions about Sāñkhya. These include the differences between senses and organs, that between inert matter and a living body, how desires influence perception, how Sāñkhya elements could be understood in analogy to motion, and the relation between yoga and the control of senses and the ...

This is the transcript of the eighth episode of my podcast. In this episode, we talk about a number of unique problems that arise in trying to make Vedic philosophy more rigorous in a logical and mathematical sense. I have been presenting some of these ideas while discussing the theories ...

This is the transcript of the seventh episode of the Shabda Podcast. In this episode, we will talk about the problem of epistemology or how do we know. We will go over some historical material regarding the methods of knowledge prevalent in Western philosophy and then look at the same ...

This is the transcript of this sixth episode of my podcast. Semantic atomic theory or the semantic interpretation of atomic theory is the idea that atoms are symbols of meaning and instead of the classical physical properties such as energy, momentum, angular momentum, and spin, these atoms possess semantic properties ...

Some people argue that because we are predestined to suffer and enjoy due to karma therefore there is no point in helping people. This view of karma is interpreted to mean that Vedic philosophy is opposed to altruism and charity. In fact, practitioners of some religions such as Christianity claim that ...

This is the transcript of the fifth episode of my podcast. In this episode we talk about the nature of karma and how it is created. We discuss how karma is created as a consequences of actions, different from cause and effect, and to the extent that science only deals with causes and ...

We normally think that the world comes to us during perception. For example, light enters your eyes; the electrical impulses go into the brain, where an image is created. Owing to this model of perception, John Locke claimed that the mind is tabula rasa or a blank slate at birth ...

Biologist Rupert Sheldrake coined the term Morphic Resonance to describe the idea that the occurrence of events in one place seems to recreate those same events in other places. For example, he notes that once a crystal has been synthesized in one place, synthesizing crystals in other places subsequently becomes ...

The following is the transcript of the fourth episode of my podcast. This episode talks about an alternative model of evolution based upon the notions of matter derived from quantum physics rather than classical physics. In classical physics, a particle established continuity between successive states, but in quantum physics there ...

This is the edited transcript of the third episode of my podcast. In this episode we talk about the problem of incompleteness in science and how this problem is not limited to physical theories but goes way deeper into mathematics and logic itself. The root cause of this problem is ...

This is the edited transcript of the second episode of my podcast. This episode discusses how space and time are treated as trees of three kinds of meanings in Vedic philosophy. The idea of tree of meaning has been described at various places in Vedic texts, as well as in ...

This is the edited transcript of the first episode on my podcast. The episode discusses the relation between religion and science from the perspective of Vedic philosophy, and how an original meaning embodied by God expands into symbols which include both the soul and their material experiences. This relation between meaning ...

As mental illnesses become prominent in today’s world, and science doesn’t believe in the existence of anything that cannot be sensually perceived, the cure of such illnesses suffers from a conceptual poverty inherited from the legacy of the physical sciences. While the understanding of the mind is receiving renewed focus ...

In all religious philosophies, God is the original person, Who creates all else. If we were to count things, then God would represent 1. In Vedic philosophy, additionally, all that is created is also a part of God, Who is then described as the complete truth. In effect, since God ...

According to a Gallup poll, about 6% of Americans believe that man never went to the moon; they endorse conspiracy theories in which these landings were supposedly staged in a studio. This post is not about such conspiracy theories. I will discuss why we cannot go to the moon, although ...

I used to think that happiness is caused by other people, situations, and things. If only they would just behave, I would be happy. As silly as it sounds, it is indeed a deep-seated belief in each one of us. I have now realized that happiness is a cause rather ...

Over the years as I have written many books, and new readers often want to know where to begin, how to proceed systematically, so that understanding them would become easier. Implicit in this request is the problem that the books are not easy reading, especially if you don’t read them ...

How do we know something to be true? This question has preoccupied philosophy for as long as we can remember. Many answers are offered to solve the problem, but each one suffers from a different problem. For example, reason is a useful method of knowing, but reason only compares a ...

This post offers some practical advice on how to deal with different kinds of people in this world based on some ideas drawn from Vedic philosophy—namely, divine and demonic natures—which are separated into the upper and lower parts of the universe. In the present world, which lies in between the ...

Anthropology is the study of what it means to be human. Some of the factors that have been offered as distinguishing characteristics of humans include language, religion, and social laws. Evolutionists, such as Charles Darwin, believed that humans are similar to animals, although incrementally more intelligent due to their state ...

Nearly every religion employs the idea of prayer, and most people view prayers as a way to alleviate their suffering. If such a thing were possible, it would encourage the sinner to continue sinning and use prayer to be pardoned. Conversely, if such a thing were impossible, then the skeptic ...

Vedic knowledge comprises the four Vedas (Rig, Yajur, Sāma, and Atharva) with their numerous Samhita, 108 Upanishad, 18 Purāna, Mahabharata, dozens of Tantra texts, and so forth. The above texts, however, are not exhaustive; for example, they don’t contain meticulous details on astronomy, linguistics, grammar, logical reasoning, life sciences, architecture, ...

Vedic texts describe how the body of a soul is created due to guna and karma. This seems unintuitive if we think that the body is created by eating food. But how do we eat food? Food consumption is, in Vedic philosophy, influenced by two factors, called guna (plural) and karma. This ...

One of the most enduring images in the Vedic scriptures is that of Lord Brahma sitting on a lotus the stem of which goes down to the navel of Garbhodakaśāyī Viṣṇu, who is also praised as Hiranyagarbha. The fourteen planetary systems in Vedic cosmology are described to reside inside the ...

Many people currently view a guru as a classical particle, which interacts with other classical particles through physical contact like a billiard ball colliding with another billiard ball. The advocates of such a theory claim that it is necessary for a person to be physically in touch with a guru, ...

At the present, most people view Gauḍiya Vaishnavism as one among the many sects of Vaishnavism, with the others being Viśiṣṭādvaita, Dvaita, Dvaitādvaita, and Śuddhādvaita. Vaishnavism is itself considered one of the three sects—namely, Shaiva, Shakta, and Vaishnava. The three sects are together believed to constitute personalism as opposed to ...

Exegesis, according to Wikipedia, is “a critical explanation or interpretation of a text, particularly a religious text”. In the Vedic tradition, it exists as the commentaries by previous āchāryās who have explained the scriptures in various ways according to time, place, and circumstances. Such commentaries are essential for one key reason—the ...

The Bhagavad-Gita describes various yoga systems called karma-yoga, jñāna-yoga, dhyāna-yoga, and bhakti-yoga. This post discusses the differences between the various yoga systems and how these systems are based on different causes of our experience. With this, we can also discern which system is superior to the others, to construct a ...

In the introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, Śrīla Prabhupāda writes, “The subject of the Bhagavad-gītā entails the comprehension of five basic truths. First of all the science of God is explained, and then the constitutional position of the living entities, jīvas. Prakriti (material nature) and time (the duration ...

“The pursuit of happiness and meaning are two of our most central motivations in life” but “there can be substantial trade-offs between seeking happiness and seeking meaning in life,” writes Scott Barry Kaufman in a thought-provoking Scientific American post. In a stereotypical sense, the pursuit of meaning is one that ...

The previous post identified two impersonalist tendencies—i.e. "we are one" and "we are equal"—and discussed their respective impacts on Indian and Western societies. The post also discussed how a personalist system based on hierarchical thinking (rather than equality or oneness) is necessary for social organization. This post carries forward that ...

There is one fundamental cultural difference between the West and India—the West is a flat, egalitarian society, while India is still, to an extent, a hierarchical society. In the stereotyped view of the West, children do not respect parents, students do not respect teachers, and citizens do not respect politicians ...

Theory of Four Kinds of Spaces Modern science conceives space as a container separate from the objects moving in that container. Each object in this container is independent of the other objects. Such objects then interact through forces. Since each object binds together many properties, therefore, what binds these properties ...

In late 1997, H.H. Bhaktisvarūpa Dāmodara Maharaja told me that he wanted to compile Śrīla Prabhupāda’s instructions on Bhaktivedānta Institute into a book. With that intent, he and I made some recordings, where Maharaja narrated the early history of the Institute and I transcribed the tapes. Following this, I searched ...

We generally think of religion as something that pertains to transcendence beyond the current material existence. The reality, however, is that the day-to-day practice of religion involves societies whose cultural norms must be compatible with the tenets of the religion. If there is a misfit between culture and religion, then ...

It is not hard to find debates today between “flat” and “round” Earth. Many of these debates are founded on conspiracy theories, but discussing those conspiracy theories isn’t the intent of this post. This post discusses a completely different notion of flat Earth which is found in Vedic cosmology texts, ...

This post discusses the relevance of the idea of “gross” and “subtle” matter in Sāńkhya to the problems of prediction in quantum theory, highlighting the solution using everyday examples. I also discuss how the attempts to divorce “gross” and “subtle” matter, or reduce “subtle” matter to “gross” matter, lead to ...

Some readers noted after my previous post (perhaps tongue-in-cheek) that my website has a copyright sign (©) at the bottom of each page. So it seems that I’m protesting the existence of patents but I indicate that the protest itself (my article) is copyrighted. That would seem hypocritical. Would I ...

If you talk to a mathematician about their theories, they will say that mathematics is a discovery rather than invention. If you ask a physicist about their theory, they will claim that they are discovering the nature of reality rather than inventing it. But if you talk to a technologist ...

The term “New World Order” often refers to a system of global governance and economics, including the system of monetary exchanges and trade established through institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the balance of power between the nations through organizations such as the United ...

Economists have taught us that nothing by itself has intrinsic value. The value, according to them, rather depends on supply and demand for that thing. If the supply is high and the demand is low, then the value automatically decreases. Conversely, if the demand is high and the supply low, ...

This is a follow-up to the previous post, which discussed the nature of space in Śrimad Bhāgavatam (SB). The goal of this one is to describe the ideas of “manifest” and “unmanifest” states of matter. Matter in the Śrimad Bhāgavatam (and indeed in many other Vedic works of literature) is ...

Many people believe that the things that science is currently discovering were known to Vedic philosophers and sages in the past. This notion is false because the concepts of matter in Vedic philosophy are radically different from those in modern science. This post discusses the issue from the standpoint of ...

If the universe was not determined in some sense, then we could not make any scientific predictions. If, however, we did not have free will to choose among alternatives, there could be no moral judgments. This contentious issue confuses many of us, as we tend to either capitulate to free ...

While going down in an elevator, it recently occurred to me that the elevator doesn't move unless we indicate the floor it has to go to, quite different from an escalator that keeps moving regardless of whether anyone has anywhere to go to. This difference is a useful way to ...

If you have had a difficult life―like some people around us―you might have asked yourself: Why does it happen to me and not to others? If you are a good person but have still suffered at the hands of others, you might ask yourself: Do I really control my life? ...

Darwinian evolution or evolutionary theory predates the development of modern physics—e.g. quantum theory. At the time at which the theory was developed, the best-known theory of matter was classical physics, in which matter always exists in definite states. Ideas such as random mutation and natural selection in evolution were incompatible ...

Mystic Universe – An Introduction to Vedic Cosmology is a recent book that discusses Vedic cosmology and contrasts its ideas of space and time to that currently used in modern science. This post explores some of the key differences between modern and Vedic cosmology, and the reasons for this difference. This ...

Many people who look at Vedic philosophy in current times, understand it as Advaita, which is an interpretation of Vedānta, that claims that the ultimate reality is a singular, unified existence called Brahman, from which the world is produced as māyā or illusion. The Brahman is equated with consciousness, although ...

My two previous posts explored the flaws in the materialist reduction of free will to rationality and discussed the use of free will in science. The second post concluded by arguing that every conscious experience involves choices, and these may be good or bad―depending on whether they are successful. This ...

The previous post examined the materialist critique of free will and showed why the reduction of free will to rationality (and then to the mechanization of rationality) is flawed because rationality itself involves choices of axioms that themselves cannot be rationalized―i.e. reduced to more fundamental axioms. The only way to ...

Attacks on free will have become fairly common. While the attackers often recognize what is at risk — namely the sense of responsibility and accountability — they are motivated by establishing the primacy of what science seems to be telling us over what we have commonsensically believed over the centuries. This post examines the ...

I generally refrain from commenting on theological topics and restrict myself to issues in science, but in this post, I will make an exception. The issue of interest is whether a soul "falls down" into matter. There is often confusion around this topic, which, in my view, rests upon a ...

During recent online conversations with commentators, I heard a refrain about science: science is only a model, it has nothing to do with reality; our models may get closer to reality over time, but we have no way of knowing that they have gotten to reality, nor do we know ...

Even a broken watch tells the right time twice a day.  However, to know that the watch is broken, we must observe it when it tells the time incorrectly rather than when it tells it correctly. This analogy is a useful way to understand the problem in modern science because ...

The below is a response to the question about the conflict between reason and faith. It is also detailed in the book Uncommon Wisdom. The gist of the argument is that the manner in which science has construed the use of reason (and experience) - i.e., the path to discovery ...

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The problem in any kind of existence begins from a very old distinction between appearance and reality. Appearances are obviously how things seem to us in our perception although not everything that we perceive does really also exist. How things seem to us is a property of our perceptual apparatus—senses, ...

In the Srimad Bhagāvatam, a Vedic text widely regarded as the culmination of Vedānta (which is in itself considered the conclusion of all knowledge), Sage Kapila elaborates the Sāńkhya theory of material nature to his mother Devahuti and concludes (SB 3.32.32): Philosophical research culminates in understanding the Supreme Personality of ...

A common argument against the mind-body duality is that the mind is an epiphenomenon of chemical reactions in the brain much like the fluidity of water is a consequence of molecular interactions. This argument seems appealing because if we reduce water to its molecules, we don’t see fluidity in each ...

There are many path-breaking areas of research at the nexus of meaning and matter. I am particularly interested in the following areas, with the specifics described below ...

The main goal of today’s academic research is to keep the pretense that the situation is, after all, not all that bad. I say this because, if you happen to take a closer look at the biggest outstanding problems facing academic research you will find problems that require not just a ...

Science has, since its inception, suffered from the mind-body divide that Descartes created. The divide forced sciences to pursue an ideology of matter as opposed to the existence of the mind, which makes an understanding of the mind impossible. Attempts in current science to explain sensations, mind, and intelligence based ...