All physical analogies fail to correctly describe Bhedābheda philosophy. One such analogy is a drop in an ocean. The Bhedābheda proponent says: The drop is distinct from the ocean and yet one with it. The reductionist’s counter to that claim is that if you remove all the drops, there will be no ocean; hence the …
No two people are completely alike. No two roses look exactly the same. No two oranges are identical. Even as we classify the world into concepts, those classifications do not entail that two things are exactly alike. This fact is accommodated in modern physics by permitting different distributions of matter and energy, subject to some …
Vaiṣṇavism presents a conception of God that doesn’t fit into well-known categories such as monotheism, polytheism, monism, pantheism, panentheism, henotheism, deism, and others. This is because Vaiṣṇavism accepts all their assertions and rejects all their negations. For example, the monotheistic claim that “God is one” doesn’t negate the polytheistic claim—i.e., “God is many”. Likewise, the …
In the previous post, I made a pithy remark in passing—Progressive history doesn’t have revolutions and paradigm changes. I will use this post to explain how this is a consequence of the modern scientific assumptions about the separation of locations, times, and things. Separation allows us to count things, and then describe them using mathematical …
In a recent conversation, many good questions about the problems of Advaita Impersonalism arose, which we could not cover during the conversation itself. This post tries to respond to these questions. For those who might be unaware, Advaita Impersonalism can be summarized into four claims: (a) Brahman is real or true, (b) the material world …
I’m literally exhausted by the number of people who claim that the mind is the brain, based on the neuroscientific experiments, in which injecting electrical signals into the brain results in novel experiences. These claims arise due to the stark mind-body duality created by Descartes that was readily embraced by Christianity as the soul-matter duality. …
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 …
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 …
