Vedic Cosmology

Visions of the Moon Per Vedic Cosmology

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...

Round Earth in a Flat Cosmology

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 this post to further elaborate what is “round earth”, which is...

Did We Land on the Moon?

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 we can have the experience of going to the moon, based...

The Universe in a Lotus Stem

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 “stem” of this lotus, which is kind of perplexing because the...

The Four Tiers of Reality

The previous post discussed the meaning of sat, chit, and ananda—i.e. consciousness or relation to things, the search for meaning, and the search for happiness. The search for meaning creates a personality—i.e. how others know you. The search for happiness creates an individuality—i.e. what kinds of pleasures one enjoys. The relationship to the world also creates our identity in the form...

Lessons of Ayurveda for Vedic Cosmology

The previous post discussed the model of the human body in Ayurveda. If you haven’t noticed, the most surprising aspect of Ayurveda is that it remains silent on what modern medicine calls heart, lungs, intestines, brain, pancreas, spleen, etc. It is surprising because modern medical education begins with anatomy and memorizing anatomy is every student’s job in the first year of...

Space as a Model of Society and Ecosystems

In Vedic cosmology, space is meant for living beings, because the material universe exists for the purposes of such beings. When space is the canvas on which we describe living phenomena, then macroscopic phenomena in the space constitute the evolution of society, while the microscopic phenomena indicate the evolution of the individual living entity. Sāńkhya is a detailed theory of the...

Why the Controversy on Flat Earth is Misplaced

It is not hard to find debates today between “flat” and “round” Earths. 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, where space itself is viewed differently than in modern science. How...

Mystic Universe – An Introduction

Last year, I wrote a post on the Twin Paradox in relativistic theory, followed by another post on the nature of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which I never published. The reason I never published the latter post is that I felt that this could be developed into a full-fledged work on Vedic cosmology. I have spent the last few months...