No matter what modern historians would say, when one studies Samhita parts of the Rigveda one gets tempted to believe that ancient Indians were indeed in touch with divine Aliens or the Devas from other worlds.
The dialogues with the Devas are so intimate. The descriptions of the Devas, their vehicles, as well as the way they arrive at the sacrificial place, all look so real. One refuses to believe that they were all part of superstition or the beliefs of primitive men.
In the previous episode we discussed how everything is readied for the animal sacrifice.
But neither the Adhvaryu, nor the Hotr, not even the Udhgatr or the Brahma would like to kill the animal. They don’t want to taint their hands with blood! But the animal has to be killed before it can be offered to the Devas. How do they do that?
There is an interesting incident described in Tipitaka – a collection of Buddha’s discourses. Once Buddha was visiting the ancient city of Nalanda in Northern India. This city hosted one of the renowned Universities in the ancient world. It was like the Stanford, MIT, or Oxford of today. Students from all parts of the world used to throng this place to pursue advanced studies.
Many great visiting scholars and teachers used to give lectures in that University about whatever they propagated. Often these teachers used to embellish their speeches with mystifying ideas and baseless claims much like what some of our modern Gurus do 😉 So, one of Buddha’s admirers namely Kevatta, suggested to Buddha that he should precede his discourses by a display of psychic powers by some of his disciples to impress the audience.
It may be true that we human beings are the most intelligent of all the creatures on this earth. But does that empower us to behave as if we are the sole owners of this earth? Many religious scriptures declare that this entire world is created for the sake of we human beings. They say that all other creatures have an existence meant for our comforts.
If you think that only humans are attracted to intoxicants, you are wrong.
Even the Devas of the Vedas have a weakness for drinks. They come running all the way to have a taste of the great drink prepared specially for them by the sages who perform the Vedic rituals and invite them by means of fire signals!
Probably, you think that it is a silly question. But the Vedas have an interesting explanation 😉 This explanation is given in the very beginning, just before a Vedic ritual starts.
Many of us practice Yoga to keep fit. Yoga has almost become synonymous with body postures or Asana as they are called. You will be surprised to know that health was never the primary goal of Yoga! Even the Hatayoga, the forerunner of modern Yoga, does not have health as the primary goal. It looks at health only as a prerequisite to further practice of Yoga and not as an end in itself.
In the previous episodes, I have been talking about various things preparing a ground for the final act namely the Vedic ritual. As we discussed in the very beginning, the ritual part of the Vedas is described by the Brahmana part of the Vedas. They contain elaborate step by step instructions for conducting a typical Vedic ritual.
If you have ever visited Egyptian pyramids, you probably have marveled at their construction. Their construction instills awe, not as much due to the structural complexity, but because of their gigantic proportions. The constructs of Vedic Indians that I am going to discuss in this episode amazes one not because of their size but because of their structural complexity and aesthetic beauty.
A few decades ago, I came across a paper published in one of the renowned peer reviewed mathematical journals. The paper claimed that whatever we know today as geometry, trigonometry and so on, actually originated in ancient India. Whether it is the so-called Pythagoras theorem, or the precise value of mathematical constants such as Pi or even methods to approximate the square root of 2, were all known to ancient Vedic Indians!
The paper even claimed that the ancient Babylonians borrowed these ideas from Vedic Indians. And the Greeks like Pythagoras could have taken cues from them.
If you read some of the mantras in the Veda, it appears as if the Devas or the Vedic aliens used to visit the Vedic Indians as and when they were invited. The descriptions are so vivid and honest and the dialogues are so intimate that it is difficult to believe that it was just a matter of superstition or fakery.
In the previous episodes we discussed how the ancient Vedic rituals of India were in fact some kind of communion with aliens from outer world. These aliens were called Devas. This is how ancient Indians viewed the entire process.
I always had lot of interest in the Vedas. But my focus has always been on the Upanishad part that deals with philosophic issues covered by the Vedas. Being a person whose main access to Vedas is through printed books or electronic media, I did not have much need to remember things. My computer could do that job for me 😉
Contrary to what most people believe, Yoga is not all about ‘twisting and turning’😉. The body postures that are most popular as Yoga today are only a small part of Yoga. The real Yoga is about how we can modulate our minds to achieve various ends.
All of us routinely employ this even without being aware of it. I had a student whose name was some difficult to pronounce Arabic word. That was the first time I was hearing such a name. I had tough time remembering his name.
So, once I asked him what that name really means. He not only gave me its meaning, but also told me some story from Quran related to that name. I remembered that name for a long time, after that!
Do you remember how you used to memorize a nursery rhyme in your younger days? If the rhyme is a bit too long, you probably split it into fragments, went back and forth uttering the words in these fragments, probably even repeating some of the words, and so on. You kept repeating this process for a while. That seemed to help you in remembering the rhyme.
We were discussing various reasons why Vedic Indians never wrote down the massive texts namely the Vedas. They chose to orally transmit them from generation to generation. No matter why they did that, it was a herculean effort considering the size of these texts. Added to this, there were stringent restrictions on exact ways of pronouncing the Mantras, the elaborate liturgy and so on. They appear to have managed to preserve all these things almost unchanged over thousands of years without resorting to writing them down. How did they manage to do that?
In the previous episode we discussed whether the ancient Indians who propagated the Vedas were illiterates. This doubt arises since Vedas were never written down and were passed down from generation to generation in a purely oral tradition. What could be the reason?
Just imagine that some
day, not in the distant future, our entire earth gets completely
destroyed either due to some natural calamity or some man-made disaster,
wiping out the entire humanity. And some alien lands on this earth
either by accident or as part of his exploratory expedition. What would
he find here? He will definitely find lot of RCC structures, well laid
roads, remnants of our electronic and other mechanistic gadgets.
But he would find no evidence of our vast knowledge which were recorded
and stored in our computers. All those hard drives and CDs would have
been burnt to ashes. We are also not in the habit of erecting stone
inscriptions the way our forefathers did. Our books and other such
storage devices are highly perishable. What do you think the alien would
conclude?
Many people are curious to know what happens when one meditates for a prolonged duration on a regular basis. Will we experience God? Will there be an extreme ecstatic experience? Does one attain special psychic powers? These are some of the questions people often ask.
Sometimes, we have a tendency to associate importance with size. If a Guru has billions of followers then he must be a great Guru; if someone has millions of followers on the social media then whatever that person says should be important; if a religious scripture is voluminous, then what it contains must be the truth, and so on. But that is not necessarily true. I sometimes joke that greater the following a Guru has, more mediocre he is 😉 You find more people at the base of the intellectual pyramid!
Some parents have weird fancies! Here we have a poor man Ajeegartha who had a son named Shuna ShEpa – a name that literally means “tail of a dog”! Did this boy have a dog like tail? We don’t know. But his father found it right to give such a funny name to this boy.
The words ‘white’ and ‘black’ have become taboo words these days. They are reminders of atrocity committed to some races merely based on skin color. I am not talking about those dark ages. I am discussing about Vedas and their possible composers.
Thesedays, we hear of sex drugs, aphrodisiacs and even sex transplants. But have you ever heard of anyone exchanging his youth with someone younger than him? That is what the ancient Indian King Yayaati is supposed to have done. It is an interesting story that appears in the great Indian Epic Mahabharata. Let us do a momentary detour into this story.
We were discussing about the authorship of the ancient Vedas of India. One of the theories that were proposed was that of some barbaric nomads called Aryans who invaded India around 3500 years ago. It was they who composed the Vedas.
We were talking about the Vedas which are considered to be the repositories of knowledge.
If there is some repository of knowledge, the obvious inference is that it was composed by someone or by a group of people. But the adherents of the Vedas claim that the Vedas are apaurushEya – which means that they were not composed by anyone.
One of interesting observations of ancient Indian Grammarians was that all the words in any language have a verb as their root. That means any word, no matter it is a noun or adjective or otherwise, has a verb from which it originated. There is no language, if there is no action.
I know, it may sound like a cruel joke to talk about any such thing when thousands of innocent lives are going due to the current Corona pandemic.
No, I am not out to sell any such magic remedy. I am afraid, there is none. I am only reminded of how human beings resort to anything whatsoever, when faced with calamities that seem to threaten their lives and there is no solution in sight.
One comes across an interesting story in the Buddhist Tipitakas. Once Buddha was passing through a dense forest all alone. It was getting dark. People advised Buddha not to take such a risk since that forest was known to be inhabited by a cruel robber who almost killed any passersby. He even chopped off the fingers of his victims and wore a garland of them! People called him Angulimala – one who wears a garland of fingers.
Buddha was fearless and he ignored their advice and kept walking into the forest.
One person who came across some statements made by a well-known Hindu supporter raised this question.
Apparently, this Hindu supporter who has written tens of books on threats to Hinduism from ‘outsiders’ has objections to non-Hindu Yoga Gurus coming up with their own versions of Yoga.
According to this scholar, these non-Hindu Yoga Gurus distort Yoga by replacing some of the essential aspects of Yoga to suite their own religious affinities. One of them is the chanting of the sound OM during Yoga practice.
This is quite a tricky question. It could potentially lead to unending debates. Most Buddhists believe that Buddha did say that the soul does not exist.
And many a so-called ‘rationalist’ rally behind Buddhism because it rejects the concept of soul!
BeforeI get into the question answer session, let me make a quick announcement.
The fourth part of my audio book “The Ultimate book on Yoga” is now available. It is titled “Part 4 of The Ultimate Book on Yoga: How do Yoga postures work?”.
It is a one-hour long audio available in most stores and some libraries. You may not find it in amazon/audible though, since they don’t support parts.
If you have ever wondered how Yoga postures help in improvement of health, this is the book for you.
This book investigates into the reasons how Yoga postures enhance health. That would not only satisfy your curiosity but also helps you in performing these postures in the right way to reap the full potential of Yoga. So, please have a look, I mean lend an ear 😉. You will surely find some interesting things about this aspect of Yoga which you probably were never aware of.
As usual, use the link https://books2read.com/UltimateYoga to find this book in your favorite store. This link would take you to the first part of the series. Some stores may list the current part explicitly as a book in the series titled “The Ultimate book on Yoga”, some may show it as other related books. In some stores you may have to explicitly search for it using the title in the search box. I am sure that you will find this book very interesting and useful.
Now let us get back to our regular question answer session.
Today’s question is “Is Samadhi some form of brain malfunction?”
That is a tough question which can potentially shake the roots of many Yoga enthusiasts 😉 People who are determined to rubbish spiritual experiences and all types of spiritual practices keep quoting all sorts of ‘evidences’.
They argue that the experience that one goes through in advanced stages of meditation are nothing short of some weird happenings in the brain.
We often use the word spirituality to mean some uncommon or mystic set of notions or practices. Even people who do not believe in the concept of spirit or soul use the term to mean such things. Many people talk about ‘spiritual experiences’. Most modern Gurus take subjective experience as the proof of existence of spirituality that is beyond science.
This is the question I am often asked. Many people get attracted to Yoga or meditation believing that they can attain psychic powers through these practices. Many a Gurus became well known either because of their psychic claims, or through their autobiographies in which they give a long list of mystics they have met in their lives who displayed psychic powers.
Before I discuss further, let me clarify that what I intend to discuss is about Advaita and Dwaita which are often wrongly translated as Monism and Dualism respectively.
BeforeI take up today’s question, I have a small update.
The third part of my audio book series namely “The Ultimate Book on Yoga” is just out and is available in almost all stores and in some libraries.
It is titled “Part 3 of The Ultimate Book on Yoga: How to minimize stress?”. It is a one hour forty-five minutes long audio in which I discuss simple but effective and long-lasting Yogic techniques to minimize stress.
It is almost completely explained in an anecdote driven style that should make listening interesting and convincing. As usual, the link to look for is https://books2read.com/UltimateYoga. You can choose your favorite store and search for the book using the title if it is not explicitly listed. I hope that you will find this part interesting and useful.
Now back to our regular Q n A session.
Today's question is "Does Patanjali really teach meditation?"
Patanjali may be a puzzle to many people who dabble around in Yoga.
The person who asked me this question is under the impression that Patanjali who is often credited to be the father of Yoga does not really teach how to meditate!
The person who asked this question apparently watched a video in which a well-known spiritual Guru made a claim that he has ways to stop time!
The context was a discussion between a reputed astrophysicist and this spiritual Guru. The astrophysicist kept wondering about various theories about time and how conclusions arrived at by these theories are beyond comprehension.
After the overwhelming response to my audiobook “Part 1 of the Ultimate book on Yoga : Let us know Yoga better”, I have now released a sequel to that book titled “Part 2 of the Ultimate book on Yoga : Brain science behind Yoga”.
I have been discussing lot of things for the past some years. Most of my talks were around Yoga, Meditation, Indian philosophy and so on.
I have always encouraged people to ask questions before accepting anything. Many of my readers have asked me questions both through by blog as well as through other channels.
After having defined what God is, and why idol worship is not something forbidden, Badarayana goes on to give some finer suggestions on God realization.
Idol worship has been in vogue since time immemorial in all races and communities. Hindus are no exceptions. But Abrahamic religions forbid idol worship at least as a principle. There is an interesting story regarding this.
