Veda40- The drama of life!

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We were discussing a mind game in the previous episode where an actor plays multiple roles ‘simultaneously’. What does this game have to do with the Advaita and the concept of Maya that we were discussing about in previous episodes?

Veda39- Let us play a mind game!

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I have a smart neighboring kid who is just 2-year-old. She can hardly express herself clearly. But some of her utterances amaze me and show how shallow we, the ‘so called adults’ are!

Veda38- This world is like a movie show!

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The analogy and explanation that I am going to discuss now apparently is first put forth by some well known Swami of Ramakrishna order, successors of Swami Vivekananda. This analogy is often used by many modern Advaita teachers to explain the concept of Maya or illusory nature of this world. The analogy is quite interesting and very close. But not quite close. Let us see how.

Veda37- Saying it all in just twelve sentences!

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The world we know of is unfathomable, and infinite in dimension. There could even be worlds beyond the reach of our senses. Added to this, this world has an unfathomable past and hopefully future too. Can we describe this massive entity, at least the intelligent part of it, in just twelve sentences? One of the Upanishads namely the Mandukya Upanishad from the Atharva Veda seems to make exactly such a claim! What does it say?

Veda36- There are things that cannot be inferred by reasoning!

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Many of us over emphasize on logic and reasoning. Rightly so, if you are scientifically oriented person. Science does stress on logic and reasoning and discourages subjective opinions or views. Many of the scientific ‘truths’ are accepted not because some great scientist like Newton or Einstein has said so, but because they can be arrived at using logic and reasoning and of course mathematics. Even when some of their findings are yet to be proven empirically, we take it for granted that they are true since these scientists based their discoveries on sound foundation of logic and reasoning.

Veda22- Why do we wear clothes?

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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.

Veda21- A tour of typical Vedic ritual

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Yajnya Shaala (Place of ritual)

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.

Veda20- Were the Vedic Indians vegetarians?

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Vegetarianism is considered to be a virtue in many places. In some parts of India, you are looked down if you are a non-vegetarian. 

 

What about the Vedic Indians? Were they vegetarians?

Veda19- The amazing constructs of Vedic Indians!

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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.

Veda18- Were the Vedic Indians mathematical genius?

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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.

Veda17- Did the aliens really visit Vedic Indians?

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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.

(QnA-06)- Are psychic powers real?

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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. 

 

Do such powers really exist?

BookTalk: Was Jesus really in India?: Final verdict on the age-old mystery

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In today’s book talk I am going to discuss about my recent book “Was Jesus really in India? : Final verdict on the age-old mystery”.


You probably have read about the controversy raised by a Russian Journalist Nicolas Notovitch, way back in late 1800s. He claimed that he found an ancient manuscript related to Jesus in a remote Buddhist monastery in the Himalayas.

BookTalk: Mysterious experiences

In today’s book talk I am going to discuss about my recent audio book “Mysterious experiences : A peek beyond the confines of the Mind”.

Swami Vivekananda once mentioned some mysterious experience he used to have in his younger days, I.e, before he became a Sanyasi. Whenever he closed his eyes before he slept, he could see a bright light in front of him. But swamiji never felt that that was something unusual. He thought everyone else experiences the same way!

What you experience and what actually IS, need not be the same!

Nowadays, I see some popular Gurus making their supposedly  ‘mysterious experiences’ as their USP. They urge their prospective disciples to believe what they experience as the ultimate reality.

Higher is your qualification, more you are gullible?

Though very strange, I have often observed this happening. Many a highly qualified intellectuals get easily fooled by pseudo Gurus. I have always wondered why? 

Demystifying the strange mantra

Recall the original strange mantra we started with.

 

“That is complete. This (too) is complete. (This) complete has come from (that) complete. When complete is removed from complete, what remains is also complete”

If we equate ‘that’ to the original ‘That’ which alone existed in the beginning (recall the Chändogya Upanishad creation story) and ‘this’ to our perceptible world we see around, including us, the meaning of this apparently strange mantra becomes almost clear. 

This world came from ‘That’. And as per the Upanishad, even after this world came out, ‘That’ remained as it was. ‘That’ did not get transformed into ‘this’. It took more forms and coexists with all those forms.

There is no doubt about the fact that the original ‘That’ was limitless or ‘complete’. But each of the forms taken by ‘That’ is definitely not limitless and complete.  Each has its own shortcomings.

If that is the case, how does the above mantra say that ‘this’ is also complete?

We probably have to see each of the entities in ‘this’ sans the name and form it has taken. What do we see there? ‘this’ is same as ‘That’. This is what exactly, many Upanishads say – when all names and forms are dropped, ‘this’ becomes indistinguishable from ‘that’ or in some way ‘this’ merges with ‘That’ in the same way “the rivers merge with the sea when they finally lose their individual names and forms”. Before merging, each river had a name and its own characteristics such as speed, breadth, length, force and so on. But once they merge with the sea, there is no river but just the sea.

This is also the momentary experience one gets in advanced stages of meditation or samädhi. When the identity with the body is overcome, the limited ‘I’ becomes universal ‘I” which is limitless. 

So, ‘this’ is also ‘complete’ in reality.

PS: I am aware of possible objections some staunch Dvaita adherents may have to my explanation. I am only trying to unify diversity in views and see sense in various Upanishadic verses, and great philosophies of these masters whom I hold in high esteem. After all, in the domain of ‘infinity’ our ‘limited’ algebra does not work as we saw earlier.

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Multiplicity in the universe is only apparent

Recall again the Chändogya Upanishad description of the creation of the world that we discussed in an earlier post. Originally there was a single entity. But that single entity (simultaneously) took different names and forms and ‘became’ many.

No matter what forms and names the original ‘That’ took, the fact remains that each of those forms are all ‘That’ in the essence. The names and forms may be different. It is a case of simultaneous coexistence of the same entity in many forms. In our space/time limited world view, such a thing is difficult to comprehend. But let me give a simple example to illustrate this point (this is only for illustration, please don’t stretch it beyond limits)

Assume that there are multiple movie theaters adjacent to each other, each running different movie with the same actor playing the lead role.  In each movie, the actor plays a different role – in one he may be a drunkard, in another he may be a wicked man, in yet another he may be a saint and so on. The role is dictated by the story line of each movie and the actor plays exactly as per the script – the name and form he has taken.

At the same time the real actor sitting somewhere, may neither be a drunkard, nor wicked, nor a saint. He is in no way bound by the story line of the movies he has enacted. For a viewer, the same actor appears differently. But behind all those diversity of roles, it is the single actor who is playing the roles. The differences are imposed by the story lines of each movie.

So if we ignore the space/time limitation of our perceptible world, it is not too difficult to understand that behind all this seeming diversity, there is a single entity that appears differently. 

This is exactly (well, almost), the Advaita philosophy of Šankara – “Brahma (the name used for ‘That’) alone exists, the diversity is just apparent (Mithya) “

Let us move back a step and see the original strange mantra with which we started and see how all these things mesh well. That will be the next post.

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Our space-time limited world

We live in a space/time limited world. Here, no entity can exist in more than one place ‘simultaneously’. Similarly, no two things can occupy the same space at the same time.

 

The consequence of this limitation, that we take for granted, is that an entity cannot have more than one form at the same time. Also, the form dictates the capabilities of the entity. For example, water can either be liquid – as water, or solid – as ice, or gaseous – as steam, at different times but not at the same time. And when it is liquid it has different properties and uses as compared to when it is in solid form. So these names and forms make them different, though the contents can be one and the same.

What if we remove this space/time restriction?

In such a situation, a single entity can be liquid, gaseous, or solid at the same time: probably, many more things. Though they appear to be many different things, they all are indeed the same thing.

With this relaxed restriction on existence, let us trace back our discussion to previous posts.

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Root of the mystery

In one of the well known Upanishads, namely the Chändogya Upanishad, there is a description of how this world came into existence. Let me summarize the relevant verses as follows.

 

“In the beginning, there was nothing but ‘That’ alone that existed. And ‘That’ wished to be many. It took the form of ‘Tejas’ (bright light). This ‘Tejas’ too wished to be many and it took the form of ‘Äp’ (water). This ‘Äp’ in turn took the form of ‘Anna’ (nutriment)”

What is interesting is even after taking these various forms the original ‘That’ remained as it was. Explaining the ‘creation process’ further, the Upanishad explains how each of these three forms – bright light, water and nutriment – combined among themselves and resulted in the formation of several entities each distinct in its own way. Then the Upanishad says

“Having taken so many forms, ‘That’ entered each of them in the form of ‘Jiva’ (soul) and separated ‘name’ and ‘form’”

So, in this way, the single entity that alone existed in the beginning ‘became’ many things/beings that we see around us as ‘world’.

But how is that possible? How can one entity become many and still remain as it was! We will see this in the next post.

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