Ask this question to a staunch believer. Probably, he can’t give you a logical answer. But then faith and logic often don’t go together. Faith does not ask questions but merely accepts what is told. In the religious scenario asking questions is even forbidden. So, we just accept the existence of God even when we don’t know what that God is!
During one of my early morning walks in a remote Indian village, I came across this elderly gentleman. He looked quite old with his wrinkled face betraying his age. He greeted me with a smiling face and introduced himself as a retired banker. He proudly declared himself as a person belonging to a faith that believed in a single God. Basically, he was a Muslim.
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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.
