Tag: <span>Science</span>

Tag: Science

Musings

Why Science & Religion May Not be Adversaries

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Are science and religion necessarily competitors or can they be complimentary? Author of 3 popular books on Indian mythology and a doctor by profession, Dr Vineet Aggarwal shares his thoughts on the topic. Indeed when one studies the ancient scriptures deeply, one is often astounded by the scientific knowledge one finds.

Philosophy (Jnana)

Where Science and Metaphysics Fall Short

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Sri Aurobindo’s words on the limitations of science and metaphysics in explaining the world. As he writes, “Metaphysics seeks to tell us What the Universe is and Why it is; in other words to explain the Inexplicable; but the end of this process is inevitably a juggling with words which must repel all clear-minded thinkers”. The approach of Hinduism is altogether different.

Philosophy (Jnana)

Indian Monk Says to Rise Above Thought and Reason (Swami Vivekananda)

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Are there limits to our reason or is reason all we must rely on?
Swami Vivekanda said: “The really difficult part to understand is that this state, the Absolute, which has been called the highest, is not, as some fear, that of the zoophite, or of the stone. That would be a dangerous thing to think. According to these thinkers there are only two states of existence, one of the stone, and the other of thought. What right have they to limit existence to these two? Is there not something infinitely superior to thought?” Read more in the article.

Newsletters

A Song for the Neuroscientists (Avadhuta Gita)

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Weekend Thoughts: A Gita for the Neuroscientists


First it was physics, now it’s neuroscience. The scientific community has always delighted in casting its sceptical eye on the spiritual and mystic dimensions of life. And our ‘rational’, modern age, has readily granted them the position of ‘experts’ with few stopping to consider that title for the other side instead.


Modern neuroscientists have been able to make careers expounding theories that play with the mystical. There’s the science of ‘consciousness hacking’ which purports to use technology to enhance human experience. There’s also the ‘Integrated information theory’ which purports to measure the extent/depth of consciousness in each living thing. Most recently, efforts are starting to be made to achieve immortality through AI. In short, the list is long.


In his latest book, Two Saints, Indian journalist and author Arun Shourie has gone so far as to suggest (based again on the testimony of neuroscience) that the sadhana of the saints Ramakrishna Parmahansa and Sri Ramana Maharshi was marked by sleep disorder and unhealthy effects on the mind and brain. I must declare upfront that I have not read the entire book but the excerpts and book reviews that I have read have confirmed that deeper association with the book would be a colossal waste of time and money. Such comments about sleep deprivation showcase a poetic irony in that saints who are ‘awake’ are accused of not sleeping enough!


To our scrupulous neuroscientists, I propose a certain song (gita) of timeless origin in India – the Song of the Avadhuta or the Avadhuta Gita. Credited to the sage Dattatreya, the Avadhuta Gita is the song of every enlightened soul, including the avadhuts Sri Ramana Maharshi and Ramakrishna Parmahansa whose perception of life transcended the senses. Indeed, the basic fallacy in the scientific approach in assessing spiritual matters is its insistence on objective and measurable experience whereas spirituality belongs to the realm of the subjective.




He does not attain a “many” or a “One” that is separate from himself;

 It is not something other, like an object with length and breadth.

 It cannot be objectively proven, or compared with anything;

 It’s the Lord, the Self, the Eternal, he attains. 


(Avadhuta Gita, II: 36*)






The basic problem is that scientists keep turning up to scrutinise the mystical with their measuring sticks, trying to employ their senses and mind to figure out what is beyond the senses and mind. And we watch as they churn out theories and data about Consciousness, which attempts can be likened to someone bumping into furniture in a dark room. “No, it’s not this”, “not that”, “wrong again” sigh the enlightened sages. Neti, neti.




You are the ultimate Reality; have no doubt.

 The Self is not something known by the mind;

 The Self is the very one who knows!

 How, then, could you think to know the Self? 


(Avadhuta Gita, I: 42*)




In my view, the neuroscientists would be better off trying to understand the meaning of the following lines to better satisfy their curiosity about the physical and mental “condition” that a mystic experiences. This is the state of the avadhuta who has transcended space and time:




I’ve put an end to both wavering and unwavering; 

I don’t even imagine thought. 

I’ve put an end to both dreaming and waking; 

I neither sleep nor wake. 

I’ve put an end to animate and inanimate; 

I’m neither moving nor still. 

I’m nectarean knowledge, unchanging bliss; I’m everywhere, like space.


(Avadhuta Gita, III: 16*)




The two saints Ramana and Ramakrishna are not physically here anymore but their message is always timelessly here and quite apt for our mind-obsessed friends:




O mind, my friend, what’s the good of so much speaking?

 O mind, my friend, all of this has been made quite clear.

 I’ve told you what I know to be true;

 You’re the ultimate Reality. You’re unbounded, like space.

 (Avadhuta Gita, I: 68*)




The Avadhuta Gita has to be felt and experienced, not simply heard. Indeed it is a song without a tune. A song that each one must set to the tune of their own life.


*Dattatreya: Song of The Avadhut translated by Swami Abhayananda

Also see an earlier article I wrote on similar themes and a recently published post on LWP where the spiritual teacher Mooji (in the lineage of Sri Ramana) explains what the path of self-enquiry is about.


See also: The Face of Grace, Ramana Maharshi 


 


Important Updates


We will be counting down to Yoga Day on 21 June with an article a day on yoga – some old, some new, ranging from articles on how to begin yoga, to more philosophical aspects. We’ll also feature a selection of 10 yoga-asanas – one a day staring tomorrow to get you in the mood!




Weekly Digest




Finishing up with a weekly round-up from LWP in case you missed it (scroll down to see more details):


Monday Recipe: Red Pesto, a vitamin powerhouse

Tuesday: Researcher Kiran Varanasi’s thoughts on how the computational nature of Sanskrit is directly relevant to science and ecology and can show us the way forward

Wednesday: Nimisha Bowry’s thoughts on the ‘As You Like It Generation’ in the LivLite section

Thursday: Beloo Mehra’s walk through the beauty and divinity of an Indian temple

Friday: Ranjan Bakshi’s review of Nithin Sridhar’s book, Musings on Hinduism

Saturday: An introduction to self-inquiry with a short clip by spiritual master Mooji discussing The Most Important Question

Last Sunday’s Newsletter: “We Won’t Always Have Paris”



									


			
		
	
         
           
         
         
    
	








		

		

			

				
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Sanskrit, Science and Ecology
			
			

				
		
			
			
			
		
				
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“Understanding the anatomy of language through grammar enables us to reach a higher plane of creativity in art, as well as in science…The immense heritage of scientific works in Sanskrit bear proof to this creative capacity. Unfortunately, modern methods of academic instruction in mathematics and science have been disconnected from this heritage. Instead of a delightful marriage between scientific investigation and artistic beauty, we have the divergent worlds of sciences and humanities, where people fight to establish their egos in their theories. This disconnect has produced so much pollution in this world that people have forgotten that all of human endeavour is a shared enterprise, and that its objective is to elevate the consciousness to a higher Rasa.”


Diversity in Indian civilisation


For about ten thousand years, the Indian subcontinent was not only the most populous area but also the most technologically and economically advanced civilization in the world. But despite this, the region preserved its biological diversity. The forests of India housed vast numbers of tigers and other wild animals, whose numbers started to decline only during the colonial era. The same is true of linguistic and cultural diversity in human societies.


One can contrast how Irish and other Celtic languages were exterminated from the British isles with how Dravidian and South-East Asian languages thrived despite the dominance of Sanskrit. India is the only civilization in the world where tribal languages and customs are preserved, despite being in close contact with literate societies. Apart from protecting economic and lifestyle niches, religious beliefs and practices were also protected. Many external religions such as Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Syriac Christianity, Bahai’ism have sought and found refuge in India. This case of India is all the more surprising when we note that the aggressive European civilizations were but cousins to India, sharing a common linguistic and mythological ancestry. So what did its cousins lack that made India so tolerant?


Sanskrit – tool for elevating consciousness


The answer may be in the computational nature of the Sanskrit language and the sciences nourished by it. Taken together, they are a means of amplifying the consciousness of a person, making him aware of every single aspect of life and his conduct to it. This reinforcement of consciousness is the key to avoiding environmental catastrophe in any age. Often, humans destroy living ecosystems through sheer ignorance and lack of attention. Greed is a big factor, but stupidity results in greater violence in the long term.


The languages and belief systems that we think in are Prakrits – applicable to a specific place and context. A certain type of fish might survive in certain type of waters, but other fish may die. Such is the case with Prakrits – they cannot claim to be universal. Further, if they become polluted (become Apabhramsas), they cause suffering to the very creatures that thrived on them.


The greatest cause of suffering is the ego nurtured by the polluted mind. For example, after they conquered Bengal, the British systematically scorched the region with famine to break the morale of the people.  The early Americans exterminated the bison so that they could starve the native Indian tribes that depended on it. It is hard to fathom the depravities of such egotism, which continues to cause ecological destruction today. There is an important lesson to be learned from human civilizations that survived for a long time without ecological collapse like in India (at least until today’s age). The lesson is the open computational grammar of Sanskrit, which makes it modifiable to be suited to specific local contexts in space and time, such that the human mind pays attention to the changing constraints of nature.


Sanskrit is unique, because unlike any other human language, there is no dictionary needed for Sanskrit. Instead, it possesses a generative grammar of computational rules. The number of Sanskrit words is potentially infinite. Even if we restrict to words less than 5 syllables in length, there are more than hundreds of thousands of words. Each word in Sanskrit is akin to a self-explanatory computer program that can be parsed into individual syllables (phonemes) by which its meaning can be derived. Thus, an infinite number of new words can be generated whose meaning will be unambiguous to a Sanskrit speaker.  The magic of Sanskrit grammar is that you can have multiple ways of breaking a word and putting it together again, that leads to multiple angles of meaning, all of which converge on the denoted object.


Map reconstructing the now-dry ancient Saraswati river mentioned in Vedic texts. The river flowed through North-West India (Source: Wikipedia)


From the Indian perspective, the physical analogy for an algorithm is not a mechanical clock, but a constantly flowing river that nourishes people. This river is Saraswati on the banks of which the Indian civilization flourished, and who was later glorified as the goddess of speech. In the Indian tradition, this river is supposed to flow through all the other rivers, blending at sacred spots of confluence. When Indians make pilgrimages, they carry small pots of water from the rivers of their places of origin to the sacred Ganges and mix them in. This is a way of acknowledging the commonality of all the rivers.


Saraswati, Goddess of Speech, Knowledge  and the Arts


Interpreting this tradition with computers and algorithms, we should encourage interoperability of all computing systems, by periodically blending in the waters of computation with each other. Like the waters of a river, they can be enjoyed by all living beings. In a more general sense, we can say the same for open-source software if it achieves political and economic awareness amongst people. Thinking of algorithms and computer programs as rivers also requires us to maintain them free of pollution. Various types of pollution in terms of data-structures, security, network infrastructure etc. need to be addressed in a similar manner to how we address pollution in ecology.


Reviving the Sanskrit tradition


Throughout the cultural history of India, all great poets and writers in regional languages studied Sanskrit and were equally proficient in it. The power of Sanskrit in word formation and grammar has penetrated all Indian languages. In fact, the first writers of any regional language (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam etc.) wrote a technical Paninian*-style grammar for their language before composing any literary work. This is because they understood the importance of grammar in imparting consciousness to the literary tradition. Understanding the anatomy of language through grammar enables us to reach a higher plane of creativity in art, as well as in science.


The immense heritage of scientific works in Sanskrit bear proof to this creative capacity. Unfortunately, modern methods of academic instruction in mathematics and science have been disconnected from this heritage. Instead of a delightful marriage between scientific investigation and artistic beauty, we have the divergent worlds of sciences and humanities, where people fight to establish their egos in their theories. This disconnect has produced so much pollution in this world that people have forgotten that all of human endeavour is a shared enterprise, and that its objective is to elevate the consciousness to a higher Rasa (essence). In Sanskrit tradition, the contrast could not be stronger. Great Indian mathematicians of the past like Bhaskara were also highly skilled poets. All the great Sanskrit poets and musicians used computational thinking that would pride a scientist. These bridges have to be rebuilt today, not only for the sake of lovers of Sanskrit, but for the whole world.


The mainstream narrative from western media is okay with letting Indians have their naked mystics, but not as open about acknowledging the full extent of scientific contributions. But anybody who tries to confine the applicability of Sanskrit to these narrow realms is an enemy, not of Sanskrit, but of science.


*Sankskrit grammarian in the ~6th -4th BCE, considered the father of Indian linguistics

									


			
		
	
         
           
         
         
    
	








		

		

			

				
					Philosophy (Jnana)
			  

			
Art, Cosmology and the Divine | Part II
			
			

				
		
			
			
			
		
				
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Main photo (above) is a Basohli illustration of the Gita Govinda, The South Wind Cools Itself in the Snow of the Himalayas, c.1730


Continuing this six-part series (Read Part I) in which distinguished scientist, academic and Vedic scholar Subhash Kak shows how traditional Indian art is not only aesthetically sublime, but reflects the cosmos and the Divine itself. Here we look more closely at the astronomical codes reflected in Vedic art and rituals.


 


Part II: General equivalences


The view that the arts belong to the domain of the sacred and that there is a connection between them is given most clearly in a famous passage in the Vishnudharmottara Purana in which the sage Markandeya instructs the King Vajra in the art of sculpture, teaching that to learn it one must first learn painting, dance, and music:


Vajra: How should I make the forms of gods so that the image may always manifest the deity?


Markandeya: He who does not know the canon of painting (citrasutram) can never know the canon of image-making (pratima lakshanam).


Vajra: Explain to me the canon of painting as one who knows the canon of painting knows the canon of image-making.


Markandeya: It is very difficult to know the canon of painting without the canon of dance (nritta shastra), for in both the world is to be represented.


Vajra: Explain to me the canon of dance and then you will speak about the canon of painting, for one who knows the practice of the canon of dance knows painting.


Markandeya: Dance is difficult to understand by one who is not acquainted with instrumental music (atodya).


Vajra: Speak about instrumental music and then you will speak about the canon of dance, because when the instrumental music is properly understood, one understands dance.


Markandeya: Without vocal music (gita) it is not possible to know instrumental music.


Vajra: Explain to me the canon of vocal music, because he, who knows the canon of vocal music, is the best of men who knows everything.


Markandeya: Vocal music is to be understood as subject to recitation that may be done in two ways, prose (gadya) and verse (padya). Verse is in many meters.


Some of the early meters range from the gayatri with 3 sections of 8 syllables (3 × 8 = 24) to anushtubh (4 × 8 = 32), viraj (4 × 10 = 40), trishtubh (4 × 11 = 44), and jagati (4 × 12 = 48). These appear to be connected to the astronomical number 360, the number of civil days in the year. There are also many other more complex meters, with a less obvious astronomical basis.


To understand the principle behind the broader equivalences of Indian art and its cosmology, it is good to begin with the fire altars of the Vedic period that were themselves designed to represent astronomical (outer) as well as inner knowledge. An assumed equivalence between the outer and the inner cosmos is central to the conception of the temple, which is why numbers such as 108 and 360 are important in its design.


The number 108 in the distance from the earth to the sun and the moon


The number 108 represents the approximate distance from the earth to the sun and the moon in sun and moon diameters, respectively. (The diameter of the sun is also 108 times the diameter of the earth, but that fact is not likely to have been known to the Vedic rishis.) The number of dance poses (karanas) given in the Natya Shastra is also 108, as is the number of beads in a rosary (japamala). The ‘distance’ between the body and the inner sun is also taken to be 108, so that the number of joinings is 107. Not surprisingly, the number of marmas in Ayurveda is 107. The total number of syllables in the Rigveda is taken to be 432,000, a number related to 108.


The number 360 is taken in the Ayurvedic texts to be the number of bones in the developing fetus, a number that fuses later into the 206 bones of the adult. The centrality of this number in Vedic ritual is stressed in the Shatapatha Brahmana.


The primary Vedic number is three, representing the tripartite division of the physical world into the earth, the atmosphere, and the sky and that of the person into the physical body, the pranas, and the inner sky. 


The Vedic altars had an astronomical basis related to the reconciliation of the lunar and solar years, which mirrors the reconciliation of the female and male currents within the body and mind of the individual. The fire altars symbolized the universe and there were three types of altars representing the earth, the space and the sky. The altar for the earth was drawn as circular, whereas the sky (or heaven) altar was drawn as square.


The fire altars were surrounded by 360 enclosing stones, of these 21 were around the earth altar, 78 around the space altar and 261 around the sky altar. In other words, the earth, the space, and the sky are symbolically assigned the numbers 21, 78, and 261. Considering the earth/cosmos dichotomy, the two numbers are 21 and 339 since cosmos includes the space and the sky.


The main altar was built in five layers. The basic square shape was modified to several forms, such as falcon and turtle. These altars were built in five layers, of a thousand bricks of specified shapes. The construction of these altars required the solution to several geometric and algebraic problems. 


The falcon altar


Two different kinds of bricks were used: the special and the ordinary. The total number of the special bricks used was 396, explained as 360 days of the year and the additional 36 days of the intercalary month. Two kinds of day counts: the solar day, and tithi, whose mean value is the lunar year divided into 360 parts.


Three different years were considered: (i) nakshatra, or a year of 324 days (sometimes 324 tithis) obtained by considering 12 months of 27 days each, where this 27 is the ideal number of days in a lunar month; (ii) lunar, which is a fraction more than 354 days (360 tithis); and (iii) solar, which is in excess of 365 days (between 371 and 372 tithis).


A well-known altar ritual says that altars should be constructed in a sequence of 95, with progressively increasing areas. The increase in the area, by one unit yearly, in building progressively larger fire altars is 48 tithis which is about equal to the intercalation required to make the nakshatra year in tithis equal to the solar year in tithis. But there is a residual excess which in 95 years adds up to 89 tithis; it appears that after this period such a correction was made. The 95 year cycle corresponds to the tropical year being equal to 365.24675 days. The cycles needed to harmonize various motions led to the concept of increasing periods and world ages.


The number of syllables in the Rigveda confirms the textual references that the book was to represent a symbolic altar. According to various early texts, the number of syllables in the Rigveda is 432,000, which is the number of muhurtas in forty years. In reality the syllable count is somewhat less because certain syllables are supposed to be left unspoken. The organization of the Rigveda is also according to a plan, but that is a different story told in my book, The Astronomical Code of the Rigveda.


The verse count of the Rigveda can be viewed as the number of sky days in forty years or 261 × 40 = 10,440, and the verse count of all the Vedas is 261 × 78 = 20,358.


The Brahmanas and the Shulbasutras tell us about the altar of chhandas and meters, so we would expect that the total Rigvedic hymn count of 1017 and the group count of 216 have particular significance. Owing to the pervasive tripartite ideology of the Vedic books we choose to view the hymn number as 339 × 3. The tripartite ideology refers to the consideration of time in three divisions of past, present, and future and the consideration of space in the three divisions of the northern celestial hemisphere, the plane that is at right angle to the earth’s axis, and the southern celestial hemisphere. The number 339 is simply the number of disks of the sun or the moon to measure the path across the sky: π times 108 is approximately 339. The Rigvedic code then expresses a fundamental connection between the numbers 339 and 108. The numbers 108 and 360 appear as the axis and the perimeter dimensions of the temple.


Read Part I in the series: Introduction


Read Part III: Temples and Gods


Read part IV: Churning of the ocean


Read Part V: Krishna’s Dance


Read part VI: Indian Aesthetic in an Age of War