Childish Western philosophers. Not a single mention of Indian metaphysics which has deeply studied this problem. Not to be taken seriously.
1. Who am I? What is I? Is the concept of "I" an Illusion or is it Real?
2. What is Consciousness and its nature?
3. What is Karma?
4. Is there a God?
5. If there is a God, then what is the relationship between God and I? Am I different from God or the same as God?
6. What is Creation? Is it an Illusion or is it Real? How big is it? What are the various planes of existence (also called Lokas)?
7. What is the relationship between God and Creation? Is it dependent, independent or one with God?
8. What is the relationship between Creation and I?
9. What is the ultimate purpose of existence? Is there a life beyond this life?
10. What is Time? Is it Relativistic or Absolute? What is the Age of Creation? Is Creation cyclical or is it linear? How does Karma tie into this?
11. What is considered Pramana (Proof) for arriving at an answer for these fundamental questions?
> an example of those groundbreaking Indian metaphysics studies
It is hard to point to one because Indian metaphysics is vast. But for me, the most groundbreaking Indian metaphysics study is in coming up with a value for the Age of the Creation by dividing Time into Yuga cycles.
To quote Carl Sagan "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.".
Even though he got the part about Creation undergoing continuous Creation and Destruction right, the figure he quoted was wrong. The Multiverse, as per Sanatan Dharma, has a lifespan of 311.04 trillion years with our Universe being a really, really tiny portion of it (also called Brahmanda. There are infinite Brahmandas in the Creation and the Creation itself is divided into 14 planes of existence / parallel universes called Lokas). The day and night of Brahma, as per Sanatan Dharma, does not constitute the length of the Cosmos. So 8.64 billion years is definitely the Time duration of a day and night of Brahma but it does not equate to Age of the Creation. The Age of the Creation = 100 Brahma Years = 311.04 trillion human years. And yes we are talking relativistic Time here.
Coming to relativistic Time, I really like how such concepts are so well explained through stories in Dharmic scriptures. One of those is about a King named Kakudmi who took his daughter Revati to visit Brahma Loka (another plane of existence / parallel Universe) which is the residence of Lord Brahma (the deity incharge of Creation in Sanatan Dharma). He felt there was no one worthy of her intellect and beauty on Earth and wanted to consult with Brahma to get her a suitable husband. He nevertheless took with him a shortlist of candidates which he reluctantly prepared to be presented to Brahma. One arrival in Brahma Loka, Brahma was engaged in listening to musical performances by the Gandharvas (artists in the Dharmic lore). Kakudmi bowed and waited patiently. Once the performance was over, he approached Brahma with his problem and list of suitable candidates. Brahma laughed loudly and explained to Kakudmi that Time runs differently in different planes of existence and that in the short time they had to wait in Brahma Loka to see him, 27 Chaturyugas had elapsed on Earth. 27 Chaturyugas. Each Yuga cycle = 4,320,000 human years. So 27 Chaturyugas = 116,640,000 human years.
“O King, all those whom you may have decided within the core of your heart to accept as your son-in-law have died in the course of time. Twenty-seven catur-yugas have already passed. Those upon whom you may have already decided are now gone, and so are their sons, grandsons and other descendants. You cannot even hear about their names. You must therefore bestow your daughter upon some other husband, for you are now alone, and your friends, your ministers, servants, wives, kinsmen, armies, and treasures, have long since been swept away by the hand of Time.”
Brahma then comforts King Kakudmi and prophesizes that by the time he reaches Earth, God would incarnate and with him would incarnate various Devatas (demigods) and one of them, by the name of "Balarama", would become her husband.
https://neurophysics.ucsd.edu/courses/physics_171/Buzsaki%20...
Read this and stop all the magical fairy tales.
Pretty much 50/50.
Christianity it's a mix between the Greek and Abrahamic views of the world.
Sorry. Disagree. As someone who studies Vedanta I know for a fact that it is not pseudoscience.
> Read this and stop all the magical fairy tales.
You have to remember that these scriptures were written in a different era. They used poetry and stories as a medium to explain difficult to understand concepts. That does not make it "magical fairy tales". Those who can grasp the inner meaning of the stories know what they were actually trying to say. For everyone else it seems like a magical story/mythology.
Take this hymn as an example:
ॐ पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदं पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते । पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते ॥ ॐ शान्तिः शान्तिः शान्तिः ॥
The translation is roughly:
1: Om, That is Purna; This is also Purna; From Purna is manifested Purna,
2: Taking Purna from Purna, Purna indeed remains,
3: Om, Peace, Peace, Peace.
It might seem complete gibberish at first glance. But it is definition of Infinity in the form of poetry. Purna means fullness. It is explaining the characteristic of infinity and how adding/removing anything from infinity doesn't change its intrinsic value. That it always remains infinite.
This is just one example. The problem is not in the authors of these scriptures. They were highly advanced beings for their Time. The problem is with us that we do not have the capacity to understand it the right way. Even now many Vedic scriptures are mistranslated with even more of them tragically lost due to burning of the Nalanda University by invaders.
I also checked the book you linked to see what the author has to say about Time. Funnily enough, the book itself quotes Dharmic concepts of cyclical Time to further its points albeit in a convoluted and rejigged way, where the author says: "An alternative to the periodicity view of the universe is to display periodicity as a series of sine waves. Now we can walk along the troughs and peaks of the line without ever returning to the starting point (figure 1.1, right). Time here is a continuum with the cycle as its metric. The cycles are identical in shape, and the start and end points of the cycles form an infinite path into the seemingly endless universe.". He doesn't realize that this is exactly what Dharmic concept of Time is anyways. So his assumption that "Time is cyclical" to mean everything "repeats" is not what Dharma says at all. It just stems from a common misunderstanding of Dharmic concepts that has plagued the discourse in the West as most of the translations are done by Western Indologists without conversing with Indian Vedanta scholars who are experts in the field.
This is why we should use Mathematics, it's an universal language. If you think about it, from Geometry itself you can extrapolate the 90% of the core Algebra laws.
Religion and philosphy are just either methods of power or the emergent culture of the society of their days. Kinda like Nietzche was the "son" of the industrial revolution on cities against the old Regime which was tied to rural societies.
When Nietzche said "God it's dead" for sure it meant as the old regime which emerged from ruralist towns and the Neolithic revolution which was something born of agriculture.
Even the Bible itself it's a metaphor as a war between hunters/gatherers and farmers (Cain vs Abel) and the Abrahamic religion are just Sun/wheat workshippers. The Holy Week meets exactly harvesting times after a hard winter. Abrahamic religions are just that, the glorification of the Neolithic symbols.
The paradise was in the hunter/gatherer society, were no hard work was needed to keep the lands farmed and the cattle fed, you just hunted animals and collected fruits; and giving a painless childbirth could be possible maybe with either drugs or hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Good. Now that you talk about Mathematics being the universal language, the core of Mathematics itself originated from Dharmic scriptures. The symbols themselves are Brahmi numerals. These numerals were studied by Arabs who took it to the West which ultimately became the numeral system we know today. This is how many of the measurements were made in Ancient times by Hindu astronomers. For instance, how do you think Indian sages measured the distance between Earth and the Moon or the circumference of the Earth if not for using Brahmi numerals? Aryabhatta calculated that the Earth's circumference is 39,968km. Off by 0.27% of the actual value of 40,074km.
No one is contesting not to use Mathematics that we know of today to do our measurements. But remember that the Ancients (before the rise of the Abrahamic religions and destruction of various important libraries - Alexandria, Takshashila, Nalanda etc) used advanced mathematical concepts to construct super structures: Great Pyramid of Giza, Mayan Temples, Indian Temples like the Kailasa (which baffles scientists to even this day) etc. There is no way that many of these marvels were possible without having decent grasp on scientific and mathematical concepts. Most of that Knowledge is lost. That is the only conclusion I get after having studied them. The Knowledge we know today are mostly rediscoveries. The only difference being that we are more terse/accurate in our calculations. Conceptually there hasn't been any major advancements from what Ancients knew. Theoretically at the very least.
No wonder people sees Indian nationalism as a joke. Kinda like the Nazis when they had "time-travelling" UFO tech mixing pseudoscience with esoteric stuff...
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2Jl4HNDixc
> How did they lost it? Against what?
You do realize the Hindu civilization (more specifically Sanatana Dharma) is the only Ancient Civilization that is currently existing? Most of the other Civilizations (like Egyptian, Mayan, Greek etc) that co-existed with us were wiped out by either natural disasters or with the rise of Abrahamic Religions. Libraries were burnt down. Most of the structures destroyed. Why do you think the Sphinx in Egypt has its nose cut off? Who destroyed these beautiful super structures? If you truly are inquisitive you will find your answers. They are the same ones who destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. They are the same ones who burnt the Libraries of Alexandria to the ground. The same ones who destroyed the Libraries of Takshashila and Nalanda. It is quite rich to question "where is the evidence" after destroying evidence. We have somehow managed to collect and preserve whatever remaining piece of evidence we have and tried to reconstruct lost history through it. We ofcourse do not have complete knowledge of what was lost.
> Why didn't the contemporary people to the Indians depict them as semigods?
All Ancient Religions had concepts of God and a family of Demigods. Take Greek or Egyptian or Mayan or Hindu. Even Zoroastrians had scriptures that were similar to Vedic scriptures. Most of these are gone now except the Hindu Civilization. We are the last ones who managed to preserve some of the Knowledge despite repeated invasions. Even we have lost major portion of our Knowledge as our scriptures reference texts which no longer exist today. It is extremely sad/unfortunate.
> No wonder people sees Indian nationalism as a joke.
Which people are these? I haven't met anyone except very few people who has an issue with genuine curiosity/understanding of what the Ancients did/believed in and implemented. I feel you need to come out of being so close-minded. It is antithesis to someone who claims to believe in science. Science is not dogmatic. If it was dogmatic we would have never moved on from Newton's theory of absolute time to Einstein's explanation of relativistic time. And you can get ideas from anywhere. There is no reason to dismiss something as "pseudoscience" just because you are unable to understand it the right way. This is what the Church did in the medieval ages to scientists like Galilio and Copernicus. Don't emulate such practices. Be broadminded/inquisitive enough to question and reason rather than outright dismiss an entire field of research as "pseudoscience".
> Kinda like the Nazis when they had "time-travelling" UFO tech mixing pseudoscience with esoteric stuff...
Jokes on you because most scientists of that era actually studied Dharmic scriptures. Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr and Carl Sagan are some of the names that come off the top of my head.
All of them read some portions of the Dharmic scriptures, specifically Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita, that shaped their understanding of metaphysical nature of Creation as well as existence.
It is very unfortunate that people today do not have the same curiosity as what these excellent scientists of the previous Era had in expanding their conscious thoughts beyond what is taught in academia. Even what is currently taught in academia is just a synthesis and solidification of what the Ancients taught us through generations. You study Dharmic scriptures and you'll find a lot of foundational concepts of science described in great detail. Ofcourse you would first need to be open minded to do that.
You wouldn't even pass a basic high school test here.
Sorry.
All of your statements won't validate the scriptures. They are just myths. Grow up.
Newton did 'alchemy'. Well, he tried. Obviously, it didn't work. So what? Tell that to Lavoisier. Bam. 5000 years of bullshit, debunked from a French Chemist with basic Chemistry.
> Your comment it's a list of fallacies
List them.
> All of your statements won't validate the scriptures. They are just myths. Grow up.
I don't need to validate scriptures to some random nut on the internet. Whether you like it or not these scriptures are and will be studied for centuries and inspire many great scientists who are yet to come. Even after you will cease to exist on this planet. So don't regard yourself higher than what you are truly worth. Less than a dust in this cosmic existence.
> Newton did 'alchemy'. Well, he tried. Obviously, it didn't work. So what? Tell that to Lavoisier. Bam. 5000 years of bullshit, debunked from a French Chemist with basic Chemistry.
Well he became Newton because he did venture into and studied various paths (including occult practices). That is what a true scientist is and what a true scientist does. He was open minded, explored everything and did not take anything for granted. Even if it means setting up for failure. You would never get it because you are as close minded as it gets. It is not your cup of tea. You are probably only good at what is taught to you in academia and regurgitating that. That is where you will reside rest of your life. You are incapable of expanding your knowledge, producing new proofs/theorems or even coming up with novel concepts. So no matter how much you harp about science vs pseudoscience your contributions are next to nothing compared to a Newton, Galileo or Copernicus or any of the greats of that Era. Yes they got many things wrong. But the things they got right changed the World for the better. Now you will sit here in judgement of these great people who walked the Earth? Who tf are you?
And yes Lavoisier wouldn't have gotten to where he did if not for seeing all the failures of alchemy. There is nothing like "basic Chemistry" when the foundations of it was laid through various failures of the people from previous generations. As someone truly said, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And all giants before us have had their fair share of success and failures. And they never got to where they did without first venturing into as many things as they could and giving it an honest shot and not dismissing everything as pseudo-science.
> You wouldn't even pass a basic high school test here.
Still waiting on the scientific explanation for the Kailasa Temple.
Not magic, for sure.
You still have time to explain how anyone could carve a Temple out 400,000 tonnes of rock from a mountain face. You will just not be able to explain it with Knowledge of Science that we have today. Even the most advanced machinery that we have today will not be sufficient to build the Kailasa Temple in mere 18 years. Heck we take multiple months to just drill a tunnel through a mountain. Here we are talking about not just carving out an entire mountain but also transporting 400,000 tonnes of rock.
The invaders tried to demolish the Temple. Spent 3 years chipping away at the carvings and could only do minimal damage. That's how spectacular this Temple is.
Good luck coming up with a modern scientific answer for this one. No technology exists today which can recreate this.
So did the Egyptians, but with water and slopes. With a few mms of water on it, big rocks slide up like magic.
Seriously, stop defending lost causes because of my $LOST_COUNTRY. I'm Basque, so I've read lots of similar bullshit from Basque and/or Spanish nationalists, or Rome/Greece supporters stating that only the Graeco-Roman empire was able to build big buildings or sculpture with ease.
Phoenicians did amazing wonders. So did the Cretan culture, which was almost considered a god-like empire from the Greeks and the surrounding Mediterranean tribes.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_culture
Once you get Geometry, Math and basic Physics right and written down, architecture almost develops itself in any empire.
Geometry for sure was born as a method to split terrains to avoid clashes. So did Math, as a method to store goods efficiently. And for trade between tribes, for sure. So any developed empire could get construction things right with very few efforts.
We have plenty of comparable architectures across civilizations but nothing compares to the Kailasa Temple in terms of how difficult it was to have constructed something like this. Carving a mountain is almost impossible considering even today's technological advancements. Just boring a tunnel through a mountain takes months. This is a megalith structure carved from top to bottom. According to local legend it took a week to finish. But scientists insist it took 18 years based on carbon dating. Even if we consider 18 years as the value it is almost impossible to have done it.
To give you some perspective of how mammoth the task was:
18 years to build the temple. Required to remove 400,000 tonnes of rock (this is not even considering time taken for creating layouts and carving sculptures). 22,222 tonnes of rock per year had to be excavated out. 60 tonnes of rock per day. Even if the workers worked 24 hours non-stop, without any breaks for refreshment or sleep, it would be 2.53 tonnes of rock per hour. That is 2530 kgs of rock. Per hour! With just chisels and hammer we are told.
To give you more perspective on how difficult it was to just cut the rock, the Temple was attacked by invading Mughal King Aurangzeb in 1682. He employed more than a 1000 workers to destroy it. They tried for 3 years to break it and could only chip off few sculptures here and there before giving up.
> Physics, ropes and levers.
All this comes later. I am only talking about just cutting the mountain rock. Not even excavation and transport.
We don't even know where the excavated rock went. And mind you the Kailasa Temple is just 1 complex situated in the middle of 34 rock cut caves/temples. The only reason Kailasa Temple gets more prominence over the remaining 33 rock cut temples and caves is because an entire mountain was carved out from top to bottom instead of from front to back.
Tell that to S Ramanujan[1] who credited his findings to Goddess of Namagiri. Let us see you justify it as "pseudo-science".
"An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God."
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan#Personalit...
Kinda like how Maximilian and many other after thought they could turn lead into gold after misreading gnostic texts.
Or a chamanic wizard against a surgeon in a hospital. Why not?
At least Peano axioms work.
Same way, to study ancient scriptures and their actual meaning, you shouldn't be going to random quacks or reading translations written by such quacks. There are experts in this field for a reason. Study under them.
To give you a start on this journey, might I suggest reading Philosophy of Madhvacharya? [1]
[1]: https://michaelsudduth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Philos...