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Hare Krishna Prabhu. Is Karana Samudra or material sky present within Paravyoma or Spiritual sky separated by Viraja river or is it out of Paravyoma and eternally dependent on it? If it is within Paravyoma and come out only at the time of Srishti, how can we understand this idea of within? In normal logic ‘within’ means a circle within another circle. But how a circle can be drawn inside another circle without affecting the nature of bigger circle? In simple words, how can we understand the relationship between Knower, Knowledge and Known. Known here is objective world of matter and Knower is God. From the view point of God where is this material world of objects and activities?
Just try to understand that if Krishna is standing in front of you, then you are a part of Krishna although it seems to you that you are outside Krishna and hence not a part of Krishna. Try to find a model in which you can reconcile this outside-inside contradiction. The day you can understand this simple idea, cosmology will become very easy.
All ideas of an “objective world” are false. There is no object. There are only subjects. I have explained this at least a few dozen times by now. The correct model is mind and thought. Thought is within the mind and manifests from the mind. When the thought is manifest, it seems separate from the mind, but it is not. There will be no thought without the mind. When the thought disappears it hasn’t ceased to exist. It goes back into the mind.
The material world is a dream. It is produced by the Lord as His dream. It looks as real as if there was an objective world. But those who think in terms of an objective world can never understand how the world was created and how it is annihilated. This is why we say repeatedly that the world is like a thought produced from the mind.
Even your body is a thought produced from the mind. It is not objective reality. If the mind did not exist, then the body will not exist. The mind can exist without a body. But the body cannot exist without the mind. Therefore, we study Sāñkhya before we study cosmology. That means, first study how your body is created from your mind. If you can understand that, then you can understand how the material world is a gigantic body produced from God’s mind. This world is also like a dream or thought. There are no objects, no substances, no things. Everything is simply a thought, just like in a dream.
Each thought is a summarized world. So it is called a “sphere”. That thought can be expanded into details, just like color is a sphere and various shades are expansions of color. Red, green, and blue cannot exist without color. However, color can exist without red, blue, and green. This is the hierarchy of Sāñkhya philosophy in which the more abstract idea precedes the more contingent idea.
The Īśopaniṣad states: That is complete and this is complete. From the complete comes the complete. After removing the complete from the complete, the balance is complete.
The initial complete is color. Then the collection of all shades is the next complete. Even after color has expanded into its shades, color is not reduced. It remains complete. This is the nature of concepts or meanings. A complete produces a complete but is not reduced by such production. It violates all principles of arithmetic because 1 +1 = 1 and 1 – 1 = 1. Arithmetic is utterly false. But it is sometimes useful when we don’t think about color, and just count the number of shades.
Anyone who tries to study mathematics and Sāñkhya side by side will never understand Sāñkhya because it is antithetical to mathematics. You are doing that side-by-side study. So you cannot understand Sāñkhya and anything else given in Vedic texts. Your first step is to abandon mathematics, which means words like “circle” and “objective reality”.
There is no circle. There is a personality called Rudra. From His mind, an imaginary world comes out and it looks like a sphere. Within that sphere are infinite living entities, one of which is a new Rudra, from whom expands another world that looks like a sphere. The new sphere is smaller than the older sphere. So it looks like a circle inside a circle. But it is not a circle. It is a world of thoughts.
These worlds of thoughts are nested because everything we can speak about cannot be touched. All that we can touch cannot be seen, and so on. This happens for imaginary worlds. For example, I can talk about a “square circle”, but I cannot touch it, I cannot see it. It is just word jugglery. Then there is dark matter and dark energy. It exerts pressure on my skin but I cannot see it, which is why it is called dark.
The total number of nonsensical terms like “square circle” is 1000x bigger than the sensible terms like “square” and “circle”. The total amount of dark matter is 1000x bigger than the visible matter. All the things that you can see, but are odorless and tasteless is 1000x bigger than the things that tasteful. The total number of things that are tasteful but odorless is 1000x bigger than the things that have both taste and odor. In this way, we draw conceptual circles. Each circle is a set expanded from a concept. The members of that set are also concepts. The set is denoted as a circle. But it is produced from a concept and it contains concepts.
Those who understand Sāñkhya can use mathematics as a tool selectively. But those who begin with mathematics will never understand Sāñkhya. One has to abandon mathematics completely to understand Sāñkhya. I have explained this a few times to you. Mathematical thinking is the enemy of spiritual life and all truth.
When you stand in front of Krishna, understand that He is the mind and you are His thought. The mind has a self-thought and other-thought. Both self- and other-thought are in the mind, hence, we are part of Krishna. But it looks like we are separate. This separateness has been objectified by modern science. It is sometimes useful to think in terms of separateness. But it is ultimately false. When our mind is conditioned by this separateness, then we start thinking of “objective reality” rather than a dream. We think that the world is separate from the dreamer when it is created by the dreamer for his pleasure.
Therefore, cosmology is a very late subject. The first subject is that I am part of God. The next subject is that the body is produced from the mind. The third subject is that the body is changing because the thought is associating and dissociating with other thoughts in someone’s dream. Sometimes one thought says to another: You are my enemy. Then after some time, the thought says to another thought: You are my friend. It is friendship or enmity between thoughts. This is explained though qualities. Some qualities are compatible, other qualities are inimical. When we can understand these basic things, then cosmology makes sense.
This sequence is given everywhere. But we are jumping to what we want to understand assuming that we can understand it without the prior things. It is the attempt to pass the Class X exam without passing the Class I exam. And it is being reinforced by numerous people who have neither passed the Class I nor Class X exam. They just claim to have passed all exams. Therefore, don’t be deluded by what the majority is doing. They have failed all exams. Go by the sequence given in each book. Read it carefully from the beginning. Don’t move forward unless you understand everything.
I have been thinking about a model to visualize the concepts. Thank you for the reply. Yes, Prabhupad has once quoted Brahma Samhitha where it is said that entire creation is a dream of Maha Vishnu and is unreal for Him because He is not experiencing the pains and pleasures that we experience though He knows that we are going through such experiences and Jiva’s experiences are ontologically real and epistemically false due to karma. But a confusion came about the position of material space within spiritual space. A very crude model I got after asking the doubt was that of Light. Light carries all varieties of information in its womb and yet it is not affected by it. The mysterious power of Light can materialize a reality for the beings within it and yet remain unaffected by it. I was earlier thinking about a screen external to God where His light is reflected and found a problem in marrying the outer and inner world. Now I have decided to read all your books from beginning to end. I was not completely free when I started reading your books. Out of curiosity I went for a fast reading and created problems. Now I am free for three months and started from basic books like Is apple really red and Godel’s mistake.
Yes, every model based on object-thinking is false. This is why to explain all these things I had to move over to concept-thinking. In many Vedanta interpretations, object-thinking is used. For example, when we say that soul is a part of God, then we get the problem that if parthood was based on objects, then how can the soul suffer without God suffering? If the soul is like God’s hand, then burning the hand must make God feel pain. So this analogy fails easily. Similarly, if we say that God and soul are separate objects, then, why can’t they remain separate individualistic persons forever?
All Vedanta analogies become problematic and we have to revert to an inconceivable conclusion. But if we take the concept analogies, then analogies are good. Yellow is a part of color, but if we delete yellow, then color is not reduced. If our eyes are blinded, the sense of seeing is not blinded. The sense of seeing can see as if eyes were present.
This is why I had to change the analogies and descriptions to concepts. Then it is not inconceivable. Then I had to go back to the history of object-thinking and disprove everything from the beginning, including logic. For example, God is everything, but everything is not God. God is both cruel and kind. God is both inside and outside. God is both the biggest and the smallest. Sentence inversions are not always true. Opposites can be simultaneously true. One claim does not preclude the opposite claim.
What we mean by “God” is the limit of our thinking. God is the domain of ideas. Within that domain are ideas like cruel, kind, biggest, smallest, inside, outside, and so on. Our mind is roaming from one idea to another but it cannot go beyond the domain. Since that domain is God, hence, everyone is inside God. Since this limit applies to everyone, hence, God is the origin of all thinking. Since nobody can create anything unless they can think it, therefore, God is the origin of the world. In this way, we create a model of the universe based on our limits of thinking. That is a scientific model of reality.
It is a scientific model because it requires no blind faith. Even if your body is in one place, your mind can go anwhere in a moment. So you don’t need experiments. You just need a developed mind to go anywhere in a moment. And it can be rational, which means how all the concepts are produced from elementary concepts. In this way, we construct an alternative foundation of science without blind faith or experiments.
I have a remark regarding dark matter and energy – to me, those are placeholders invented by material scientists to accommodate the “observed” expansion of the material universe. I would hazard the following statement in that regard – they are necessary to keep relativistic theory going and have no other merit. As a person who has read The Mystic Universe, an introduction to Vedic cosmology, and having understood the book to the limits of my abilities, I would further say that one’s starting point in the progression of one’s knowledge is of the highest importance – I now see things as concepts based upon my understanding of the primary assertion, that made in the invocation of the Isa Upanishad where the idea of completeness is the overriding one, and then, that the 1st verse of the Isa Upanishad sums up ownership of the self same whole, where the proprietorship of all the material universes and the spiritual sky rests solely with the Lord, Krsna.
I’m making small steps in progress, and am on a particular path upon the “tree of knowledge”. Thank you for your help.
Dark matter is called “Vayu” in Vedic texts. Vayu, which is translated as “Air”, is what can push you like a force but it cannot be seen. Modern science has excluded all aspects of mind. But that is not the only thing it has excluded. It also cannot explain taste and smell along with air and ether. It is focused on the visible portion of matter.
There is no molecular theory of taste and smell. There is no explanation of effects of location because all location is empty and place has no effect. A good deed done in a holy place is no better than done anywhere else. The air portion of matter is what is not visible and yet it pushes just like we cannot see wind and yet it pushes.
Modern science is confined to what we call “Fire” or “Agni” or the visible portion of matter. It is one out of 24 elements in Sankhya. Even that is not understood because Agni doesn’t spread uniformly like light used to in classical mechanics. Agni can also be hidden and manifest, which means energy disappears and appears. When Agni appears, it comes in a triad called adidavika-adibhautika-adiatmika. For example, sensation of light in the eyes, a source of external light, and a demigod’s action. All three manifest simultaneously. This is called the quantum collapse. A consciousness is involved, but it is not our consciousness. It is the demigod’s conscious action.
Since they will never accept a demigod causing things, it is a dead-end. In pagan religions, people could have accepted that the demigod of Fire causes our sensation, but Christianity ruined that. The demigod of Fire could ensure that Prahlada was not burnt while Holika was burnt. But such discretionary action is not possible now. The quantum wavefunction collapses for one detector and not for another. But nobody can say why. That is just like saying that Holika is burnt but Prahlada is not burnt although we cannot explain why. Thus, modern science is at a dead-end.
You are right that dark matter and dark energy are additions to keep the theory of gravity intact. But since these are words without meaning, hence, many people are working on revising gravitational theory. We are back to pre-Newtonian times.
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