The earth is flat

[Mira Jamadi]

Hello Ashish,
I am at the place in Mystic Universe where you explain how the earth is flat.  While many aspects (maybe most) surpass my understanding for the moment, one aspect that I am able to ask clarity is on the experience of the flat earth, which is a semantic experience of the earth and the earth as a sphere, which is sensual experience.
My question would be related to the earth, but also of all experience I guess.  Do I understand correctly that we humans experience both the sensual and the semantic simultaneously?  Or not?  Can you describe how a human experiences semantically?  Through something like intuition?  Does one experience a contrast between experiencing semantically versus sensually?  Like seeing versus having an inner knowing and perhaps the information one receives from both experiences contrasts the other.  If so, is this something to reconcile within oneself, as one tries find how the two experiences can fit together or is it experiencing both dimensions as realities even though they don’t give us the same information?
 
Thank you,
Mira

[Ashish Dalela]

You can imagine how a picture is encoded on a computer. It is stored on the computer disk as 1s and 0s. But when you open that file, you see colors like red, blue, green. Semantic and physical are not different things. There is only semantic; physical is a concoction of modern science. If you take a book, and measure its height, weight, etc. and ignore the meaning, then it is physical. This physical reality is the reading of the book by an illiterate. But if you read a book, then it is semantic. Like that, everything is semantic, and physical is an illiterate reading of that semantic.

Now, once we understand that everything is semantic, there are two aspects to this semantic. These aspects are called knowledge and action. Suppose you look at something that has the shape and size of a car, but it doesn’t work like a car. So, it seems to be a car, but it is not a car. Likewise, you can see a real truck, that moves like a car, but due to shape and size difference, it is not a car. So, we apply two methods to define what a car is — it must look like a car, and it must work like a car. These two ways of defining are complementary and define the semantic ‘space’.

In modern science, we reduce the ‘working’ to ‘seeing’. So, if you see a car moving, you just say that point A and point B are two states of seeing the car. But what connects them? We don’t see that. And because we don’t see, we hypothesize causes — e.g. gravity is pulling the car down a slope, the energy released from burning fuel creates a force to push the car up a slope, etc. In modern science, the different states of seeing are called ‘matter’, and the connection between these states is called ‘force’. But this force exists in another object — the earth to pull due to gravity, or fuel to burn and produce energy. So, then, what is the difference between the ‘force’ that comes due to earth or fuel vs. the ‘matter’ that we perceive as the car? Since we are unable to clearly answer this, eventually, we say that all force is due to matter, and all matter is due to force. This idea is then framed (incorrectly) as matter-energy equivalence. For example, the mass of an object is matter, and the force it exerts is energy. And these are equivalent. Thus, you can convert mass into energy and energy into mass. This is the basis of nuclear bombs.

But in Vedic philosophy, this equivalence is not accepted. We say that knowledge and action are different aspects of the same thing. So these are not separate, and they are not identical. Why? Because we demand that only something that works like a car and looks like a car is a car. This ‘car’ is a concept, and working and looking like a car are two aspects of that concept. So, what we call ‘flat space’ are these two aspects. This is a scientific description of the object, but different from modern science. It is hard to simplify this any further, but repetition on it helps.

In simple language, there are many places in the universe in which there are living beings that look just like us, but they don’t behave like us. Since they don’t behave like us, they are not to be called humans. And there are many places in the universe where there are living entities that behave like us but don’t look like us. Again, these are not humans. Due to the many types of looks and behaviors, the ‘humans’ are classified into many categories. Some look similar but behave differently. Some behave the same but look different. So, this looking and behaving is the two-dimensional ‘space’ in which different points are different types of living entities.

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