Profound thought and Vedic Science

Let us look at two songs – both very popular – from Indian movies:

(1) Ek, do teen…. char paan, che, saat, aath, nau, das gyarah… from Ram Lakhan (lyricist: Sameer)
(2) Humne dekhi hai in aankhon ki mehakti khushboo.. from Khamoshi (lyricist: Gulzar)

Popularity besides, which song do you think is more profound? But more important than that is to know…. why? Why does one song – or creation – sound more profound than the other? Have you ever thought of it?

Listen to these two songs and see which song leaves you with a string of thoughts and takes you down a lane of further and amazing thoughts and insights. In fact, if you dwell on the second song for just 10 minutes, you probably are more likely to take the road that the poet, Gulzar, himself may have taken to REACH those lines. While the first song, is just that.. the first thought that came in a poet’s mind.. the first unsophisticated words without much thought.

So, what is said is important, but what the poet REJECTED enroute to those words is CRITICAL. The more “lower level” thoughts that one traverses, the more sophisticated and profound the thinking is likely to be. Also, by the same principle, it also stands to reason that once you read or think of things that are profound, the chances are that the writer would have made enough progress on the thinking (road) leading up to that.

It is the same with all creation – art or science. Why do I say that? It is strange but there are many things in the Eastern Philosophy and specially the Vedic scriptures that shows a level of thinking of describes processes and things that at the time, they are supposed to have existed – given the claims of the historians and the “Age” prevalent at that time – seem to sound impossible. But those thoughts and writings are unmistakeable.

This is a passage from Doomsday 1999 By Charles Berlitz (p. 123-124), where the writer expresses the same sentiment.[1]

“If atomic warfare were actually used in the distant past and not just imagined, there must still exist some indications of a civilization advanced enough to develop or even to know about atomic power. One does find in some of the ancient writings of India some descriptions of advanced scientific thinking which seemed anachronistic to the age from which they come.

The Jyotish (400 B. C) echoes the modern concept of the earth’s place in the universe, the law of gravity, the kinetic nature of energy, and the theory of cosmic rays and also deals, in specialized but unmistakable vocabulary, with the theory of atomic rays. And what was thousands of years before the medieval theologians of Europe argued about the number of angels that could fit on the head of a pin. Indian philosophers of the Vaisesika school were discussing atomic theory, speculating about heat being the cause of molecular change, and calculating the period of time taken by an atom to traverse its own space.

Readers of the Buddhist pali sutra and commentaries, who studied them before modern times, were frequently mystified by reference to the “tying together” of minute component parts of matter; although nowadays it is easy for a model reader to recognize an understandable description of molecular composition.”

There was enough discussion of sub atomic particles by Buddha himself. He just termed them as Kalapas.[4]

The Buddha taught His disciples that everything that exists at the material level is composed of “Kalapas.” Kalapas are material units very much smaller than atoms, which die out immediately after they come into being. Each kalapa is a mass formed of the eight basic constituents of matter, the solid, liquid, calorific and oscillatory, together with color, smell, taste, and nutriment. The first four are called primary qualities, and are predominant in a kalapa. The other four are subsidiaries, dependent upon and springing from the former. A kalapa is the minutest particle in the physical plane — still beyond the range of science today. It is only when the eight basic material constituents unite together that the kalapa is formed. In other words, the momentary collocation of these eight basic elements of behavior makes a man just for that moment, which in Buddhism is known as a kalapa. The life-span of a kalapa is termed a moment, and a trillion such moments are said to elapse during the wink of a man’s eye. These kalapas are all in a state of perpetual change or flux.

This discussion is actually the basis for classification subatomic particles as they are known today – called the Eighfold Way.[3]

classification of subatomic particles known as hadrons into groups on the basis of their symmetrical properties, the number of members of each group being 1, 8 (most frequently), 10, or 27. The system was proposed in 1961 by the American physicist Murray Gell-Mann and the Israeli physicist Yuval Ne?eman. It is based on the mathematical symmetry group SU(3); however, the name of the system was suggested by analogy with the Eightfold Path of Buddhism because of the centrality of the number eight. One of the early triumphs of the Eightfold Way was the prediction of the existence of a heavy subatomic particle required to complete one of the groups. The particle, called omega-minus, was discovered in 1964. That same year, Gell-Mann set forth the concept of quarks as the physical basis for the classification system, thereby establishing the foundation for the modern quark model of hadrons.

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There are many such references about things for which the building blocks or the milestones of road to those assertions appeared very late in human history. It is one thing to say that someone thought up the existence of “Atoms” in an age when, ostensibly, even forces like gravity (and other centripetal and centrifugal ones) or particles like molecules were not heard of. But it is quite another thing for people in THAT age to COME to that level of understanding of the Universe to make those assertions. It is not just possible to keep making claims that seem uncannily correct.

In the 6th century BC, Kanada, founder of the Vaisheshika school, developed a theory of atomism and proposed that light and heat were varieties of the same substance. In the 5th century AD, the Buddhist atomist philosopher Digna-ga proposed atoms to be point-sized, durationless, and made of energy. They denied the existence of substantial matter and proposed that movement consisted of momentary flashes of a stream of energy.

Reference Links:

1. Bibliotecapleyades
2. Teachings of J. Krishnamurti : Dhamma as taught by Buddha.
3. Eightfold Way
4. The Eightfold Way and The Kalapas
5. List_of_Indian_inventions