The Divinity Within

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I started on this Post quite early but was not able to finish it because of something I needed to do. So I'm now rushing to finish it before the end of the day.

This next segment uses vedic revelations as the basis to examine the human body and mind as layers of reality. Seen as layers, the functions of the different parts becomes clear and improves our ability to manage them effectively.

While our bodies and brains are made of stuff of this world, there is an inner core which comes from another realm and which survives the death of the body to move along into an afterlife. Understanding the nature of out inner self and thereby, understanding the purpose of this life gives us guidance about how to conduct ourselves.

This is preparation for defining a moral code or guideline for ourselves. The Page I'm referring you to discusses the subject quite comprehensively so I won't go into more detail here. Just click on the link.

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pancamayakosha - aananda>vignyana>prana>mano>anna

Four Paths of Yoga

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Unlike the other major religions which have one scripture each to build upon, what is popularly known as Hinduism has a plethora of scriptural sources. This is because of the antiquity of the revelations from which from which a huge host of religious practices have emerged. The oldest scripture, the rig veda, is believed to be perhaps 13,000 years old. The others, based on analysis of the shift in the linguistics therein, are believed to have been revealed/recorded some 2 to 3 millennia apart. Since then, there have been many more books, also taken to be scriptural, but the 4 vedas remain the mainstay.

Much wisdom was handed down from those scriptures but, as is always the case with humans, while rituals were adopted and even enforced, the wisdom was forgotten. By the time Jainism & Buddhism became popular in India, the Brahmins, who had been charged with preserving the ancient wisdom, had become corrupt and materialistic. With the people looking for better answers, the new religions swept across the nation.

Adi Shankara, who was already searching for his true self at the tender age of 8, went beyond the wisdom of the vedas. Seeing the need to unify the followers of the vedic traditions in the face of fierce competition, he codified the vast array of pathways to divinity that had evolved over the millennia into four primary paths of union with the Source. My next segment is about those four paths.

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Divine origins

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Until now, I have made it a point to only create a new Blog entry once a day. But today, I am catching up. I want the Pages that I created previously to have Posts referencing them so that they are not missed by a visitor progressing through Blog entries. So I will do more than one per day. How many I can do today is left to be seen.

The origins of the vedic traditions are shrouded in mystery because, for a long time, the vedas were not written down but were carried orally. As a consequence, history based on the oldest discovered artifacts does not do justice to the antiquity to the traditions. A more indicative method of dating would be to use the incredibly accurate constellation charts of the ancient texts and correlate them to what is currently known about the movement of stars in the night sky. It is a trivial matter to project star movements backwards in time and gauge when the positions would have matched the vedic descriptions. The results are startling. But until the scientific community is ready to accept them, let them remain mysterious.

My recapture of what probably happened back then is based on what was carried forward orally and only captured in writing some six millennia ago. Anyone interested in studying these origin stories can easily perform an AI assisted search. For the less dedicated, my summary should be sufficient.

I explain how the seven rishis credited with spreading the dharma are believed to have been initiated into their knowledge.

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Dharma - the purpose of life

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When I started this Blog, I was clueless about what I wanted to do and had no clue how this Blog platform worked. I had to learn and design as I progressed. So I started off with creating a number of Pages where I captured stuff that I had already written previously. One of those was a paper on dharma which I had completed about this time last year. That paper is available in PDF format, if anyone is interested.

I decided quite early that I didn't want my Blog to be burdened with long articles. So I split up my paper into 8 parts, each part on a separate Page. I provided links to each of the Pages in a top level Menu Page which was visible at the top of my Blog. I also provided links at the bottom of each Page to the subsequent Page. But I had never created Posts referencing those Pages. So anyone going through my Posts would miss those Pages. That's a defect I intend to correct.

The first Page introduces dharma, a Sanskrit word with a multifaceted meaning. I give a short history on the evolution of the religious landscape in India and the emergence of Adi Shankara's condensation of the vedic spiritual traditions in a comprehensive summary, and his effective rebuttal of the new traditions. That is the first stage of my paper.

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The Tao of Music

Today, I am introducing a new segment in my Blog - a dedication to music and song.

For a start, I will look at songs that helped me to attain clarity about one or another aspect of life. I have identified three to get started with and have provided links if you wish to listen to them. The videos I selected carry lyrics so that you can explore the songs on your own. I plan to discuss the lyrics at a later date.

I have also share links to three religious/spiritual songs. They represent three different moods. I plan to discuss those lyrics as well.

Finally, I have added some musical conversations that struck me as being symbolic of their genres.

From a philosophical viewpoint, music lies at the core of everything. That is my justification for including a segment on music. The illustration is simply a whimsical collaboration with my AI.

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