Śiva's Brainchild

Contents

Presentation Notes

Introduction

The Horns of a Rabbit

The Hindu Picture

The Causal Ocean

Expansion of Being

Gunas, Purusa, and Prakrti

Śiva

Expansion and Involution

The Transpersonal

The Divine Couple

Viśnu and Brahma

The First Great Dispute

Sex and Divine Love

Svarūpa and the Infinite

The Transcendental and the Mirror

Brahma and the Universe

Soma

The Seven Oceans

The Origins of the Saptadvīpa

Mind and World

The Sun

The Bhu Mandala

The Arising of Prakrti

Kaleidoscope

The Creation of the Senses

The Churning of the Ocean

Beyond the Poison

The Core

Yogamaya and Mahamaya

§

Bibliography

Presentation Notes

Some of the source translations consulted for this book contain transliterated words followed by plain brackets containing an explanation of some kind. These annotations are generally included in quoted material, in the same plain parentheses. The use of square brackets in a quotation or paraphrase denotes inserted explanatory content that is not directly from or derived from the original translation.

Italics are used both to make certain words more salient, deliberately linking their occurrences together, and for emphasis in general. Italics are also generally used where words are transliterations, especially if they include ś, ī, ū or ā pronunciations for which there may be no true English equivalent.

However, sometimes this principle is not followed in order not to over-italicise a length of text. Pronunciation indications are limited to the ś, ī, ū and ā characters, which Westerners often render approximately as sh, ee, oo and ah respectively. The use of the ā, ī, ū and ī characters is usually applied where these appear in the transliteration, or where transliterated words in the translation are being specifically referenced.

' Śiva ' is used rather than ' Shiva ', and ' Viśnu ' rather than ' Vishnu ', and both are italicised except in reproducing a book title as it stands, such as referencing a Purana translation.

' Brahma ' is generally used rather than ' Brahmā ', except in some cases where the name has been reproduced as it appears in the translation consulted and discussed. 'Krsna' is used rather than 'Krishna', and together with 'Radha' is most often written without italicisation.

' Brahman ' is always italicised whilst ' Brahma ' is always not, in order to make the distinction between these two similar words, always clear.

'Rig Veda' is used rather than ' Rg Veda '. However, the condensed form rt, rather than rit, (as in, for example amrta), is adhered to. In these cases the r is pronounced approximately ri.

Introduction

Some things are deep, and some things are shallow. And there is much in between. When a mind encounters something deep, from deeper than it has ever been before, then it can often seem difficult. If we are speaking of human experience, then the communication of such things is often in the form of parable, allegory, fable or fiction. Which is a perfectly valid medium of communication.

It's not necessarily so, that what's deeper than our ordinary, direct experience of everyday human affairs, is difficult in itself. It's just that talking about it requires a change of mindset, or even, in the case of what is deepest, the transcendence of ubiquitous, ordinary thought.

One idea that is deep when taken seriously, is that this, that we are living as our lives, is a living myth, a dream, a metaphor, played out in an illusion called time. It may well be that the easiest way to communicate such a thing, is through fable, or fiction. But then, what we are talking about is something in which the whole idea of the difference between fact and fiction, or fiction and actuality, begins to dissolve.

This recognition of time as the supporting structure of an illusion, and the awakening from the belief in the duality of fact and fiction, or fiction and actuality, is not an alien idea, in the sense that I am certainly not the first to speak of it. Many artists and writers and philosophers have sensed it or known it.

It is already inherent in Hinduism, which we are going to be talking about, but not in a way that puts it inside a box, and makes it exclusive. Hindus naturally believe that Hinduism contains the truth. The truth about our constitution and situation. I suggest that Truth isn't anything that can be contained in anything. Rather, if there is indeed Truth in Hinduism, which I contend there is, then we should understand that Hinduism doesn't so much contain it, as express it, in its own way, through its own cultural fabric.

So Hinduism isn't the only expression about time and being, in which what happens in time is portrayed as an illusion - a play of being. That is, to be more accurate, in Hinduism, it is portrayed as something called Maya, which gives rise to what the Hindu corpus calls delusion in those who are caught up in the play of it. The play of it is something that Hinduism calls a lila.

Many artists, writers, philosophers, and spiritual teachers, in their work, have been concerned with time and being, and the relation between time and being, in their own way. It's not something just confined to Hinduism. It's not even confined to the East, or for example to Buddhism, which arose out of Hinduism. The recognition of the connection between time and being is already here, even in our popular Western literature. So let's talk to begin with, in these terms.

For example, Joan Lindsay's unusual consciousness of time was expressed in her novel Time Without Clocks, and her best-selling story Picnic at Hanging Rock. In the Mythic Symbolism of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan quite explicitly (for those who can see it) draws on a deeper understanding of time as the fabric of our experience, and as something that is all around us, rather than in a straight line from past to future, in the way that the Western mind usually likes to see it.

In her video interviews she related how her own experience of things went beyond the idea of what comes before and what comes after. A little research will reveal that apart from her remembering St Valentine's Day (on which she was married), dates, like clock time, had very little meaning for her, to the extent that at one point in her life she had to ask a friend to find out when she had been born. And when she was told, she remarked that she was apparently not present at her own birth. (See Terence O'Neill, Joan Lindsay: a time for everything, La Trobe Journal, 83, 2009, 41-52).

The timeless is played out in her books, and, indeed, in Picnic at Hanging Rock events that determine the spreading of a pattern of disruption through lives, happens early-on in the story, literally whilst the clocks are inexplicably stopped.

Set in Australia on Valentine's day, 1900, in Picnic what happens in this timeless time whilst the clocks are stopped, is the disappearance of three schoolgirls and a teacher, in their ascent up a rock, whose own timescale is enormous compared to actual human lives (a point explicitly played out in the dialogue when the girls are still approaching the Hanging Rock).

Their disappearance cannot be translated back into rational actuality or fact, or clock time. Not even by reading the missing Chapter Eighteen (now available) revealing what was at the top of the ascent. This chapter, the publisher left out of the book, turning Joan Lindsay's own brand of mysticism into a conventional but compelling mystery woven with elements of the supernatural.

In a note at the beginning of Picnic Lindsay states that the question of whether the story is fact or fiction readers themselves must decide. The reason she gives is that because the picnic took place in 1900, all the characters are long since dead, and so it seems unimportant.

Lindsay is leading the reader here. But few take the clue. In truth, every human being who has ever lived is consigned to this status, because all human beings die and soon become long since dead. The status of persons and happenings in all stories of persons, whether you want to think of it as fact or fiction, is, as Joan Lindsay knew, unimportant in time.

But not according to those who believe in the reality of clock time as something separate from our experience of being as human beings. Unlike Joan Lindsay, most people do believe clock time to be reality. And so when it comes to Joan Lindsay's work countless people have endeavoured to find out and satisfy themselves as to the facts of what really happened on the rock. They believe in an actuality, unfolding in clock time, without ever understanding that the actuality experienced by human beings, is a fiction, a myth, even as it is happening.

In clock time there is history. And even then, history is only a matter of interpretation. History, as they say, is written by the victors. Go beyond clock time, see-through it, and there you begin to discover a different reality and truth behind what is happening in human experience and human affairs. A different reality behind human perceptions and experiences. A realm in which the idea of a factual truth in something called actuality, turns out to be a delusion (in Hinduism a delusion based on what the Puranas call false ego, the preserving of the personal idea of who I am as a separate being).

The relation of time to spiritual ascent is subtly reflected in Picnic. In the story, the girl who leads the ascent up the rock is Miranda. Joan depicts Miranda as the most spiritual of all the characters, saying how Irma wonders how God makes some people so disagreeable whilst others beautiful like Miranda.

Just before Miranda leads the ascent up the rock, she is explicitly recognised by the French teacher, who says Mon Dieu! (My God!) Now I know..., realising the beautiful Miranda is a Botticelli angel that she had seen at the Uffizi.

In contrast, of those who ascend the rock, the girl depicted the least spiritually is Edith, whom the character list describes as 'the college dunce', and whom in the prose is also called 'as plain as a frog'. She is actually the one to whom Irma is referring, in the passage above.

Edith finds the ascent too arduous, and fails to make it, finally running back down, screaming. Irma, a wealthy beauty, almost succeeds, but in clock time is found unconscious and alive on the rock a week later, as if she had been there only a few hours. Much is made of the fact that such a survival in the outback for that length of clock time would be expected to be impossible, but she is unharmed, except for a few scratches and bruises.

The ordinary, everyday, rational understanding of the world, is based on understanding things as they unfold in clock time. But it is only an understanding of what happens in something called time, that is not itself really understood.

The higher understanding is to understand that what is really going on is something that is continuously creating time. And for that, you have to have an appreciation that time and being are inseparable. Is this such a strange and unfamiliar idea? Not if you are familiar with the Hindu corpus.

The great scheme of things in both Hinduism and Buddhism is one in which anything that seems to exist only does so in the context of what Hinduism calls the lila - a play of being - of which it is a part. In Buddhism this relativity is called dependent arising or dependent origination, or pratītyasamutpāda. In Hinduism time and being is subject to this principle, and ultimately, every moment of time-bound being arises from an immeasurable expansion and involution of the one Being that Hinduism calls the Brahman.

The result is that every moment of time in our little human experience of being is already created from eternally preserved, timeless stories of being in which we are participating, derived from the ether or space of Hindu cosmology, the eternally recreated and timeless Ākāśa.

And so also, does Joan Lindsay in Picnic say that there is no moment on Earth that is not by ordinary standards of time immeasurable. She considers each moment a fragment of eternity unrelated to clock time.

In Picnic as it was published, minus that last chapter (Chapter Eighteen), and with a few adjustments to make the omission work, during the ascent of the girls the prose speaks of shadows lengthening on the Hanging Rock. But in the missing Chapter Eighteen the description is more explicit, stating that the whole scene of the girls' ascent up the rock is essentially happening forever, and will go on happening until the end of time, acted out in what Joan Lindsay calls a tepid twilight of a present without a past. She speaks of their emotions being forever new.

If you are familiar with the Hindu corpus it is easy to see that this is Joan Lindsay's own description of what also appears in the fabric of Hinduism, as the timeless memory of the Ākāśa at the root of what we experience as time.

We should therefore also not be surprised to find that in Picnic, after the disappearance of Miranda, Irma remembers Miranda saying that everything always begins and ends at exactly the right time and place. As Miranda walks away from the plain towards the Rock and the ascent, she turns and smiles to the French teacher, assuring her that the girls will only be gone a little while.

In Hinduism, the higher the spiritual ascent, the more time elapses on the lower slopes, until eventually, at the threshold to the transcendental, there is the Ākāśa in which everything is happening now, and will go on happening until the end of time. In the Hindu scheme this Ākāśa is air, atmosphere or ether, from which the unmanifest one, the Brahman, the Being, that is sometimes recognised as Krishna, descends through further coverings of the egg through which material existence is created.

In the missing final Chapter Eighteen, the girls who complete the ascent, remove their corsets (the constraint of their bodies), and cast them off the rock, but there, instead of falling, they too, remain, 'stuck fast in time'. They are 'becalmed on the windless air'. The girls have arrived at a place where there are 'no shadows', and 'the light too is unchanging'. The spiritual allegory is clear. Later in the text of the missing Chapter Eighteen, Lindsay even refers to the Egg.

From the position on the plain below, the mind that believes in clock time also wants to believe in an objective actuality in human affairs, in which we can find what is the truth, and what is not the truth. But as both Hinduism and Buddhism recognise, what we experience as the world, is only what we experience as our own mind.

Another Western writer, Vita Sackville-West, recognised and played on the illusion of objective actuality in Seducers in Ecuador, in which the protagonist's state of mind and perception is represented by the wearing of different coloured glasses. And in her novel The Edwardians (Penguin Vintage Classics, 2016, p. 54), the explorer Anquetil, previously believing in an objective actuality defined by 'objects, relationships, and situations', begins to realise under the candle-lit influence of the great old house Chevron, that actuality is a fiction dependent 'solely on the observer, his mood, and his prejudice'.

There is another language for all this, a scientific one. All this is a reflection of the modern scientific fact that anything we perceive, experience, or understand, is a construct of brain function. Including, actually, what we experience as the thing we call the material world.

This is perhaps a more demanding fact to come to terms with, even than what we have been talking about. From the point of view of materialist science there is nothing in our head except brain function. And it is this actual electrochemical complex network activity, that is what we are experiencing as our self and the world.

But then, perhaps still more demanding, is the fact that it is only through this complex electrochemical activity, that this complex electrochemical activity comes to be known as such, in the thing we now call science. The world in as much as we can ever know it, is a construct of brain function, and brains are part of that construct.

There is indeed an objective aspect of this material world, that is not dependent on anyone's individual brain function. But aside from scientific facts, any idea we might hold that there is some objective actuality of meaning or truth in the world, separate from our own mind, is mistaken. It is, as we shall come to see, what the Hindu corpus regards as a delusion. A delusion caused by what Hinduism calls Maya, the very appearance itself, of the material world.

Let us turn one last time to Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which Irma, having ascended some way up the rock (the spiritual ascent), looks down upon the picnic ground, the plain, and wonders what all the people can be doing down there, like a lot of ants.

By now she is already looking down from a higher place, a place from where what she observes, is not unrelated to Hinduism, even though Picnic has apparently absolutely nothing to do with Hinduism. If anything, as some have argued, it reflects aspects of the Australian aboriginal dreamtime. But then, aboriginal dreamtime, and Hinduism, also share something in common: the dream.

As she looks down upon the plain, Irma goes on to see, from her vantage point higher in the ascent that many people are without purpose, except that they are probably involved in some function unknown to themselves. What a strange observation. Or is it? Not strange at all, in the context of the Hindu corpus, and indeed, Hinduism even has its own word for this very state of affairs: karma.

In Hinduism, time and being are inseparable. In fact, according to the Purana stories, time is linked inextricably to Being. And time, as we all know, is measured in cycles. In Hinduism being and time comes in cycles, as it were, cycles of being in the great scheme of things.

What we shall see in the course of this book, is how the Hindu corpus tells us our own experience of being and world, is a play of being, a lila, created in cycles through a thing called time, from an infinite expansion and involution of the one Being. The Being that Hinduism calls the Brahman.

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So now let's talk about the Hindu corpus. The story content of the Indian Puranas is sometimes referred to by the West as a mythology. But it is not myth in the modern, popular sense of the word, meaning something that is merely a mistaken belief. It is much more than that. Rather, if we are going to call it myth then we ought to distinguish it from the former meaning, through the use of an uppercase M. Very often, Myth, or Mythic symbolism, is not recognised for what it is. Whether it arises in a work such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, or in the Puranas.

We will be looking at meaning, and there isn't always only one meaning, because the language in the Hindu corpus is often polysemic. In fact, as we see at one point, the content of the corpus itself, explicitly declares itself to be that.

To glean anything of any value we have to look beyond the belief that core scriptural stories in religions in general, are merely myth in the sense of mistaken understanding, or fiction. At yet at the same time we cannot become trapped in the mistaken belief that these stories must be taken literally in just one way, in order to glean the deepest truth.

Myth is a particular kind of story-telling that appears in religions, that rather too easily allows, or arguably even encourages, modern rational materialism to call it nonsense or imaginative fiction. The truth is that many of these stories actually contain a depth of meaning that we respect in this book by using the upper case words Myth and Mythology. The Hindu Mythology that we refer to, is just one such example.

Some Hindus might well still object to the idea of calling the stories in the Puranas a Mythology, even if we are using an uppercase M. And actually, in a particular way, they have a point. They have a point, because using the word Myth suggests that the stories in the Puranas have some kind of different status to our lives now and the world in which we live. But as it turns out, it doesn't really suggest that, at all.

This is not to propose that you must believe a scripture literally and unquestioningly because you are not meant to understand it in any deeper way, and that if you don't just take it at face value, then you are being sacrilegious and you don't love God, Jesus, or understand the Buddha, and so forth. Indeed, by doing that you will mould your mind into nothing but cognitive bias.

Rather, this whole question of what Myth is, is also a question about the nature of our world. It becomes a question about whether our life, and the world in which we are living now, is actually anything other than a living Myth.

Indeed, the Hindu corpus in particular, together with the Buddhist corpus, amongst all the great religions, are prominent in questioning common presumptions about the very nature of the world in which we live.

So calling something Myth is not to denigrate it. There is even a modern scientific sense in which the whole world in which we live, is already, essentially a Myth. We can give the word the uppercase M here, because the world in which we live is not just fiction. Certainly, some of it is, and we would be a fool if we could not see that. But you cannot just dismiss love, or suffering, as fiction.

Nevertheless, as a whole, there is a very modern and scientific sense in which our whole world is already taken by some modern minds of a scientific disposition, to be essentially a Myth.

This is because it is a modern scientific fact that there is nothing we know or experience of our world, including our own bodies, and our mind, that is not materially just a construct of biological brain function. This is not some baseless, speculative theory. Rather, it is an evidence-supported modern scientific fact.

The common tendency is to want to believe that there really is a world out there that has nothing to do with brain function, other than that our brains happen to arise within it. And so perhaps the most popular interpretation of this relatively new fact of neuroscience is that the brain is creating a predictive model of a material world, a world that has itself, nothing to do with brain function.

But actually, there are no pressing scientific reasons to believe that the so-called predictive model created by the human brain is a model of a world that in itself, is not a construct of brain function in general (rather than of one specific brain).

Rather, our situation is somewhat different. Because in material terms everything we know and experience, including the experience of understanding, measuring, thinking, and learning about science and how the brain works, is all a construct of brain function.

No brain organ came into existence by itself, and there is no reason to suppose that we can understand our consciousness of the world that we experience, solely on the basis of the functioning of an individual brain organ, considered in isolation. That is, in isolation from other brains, and in isolation from the whole of nature and the evolution that gives rise to it.

So even from the position of modern scientific materialism, Myth emerges. When we realise that our world is a construct of brain function, then in this very contemporary way, we can very well say that our whole world, which as human beings is our world of being, is a living Myth.

The bottom line here is not so very different from what the Hindu corpus is saying about the world. Which essentially, is that our human experience of self includes the world that we experience, and is essentially what can be described as a dream. It's not our personal dream. In Mythical terms, pertaining to Hinduism, it is, specifically, the dream of Viśnu. The Hindu corpus itself doesn't call it a Myth, though. That's a Western word. Hinduism has its own word for it: Maya.

It is a Myth, or dream, that we are experiencing the being of, and this picture of our situation even has that same scientific correlation. What our experience of being and world is, as far as science is concerned, is just a construct, specifically, a construct of brain function.

If we are going to be all very contemporary about it, like this, then we have to admit that it is a Myth, or dream, of a very special kind. Because unlike so many stories in the religions, and unlike the world of Hindu Mythology, what science calls the universe, or our material world, is not a world in which literally just anything can happen. Unlike the case in the stories in the Puranas.

On the contrary, ours is a world, or a Myth, in which - the experience of miracles aside - what can happen is really rather restricted. It is restricted by things that modern science calls the laws of nature.

As far as modern science is concerned, whilst what we experience is always a construct that is materially one of brain function, there is one thing in what we experience that does not depend on anyone's individual brain function. This is precisely the objective aspect of the material world that science studies and comes to understand.

What the Hindu corpus describes as the universe is not at all the same thing that modern science refers to as the universe. It's not that they are two different approaches to the same thing. Rather, the Hindu corpus and modern science are each actually talking about something different, when they each talk about the universe. And that is a fact that is frequently overlooked by so many people examining the Hindu corpus, even Hindus themselves.

What modern science talks about and describes as the universe, is the objective material phenomena that can be scientifically measured. If what we are calling the universe is not that, then it's not part of what modern science calls the universe. It may perhaps be part of what you or someone else calls the universe, or what the Hindu corpus calls the universe, but it's not part of the universe that modern science describes, understands, and talks about.

This does not mean that what the Hindu corpus calls the universe is a Mythology about something that is a completely separate and alternative world, other than the one in which we are living. No religion regards what it is talking about, as that. Christians don't in general regard the stories of Jesus as a Mythology, separate from the world in which we are living. And the same is true for many Buddhists, regarding their stories. Even when they involve enlightened individuals being born from a lotus flower in the middle of a lake.

The truth is that what you experience is what you experience. And the same is true for any collective of people. What that experiencing is, as far as modern science is concerned, is a construct of brain function. However, we can also say that all our scientific knowledge is also a construct of brain function. Even the experience of measuring, and deducing, in science, are all things that we only encounter in the first place as a construct of brain function.

The fundamental fact that our experience of being and mind and world is a construct of brain function, means that there is no true separation between belief, experience, and scientific knowledge. They all meet together, in brain function. However, scientific knowledge goes beyond belief and subjective experience, because it deals with what is beyond the construct created through anyone's individual brain function.

Since the scientific revolution of the 17th century there has grown and matured the underlying idea in scientific thinking that the material world in which we live, material nature itself, has nothing to do with us except that we happen to have arisen in it, and are now affecting our part of it.

This is, however, only a relatively modern idea, even in the West. It is an idea that grew with the arising of modern science, precisely because modern science is concerned with the objective nature of the world.

But it is an idea that is now undermined by what we now know about the brain. And, some would argue, it is also undermined by the facts of quantum physics.

It's not just Hinduism that disagrees with this idea that material nature has in itself, nothing to do with us, other than that we happen to be in it, perceiving it and experiencing it. All the great religions essentially disagree with that. And there is now a steadily growing contemporary secular movement of opposition to it, too.

Hinduism itself disagrees with the idea, but its foundation corpus, is pre-scientific. Hinduism has come into the West now, and has already established a base that many Westerners have been attracted to in the search for spiritual truth or a deeper understanding of the nature of our existence. Hinduism exhibits no knowledge about the human brain, and says nothing about human brain function. The corpus nonetheless forms the cultural basis on which Eastern Masters have been expressing spiritual teaching to the West, for some time now.

On this planet we are taking the first small steps towards a major revolution in our understanding. A revolution of an unprecedented kind, actually, a completely new knowledge of our constitution and situation. This will eventually arise out of the scientific understanding of the brain.

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Hinduism is generally conceived as dividing into four major branches. These are Shaivism (worshipping Śiva as supreme), Vaishnavism (worshipping Viśnu as supreme), Shaktism (worshipping Devi as supreme) and Smartism (worshipping Śiva, Viśnu, Śakti, Surya, and Ganeśa, equally). However, in Hinduism there are many, many more than just four belief systems or approaches to Truth, God, or the Divine.

All the different types of Hinduism have their origination in the Vedas, from which has evolved its great corpus, which includes, over time, many new branches condensing and distilling the teachings of the former. Buddhism itself arose out of this expansion.

The word Vedas does not necessarily refer to what is written down. It is based on the Sanskrit root vid, literally meaning Divine knowledge, and it refers in general to the revealed knowledge of the original rsis, or seers. This knowledge is generally thought to have been passed on by oral transmission before being written down.

The term Rig Veda, however, does refer to written wisdom. Whilst the original scriptures in the Rig Veda are believed to have been arranged and compiled early in the Common Era, they are acknowledged to have been passed down orally, perhaps for thousands of years or longer.¹

It is easy to see from the very nature of Hinduism that within the confines of a single book such as this, only a limited or selected part of the content of the corpus can be referenced. Furthermore, this is not a book of Indology or Sanskrit scholarship.

However, what is included here, is based primarily on scholarly translations by Indians, into English from the Sanskrit sources. So in the course of this book, we are at least, so to speak, in reasonably close contact with the sources themselves, rather than relying on informal secondary interpretations, or re-tellings of the stories.

In this book we are not even going to get into most of the stories that are popularly transmitted as part of Hindu culture. We are not even really interested in the stories just as entertaining stories of personalised beings. What we are interested in, is deeper meaning. There are different layers in Hindu Mythology and in the way it is told, and popular knowledge of the Mythology is not our destination here.

There is a very large tract of time over which what is now the Hindu corpus became established. So the Puranas contain many different styles of writing, from different periods, and include the transmission of accounts and stories by a process that we could regard as informed repetition.

In consulting the translations by Indian scholars, it is clear that some Sanskrit sources themselves may contain instances of defective text, spelling errors, redundant repetition, and the passing down of material whose content and sometimes even meaning, the writer is at least apparently not confident about.

Some of the material is in the style of authoritative declaration. However, the presentation is often in the style of formalised hearsay, relying on terms (or equivalents) such as It is remembered that…, or The sages say, and so on. Although we may consider this to be authoritative too, this style is about transmission, and a deferring of authority to the past.

Another important feature that we can see in the translations is the interweaving of different modes of belief, thought, insight, and knowledge. The texts arise out of a particular culture, and they speak to a particular culture.

Sometimes the material contains a mode of thinking about the nature of the world, that is clearly a prescientific forerunner to the fully materialistic modern, scientific view. But it is nevertheless still prescientific and not scientific.

Take the use of numbers, and measurements, for example. As far as modern science is concerned, in the Puranas these are pre-scientific because they have not been obtained through empirical measurement, in the modern scientific sense. Nor are they the results of calculations based on such measurements. But then, they do not even claim to have been. Rather, they constitute a form of revealed knowledge. This knowledge is not of the scientific kind.

The meaning and purpose of the use of numbers in this context, is often misunderstood by modern readers as having scientific meaning, or as being scientific assertions, according to how modern science is understood. Some of the quantities spoken of in the sources do correlate to some modern scientific measurements. This unfortunately encourages some modern readers to perpetuate the confusion between spiritual truth and scientific fact.

There is a good deal of figurative material in the Puranas that superficially seems to the modern mind to be a way of understanding and explaining the nature of what the corpus calls the universe, in terms of structures. However, these descriptions do not imply that the thinking in the Hindu corpus is even remotely comparable to the modern scientific way of thinking about the material world in the scientific, objective way. Rather, the true content has a much deeper meaning. It is not materialist. It is not scientific.

Even though the deeper content of the corpus is expressed through the fabric of a specific culture and its own evolution, this content shines out, as a true light, when the fabric is seen through. We don't have to be Hindu. It's not that the fabric is unnecessary, though. On the contrary, it is the very medium through which this light shines.

And why not? Human beings only learn and experience and express, through the brain. Every culture, every religion, is a particular formulation in the one principle of the human brain. And that is because the very nature of the brain is all about such formulations.

So the conceptual communication of spiritual truth has to come through the stuff