Vedic Quotes

He fitted the Vedic definition of a man of God: “Softer than the flower, where kindness is concerned; stronger than the thunder, where principles are at stake.

The dog is a loyal, lovable animal but Hindu scriptures do not treat it as an auspicious creature perhaps because loyalty feeds on fear and the purpose of Vedic scriptures is to outgrow fear by expanding the mind.

He quotes an ancient Vedic hymn: “ ‘May your eye go to the Sun, To the wind your soul … Or go to the waters if it suits thee there,’ ” Finch finishes.” “As he (the sheriff) talks, I lie back against the ground, the blanket wrapped around me, and say to the sky, “May your eye go to the Sun, To the wind your soul.… You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.

Ayurveda teaches us to love "as is" - not as we think people "should be.

According to Vedic scriptures, God does not ‘create’ this world. He simply made all creatures aware of it. Awareness leads to discovery. Discovery is creation.

This is the sum of duty. Do not unto others that which would cause you pain if done to you.

The ancient Vedic texts known as the Upanishads declare, “You are what your deepest desire is. As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.” Our destiny ultimately comes from the deepest level of desire and also from the deepest level of intention. The two are intimately linked to each other.

I thought about my [Punjabi] family. The only nakshatram we think about is the division of petrol pumps when we have to see the girl.

Whether divine or human, it is precisely the imagination that fashions and recognizes the universe as meaningful, abiding, and valuable, that is to say, as real.

If you board an aircraft built according to science—with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong—you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.

Science’s skeptical core makes it a poor competitor for human hearts and minds, which recoil from its ongoing controversies and prefer the security of seemingly eternal truths. If the scientific approach were just one more interpretation of the cosmos, it would never have amounted to much; but science’s big-time success rests on the fact that it works. If you board an aircraft built according to science – with principles that have survived numerous attempts to prove them wrong – you have a far better chance of reaching your destination than you do in an aircraft constructed by the rules of Vedic astrology.

Three types of people are never able to sleep peacefully: Yogi (One who’s involved in persistent effort to better oneself so as to better the world), Bhogi (One who’s extremely involved in satisfying his/her carnal pleasures or addictions) and Rogi (One who has incurred unbearable pain through illness by abusing one’s own body and mind).

the term ‘Indra’s Net’ has been preserved, and this allows scholars like myself to retrace the Vedic origins of these widely popular ideas.

idea that the Vedic Aryans came from outside of ancient India and entered the region to start what became the Vedic civilization is a foreign idea.

Those who are interested in material benefits worship the demigods by various sacrifices according to the Vedic rituals.

...if I do not take my intellectual vocation seriously, putting it before everything else even at the risk of appearing inhuman, then I am also incapable of helping people in more concrete and proximate ways. Conversely, if I am not alert and ready to save people from a conflagration, that is to say, if I do not take my spiritual calling in all earnestness, sacrificing to it all else, even my own life, then I shall be unable to help in rescuing the manuscript. If I do not involve myself in the concrete issues of my time, and if I do not open my house to all the winds of the world, then anything I produce from an ivory tower will be barren and cursed. Yet if I do not shut doors and windows in order to concentrate on this work, then I will not be able to offer anything of value to my neighbors.

As explained by David Frawley, “Dravidian history does not contradict Vedic history either. It credits the invention of the Tamil language, the oldest Dravidian tongue, to the rishi Agastya, one of the most prominent sages in the Rig Veda. Dravidian kings historically have called themselves Aryans and trace their descent through Manu (who in the Matsya Purana is regarded as originally a south Indian king). Apart from language, moreover, both north and south India share a common religion and culture.” 2

The ultimate goal of human life is to transcend culture and personality to the unconditioned pure being. But the means to do this is through our culture and way of life.

The Vedic viewpoint presents a type of linguistic realism in which reality is the 'text' which is being processed by the observer. Reality can also be modified by adding text to it similar to how a programmer programs a computer by inputting a computer program.

proverb from the Sanskrit Vedic Scriptures of around 1500 bce: “Upon this handful of soil our survival depends. Husband it and it will grow our food, our fuel and our shelter and surround us with beauty. Abuse it and soil will collapse and die, taking humanity with it.

Denying the poor access to knowledge goes back a long way. The ancient Smriti political and legal system drew up vicious punishments for sudras seeking learning. (In those days, that meant learning the Vedas.) If a sudra listens to the Vedas, said one of these laws, ‘his ears are to be filled with molten tin or lac. If he dares to recite the Vedic texts, his body is to be split’. That was the fate of the ‘base-born’. The ancients restricted learning on the basis of birth. In a modern polity, where the base-born have votes, the elite act differently. Say all the right things. But deny access. Sometimes, mass pressures force concessions. Bend a little. After a while, it’s back to business as usual. As one writer has put it: When the poor get literate and educated, the rich lose their palanquin bearers.

Racism quickly came to color the English usage of the Sanskrit word arya, the word that the Vedic poets used to refer to themselves, meaning “Us” or “Good Guys,” long before anyone had a concept of race. Properly speaking, “Aryan” (as it became in English) designates a linguistic family, not a racial group (just as Indo-European is basically a linguistic rather than demographic term); there are no Aryan noses, only Aryan verbs, no Aryan people, only Aryan-speaking people. Granted, the Sanskrit term does refer to people rather than to a language. But the people who spoke *Indo-European were not a people in the sense of a nation (for they may never have formed a political unity) or a race, but only in the sense of a linguistic community.10 After all those migrations, the blood of several different races had mingled in their veins.

All the Vedic literatures and the Purāṇas are meant for conquering the darkest region of material existence.

Retrograde mercury is the only enemy that writers have.

Vedic wisdom is bringing a modern renaissance that has already begun. Ancient Ayurvedic Medicine is in fact ultra-modern, cutting-edge unified field based medicine.

A university degree, in any case, is not remotely related to Vedic realization. Saints are not produced in batches every semester like accountants.” After

Dharma Is a Lifelong Process Discovering your dharma is not a one-time process—it’s a commitment to forever coming back into alignment.

It is never a choice between good or bad, positive or negative. It is a choice of being present to what is required of you in the moment.

The word Swaraj is a sacred word, a Vedic word, meaning self-rule and self-restraint, and not freedom from all restraint which ’independence’ often means.

Policemen are often confronted with situations which baffle them at first. A certain crime scene may seem meaningless, but they have to derive some meaning out of it. They have to connect the dots, find the links, delve into its history, look for evidence, come up with a zillion theories and arrive at truth. The thing is, truth is always stranger than fiction.

As per some Vedic marriage rites, a woman is first given in marriage to the romantic moon-god, Chandra, then to the highly sensual Gandharva named Vishwavasu, then to the fire-god, Agni, who cleanses and purifies all things, and finally to her human husband. Thus, the ‘four men’ quota is exhausted. Clearly this was an attempt of society to prevent Hindu women from remarrying.

The Vedic people stopped interbreeding with the earlier local population and began to talk of purity only when they no longer needed women from outside their community as wives, because they now had enough girl-children whose early mixed roots, they decided, did not matter. And the British came up with their racist notions of not mixing with Indians only after the Suez Canal opened and there were fast steamships bringing white British women to India in search of British husbands. Purity is a convenient political myth floated by the powerful to justify brutal apartheid.

Vedic culture it’s understood, for instance, that we all possess three bodies—a knowledge body, a truth body, and a begotten body—and to learn to recognize the limits and strengths of each can be life-changing.

Matter is a medium of communication between minds, and everything that exists in the mind can also exist in the body. Furthermore, the body—being the expression of a mental state is developed as a manifestation of the mind.

Wendy Doniger, by the way, and as we shall see later in this book, compares the wanderings of the Vedic people to that of the cowboys who destroyed the Native Americans; and, for good measure, the Nazis during World War II.

The only way to overcome the turbulence of your thoughts and contradictory ideas is to just start doing something, even if you aren’t 100 percent sure about it. You’ll know what’s right for you only when you begin taking action.

The aim is to get as close to nature as possible, shattering the tyranny of cultural values and judgements. In the Vedic approach, self-realization has to be achieved by detached adherence to cultural values and judgements, social roles

So, paganism is simply a reference to following the old remnants of the Vedic Aryan culture. And people throughout pre-Christian Europe worshiped a variety of spirits and demigods, known by different names according to culture and region.

Srinagar, there was a grave of a Christian soldier from Travancore, which had the Vedic swastika and a verse from the Quran inscribed on it. There could be ‘no more poignant and touching symbolof the essential oneness and unity of India’.61

I looked in depth into the ancient and 100 per cent Indian origins of Vedic civilisation in my book "Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age". There was no such thing as an "Aryan invasion of India". That whole racist idea is completely bust.

From experience in the past we create memories, which are the basis of imagination and desire. Desire is the basis of action, once again. And so the cycle perpetuates itself. In Vedic tradition and in Buddhism this cycle is known as the Wheel of Samsara, the basis of earthly existence.That’s why, if you really want to break out of the mundane, you must learn to think and dream the impossible. Only with repeated thoughts can the impossible be made possible through the intention of the nonlocal mind.

Mythos is the sum total of the early historic and prehistoric myths which preceded the logos. The mythos includes not only the Greek myths but the Old Testament, the Vedic Hymns and the early legends of all cultures which have contributed to our present world understanding.

always been lauded as containing the secrets of cosmogenesis. Raja Roy in his remarkable book shows how this is true not only from the yogic vison but according to the latest insights of modern physics. The book takes the reader on a vast panoramic journey through the universe of

They were mantras to be memorized and correctly chanted with careful pronunciation, enunciation, and intonation. Their magic was in the sound, not in the meaning. To learn the Vedas, I must find a competent guru and spend years at his feet practicing the art of Vedic chanting, while performing

The origin of the caste system, formulated by the great legislator Manu, was admirable. He saw clearly that men are distinguished by natural evolution into four great classes: those capable of offering service to society through their bodily labor (Sudras); those who serve through mentality, skill, agriculture, trade, commerce, business life in general (Vaisyas); those whose talents are administrative, executive, and protective-rulers and warriors (Kshatriyas); those of contemplative nature, spiritually inspired and inspiring (Brahmins). “Neither birth nor sacraments nor study nor ancestry can decide whether a person is twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin);” the Mahabharata declares, “character and conduct only can decide.” 281 Manu instructed society to show respect to its members insofar as they possessed wisdom, virtue, age, kinship or, lastly, wealth. Riches in Vedic India were always despised if they were hoarded or unavailable for charitable purposes. Ungenerous men of great wealth were assigned a low rank in society. Serious evils arose when the caste system became hardened through the centuries into a hereditary halter. Social reformers like Gandhi and the members of very numerous societies in India today are making slow but sure progress in restoring the ancient values of caste, based solely on natural qualification and not on birth. Every nation on earth has its own distinctive misery-producing karma to deal with and remove; India, too, with her versatile and invulnerable spirit, shall prove herself equal to the task of caste-reformation.

The origin of human consciousness as well as the mystical experience may have been linked to humanity’s use of visionary plants. In the Rig Veda, one of the earliest collections of Vedic Sanskrit hymns from India, there is frequent mention of a plant called soma, which, when drunk, produced marvellous seemingly entheogenic effects.

A primitive capitalism had developed, which had quite different priorities. The lavish sacrifices had been designed to impress the gods and to enhance the patron’s prestige. By the fifth century, these eastern peoples had realized that their improved trade and agriculture brought them far more wealth and status than the Vedic rites.

I am giving you the key to get out of frustration. Listen! Any situation you are in, when you are frustrated, look in and find out ‘What must be the best thing in this situation for which I have aspired this situation in my past? Let me look from that context at this situation.’ You will see you are enjoying exactly what you wanted!

Vedic science, the ancient wisdom tradition of India, says that unless you can get in touch with that embryo of a god or goddess incubating inside you, unless you can let that embryo be fully born, then your life will always be mundane. But once that god or goddess expresses itself through you, then you will do grand and wondrous things.

What is Aryan Cult? It is the spontaneous revelation of self, whereas Non-Aryan Cult is mortification of Self. The religion of the Vedic sages was the spontaneous revelation of life-power of a human body. Jainism is also a religion of self-mortification. Dravidian religion was emotion and devotion and Hinduism is the combination of all these.

The Aryans also composed two of the world’s greatest (and longest) epic poems, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which is eight times longer than the Iliad and Odyssey put together and three times longer than the Bible—all without the benefit of writing. These Vedic recitations, both sacred and secular, form the bedrock of Indian and Hindu culture. The

Dawkins’s result can only be obtained because of the element of intelligent design embedded in the whole experiment.

People keep celebrating their birthdays on the WRONG date. Our birthdays change each year, but most people do not know — because they only know the Western system of life.

The eternal relief is in finding peace after doing your work bereft of lust, anger, greed, infatuation, ego, and envy.

Brahmins were essentially transmitters and stewards of Vedic hymns and rituals, not its interpreters or owners. Over time, however, they used their exalted position to dominate society and claim entitlements. It was an irony of history that those who carried knowledge of how to expand the mind failed to expand their own minds, and chose the common path of domination instead.

The premise of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) was used as a perfect tool, especially by the British, to divide the Hindu society and the state of India. The North Indian “Aryans” were then pit against the South Indian “Dravidians,” along with high-caste against low-caste, mainstream Hindus against tribals, Vedic orthodoxy against the indigenous orthodox sects, and later to neutralize Hindu criticism of the forced Islamic occupation of India, since “Hindus themselves entered India in the same way as Muslims did.” Even today, the theory has still been used as the basis for the growth of secularist and even Marxist forces. The problem with all of this is that people of Indian descent, especially the youth, when they hear all of this Aryan Invasion theory nonsense, they begin to lose faith in their own country, culture and history, and especially in the Vedic tradition and epics. They think it is all just stories, fiction, or even a lie. But that is not the case at all, which is why it is important to show where this theory came from, what its purpose was, and why we should throw it away and take a second and much deeper look at what the Vedic tradition has to offer, and how it was actually the source of much of the world’s advancement in so many areas.

Meanwhile in India, Dayananda Saraswati headed a Hindu revival movement, whose basic principle was that the Vedic scriptures are never wrong. In 1875 he founded the Arya Samaj (Noble Society), dedicated to the spreading of Vedic knowledge – though truth be told, Dayananda often interpreted the Vedas in a surprisingly liberal way, supporting for example equal rights for women long before the idea became popular in the West.

The fundamental difference between Vedic and tantric thought is your take on God. In tantra you say, “You are my object of worship. You are superior than I am and that is why I’m praying to you. But, I’m not merely interested in eulogizing or seeking pardon for my sins. I want to purify myself to the extent where I merge in you and you merge in me, so that one day I become you. I’m not interested in this union after I die; I want to experience it while I live.

(Q) Multiply 456789 by 999999 We subtract 1 from 456789 and get the answer 456788. We write this down on the left hand side. Next, we subtract each of the digits of 456788 (left hand side) from 9 and get 543211 which becomes the right hand part of our answer. The complete answer is 456788543211   More examples: The simplicity of this method can be vouched from the examples given above. Now we move to Case 2. In this case, we will multiply a given number with a higher number of nines.

The mind isn’t only the thoughts and sensations constantly streaming through it. There is a silent, invisible foundation to thought and sensations. Until that background is accounted for, individual consciousness mistakes itself, and in so doing it cannot help but mistake what it observes. This is expressed in a Vedic metaphor about the wave and the ocean: A wave looks like an individual as it rises from the sea, but once it sinks back, it knows that it is ocean and nothing but ocean.

there is a persistent emphasis on religious themes, such as the nature of the Islamic warrior, the role of Islam in training, the importance of Islamic ideology for the army, and the salience of jihad. Pakistan’s military journals frequently take as their subjects famous Quranic battles, such as the Battle of Badr. Ironically, the varied Quranic battles are discussed in more analytical detail in Pakistan’s journals than are Pakistan’s own wars with India. A comparable focus on religion in the Indian army (which shares a common heritage with the Pakistan Army) would be quite scandalous. It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata. Judging by the frequency with which articles on such topics appear in Pakistan’s professional publications, religion is clearly acceptable, and perhaps desirable, as a subject of discussion.

Think of the universe as a single, huge organism. Its vastness is a perceptual, projected reality; even though “out there” you may be seeing a big football stadium filled with thousands of people, the real phenomenon is a small electrical impulse inside your brain that you, the nonlocal being, interpret as a football game. Yoga Vasishta, an ancient Vedic text, says, “The world is like a huge city, reflected in a mirror. So too, the universe is a huge reflection of yourself in your own consciousness.

Oh Devi, give me the food for jnana (knowledge) and vairagya. This means not to project my past into the future and destroy my life by quickly aging. Devi then gives the grain of the great truth, the knowledge of not projecting your past into the future. When the grains are offered into that skull, the skull was enjoying so much. So she purposely drops a little bit of grain outside the skull on the ground. The skull felt the taste of the food so much that it just jumped out to eat that food and Shiva was free of the skull. He was liberated.

is the “waters” of the celestial “ocean” which come to mind, in which Noah’s Ark now swims as a constellation. In the Indian version of this story the ark is a boat on which the Seven Rishis (better known to us as the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major), and the Vedic culture that they represent, are ferried to safety by a giant Fish (the constellation Pisces). Gazing on myth from this angle we can find in the skies many of the cast of characters of “The Greatness of Saturn.” Aditi [* FOOTNOTE: A well-thought-out cosmology which catalogues such extensions of ‘Earth’ into ‘Space’ is presented by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Namlet’s Mill, and the interested reader will find a wealth of detail worth pondering in that book.] (‘The Unbroken, Unbounded One’; by extension, eternity) is the mother of the devas, the ‘shining celestials,’ and Diti (‘The Bound, Divided, Cut One’) is the mother of the asuras, the enemies of the devas. There is good reason to believe that Aditi represents the northern celestial hemisphere and the zodiac, which being the part of the heavens that is visible throughout the year

Viewed from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, the Veda is as dark as night, dense, with no apparent inclination toward clarity. It is a world that is self-sufficient, highly tensioned, even convulsive, wrapped up in itself, with no curiosity about any other manner of existence. Streaked by all kinds of violent desires, it has no thirst for objects, vassals, pomp. If we are looking for an emblem of something utterly alien to modernity (however it might be defined), something that might look upon it with complete indifference, we find it in the Vedic people.

Erroneous assumptions about what the ancients meant when they spoke of the sky and its denizens have thus proliferated, assisted unfortunately by certain Eastern writers who reason that if the Veda is infallible everything of value must be mentioned within it. These people, who subscribe to a different but no less deluded version of literal history, vainly strain to discover somewhere in the Vedic corpus evidence of every modern advancement. In its extreme form this school even identifies some of India’s deities with alien spacemen. Both the materialist and the fundamentalist approaches, by mistaking wisdom’s vessels for the wisdom itself, consign the original significations of the Vedic wisdom to history’s dustbin, retaining only myth’s hides for their trophies. As an example of how far away from mythic reality literal history can stray, consider the literalist assumption that the ‘underworld’ must needs be underfoot. Though this may seem eminently reasonable and commonsensical to the average modern individual, suppose for a moment that the ancients had instead placed the underworld in some nether corner of the sky.

In the beginning, when Twaslitri (the Divine Artificer) came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man and that no solid elements were left. In this dilemma, after pro-found meditation, he did as follows: he took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of the creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sun-beams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldnesss of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these together, he made woman and gave her to man. (Written by scholars of the Vedic Age)

The whole history of India and Hinduism. First comes Krishna. Seeing his charisma, the whole country follows him. Then comes Buddha who is completely opposite ideology. But seeing his charisma and ability to lead people into enlightenment experience, the whole country followed him. Then came Shankara. Just his ability to lead people into experience, simply the whole country followed him. Then came Nagarjuna who is completely opposite to Shankara. But his ability to lead people to experience, the whole country followed him. So, we never followed any infrastructure, organization. We followed the beings’ ability to lead us into the next level.

ODYSSEUS AS A YOUTH AT HOME WITH HIS MOTHER ODYSSEUS THE HERO OF ITHACA ADAPTED FROM THE THIRD BOOK OF THE PRIMARY SCHOOLS OF ATHENS, GREECE BY MARY E. BURT Author of "Literary Landmarks," "Stories from Plato," "Story of the German Iliad," "The Child-Life Reading Study"; Editor of "Little Nature Studies"; Teacher in the John A. Browning School, New York City AND ZENAÏDE A. RAGOZIN Author of "The Story of Chaldea," "The Story of Assyria," "The Story of Media, Babylon, and Persia," "The Story of Vedic India"; Member of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, of the American Oriental Society, of the Société Ethnologique of Paris, etc. CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK CHICAGO BOSTON COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS

The earlier Aryan invaders of the Gangetic Plain presided over feasts of cattle, horses, goats, buffalo, and sheep. By later Vedic and early Hindu times, during the first millenium B.C., the feasts came to be managed by the priestly caste of Brahmans, who erected rituals of sacrifice around the killing of animals and distributed the meat in the name of the Aryan chiefs and war lords. After 600 B.C., when populations grew denser and domestic animals became proportionately scarcer, the eating of meat was progressively restricted until it became a monopoly of the Brahmans and their sponsors. Ordinary people struggled to conserve enough livestock to meet their own desperate requirements for milk, dung used as fuel, and transport. During this period of crisis, reformist religions arose, most prominently Buddhism and Jainism, that attempted to abolish castes and hereditary priesthoods and to outlaw the killing of animals. The masses embraced the new sects, and in the end their powerful support reclassified the cow into a sacred animal. So it appears that some of the most baffling of religious practices in history might have an ancestry passing in a straight line back to the ancient carnivorous habits of humankind. Cultural anthropologists like to stress that the evolution of religion proceeds down multiple, branching pathways. But these pathways are not infinite in number; they may not even be very numerous. It is even possible that with a more secure knowledge of human nature and ecology, the pathways can be enumerated and the directions of religious evolution in individual cultures explained with a high level of confidence.

In fact, Hinduism�s pervading influence seems to go much earlier than Christianity. American mathematician, A. Seindenberg, has for example shown that the Sulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics, constitute the source of mathematics in the Antic world, from Babylon to Greece : � the arithmetic equations of the Sulbasutras he writes, were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians, as well as in the edification of Egyptian pyramids, in particular the funeral altar in form of pyramid known in the vedic world as smasana-cit (Seindenberg 1978: 329). In astronomy too, the "Indus" (from the valley of the Indus) have left a universal legacy, determining for instance the dates of solstices, as noted by 18th century French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly : � the movement of stars which was calculated by Hindus 4500 years ago, does not differ even by a minute from the tables which we are using today". And he concludes: "the Hindu systems of astronomy are much more ancient than those of the Egyptians - even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge �. There is also no doubt that the Greeks heavily borrowed from the "Indus". Danielou notes that the Greek cult of Dionysos, which later became Bacchus with the Romans, is a branch of Shivaism : � Greeks spoke of India as the sacred territory of Dionysos and even historians of Alexander the Great identified the Indian Shiva with Dionysos and mention the dates and legends of the Puranas �. French philosopher and Le Monde journalist Jean-Paul Droit, recently wrote in his book "The Forgetfulness of India" that � the Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy, that Demetrios Galianos had even translated the Bhagavad Gita �.

In Delhi we drove past dozens of Jain Sādhu holy men in saffron-coloured clothing which symbolises their saṃnyāsa (the ashrama life stage of renunciation). The Sādhu are respected for their holiness and feared for their curses, and 2000 years ago military generals laid down arms rather than wage war against a city protected by the Sādhu. In ancient Vedic verses they were called the long-haired ones and even today they have long stringy locks of hair that resemble dreadlocks, and many smoke sacred chillums of hashish all day long. They survive off alms or the goodness of others, often eating food provided only by prostitutes or low-ranking ‘sweeper’ caste people. The ones we saw, we were told, had walked 838km from the holy Ganges River carrying a spoonful of holy water. And it is with profound sadness that we missed the photographic opportunity.

By sacralizing both nature and human flesh, Whitman set the poetic template for what some consider a homegrown Tantra, the stream of Vedic spirituality that sees the divine in the mundane and directs sensory experience toward spiritual realization. “He taught people a way of beholding nature which is itself a form of prayer,” said the author and poet Diane Ackerman. She called Leaves of Grass “a sacred American text about the essential goodness and perfectibility of people, the sanctity of the common man, the holiness of the human body viewed naked and up close, the privilege of democracy, the need to forge one’s own destiny, and the duty of all to discover the world anew, by living in a state of rampant amazement at the endless pocket-size miracles one encounters every day.”16 That is as good a description of an American Tantra as can be imagined. Transcendental

Descriptions of a killer global flood that inundated the inhabited lands of the world turn up everywhere amongst the myths of antiquity. In many cases these myths clearly hint that the deluge swept away an advanced civilization that had somehow angered the gods, sparing 'none but the unlettered and the uncultured' and obliging the survivors to 'begin again like children in complete ignorance of what happened ... in early times'. Such stories turn up in Vedic India, in the pre-Columbian Americas, in ancient Egypt. They were told by the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Arabs and the Jews. They were repeated in China and south-east Asia, in prehistoric northern Europe and across the Pacific. Almost universally, where truly ancient traditions have been preserved, even amongst mountain peoples and desert nomads, vivid descriptions have been passed down of global floods in which the majority of mankind perished.

The key point here is Macaulay’s belief that “knowledge and reflection” on the part of the Hindus, especially the Brahmanas, would cause them to give up their age-old belief in anything Vedic in favor of Christianity. The purpose was to turn the strength of Hindu intellectuals against their own kind by utilizing their commitment to scholarship in uprooting their own tradition, which Macaulay viewed as nothing more than superstitions. His plan was to educate the Hindus to become Christians and turn them into collaborators. He persisted with this idea for fifteen years until he found the money and the right man for turning his utopian idea into reality. He needed someone who would translate and interpret the Vedic texts in such a way that the newly educated Indian elite would see the superiority of the Bible and choose that over everything else. Upon his return to England, after a good deal of effort he found a talented but impoverished young German Vedic scholar by name Friedrich Max Muller who was willing to take on the arduous job. Macaulay used his influence with the East India Company to find funds for Max Muller’s translation of the Rig Veda. Though an ardent German nationalist, Max Muller agreed for the sake of Christianity to work for the East India Company, which in reality meant the British Government of India. He also badly needed a major sponsor for his ambitious plans, which he felt he had at last found. The fact is that Max Muller was paid by the East India Company to further its colonial aims, and worked in cooperation with others who were motivated by the superiority of the German race through the white Aryan race theory. This was the genesis of his great enterprise, translating the Rig Veda with Sayana's commentary and the editing of the fifty-volume Sacred Books of the East. In this way, there can be no doubt regarding Max Muller’s initial aim and commitment to converting Indians to Christianity. Writing to his wife in 1866 he observed: “It [the Rig Veda] is the root of their religion and to show them what the root is, I feel sure, is the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last three thousand years.” Two years later he also wrote the Duke of Argyle, then acting Secretary of State for India: “The ancient religion of India is doomed. And if Christianity does not take its place, whose fault will it be?” This makes it very clear that Max Muller was an agent of the British government paid to advance its colonial interests. Nonetheless, he still remained an ardent German nationalist even while working in England. This helps explain why he used his position as a recognized Vedic and Sanskrit scholar to promote the idea of the “Aryan race” and the “Aryan nation,” a theory amongst a certain class of so-called scholars, which has maintained its influence even until today.

The simplest, easiest, most beautiful way of cleaning the parasites from your muscle memory is taking haritaki powder. Don't underestimate the power of haritaki, triphala or ashwagandha. These are all not just stomach cleansing items, they cleanse the parasites sitting inside your muscle memory triggering you to get addicted to certain food or behavior or certain habits. Almost all physical disorders and diseases are due to parasites sitting inside your muscle memory. Detoxing your muscle memory literally transforms your life to royal life. If you want to become a king, all you need is take haritaki and triphala churna everyday In mahabharata, bhishma’s enemy drishtadyumna’s sister - shikandi (she is actually napumsaka), takes birth again just to kill bhishma.It means even after death she is not ready to give up her anger.When the parasites sit in your biomemory level, they become part of your very cognition about you. That is the most dangerous.

One of the most remarkable of these hymns is that addressed to the Unknown God. The poet says: "In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. As soon as he was born he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven." The hymn consists of ten stanzas, in which the Deity is celebrated as the maker of the snowy mountains, the sea and the distant river, who made fast the awful heaven, He who alone is God above all gods, before whom heaven and earth stand trembling in their mind. Each stanza concludes with the refrain, "Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice?" We have in this hymn a most sublime conception of the Supreme Being, and while there are many Vedic hymns whose tone is pantheistic and seems to imply that the wild forces of nature are Gods who rule the world, this hymn to the Unknown God is as purely monotheistic as a psalm of David, and shows a spirit of religious awe as profound as any we find in the Hebrew Scriptures.

As the Vedic ritualists say, man is the only one of the sacrificial victims who also celebrates sacrifices. It is essential to anticipate this question: why invent the highly complex ceremony of sacrifice, if in the end everything is to be reduced to dividing up pieces of meat? Here is the answer given by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa: the sacrificial victim shall be divided into thirty-six parts, because the bṛhatī meter consists of thirty-six syllables: “By dividing it in this way, the victim is made into a celestial being, whereas those who proceed in another way tear it apart like rogues or criminals.” And here we see the great role that meter plays in the Veda, as the primary articulation of form, as the first effective device for breaking away from the meaningless and arbitrary succession of existence. Here it is said, among other things, that “the bṛhatī is the mind.” And so, if the mind coils within itself the thirty-six fragments of the sacrificial victim, this alone is enough to transform those pieces of flesh into fragments of a whole that has a life of its own—and is perhaps also “a celestial being.

Mandana Misra was a great scholar and authority on the Vedas and Mimasa. He led a householder’s life (grihastha), with his scholar-philosopher wife, Ubhaya Bharati, in the town of Mahishi, in what is present-day northern Bihar. Husband and wife would have great debates on the veracity of the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Gita and other philosophical works. Scholars from all over Bharatavarsha came to debate and understand the Shastras with them. It is said that even the parrots in Mandana’s home debated the divinity, or its lack, in the Vedas and Upanishads. Mandana was a staunch believer in rituals. One day, while he was performing Pitru Karma (rituals for deceased ancestors), Adi Shankaracharya arrived at his home and demanded a debate on Advaita. Mandana was angry at the rude intrusion and asked the Acharya whether he was not aware, as a Brahmin, that it was inauspicious to come to another Brahmin’s home uninvited when Pitru Karma was being done? In reply, Adi Shankara asked Mandana whether he was sure of the value of such rituals. This enraged Mandana and the other Brahmins present. Thus began one of the most celebrated debates in Hindu thought. It raged for weeks between the two great scholars. As the only other person of equal intellect to Shankara and Mandana was Mandana’s wife, Ubhaya Bharati, she was appointed the adjudicator. Among other things, Shankara convinced Mandana that the rituals for the dead had little value to the dead. Mandana became Adi Shankara’s disciple (and later the first Shankaracharya of the Sringeri Math in Karnataka). When the priest related this story to me, I was shocked. He was not giving me the answer I had expected. Annoyed, I asked him what he meant by the story if Adi Shankara himself said such rituals were of no use to the dead. The priest replied, “Son, the story has not ended.” And he continued... A few years later, Adi Shankara was compiling the rituals for the dead, to standardize them for people across Bharatavarsha. Mandana, upset with his Guru’s action, asked Adi Shankara why he was involved with such a useless thing. After all, the Guru had convinced him of the uselessness of such rituals (Lord Krishna also mentions the inferiority of Vedic sacrifice to other paths, in the Gita. Pitru karma has no vedic base either). Why then was the Jagad Guru taking such a retrograde step? Adi Shankaracharya smiled at his disciple and answered, “The rituals are not for the dead but for the loved ones left behind.

Aurobindo’s orientation has yielded important new insights into the thought of the Vedic seers (rishi), who “saw” the truth. He showed a way out of the uninspiring scholarly perspective, with its insistence that the Vedic seers were “primitive” poets obsessed with natural phenomena like thunder, lightning, and rain. The one-dimensional “naturalistic” interpretations proffered by other translators missed out on the depth of the Vedic teachings. Thus Sūrya is not only the visible material Sun but also the psychological-spiritual principle of inner luminosity. Agni is not merely the physical fire that consumes the sacrificial offerings but the spiritual principle of purifying transformation. Parjanya does not only stand for rain but also the inner “irrigation” of grace. Soma is not merely the concoction the sacrificial priests poured into the fire but also (as in the later Tantric tradition) the magical inner substance that transmutes the body and the mind. The wealth prayed for in many hymns is not just material prosperity but spiritual riches. The cows mentioned over and over again in the hymns are not so much the biological animals but spiritual light. The Panis are not just human merchants but various forces of darkness. When Indra slew Vritra and released the floods, he not merely inaugurated the monsoon season but also unleashed the powers of life (or higher energies) within the psyche of the priest. For Indra also stands for the mind and Vritra for psychological restriction, or energetic blockage. Aurobindo contributed in a major way to a thorough reappraisal of the meaning of the Vedic hymns, and his work encouraged a number of scholars to follow suit, including Jeanine Miller and David Frawley.2 There is also plenty of deliberate, artificial symbolism in the hymns. In fact, the figurative language of the Rig-Veda is extraordinarily rich, as Willard Johnson has demonstrated.3 In special sacrificial symposia, the hymn composers met to share their poetic creations and stimulate each other’s creativity and comprehension of the subtle realities of life. Thus many hymns are deliberately enigmatic, and often we can only guess at the solutions to their enigmas and allegorical riddles. Heinrich Zimmer reminded us: The myths and symbols of India resist intellectualization and reduction to fixed significations. Such treatments would only sterilize them of their magic.

Many years ago I was trained in Ayurveda, a system of traditional medicine that dates back to the ancient Vedic period in India. The word Ayurveda is derived from the Sanskrit ayus, meaning “life,” and veda, meaning “science” or “knowledge.” While I have never considered myself to be a true practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine, nonetheless the pulse diagnosis training has served my patients very well, often providing diagnostic clues when none was otherwise apparent. And Susan’s pulse

The conditioned souls who have come to the material world to fulfill their desires to lord it over material nature are bound by the laws of nature. The best course is to abide by the Vedic rules; that will help one to be gradually elevated to liberation.

This age (Kali-yuga) is the age of bluffing and quarrel. Actually there is no possibility of attaining yoga perfection by such paltry proposals. The Vedic literature, for emphasis, clearly states three times that in this Age of Kali – kalau nāsty eva nāsty eva nāsty eva – there is no other alternative, no other alternative, no other alternative than harer nāma, chanting the holy name of the Lord.

old Vedic saying: “When you eat standing up, death looks over your shoulder.” Imagine what they would say about eating while driving your car! The epitome of unconscious eating is a Weight Watchers promotion a few years ago that offered an “eat while you drive” breakfast kit. This particular bit of madness included a box that would hold the coffee and breakfast meal without spilling it all over your car, so you could drive with one hand while eating with the other, focusing fully on neither. We generally rush through our meals while driving, talking on the phone, opening mail, or even working at our desks, not focused on our food at all. No wonder we’re always hungry—our bodies have little or no memory of having eaten anything! Would the French style of eating work for

Vedic literatures like Īśopaniṣad direct that since everything belongs to the Supreme Personality of Godhead, one should not encroach upon another’s property, but should enjoy one’s individual allotment. The best program for every living entity is to take direction from the Supreme Lord and enjoy material or spiritual life.

In the Kaṭha Upaniṣad it is stated that the Supreme Lord is the leader of all living entities. He is their sustainer and the awarder of all their necessities and desires. No living entity is independent; all are dependent on the mercy of the Supreme Lord. Therefore the Vedic instruction is that one should enjoy life under the direction of the supreme leader, the Personality of Godhead.

one should follow the Vedic regulations and surrender unto the Supreme Lord because that is the ultimate goal of perfection in human life. One should live a life of piety, follow the religious rules and regulations, marry and live peacefully for elevation to the higher status of spiritual realization.

If you are starting a business, or want to ask for a raise, or want to pursue a new career, you can have a Vedic astrologer determine the best time for such actions (muhurtha). You can also receive the best possible date to incorporate or establish a business. I have seen numerous occasions where struggling businesspeople have dissolved a company that was begun at an inauspicious time, and re-established their business with a Vedic astrologer’s help on a much better date, with good results. In fact, the results can be remarkable.

The epithet Sindhusthan besides being Vedic had also a curious advantage which could only be called lucky and yet is too substantial to be ignored. The word Sindhu in Sanskrit does not only mean the Indus but also the Sea-which girdles the southern peninsula—so that this one word Sindhu points out almost all frontiers of the land at a single stroke. Even if we do not accept the tradition that the river Brahmaputra is only a branch of the Sindhu which falls into flowing streams on the eastern and western slopes of the Himalayas and thus constitutes both our eastern as well as western frontiers. still it is indisputably true that it circumscribes our northern and western extremities in its sweep and so the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of our whole Motherland : the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu—from the Indus to the Seas.

The spirit of Bhagavad-gītā is mentioned in Bhagavad-gītā itself. It is just like this: if we want to take a particular medicine, then we have to follow the directions written on the label. We cannot take the medicine according to our own whim or the direction of a friend. It must be taken according to the directions on the label or the directions given by a physician. Similarly, Bhagavad-gītā should be taken or accepted as it is directed by the speaker himself. The speaker of Bhagavad-gītā is Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa. He is mentioned on every page of Bhagavad-gītā as the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Bhagavān. Of course the word "bhagavān" sometimes refers to any powerful person or any powerful demigod, and certainly here Bhagavān designates Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa as a great personality, but at the same time we should know that Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa is the Supreme Personality of Godhead, as is confirmed by all great ācāryas (spiritual masters) like Śaṅkarācārya, Rāmānujācārya, Madhvācārya, Nimbārka Svāmī, Śrī Caitanya Mahāprabhu and many other authorities of Vedic knowledge in India. The Lord Himself also establishes Himself as the Supreme Personality of Godhead in the Bhagavad-gītā, and He is accepted as such in the Brahma-saṁhitā and all the Purāṇas, especially the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, known as the Bhāgavata Purāṇa (Kṛṣṇas tu bhagavān svayam). Therefore we should take Bhagavad-gītā as it is directed by the Personality of Godhead Himself. In the Fourth Chapter of the Gītā the Lord says: (1) imaṁ vivasvate yogaṁ proktavān aham avyayam vivasvān manave prāha manur ikṣvākave 'bravīt (2) evaṁ paramparā-prāptam imaṁ rājarṣayo viduḥ sa kāleneha mahatā yogo naṣṭaḥ parantapa (3) sa evāyaṁ mayā te 'dya yogaḥ proktaḥ purātanaḥ bhakto 'si me sakhā ceti rahasyaṁ hy etad uttamam Here the Lord informs Arjuna that this system of yoga, the Bhagavad-gītā, was first spoken to the sun-god, and the sun-god explained it to Manu, and Manu explained it to Ikṣvāku, and in that way, by disciplic succession, one speaker after another, this yoga system has been coming down. But in the course of time it has become lost. Consequently the Lord has to speak it again, this time to Arjuna on the Battlefield of Kurukṣetra.

...there is much more to matter than modern science currently would like to acknowledge. By developing insights about the observer, we can describe matter in a new way.

VEDIC HYMNS TO THE UNKNOWN GOD In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. As soon as born, he alone was the lord of all that is. He established the earth and this heaven:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? He who gives breath, he who gives strength, whose command all the bright gods revere, whose shadow is immortality, whose shadow is death:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? He who through his might became the sole king of the breathing and twinkling world, who governs all this, man and beast:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? He through whose might these snowy mountains are, and the sea, they say, with the distant river; he of whom these regions are indeed the two arms:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? He through whom the awful heaven and the earth were made fast, he through whom the ether was established, and the firmament; he who measured the air in the sky:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? He to whom heaven and earth, standing firm by his will, look up, trembling in their mind; he over whom the risen sun shines forth:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? When the great waters went everywhere, holding the germ, and generating light, then there arose from them the breath of the gods:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? He who by his might looked even over the waters which held power and generated the sacrifice, he who alone is God above all gods:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? May he not hurt us, he who is the begetter of the earth, or he, the righteous, who begat the heaven; he who also begat the bright and mighty waters:—Who is the God to whom we shall offer sacrifice? Pragâpati, no other than thou embraces all these created things. May that be ours which we desire when sacrificing to thee: may we be lords of wealth!

Some look on the soul as amazing, some describe him as amazing, and some hear of him as amazing, while others, even after hearing about him, cannot understand him at all. —Bhagavad Gita

It is difficult to fathom that any Indian military journal would present an appraisal of the Kurukshetra War, which features the Hindu god Vishnu and is described in the Hindu Vedic epic poem the Mahabharata.

Rabi-’ah’s achievement built on a tradition of female literacy, scholarship and intellectual creativity reaching back to the dawn of thought. Countless ancient myths ascribe the birth of language to women or goddesses, in a ritual formulation of the primeval truth that the first words any human being hears are the mother’s. In Indian mythology the Vedic goddess Vac means “language”; she personifies the birth of speech, and is represented as a maternal mouth-cavity open to give birth to the living word. The Hindu prayer to Devaki, mother of Krishna, begins, “Goddess of the Logos, Mother of the Gods, One with Creation, thou art Intelligence, the Mother of Science, the Mother of Courage . . .

Whatever was said about Religion was meant human being and nothing else. As for example the Vedic sages said, ‘Aham Brahmasmi’ (I am the Brahma or God), what did he mean? After all he was a human being. It can be said like this, ‘Above all human being is the greatest.

In this world man is not meant to toil like hogs. He must be intelligent to realize the importance of human life and refuse to act like an ordinary animal. A human being should realize the aim of his life, and this direction is given in all Vedic literatures, and the essence is given in Bhagavad-gītā. Vedic literature is meant for human beings, not for animals. Animals can kill other living animals, and there is no question of sin on their part, but if a man kills an animal for the satisfaction of his uncontrolled taste, he must be responsible for breaking the laws of nature. In the Bhagavad-gītā it is clearly explained that there are three kinds of activities according to the different modes of nature: the activities of goodness, of passion and of ignorance. Similarly, there are three kinds of eatables also: eatables in goodness, passion and ignorance. All of this is clearly described, and if we properly utilize the instructions of Bhagavad-gītā, then our whole life will become purified, and ultimately we will be able to reach the destination which is beyond this material sky.

cow dung is the stool of an animal, and according to smṛti or Vedic injunction, if one touches the stool of an animal he has to take a bath to purify himself. But in the Vedic scriptures cow dung is considered to be a purifying agent. One might consider this to be contradictory, but it is accepted because it is Vedic injunction, and indeed by accepting this, one will not commit a mistake; subsequently it has been proved by modern science that cow dung contains all antiseptic properties. So Vedic knowledge is complete because it is above all doubts and mistakes, and Bhagavad-gītā is the essence of all Vedic knowledge.

Another way of expressing this truth is to say that the appearance of the world-manifestation in and on the one Consciousness is simply the nature of That. All questions regarding the how and why of it are therefore alogical. It is like asking, “Why does light shine?” or “Why does a mind think?” Who knows why a desire arises? Who knows how a thought is formed? We are aware that our thinking processes are distinguishable from our background consciousness, which is merely a witness to the mind’s activity. We are aware that the thought-producing aspect of our mind is superimposed on our consciousness, but we don’t know how or why. It simply occurs. We say that it is merely the nature of consciousness to manifest as thought. Similarly, the nature of That, the one Consciousness, is to manifest as the phenomenal world. “Perhaps,” says our Vedic author, “even He doesn’t know the how or why of it.

Even Indian scholars have been trained to feel apologetic or disdainful about what has come to be viewed as the Vedas’ gross exaggerations and fantasies concerning the ancients.