Alan Watts on "Ex nihilo nihil fit"

[godnotgod]

Right but one can not challenge his ideas.

Many have challenged the Buddha, even in his lifetime, and he even encouraged such questioning. But debate cannot go on forever. The problem with Western man is that he has mistaken the idea of every issue having two sides as the goal rather than the process, and so he thinks there must always be a debate. At some point, a solution is reached as to what, exactly, is the truth, and that issue becomes resolved.

If you are going to criticize the ideas of the Buddha, don't just stop there. By all means, let us hear your criticism to see if it is valid. So far, all you have succeeded in doing is to say he is fat and full of BS. Can you lift yourself up out of the muck and look intelligent for a change? We are all waiting with baited breath. Just show us one something that you know that the Buddha was incorrect about.

 

[Beyondo]

if you are going to criticize the ideas of the buddha, don't just stop there. By all means, let us hear your criticism to see if it is valid. So far, all you have succeeded in doing is to say he is fat and full of bs. Can you lift yourself up out of the muck and look intelligent for a change? We are all waiting with baited breath. Just show us one something that you know that the buddha was incorrect about.

everything...lol

 

[godnotgod]

everything...lol

You see? You're just blowing hot air through your roof brain. You really don't know anything about what the Buddha's teachings actually are, and want to attempt to belittle him by referring instead to his physique, which has nothing to do with Enlightenment. We usually refer to such allusions as ad hominem attacks, a tactic often used by the immature.:sorry1:

 

[Beyondo]

gotnotgod:

Think Buddha not Buddha.

Read some of my post you'll find that the unconscious produces the conscious. Ergo my title on my handle: Non-conscious intelligence.

Its not order that produces order...Thought you would have caught that one...

 

[godnotgod]

Ah, no its not. Again you're like any other religous fundamentalist looking at science to justify your beliefs...

My goodness! Are we getting the hits tonight, or what? Here yet is another prime example of how your logic fails you. A string of pearls, no less.

Buddhism is not a religion.

I am not a Buddhist.

I have no doctrine to push or be fundamentalist about.

I think Buddhism was around before science came into prominence, by a few thousand years, perhaps?

Zen is not about beliefs; it is about getting rid of them.

Reality needs no justification. It only is what it is, and one can only realize it.

I never stated that science was necessary to justify Eastern wisdom. If you were listening correctly, which you were not, you would have seen that what I was actually saying was the science is now confirming what the Buddha had said centuries ago. If anything, science is using Buddhism to justify science!!

 

[godnotgod]

gotnotgod:

Think Buddha not Buddha.

Bingo! Again, you prove how much you are off the mark! Buddhism is not about Buddha. It is about liberation from suffering.

Read some of my post you'll find that the unconscious produces the conscious. Ergo my title on my handle: Non-conscious intelligence.

Its not order that produces order...Thought you would have caught that one...

Beyondo, at this point, I cannot trust much of anything you come up with. You have not shown your conclusions to be valid ones.

The relationship of chaos to order is nothing new. It is part and parcel of ancient Hindu cosmology dating back thousands of years:

"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, ( A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."

It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness."

Alan Watts


That last paragraph is a short answer to your question about what Eastern wisdom has done for mankind in comparison to science.

 

[godnotgod]

Speed of Light:

One such book is the celebrated commentary on the Rig Veda by Sayana (c. 1315-1387), a minister in the court of King Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in South India. In his commentary on the 4th verse of the hymn 1.50 of the Rig Veda on the sun, he says:

"Tatha cha smaryate yojananam sahasre dve dve shate dve cha yogane ekena nimishardhena kramamana namo ‘stu ta iti "

'Thus it is remembered: O Sun, bow to you, you who traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a minute."


The Puranas define 1 nimesha to be equal to 16/75 seconds. 1 yojana is about 9 miles. Substituting in Sayana’s statement we get 186,000 per second.

Sayana’s statement was printed in 1890 in the famous edition of Rig Veda edited by Max Muller, the German Sanskritist . He claimed to have used several three or four hundred year old manuscripts of Sayana’s commentary, written much before the time of Romer. Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the ancient book comes from one of the earliest Puranas, the Vayu, conservatively dated to at least 1,500 years old. The Puranas speak of the creation and destruction of the universe in cycles of 8.64 billion years, that is quite close to currently accepted value regarding the time of the Big Bang.

Hindu Wisdom - Hindu Cosmology

 

[Beyondo]

Bingo! Again, you prove how much you are off the mark! Buddhism is not about Buddha. It is about liberation from suffering.



Beyondo, at this point, I cannot trust much of anything you come up with. You have not shown your conclusions to be valid ones.

The relationship of chaos to order is nothing new. It is part and parcel of ancient Hindu cosmology dating back thousands of years:

"To the philosophers of India, however, Relativity is no new discovery, just as the concept of light years is no matter for astonishment to people used to thinking of time in millions of kalpas, ( A kalpa is about 4,320,000 years). The fact that the wise men of India have not been concerned with technological applications of this knowledge arises from the circumstance that technology is but one of innumerable ways of applying it."

It is, indeed, a remarkable circumstance that when Western civilization discovers Relativity it applies it to the manufacture of atom-bombs, whereas Oriental civilization applies it to the development of new states of consciousness."

Alan Watts


That last paragraph is a short answer to your question about what Eastern wisdom has done for mankind in comparison to science.

Absolutely laughable! Relativity is not used to make atom bombs! Do some research because that statement proves Alan to be ignorant of science!

In fact relativity conflicts with quantum mechanics, Einstein went to his death bed finding QM unacceptable...

QM is used to build atom bombs, but you never mentioned that QM was an idea of the ancients, but knowing you and how you love to justify your beliefs with science will state: "Oh Yeah Buddhism or Hinduism came up with quantum mechanics too!" LOL.


Buddhism is a religion, you have beliefs in a hell, an after life, etc. Those are religious beliefs.

 

[Beyondo]

Speed of Light:

One such book is the celebrated commentary on the Rig Veda by Sayana (c. 1315-1387), a minister in the court of King Bukka I of the Vijayanagar Empire in South India. In his commentary on the 4th verse of the hymn 1.50 of the Rig Veda on the sun, he says:

"Tatha cha smaryate yojananam sahasre dve dve shate dve cha yogane ekena nimishardhena kramamana namo ‘stu ta iti "

'Thus it is remembered: O Sun, bow to you, you who traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a minute."


The Puranas define 1 nimesha to be equal to 16/75 seconds. 1 yojana is about 9 miles. Substituting in Sayana’s statement we get 186,000 per second.

Sayana’s statement was printed in 1890 in the famous edition of Rig Veda edited by Max Muller, the German Sanskritist . He claimed to have used several three or four hundred year old manuscripts of Sayana’s commentary, written much before the time of Romer. Further support for the genuineness of the figure in the ancient book comes from one of the earliest Puranas, the Vayu, conservatively dated to at least 1,500 years old. The Puranas speak of the creation and destruction of the universe in cycles of 8.64 billion years, that is quite close to currently accepted value regarding the time of the Big Bang.

Hindu Wisdom - Hindu Cosmology

First of all what you quoted say half a minute which make:

19,818 miles/ 30 secs = 660 miles per second

Which is far off 186,000 miles per second, but I looked up the Hindu time units:

Here's a link to Hindu time units:

Appendix:Hindu units of measurement - Wiktionary


Small units of time used in the Vedas

• a trasarenu is the combination of 6 celestial atoms.
• a truti is the time needed to integrate 3 trasarenus, or 1/1687.5th of a second.
• a vedha is 100 trutis.
• a lava is 3 vedhas.[1]
• a nimesha is 3 lavas, or a blink.

a nimesha is therefore [(1/1687.5 sec) * 100trutis *3vedhas*3lava] = .533 seconds

1 Yojana = 9 miles, 2202 Yojanas = 19,818 miles

half a nimesha = .267 seconds

19,818 mile/.267 seconds = 74,227 miles per second.

Hindus are still way off.

Here's the link that states light traverses 2202 Yojanas in half a nimesha:

http://scienceofhinduism.blogspot.com/2010/02/speed-of-light.html

The site however states that a nimesha is 0.21333 seconds which is incorrect.

 

[godnotgod]

Absolutely laughable! Relativity is not used to make atom bombs! Do some research because that statement proves Alan to be ignorant of science!

In fact relativity conflicts with quantum mechanics, Einstein went to his death bed finding QM unacceptable...

A quick search comes up with the followng statement from the website "All About Science":

"Probably the most profound scientific advancement resulting from special relativity was the equation of E=mc2 which provided the relationship between mass and energy. This equation led to the development of the atomic bomb.

Another significant area where the relativity theory has provided a better understanding of our universe is in quantum mechanics and small particle motions. Here it was identified that radioactive particles appear to have a higher half-life when approaching the speed of light because a clock on the particle appears to be running slower from our observation reference frame. The General Theory of Relativity is one of the two main pillars of the Big Bang Theory."

Einstein's Theory of Relativity

*****************************************************

.....and from the site "Following the Path of Discovery", we have:

"Virtually no one accepted Einstein's proposal [photoelectric effect] until a decade later when the American physicist Robert Andrews Millikan experimentally confirmed the theory.
Thus Einstein's efforts helped out with the development of the quantum theory (mechanics).
For this contribution, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for 1921.

Among the theory's main assertions and consequences are the propositions that the maximum velocity attainable in the universe is that of light; that objects appear to contract in the direction of motion and vice versa; that the rate of a moving clock seems to decrease as its velocity increases; the results of observers in different systems are equally correct; and that mass and energy are equivalent and interchangeable properties according to Einstein's famous formula:

E=mc²

Though Einstein did not invent the atomic bomb, this equation laid the theoretical background for it."

http://www.juliantrubin.com/einsteininvent.html



So not only did relativity theory lead to the development of the atomic bomb, as our illustrious Mr. Alan Watts has told us, but it also led to the clarification of QM.

 

[godnotgod]

First of all what you quoted say half a minute which make:

19,818 miles/ 30 secs = 660 miles per second

Which is far off 186,000 miles per second, but I looked up the Hindu time units:

Here's a link to Hindu time units:

Appendix:Hindu units of measurement - Wiktionary


Small units of time used in the Vedas

• a trasarenu is the combination of 6 celestial atoms.
• a truti is the time needed to integrate 3 trasarenus, or 1/1687.5th of a second.
• a vedha is 100 trutis.
• a lava is 3 vedhas.[1]
• a nimesha is 3 lavas, or a blink.

a nimesha is therefore [(1/1687.5 sec) * 100trutis *3vedhas*3lava] = .533 seconds

1 Yojana = 9 miles, 2202 Yojanas = 19,818 miles

half a nimesha = .267 seconds

19,818 mile/.267 seconds = 74,227 miles per second.

Hindus are still way off.

Here's the link that states light traverses 2202 Yojanas in half a nimesha:

Hinduism - The Scientific Religion: Speed of Light

The site however states that a nimesha is 0.21333 seconds which is incorrect.

From "Science of Hinduism", we have:

"Light due to the Sun travels 2202 Yojanas in half a Nimesha"


Now for the calculation. Converting the units used in ancient India to those used presently :

1 Yojana = 9 miles

2202 Yojanas = 19818 miles

1 nimesha = 0.21333 seconds

1/2 nimesha = 0.10665 seconds


Speed = distance / time = 19818 / 0.10665 = 185822 miles per second = 299044 kms per second.


The value calculated by Michelson and Morley was approximated to 186000 miles per second, which is used these days along with the more common 3 x 10^8 metres per second.

Hinduism - The Scientific Religion: Speed of Light



I will research the accuracy of the nimesha as being 0.21333 secs. later.

Update:

From the book: "Units of Measurement: Past, Present, and Future", by SV Gupta, we have:

1 nimesh = 0.21333 ~ 0.2 s

I could not cut and paste the associated values, but you can find it all here:

Units of Measurement: Past, Present ... - Google Books

I have a tendency to trust this book by a scholar more than I do 'Wictionary'

If you wish further confirmation of this value, please only Google 'nimesha 0.21333', which will yield a substantial number of hits, whereas Googling 'nimesha .533' yields only one hit, and that is your post!

 

[godnotgod]

QM is used to build atom bombs, but you never mentioned that QM was an idea of the ancients, but knowing you and how you love to justify your beliefs with science will state: "Oh Yeah Buddhism or Hinduism came up with quantum mechanics too!" LOL.

Oh, no, no, no, sweetie! Not "too", as you would like us to believe, making your modern scientists 'first', but "long before". Don't get coy, Roy! We're hip to your trix!

For now, my dear, just a tidbit or two.....We would'nt want to overburden that oversized Big Brain of yours with too much input. Why, it might explode in a Bigg-a Bang-a, which would result in a Grande Bungatorre, and then where would we be?......Hmmmmmm?

Advaita and Science

"According to some followers of Advaita, it may very well be a place where the scientific world intersects with the spiritual world. They point to the relationships between mass, frequency, and energy that 20th century physics has established and the Advaitic 'Unity of the Universe' as the common ground. They feel that these relationships, formalized as equations by Planck and Einstein, suggest that the whole mesh of the Universe blend into a One that exhibits itself as many (namely, mass, energy, wave etc), and that this follows Advaita's view that everything is but the manifestation of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent "One". They also connect the De Broglie waves of modern physics to Aum in Hindu philosophy. Conversely, scientist Erwin Schrödinger was also a Vedantist and claimed to have been inspired by it in his contributions to quantum mechanics. Fritjof Capra's book, The Tao of Physics, is one among several that pursue this viewpoint as it investigates the relationship between modern, particularly quantum, physics and the core philosophies of various Eastern religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism."

Advaita Vedanta

"This hawk of truth is swift, and flies with a still cry,
a small sweetmeat for the eyes of night"

 

[Beyondo]

From "Science of Hinduism", we have:

"Light due to the Sun travels 2202 Yojanas in half a Nimesha"


Now for the calculation. Converting the units used in ancient India to those used presently :

1 Yojana = 9 miles

2202 Yojanas = 19818 miles

1 nimesha = 0.21333 seconds

1/2 nimesha = 0.10665 seconds


Speed = distance / time = 19818 / 0.10665 = 185822 miles per second = 299044 kms per second.


The value calculated by Michelson and Morley was approximated to 186000 miles per second, which is used these days along with the more common 3 x 10^8 metres per second.

Hinduism - The Scientific Religion: Speed of Light



I will research the accuracy of the nimesha as being 0.21333 secs. later.

Update:

From the book: "Units of Measurement: Past, Present, and Future", by SV Gupta, we have:

1 nimesh = 0.21333 ~ 0.2 s

I could not cut and paste the associated values, but you can find it all here:

Units of Measurement: Past, Present ... - Google Books

I have a tendency to trust this book by a scholar more than I do 'Wictionary'

If you wish further confirmation of this value, please only Google 'nimesha 0.21333'

Ah, the time units I sited are the same ones sited on the site you've referenced under the heading "Smaller Units of Time Used in the Vedas". :sarcastic

Learn to read...

The fact that there are two time units for Nimesha is laughable, could one say down right supiscious...Perhaps one is conveniently set to match a calculation for the speed of light? Wait! Go and meditate on that, then float in the air and come back with the answer. :jester3:

 

[Beyondo]

Behold thy Buddha, though this one is not quite as fat! :jester3:

 

[Beyondo]

Advaita and Science

What a joke! The Hindus didn't even know what the term science is. If they did then they would be the ones selling Indian teenagers iPods 3000 years ago! :jester3:

 

[Beyondo]

"follows Advaita's view that everything is but the manifestation of an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent "One".

Such a one is a non-conscious intelligence formalized from chaos to produce the virtual reality that we experience, but you will reject the idea not based on understanding but on your bias beliefs that never require validation. I at least call for the validation of my ideas before they can be accepted as fact, but you call that ego.

Fritjof Capra's book, The Tao of Physics

The book sucked, do you want my copy of it?

Why didn't Buddha stop gorging at every meal? Cause he thought the food he ate wasn't real. :jester3:

 

[Beyondo]

What did Buddha say after he farted? That couldn't have been me I don't exist. :jester3:

 

[godnotgod]

The Wictionary reference you provide states that a truti is the time needed to integrate 3 trasarenus, or 1/1687.5th of a second, which calculates to a nimesha as being .533 seconds. However, the following excerpt from a post on the subject of the speed of light as calculated by ancient Hindus states that a nimesha is 16/75ths of a second, which yields the correct value we are seeking:

The Speed of Light

It is to be noted that Bhatta Bhaskara (probably in 10th century) made the same statement in his commentary on Taittiriya Brahmana. He says this to be an old Puranic tradition.

Yojana is an ancient unit of length. Arthasastra defines it as being equal to 8,000 dhanus, which is equivalent to 9 miles. Nimesa is an ancient unit of time. One nimesa is equal to 16/75 seconds. Thus 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesa is equal to 185,794 miles per second after conversion. This is very close to the value of 186,000 miles per second for the speed of light. Why would Sayana call this the speed of the Sun? The speed of the Sun calculated by Indian astronomers was very small compared to this value. It turns out that Sayana was following the ancient Indian tradition of codifying the knowledge. In this code Sun represents light. The discovery of this code is described in the book “Vedic Physics: Scientific Origin of Hinduism”.

This subject has been discussed in detail in a scholarly article ("The Speed of Light and Puranic Cosmology", Subhash Kak, "Computing Science in Ancient India", editors T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak, 1998, pp 80-90). More information about the book is as follows:

Computing Science in Ancient India
Edited by T. R. N. Rao and Subhash Kak
Published by Center for Advanced Computer Studies in 1998
University of Southwestern Louisiana 70504
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 98-86952
ISBN: 0-9666512-0-0

The speed of light - Hindunet Forums

You can download the .PDF file from

http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/9804020

for "The Speed of Light and Puranic Cosmology" where you will find the value of 16/75ths of a second given for one nimesh on page 2 of the document.

 

[godnotgod]

Ah, the time units I sited are the same ones sited on the site you've referenced under the heading "Smaller Units of Time Used in the Vedas". :sarcastic

Please be more specific as to which time units you cited. I did not cite the "Small Units of Time Used in the Vedas" as that is from your Wictionary citation, and also found in Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_units_of_measurement

 

[godnotgod]

First of all what you quoted say half a minute which make:

19,818 miles/ 30 secs = 660 miles per second

Which is far off 186,000 miles per second

Here is the correct calculation:


1 Yojana = 9 miles

2202 Yojanas = 19818 miles

1 nimesha = 0.21333 seconds

1/2 nimesha = 0.10665 seconds


Speed = distance / time = 19818 / 0.10665 = 185822 miles per second