And then you know, a century and a half later, guess
what? The West is saying that there are all these multiple
millions and uncountable world systems. It’s all expanding,
and whether it’s going to contract or not contract, we do
not know. Everything of the Indian philosophies that was
laughed at as ridiculous, now is acknowledged as the
way it is, according to the West.My mother-in-law is a nurse, and she had been studying
both her nursing and Indian explanations of karma when
she came across a passage in one of the early Indian
books. If you look at who has the biggest karmic impact,
in terms of doing a good action or a bad action, one of
the biggest is the parent, the mother in particular. And
then there was a recorded case with one mother who had
the ovum and another mother who carried the baby to
term. At the time she was reading it, it was a long time
ago when surrogacy wasn’t done yet, and my mother-in-
law was saying, “Why would they even speculate on this?
Why is this in a book from 500 BC or 300 BC?”A few years later they did exactly that. Answer the question
now: Which one has the karma of being the mother?One of my personal hobbies is to study quantum physics,
and luckily I have enough mathematical and scientific
training that I can sort of follow it. What I find fascinating
is that when I read one of the early Indian philosophers,
Nagarjuna, and his presentation of the Middle Way, he
says that nothing exists the way it appears to, but that
doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. When I put that up against
the quantum worldview, as I understand it, there’s a way
I can interpret the data coming from quantum theory that
lines up pretty closely with what was said 2000 years ago
in India. So we’re going back to what the Indians have
always been teaching, and what the West is finally coming
to.
Another great example is that the English and other
scholars, who encountered Indian philosophy in the 1800s,
dismissed it as very speculative: There was this idea that
there’s not just a world, but countless world systems;
these huge universal world systems. What were they
thinking? They were just trying to do this kind of mental
gymnastics and see who could outdo whom, and turn to
describing the physical world.
34 Heartfulness