The paradigm of the Vedic culture presented in the Bhagavad-Gita sheds a lot of new and interesting light on the question of the nature of time and of our history, and this week we explored the extraordinary and compelling cosmology of the universe that the Gita sets forth. We are accustomed to a linear view of our time and our history here, as taught and supposed to us through the Western cultural paradigm, but the cosmology of the Gita offers something different. We discussed the cyclical nature of time, of periods of history known as yugas which constantly repeat over and over again, and we discussed how the science of the Vedas predates and hold true many of the great “discoveries” of our modern times, such as the theory of relativity, the health benefits of yoga and meditation, and the multiple universe theories of quantum physics. Ultimately the Gita calls for us to transcend these material cosmological elements to understand the nature of spiritual reality, but in our discussion we came away with a lot of thought-provoking ideas that showed us that what we know to be time and space and our own history could be much more than what we have been told or taught before.
