John Dobson’s Equations of Maya – Br. Shankara

Sunday, December 13, 2015

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John Dobson
John Dobson

We end the year with study of Jnana Yoga, an approach to spiritual realization through discrimination, reason, and release of the unreal. The goal is liberation, freedom from all limitation. Jnana (Advaita Vedanta) teaches that doubt, fear, and misery are caused by seeing inaccurately.

PDF for downloadJohn Dobson’s Equations of Maya

[Note: Br. Shankara asked Cyndi Craven to read the text as he was feeling under the weather the day of the talk. He is much better now.]

John Dobson — astronomer, student of human history, and Vedanta philosopher — wrote:

Modern cosmologists usually take non-existence for granted and hope to get the Universe out of nothing. But must we assume that in the absence of the Universe and in the absence of space and time there would be nothing? Or can we, without so rash an assumption, find clues to what might remain if instead we take existence for granted but leave out space and time? Could what remains, through apparition or maya, appear as this Universe? Can we, from what remains, get a Universe of gravity, electricity and inertia?

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” — Albert Einstein

Dobson was a master of explaining Advaita Vedanta simply. In this talk we explore and discuss his detailed, yet very clear descriptions of how Brahman appears to us as this Universe.

“There cannot be two existences, only one.” 
— Swami Vivekananda