Your Holiness,
Please accept my prostrated obeisances. All glories to your good self. All glories to His Divine Grace.
HpS - ASA - AGTSP. Prostrated obeisances sounds a little scarey. Its nice to see things in the light of Srila Prabhupada!
I thank you so much for responding to my letter and for your encouragement.
I do apologize but I couldn’t conceive of a different system of logic which can be used to expound on reality. Unfortunately I do not know which other cultures have a different way of thinking and what their mode of thinking is. I will be very grateful if you could kindly inform me as to how I can gain more knowledge of these cultures that are able to conceive of a different understanding of reality.
HpS - Many studies on cross-cultural anthropology. The person we know the best and like very much is E.T. Hall. His books are on Amazon.com and maybe in libraries in India or available as e-books.
I do agree that I think in Euclidean terms but the only other geometry I know of is Minkowskian geometry (which is used to describe curved space) and I couldn’t conceive of a different understanding. You asked me why an infinite regression is impossible. After some thought I had to admit that in all probability there is an infinite regression but I would like to still say that matter cannot regress indefinitely. I will try to explain why I feel so.
An infinite regression means that the cause effect relationship has been going on for an infinite amount of time. Lets imagine we plot a graph of volume of matter produced, verses time, with time on the x-axis. Let’s assume that the time arrived at now is called t.
Thus time has travelled a distance from –infinity to t, in other words it has travelled for a distance of infinity + t, which is infinity which is mathematically impossible because in terms of modern scientific understanding infinity cannot be approached by any entity including space-time.
HpS - Complicated! Verbal communication required! Infinite = Without End, no? Set of all positive and negative integers, and the set of all positive integers are both infinite, but they are not "co-numerous".
Another problem with infinite time is that according to the second law of thermodynamics entropy goes on increasing. Thus after an infinite amount of time, the entropy will be infinity which means there ought to be total disorder and everything ought to be at the same temperature neither of which is observed.
HpS - Wait 10 to the 164th more years!
Then space has to be infinite to account for infinite amount of matter or else matter will be infinitely dense because there will be an infinite amount of matter and only finite amount of space to accommodate it. Yet we observe that space is finite.
Before the Big Bang theory became well known, there was an understanding that the universe is infinite and has always been existing. Yet there are several problems with this paradigm as well which are now acknowledged by modern scientists like Stephen Hawking.
Thus I finally concluded that the cause of all causes is not an infinite regression of matter but of something that can violate the laws of matter, in other words it has to be an infinite regression of spirit. It seems to me that Brahman has been regressing infinitely.
I will be very grateful for your comments and/ or corrections of what I have expressed.
Your servant
jashodev
HpS - Invocation to Isopanishad it nice! In general this is not a good forum for such ideas because it requires a lot of definition of terms and other things. Seems Lord Caitanya is offering the idea of direct experience of the Cause of all Causes, no?
