Thanks to Parthasarathy-ji for alerting me to this recent interview of Jeffrey Armstrong. I found it fascinating for the breadth of subjects it covered and the insights it offered. Some excerpts below (emphasis added). As some of you may know,
Jeffrey Armstrong is an award-winning author of numerous books on Vedic knowledge..He is a philosopher, practitioner and teacher of the Vedas for the past 40 years. He has degrees in Psychology, History & Comparative Religions, and Literature and had a successful career as an executive in Silicon Valley before turning to teaching full time. Jeffrey Armstrong (Kavindra Rishi) is the founder of VASA – Vedic Academy of Sciences & Arts in Vancouver Canada. ..(and) a global advocate for the Sanatana Dharma Culture.
***
Daily Bell: How did you get interested in Indian culture and religion?
Jeffrey Armstrong: Religion is the wrong word to use for India’s teachings. Religion is a word that is more accurately applied to the Middle Eastern Abrahamic cultures. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are religions. The origin of the word religion, from the Latin, is re-legare (a legalistic system of rules given by God) or ‘bound by rules.’ Re = tied up or connected by, and ligion = legare = ligaments = to tie, bind or bandage. The usual idea is that the practitioner of a religion is bound up in rules or laws. This especially applies to the three Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, whereas the spiritual practices of India are called a Dharma Culture. The main difference is religions generally have one book of rules and stories whereas a Dharma culture has a library of spiritual and material knowledge aimed at understanding who we really are and how to properly use everything around us…
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Daily Bell: What do you believe in and why? What application does it have to the West?
Jeffrey Armstrong: My lifelong effort has been to try to find things that are universally true rather than relatively true…
What we now call the West is the outgrowth of a tribal or city/state approach to living on the planet. This means if you take care of your tribe, you are seen as good. So, to all those tribes who were fighting against each other for thousands of years in a series of wars, that essentially meant that as long as the spoils of the wars were brought back and shared amongst the tribe, they were good. Alexander the Great was a prime example of this. He went out to rape, pillage and conquer, and was a monster to the rest of the world, but was considered great by his people, hence the name…India, on the other hand, is the only culture of its size in the world that has never gone out and tried to spread its beliefs by war. In fact, it has consistently given shelter to anyone from any culture. So, to compare histories, the west is a competitive, war-based civilization and India has been a nurturing, cooperation-based civilization on an epic scale…
Daily Bell: Are there lost Indian cities under the sea?
Jeffrey Armstrong: There is at least one that was discovered in 2001 in the Bay of Cambay, which is off the west coast of India. In a routine, environmental scan of the bottom of the sea, a city was discovered which turns out to have the largest megalithic stones of any city in ancient times; artifacts were dated to about 10,000 years ago. ..The city sits in about 150 feet of water, which indicates it was built before the last melting of the polar ice caps, which most geologists date conservatively at about 12,000 years ago. It appears to have had a building format similar to the cities of Harappa and Mohendro Daro (3000-5000 BCE), which were previously thought to be the oldest cities of India ..But this underwater city off the coast of India suggests, conservatively, 15,000 years of sophisticated human history in India.
Daily Bell: Did the ancient Indians know how to fly and to build flying machines? Are there replicas of these machines on the tops of ancient temples?
Jeffrey Armstrong: On the latter question, I am not sure I have heard that there are replicas of the airplanes or Vimanas as they were referred to in the epic histories of India. But there are two Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the two epic poems that supposedly took place 5,000 years ago and over 1.2 million years ago in India, and the Ramayana actually begins with a scene in which a very sophisticated stolen airplane is being flown all over the Earth. Such ancient stories, thousands and thousands of years old, have no logical reason for talking about airplanes in any modern sense. Yet they do.
…Daily Bell: Did ancient Indians consort with aliens and travel through time or to other dimensions?
Jeffrey Armstrong: The cosmology of India describes our universe as having fourteen parallel realities on multiple levels, all existing and intersecting within the material realm in which we are currently living.
One of those levels is called the Deva realm. The Deva realm is supposedly the home of the beings who actually conduct the laws of nature to which we are subject. This view of Divine helpers is much misunderstood as the so-called many gods or also as demi-gods, but in India they were never viewed as God, gods, demi-gods or in competition with God. They were, instead, viewed as souls (or more accurately atmas) like us, but living on another plane of material reality and performing specific jobs as administrators of the laws of nature. So, gods is the wrong word for many reasons, the main one being it implies ‘God,’ which is not an Indian word in the first place. These beings are called Devas, meaning beings who ‘work in the light’ assisting the Supreme Being by enforcing the laws of nature that allow the universe to function as it does.
…So as for the alien question, it was always the view in India that there are other dimensions of intelligent life in our universe who communicate with humans and that the Devas specifically are the intelligences operating behind the laws of Nature. …The Vedas describe infinitely multiple universes filled with many Earth-like and other diverse planets and many kinds of intelligent beings living in these other dimensions, some in contact with this realm.
The closest modern analogs are found in some of the theories of quantum physics, one being string theory, which suggests there are something like eleven parallel realities that are running simultaneously with ours. This idea in physics, of parallel realities crisscrossing, is undeniably reminiscent of the ancient teachings from India…
***
Somewhat Related: Of Vimanas and Time Travel and Where is Krishana’s Dwaraka? by Varnam