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Traditional, orthodox religious persons in India offer a daily prayer called the sandhya vandana, during which consecrated moment of inward religious communion a special prayer is offered to Surya, the great resplendence that we behold in the sky. In the Rigveda there is a thrilling series of prayers addressed to the Sun, one of which is recited daily by people performing the sandhya vandana. It begins like this: citraṁ devānāmudagādanīkaṁ cakṣurmitrasya varuṇasyāghneḥ; āprā dyāvāpṛthivī antarikṣaṃ sūrya ātmā jaghatastasthuṣaśca (R.V. 1.115.1-2). Sūrya ātmā jaghatastasthuṣaśca: “The Sun is the soul of the world that moves, and also does not move.” This is a touching statement in this poignant prayer of a great rishi of the Veda.
Likewise, the renowned astronomer Varahamihira, who lived in ancient times and wrote the masterpiece of astronomy and astrology called Brihat Jataka, commences his great work with a prayer to the Sun in a beautifully worded verse: mūrtitve parikalpitaḥ śaśa bhṛto vartmā apunar janmanām ātmā ity ātma vidāṁ kratuś ca yajatāṁ bhartā amara jyotiṣām, lokānāṁ pralaya udbhava sthiti vibhuś ca anekadhā yaḥ śrutau vācaṁ naḥ sa dadātv aneka kiraṇas trailokya dīpo raviḥ (B.J. 1). Thus the Brihat Jataka of Varahamihira, the great astronomical work, commences. This is, again, a beautiful, stirring soul speaking in this verse. “Origin of the Moon,” thus he begins the prayer. Mūrtitve parikalpitaḥ śaśa bhṛta: “The Moon is the reflection of the Sun's glory.” Vartmā apunar janmanām: “The passage of those who will not return to the Earth after they attain salvation, that is the Sun. He is the passage, by treading which, you will not come back to this Earth.” Kratuś ca yajatāṁ : “All sacrifices that you offer are finally boiled down in a form of dedication to the Sun god.”
In the Manusmriti also a similar statement is made. Agnau prāstāhutiḥ samyag ādityam upatiṣṭhate (Manu 3.76). “The ahuti that you offer in the sacred fire during the havanas rises to the Sun.” This is said by a great person, Manu. And the Taittiriya Brahmana says yad vai manuravadat tad bheṣajam: “Whatever Manu has said is medicine; you have to take it and swallow it.”
Agnau prāstā-āhutiḥ samyag ādityam upatiṣṭhate. How does it reach? Ātmā ity ātma vidāṁ kratuś ca yajatāṁ bhartā amara jyotiṣām: “The soul of all those who have souls is the Sun. The visible God is here, blazing before you in the sky.” Lokānāṁ pralaya udbhava sthiti vibhuś: “The whole Solar System is guided by him. Its origin, its sustenance and its dissolution are controlled by the operation of this great orb of the Sun.” Śrutau vācaṁ naḥ sa dadātv aneka kiraṇas trailokya dīpo raviḥ: “May this light of the world bestow upon you all your pious wishes.” Thus Varahamihira invokes a great, brilliant representation of the Almighty before us.
The Upanishads often go into ecstasies. Prāņaḥ prajānām udayati eṣa sūryaḥ (P.U. 1.8) says the Prasana Upanishad: “Look, the very life of people is rising in the East. The prana of all people is here before you.” But ignorant people who are busily engaged in the humdrum activities of eat, drink and be merry do not really appreciate and do not gain even a little insight into the very causes of their existence in the world. How are we guarded? How are we protected? In the Upanishads, such as the Chhandogya, we have references to the fact that the Sun is perpetually aware of us. He is not a dead electric light hanging in the sky. The Sun has an intense awareness of every movement of all the atoms in the world.
Towards the end of the Moksha Dharma Parva of the Mahabharata there is a beautiful story which will make our hair stand on end. There was a poor man who lived in utter austerity, giving everything in charity, and to say that he was begging was to say very little. His condition was still worse. He was an intense tapasvin, devoted to japa of the name of the Lord, and with unimaginable tapas he left the world. The Moksha Dharma Parva of the Mahabharata says that the gods could see a brilliant flame rising from the body of this person. Human beings could not see it, but the gods saw it. It rushed through the rays of the Sun and entered that orb, where a brilliant, golden-hued divine being embraced it and made it his own. “There are more things in heaven and on Earth than your philosophy dreams of,” said Hamlet in the play of Shakespeare. There are more things in heaven and on Earth than your science and philosophy boast of. No one can understand what mysteries are operating in this world.
There is a little book called Supernature. What a wonder! These researches which were recorded in that little book tell us that creatures live at the bottom of the ocean in such depths, maybe a few miles deep into the water, where we cannot even imagine the touch of a ray of the Sun or the Moon. Snails and such creatures are crawling several miles deep in the water where the light of the Moon or the Sun cannot penetrate, and they know the movement of the Moon. How do they know? They say their movements are conditioned by the waxing and the waning conditions of the Moon, and their laying eggs, their mating, their living together, their activities are all conditioned by the movement of the Moon, whose rays they would have never seen in their life.
Modern science has gone into extremes of ecstasy when it proclaims that cosmic rays are the very substances of even our bodies. Even these solid substances like the desk, the wall, the bricks, and so on, are not really hard substances. They are condensed energy configurations of rays emanating from interstellar space, millions of light years away. What is their source? Only the Almighty knows. They have such impact.
The science of Indian psychology and astronomy is ultimately based on the doctrines of spiritual cosmology. There is, first of all, a vision of Reality, and then everything else in the world is explained. The inductive process of empirical reasoning was not the method of Indian thinkers. Their way of understanding was a different thing altogether. Our scriptures, our philosophies, are called darshanas, which means 'visions of Reality'. They saw directly, and then they explained everything in terms of these visions that they had. These philosophies of India are not textbooks written by the crotchety intellect of any particular person. It is not just a logical deduction that is possible under the conditions of syllogism. They are darshanas, visions. Ekaṁ sad viprā bahudhā vadanty (R.V. 1.164.46) said the original master of the Rigveda: “The one Being is visible here in all these forms.” In scriptures such as the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, the Vishnu Purana, even the Mahabharata, and also in some of the Upanishads, we have this description of the coming of the world in terms of the visions that these great masters had by way of direct revelation, and not by experiment and observation through a microscope or telescope, because any amount of observation through machines and instruments cannot probe the soul of a thing. The soul cannot be photographed by even the cleverest of cameras.
There is something called the soul and the substance of things. In this country of Bharatavarsha, this vision of the eternal base of all things was the foundation for every code of law and conduct, whether ethical, social or political. Especially the Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana, pre-eminently in the Third Skanda, we may say, gives us the way in which there was a coming down from the original unity into the form of this diversity.
There is a drastic difference between the cosmological doctrines of the West and the East. We are told that we come from apes. This is not what the Srimad Bhagavata says. We come from Adam and Eve, says the Bible. Adam was not a monkey; he was the son of the Almighty. Likewise, the Srimad Bhagavata says that we are the descendants of Manu and Satarupa, who are only the split forms of Brahma, the Creator himself. And the Srimad Bhagavata, in the Third Skanda, describes the manifestation of the cosmos. Aditya was born as one among the gods. Aditya is the son of Surya. He is said to be the progeny of Aditi, a consort of the great patriarch Kashyapa, who rose directly from Brahma's cosmic body, from whom many other great Prajapatis also arose: Marichi, Atri, Angirasa, Pulaha, Pulasthya, Krathu, Prachethasa, Bhrigu, Vasishtha and Narada. They are not persons. It is a blasphemy to call them human beings or persons because they are next to God Himself. Marichi, Atri, Angirasa, Pulaha, Pulasthya, Krathu, Prachethasa, Bhrigu, Vasishtha and Narada—these ten came directly from Brahma's body. There was no man-woman relationship. There were no woman and man. It was an androgynous integrality that was the creative Brahma. According to the Bible, the split into the positive and the negative took place at the time of Adam and Eve, and according to the Srimad Bhagavata it took place when Brahma divided himself into the two segments we call Manu and Satarupa. The same thing is told in the Manusmriti. Tad aṇḍam abhavad dhaimaṁ sahasrāṁśusamaprabham (Manu 1.9): “That anda, brahmanda, which was the body of the Creator, was resplendent like thousands of Suns, and it split into two.” The Chhandogya Upanishad says, “The Sun rose from it.” All these scriptures tell practically the same thing, in various languages.
The control that the Sun has over the destinies of people is something not fully understood and appreciated even by modern astronomers. Our astronomers are very clever and intelligent indeed, but their intelligence is limited to only the physical realm. They can measure things in terms of geometry, arithmetic, algebra, mathematics, and calculate things in terms of speed, gravitation and many other such phenomena, but all these mathematical wonders and even miracles, as we may call them, do not explain what is actually there in the world.
The sunspots, of which you are all aware, which rotate in a mysterious manner on the body of the Sun and appear once in twelve years, as they say, have such power upon the Earth. They have power even on a hair of our body, not merely on the gross ground on which we are sitting. These sunspots have such power over everything on Earth that even the rise and fall of the prices of the commodities in shops are said to be controlled by this. You will wonder what connection the Sun has got with the cost of wheat, rice, sugar and kerosene oil. How does the Sun know that all these things are happening?
Everything is known by every atom in the world. There is not even one single atom which is unaware. If you go deep into the mysteries of what we are told in the Chhandogya Upanishad particularly, there is no distance between the Sun and the Earth. The distance is only illusory, as is the distance between the Sun and the Earth that you see in a dream. You may have a dream of the Sun in the sky; why not? Millions of miles away you can see it shining, and you are here on Earth. Don't you think there is a tremendous distance? But where was the distance? There was no distance whatsoever. It was a compact presentation. Such is the compactness of the presentation of even the diversified phenomena of the world.
Even if we say there are millions of light years distance, and so on, in our arithmetical language, there is no such distance of light years to the internal prehensive forces. I am using a term of modern astronomers: a prehensive force which detects the operations of even the subtlest and the most remote things in the world, even if it be what we call light years away. Brahmaloka, Satyaloka, Janaloka and all the lokas that we speak of, which we are likely to reach after the shedding of this body if we are good enough, are not geographically distant places. They are not to be reached by airplanes or by any known vehicles. They are logical layers, not geographical layers kept one over the other like chapatis or dosas are kept. They are higher, no doubt; one is higher than the other just as the first standard of education is higher than kindergarten, the second standard is higher than the first, and the third standard is higher than the second. But are they kept one over the other like chapatis? They are one over the other, no doubt; one is higher than the other, but they are conceptually, logically higher, and not physically distinct things.
In a similar manner are these lokas. All the lokas are compact, and they are present in one and the same place. These great wonders—Bhuloka, Bhuvarloka, Svarloka, Maharloka, Janaloka, Tapolaka, Brahmaloka, Narayana, Vaikuntha, Siva, Devi, God and the Absolute—are not distant objects, and they are not away from us even by one millimetre. They are distant in the sense that our waking world is far away from the dream world. How far it is, we know very well. It is so far that it does not seem to be existing at all. When we are dreaming, the waking world does not exist, and the distance is unimaginable. But when we wake up, we find there was no distance.
In this indivisibility of the cosmos, therefore, the exertion of force upon one thing by another is not calculable merely by arithmetic. Empirical science, whatever be its advance, is ultimately a failure in the investigation of the realities of life. We cannot go into the depths of the essentials of life by even the acutest investigations of modern apparatus. We can have some inventions which may contribute to our physical comfort, but even this little physical comfort is not a creation of these instruments. They are only adjustments made with the existing laws of the universe.
Thus, the scriptures abound in their admonitions that even as the Sun is the source of the radiance of the Moon, the Atman within is the source of the radiance of our mind. There is some similarity between them. In astronomy, as well as in other schools of philosophic thought, the Sun is called Atmakaraka. All astrologers say that the Sun is Atmakaraka. Every astrologer who sees the kundali knows what this Atmakaraka means.
The Sun controls the very feelings, and perhaps the very destiny in life. And the Moon is said to be the presiding deity over the mind. This is well known even in psychological realms. We are very much influenced not merely by the Moon, but by every planet. This is the foundation of the science of astrology. People pooh-pooh astrology as a kind of quack doctrine. It is not a quack doctrine; it is a great science because the Solar System is one family, and the distance between the Earth, the other planets and the Sun is only an imagined illusion because it is a large electromagnetic field, and an electromagnetic field cannot have distance. Wherever you touch it, it is the same field.
Such a field is operating in the form of the Solar System, and the exertion of force by a little thing called the Moon upon the Earth is known during Full Moon days especially, when the ocean rises. Why should the ocean rise on the Full Moon? The pull of the Full Moon over the waters can be visibly seen because water is liquid; therefore, it wells up. It does not mean that the Moon is exerting influence only on the ocean. It is exerting this influence on the whole Earth. Because the Earth is hard and solid, we do not see it coming up like a wave. The Moon exerts influence on the brain, on every part of the body, not only on the waters of the ocean. But we see the rising of the waves of the ocean because of the liquidity of the water. If the Moon, which is a little chip off the block of the Sun, a little piece which is hovering around the Earth, can exert such an influence upon the mind and body of the whole Earth, what could be the influence of the Sun who, as they say, can determine even historical events, political wars, and the future peace and turmoil of human history? All these are hidden, as it were, in the womb of this wondrous, miraculous radiant orb of the Sun.
According to the known laws of thermodynamics, nothing can burn unless there is fuel. Where is the fuel in the Sun, which has been burning ever since the Vedas, or even before the grandfather of the Vedas was born? From where does the fuel come? They say there is helium, electromagnetic force, atomic energy in the Sun. But is there not combustion? When there is combustion, there is exhaustion of heat, and one day the Sun has to cool down. Any person who believes in this theory of entropy, as they call it, according to which there is diminution of heat by the exhaustion of the force in combustion, thinks that one day the Sun will become like a moon. There are people who think like that. But there are others who think that this is not the case. There is, no doubt, the exhaustion of heat when combustion takes place during the radiation of heat in the Sun; it is true. But there is something else also taking place inside the Sun. They say there is an automatic mechanism working inside, by which the constituents of the Sun replenish the heat by recharging themselves by an automatic battery, as it were, so that it never gets exhausted. How does it happen? We do not know.
We have in our bodies such a system going on. There is catabolic activity going on every day. We become old, weak, and depleted. But there is also a simultaneous anabolic activity. We are replenished, made strong. We may be very exhausted, tired, and we have not eaten anything. We are feeling downhearted. We go to bed, sleep well. When we get up, we are refreshed due to the anabolic activity. So when there is combustion and loss of energy and heat due to exhaustion and work, etc., there is also a peculiar inner activity of anabolism, a constructive force that is taking place. If it can happen biologically and physiologically in our body, why not in the cosmos? After all, we are a part of the cosmos. Evidently, what is happening in us is happening everywhere.
People say that one day the whole world will be cold like ice due to entropy. The heat of the universe will be equally distributed. As we know very well, space is so large, and if the little heat of the stars and the Sun, etc., are all distributed equally, there will be no heat anywhere. All will collapse and become cold and dead, and the world will be nowhere. They say, humorously, that when this theory was propounded by Sir James Jeans and others in America, some people never slept. They thought, “What is going to happen to us?” For days they never slept. It is not going to happen now, but the horror of it was such that they could not sleep because the whole world is going to collapse. But there are other astronomers who say this cannot be. Take for granted that this equidistribution of heat may one day bring about the coolness of the world and life may die, but did it arise one day? How did this world come? If that equidistribution of energy could be rearranged once again, and the world could have been manufactured in this way, and some mechanism was working for the purpose of the manufacture of this world by concentrating energy in the form of the Sun, the Solar System, and nebulae, etc., if it could have done it once, why should it not do it again?
Thus, the dissolution of the world is not the end of things. There is creation also, and our ancient scriptures and also our modern philosophies accept that there is cyclic motion of the universe. Towards the end of the Rigveda it says yathāpūrvamakalpayat (R.V. 10.190.3): “As it was, so it should be.”
Now, all these go to indicate that we are living in a well-managed cosmos. We are not living on Earth. Every constituent of our body is a constituent of everything in the world. The major force that sustains us is the Sun, but the Sun is not to be understood as merely a physical fiery orb. The Upanishads, the Panchagni Vidya, the Vaishvanara Vidya and other scriptures, which we cannot simply set aside as nonsense, confirm that the soul which is to attain moksha passes through the rays of the Sun. How can we pass through the rays of the Sun? A ray is not a motorable road; but it is a motorable road. We can run our tram of the soul through the rays of the Sun, and there we are burnt and burnished and made ready for further movements onward. The Chhandogya Upanishad tells us that there are many stages of ascent. There is kramamukti, the gradual liberation of the soul. It is not a privilege of everybody. Only extremely charitable, good, spiritual, meditative and austere people can have this blessed destiny of going to the Sun. Otherwise, we will come back. We will be reborn. The great souls who are not to return to the world, who are to attain final salvation in God, have to pass through the orb of the Sun. He will not take any tax from us, but it is like a toll gate where we are received with great honour and respect by this mighty being. It is not merely a burning fire, but a representation of the magnificence of God. It is always believed surya pratiksha te: “If God is there, here is the visible God, and the wonder of it no man has ever imagined.”
Sometime back I read a passage in a magazine. A gentleman from England who was not accustomed to the heat of the Sun in India stood outside in the Sun's hot rays in summer. He got a high fever. He was lying down. Some brainwave occurred to him, and the next morning again he stood in the Sun's rays, but he took a pot full of Ganga water, collected a few flowers, looked at the Sun, offered a prayer, placed the flowers, gave the oblation along with the Ganga jal, and stood there. The writer says, he was perfectly all right. The conclusion that the devotee had was that the Sun is not unconscious.
Do you know the story of the Sun giving an akshaya patra to Yudhisthira? Yudhisthira was starving in the forest. They had nothing to eat. Where is the food in the jungle? He was a king, and he was in this condition. Bhaumya, his preceptor, said, “Pray to the Lord. He is here, the giver of all bounty.” A prayer was offered by Yudhisthira to the Sun, which is recorded for us in the Aranya Parva of the Mahabharata. The Sun descended in visible form and offered a bowl to him. “Take this. If food is cooked in this, it will not be exhausted. You can go on eating as long as you want. It will be exhausted only if Draupadi eats. As long as she does not eat, the food will not be exhausted. It will be inexhaustible.” Such an akshaya patra, an inexhaustible bowl, was offered by the Sun to a human being. Can you imagine? Is it possible? Can any science prove this? What is the wonder?
I was in Gujarat some years ago and I was taken to the place where Yudhisthira got the bowl. A beautiful temple is there near Ambaji, on the border of Rajasthan and Gujarat. The person who escorted me said this is the place. They have written there in big words: This is the place where the Sun god offered the bowl to Yudhisthira in his miserable condition in the forest.
Yajnavalkya, the great sage, got the Yajurveda from the Sun. How is it possible? Can you get Vedas from the Sun? You have to go to the library for them. Are such miracles possible? Can you believe it? This is why you can agree with Hamlet that there are more things in heaven and on Earth then your science and philosophy can dream of.
The world is a miracle, and there is nothing that you cannot get by the grace of God, if only your heart longs for it.