Updated 6-6-2009

Time Concept of the Vedas
Linear Versus Cyclic Time
The modern historical scientists’ linear concept of time strikingly resembles the traditional Judaeo-Christian concept, and it strikingly differs from that of the ancient Greeks and Indians. The cosmological ideas of several prominent Greek thinkers included a cyclic or episodic time similar to that found in the Vedic literature of India.

For example, we find in Hesiod’s Works and Days a series of ages (gold, silver, bronze, heroic, and iron) similar to the Indian yugas (ages). In both systems the quality of human life becomes progressively worse with each passing age. In On Nature, Empedocles speaks of cosmic time cycles. In Plato’s dialogues, there are descriptions of revolving time and recurring catastrophes destroying or nearly destroying human civilization. Aristotle said often in his works that the arts and sciences had been discovered many times in the past. In the teachings of Plato, Pythagoras, and Empedocles on the transmigration of the soul, the cyclical pattern extends to individual psycho-physical existence.

When Judaeo-Christian civilization arose in Europe, another understanding of time became prominent — time going forward in a straight line. Broadly speaking, this concept of time involves a unique act of cosmic creation, a unique appearance of human beings, and a unique history of salvation, culminating in a unique denouement, the last judgment. The drama occurs only once. Individually, the life of a human being mirrors this process; so, with some exceptions, orthodox Christian theologians rejected transmigration of the soul.

Modern historical sciences share the basic Judaeo-Christian assumptions about time. The universe we inhabit is a unique occurrence: Humans arose once on this planet; the history of our ancestors followed a unique though unpredestined evolutionary pathway; and the collapse of the “Big Bang” universe will bring everything to a close.

One is tempted to propose that the modern account of human evolution is a Judaeo-Christian heresy that covertly retains fundamental structures of Judaeo-Christian cosmology, eschatology, and salvation history while overtly dispensing with the scriptural account of divine intervention in the origin of species, including our own.

The Vedic Calculation of Time:  The Vedic concept of time is cyclic, rotating in cycles of four yugas:

Satya-yuga: 1,728,000 human years
Treta-yuga: 1,296,000 human years
Dvapara-yuga: 864,000 human years
Kali-yuga: 432,000 human years

This yuga cycle totaling 4.32 million years is also called a maha- or divya-yuga. One thousand such cycles, 4.32 billion years, make up one day of Lord Brahma, the demigod who governs the universe. Such a day of Brahma is called a kalpa. Each of Brahma’s nights lasts as long as his day. Life is manifest on earth only during the day of Brahma. With the onset of Brahma’s night, the entire universe is devastated and plunged into darkness. When another day of Brahma begins, life again becomes manifest.

Each kalpa (day of Brahma) is divided into 14 manvantara periods, each lasting 71 yuga cycles. Preceding the first and following each manvantara period is a junction (sandhya and sandhyamsa respectively) the length of a Satya-yuga (1,728,000 years). Each manvantara period ends with a partial devastation and starts with a partial recreation of the universe.

Brahma lives 100 years, consisting of 360 days and nights (the Vedic year is based on the cycles of the moon, not the sun). Thus Brahma lives 100 x 360 kalpas = 36,000 days plus 36,000 nights. In human years, Brahma’s life span lies far beyond our power of imagination: 72,000 x 4,320,000,000 human years = 311,040,000,000,000 human years.

The life span of Brahma is identical with the duration of the universe. This time span, called a maha-kalpa, is also the duration of one breathing in and out of Maha-Vishnu, the Personality of Godhead. Maha-Vishnu lies down within the ocean of causality and sleeps. He is eternal, and He dreams the material world in His cosmic slumber. When He exhales, all the universes emanate from the pores of His skin, and a Brahma is born within each universe. When He inhales, Brahma dies, and He sucks the universes into His mouth and destroys them. With each exhalation, the entire process starts anew. This cycle goes on eternally and is therefore also called eternal time.

The four yugas can also be calculated in demigod years:

Satya-yuga: 4,800 demigod years
Treta-yuga: 3,600 demigod years
Dvapara-yuga: 2,400 demigod years
Kali-yuga : 1,200 demigod years

Each six months of human time is one day for the demigods, and another six months is one night. When the sun is in the southern side of the universe (summer in the Southern Hemisphere), the demons have day and demigods have night, and vice versa when the sun is in the Northern Hemisphere. One of our years is one of their days, and 360 of our years is one of their years.

Most demigods maintain their positions within the universe for the duration of one manvantara (age of Manu). Because the demigods live for one day of Brahma, they change their positions each manvantara and become other demigods. Since 14 manvantaras (14 Manus) reign in one day of Brahma, a total of 14 x 360 x 100 = 504,000 Manus and demigods change shifts in the lifetime of Brahma.

The Four Yugas :

The Vedic Puranas describe the four yugas as follows:

Satya-yuga, or the golden age, is the ideal age, characterized by virtue, wisdom, religion, and practically no vice or ignorance. Humans do not hate or envy each other, nor do they ever feel anxious, fearful or threatened. They solely worship the one Supreme Personality of Godhead, hear the one Veda, obey the one law, and practice the one religious process — meditation on the Supreme. People live for about 100,000 years.

In Treta-yuga vice is introduced. The good qualities that humans had in Satya-yuga reduce by one third. People introduce religious rites, sacrifices, and ceremonies. They start to act with fruitive desires, expecting a reward for their work and religious activities. They live for a maximum of 10,000 years.

In Dvapara-yuga uprightness is only half of what it was in Satya-yuga. The Vedas are divided into four parts, and only a few people study them. Sensual desires and diseases begin to well up, and injustice spreads in human civilization. People live for a maximum of 1000 years.

In Kali-yuga only one fourth of human uprightness remains and gradually reduces to nil as the age progresses. We now live in Kali-yuga, the iron age, the most degraded of the four ages (kali literally means “quarrel and hypocrisy”).

In this age men are short lived and have less intelligence. They are especially lazy in performing their spiritual duties and exceedingly slow to surrender to the Lord. They are misled, frustrated and, above all, always disturbed. The qualities of religion (truthfulness, cleanliness, forbearance and mercy) and the qualities of life (intelligence, duration of life and bodily strength and beauty) all diminish. The maximum duration of human life is 100 years, and even that is rare.

Where We Are Now

According to the Vedic scriptures, we are now in the first day of the second half of the life of Brahma (even he gets old, and he is now 50). Within this day of Brahma, we are in the seventh manvantara (of Vaivasvata Manu), in the 28th turnover of its 71 yuga cycles.

Modern astronomy calculates the beginning of the present Kali-yuga at 2:27a.m. on February 20th in the year 3102 B.C.

Man has been on the earth a lot longer than generally accepted. Space images taken by NASA reveal a mysterious ancient bridge in the Palk Strait between India and Sri Lanka.It has been believed that there is no evidence to determine the dates of events in the Ramayanic era. Some historians of the past even refuse to acknowledge that Rama and other characters from the Ramayana even existed. However, Sage Valmiki has recorded the dates if events in detail, albeit by describing the positions of stars and planets. To decipher the astronomical encodings has not been a trivial task, and not many have attempted to do so. It should be noted that the ancient Indians had a prefect method of time measurement. They recorded the ‘tithis‘, days according to the nakshatra on which the moon prevailed, the months, the seasons and even the different Solstices. By therefore noting a particular arrangement of the astronomical bodies, which occur once in many thousand years, the dates of the events can be calculated. The correct astronomical records goes to show that Valmiki’s has chronicled an account of a true story and also, that the an advanced time measurement system was known to the Hindus (Indians) atleast 9000 years ago.

The recently discovered bridge is made of a chain of shoals 18 miles long. The bridge’s unique curvature and composition by age reveals that it is man made. Legends as well as archeological studies reveal that the first signs of human inhabitants in Sri Lanka date back to a primitive age, about 1,750,000 years ago and the bridge’s age is also almost equivalent.

This information confirms the mysterious legend of the Ramayana, recorded to have taken place in the Treta Yuga (more than 1,700,000 years ago). At that time the inhabitants in the world were much more spiritual than they are today.

THE SCIENTIFIC DATING OF THE MAHABHARAT and RAMAYANA WAR (16th OCTOBER 5562 B.C.)

(by Gyandotcom )

SOME FACTS.

MAHABHARAT, RAMAYAN ARE NOT MYTHOLOGY BUT HISTORY OF VEDIC PEOPLE, I.E. INDIANS.

THE THEORY OF ARYAN INVASION IS NOT TRUE. VEDIC CULTURE EVOLVED IN INDIA. THE THEORY WAS PROPAGATED BY BRITISH HISTORIANS TO SHOW INDIANS THAT THEY ARE INFERIOR TRIBES.

HINDU KINGS ( SOUTH INDIA) RULED OCEANS IN ALL THREE DIRECTIONS FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS ( EVEN DURING EARLY STAGES OF MUSLIM INVASIONS ON NORTH INDIA ). THEY USED TO CALL THEMSELVES AS “TRISAMUDRESHWAR” MEANING, THE ONE WHO RULES THREE OCEANS. THEY RULED ISLANDS LIKE “MARICHASYA” (TODAY’S MAURITIUS) to JAVA, SUMATRA, INDONESIA. (THAT’S WHY THESE CULTURES HAVE STORIES OF RAMAYAN IN IT).

An example is the so called “Taj Mahal”. This was a monument built somewhere in 12th century B.C. by some Hindu king. After death of Mumtaj-Ul-Zamani, wife of Mughal emperor Shahajehan, Shahajehan took this palace from a king Mansing of Jaipur and converted this palace in to Today’s Taj-Mahal just by changing Hindu imprints to Holy Quran scripts.

Even in official history of Mughal (“Badshahnama”), Shahajehan has no where said that Taj Mahal was built in his tenure. It was a palace called Tejo Mahalay ( a Sanskrit name).
Read my Article on Tajmahal

Is Tajmahal Really Built by Shahjahan. Gyandotcom Revealed. read the post in gyandotcom

The Mahabharat has exercised a continuous and pervasive influence on the INDIAn mind for millennia. The Mahabharat, originally written by Sage Ved Vyas in Sanskrit, has been translated and adapted into numerous languages and has been set to a variety of interpretations. Dating back to “remote antiquity”, it is still a living force in the life of the INDIAn masses.

Incidentally, the dating of the Mahabharat War has been a matter of challenge and controversy for a century or two. European scholars have maintained that the events described in the ancient Sanskrit texts are imaginary and subsequently, the Mahabharat derived to be a fictitious tale of a war fought between two rivalries. Starting from the so- called Aryan invasion into Bharat, the current Bharatiya chronology starts from the compilation of the Rigved in 1200 B.C., then come other Ved’s, Mahaveer Jain is born, then Gautam Buddha lives around 585 B.C. and the rest follows. In the meantime, the Brahmanas, Samhitas, Puranas, etc. are written and the thought contained therein is
well-absorbed among the Hindu minds. Where does the Ramayan and Mahabharat fit in ? Some say that the Ramayan follows Mahabharat and some opine otherwise. In all this anarchy of INDIAn histography, the date of the Mahabharat (the mythical story!) ranges between 1000 B.C. to 300 B.C. Sanskrit epics were academically attacked occasionally in an attempt to disprove the authenticity of the annals noted therein. For example, the European Indologiest Maxmuller, tried the interpret the astronomical evidences to prove that the observations recorded in the history.