Vedic Time Cycles and the Epoch of 3102 B.C.

Many people today are contemplating the likelihood of a coming 'Planet X' event. Most are working from the commonly accepted construct of a series of cataclysmic events on earth that happen every 3,600 years. This timetable was made popular by Zecharia Sitchin, who concluded that the Sumerians documented a massive unseen planetary object whose cyclical return intervals of 3,600 years bring it into contact with the earth's atmosphere or magnetosphere. Tree rings and ice cores support the notion that every 3,600 years, there has been a climatic upheaval on the planet.

Many are looking to the various End Times prophecies for confirmation that 2012 is the year of the next big cataclysm and not surprisingly, there are many prophecies that fit the scenario. But there are also many errors put forward in assumptions that are presented as absolutes. One of these is the now common reference to the Vedic 'end times' prophecy of the appearance of Kalki Avatar.

Several documents are being widely circulated on the Net that suggest Kalki Avatar is scheduled to appear in 2012, and this is proof that the Vedic scriptures also acknowledge the 2012 End Times scenario. But this is completely wrong.



On the 'Vedic Science' page of this blog is an article entitled "Bhagavad-gita As It Is", which gives a basic explanation of the Vedic cycle of ages, or yugas. The conclusion of Vedic sastra (scripture) is that the Lord, in His incarnation as Kalki Avatar, will not appear to commence the great annihilation for another 427,000 years, approximately.

When discussing the Vedic cycles of time and historical records of massive events on the planet, students of the Vedas often refer to dates in the context of the most recent major timeline marker: the start of Kali Yuga, the current age.

Although there is some disagreement about the actual date, all Vedic scholars agree, and sastra confirms the fact that the Kali Yuga commenced with the Battle of Kurukshetra, an extraordinary battle during which the Lord manifested as Krsna, and spoke the Bhagavad-gita to his great disciple, Arjuna. The reason for the battle was that the Lord wanted to decimate the ranks of the demoniac persons on the planet, who had become extremely militaristic and were making life miserable for all citizens of the earth.

Vedic scholars set the date for the start of Kali Yuga at somewhere between 3102 B.C. and 3023 B.C., or between 5,033 and 5,112 years ago. The Kali Yuga runs for a total of 432,000 years, therefore the great annihilation and the appearance of Kalki Avatar will take place somewhere between the years 428,898. A.D. and 428,977 A.D. So clearly, these dates have nothing to do with 2012 or the next 3,600 year cyclic event.

Whether or not Vedic history has something to tell us about a cataclysmic event 3,600 years ago is another day's discussion. Today's article, and the previous quotes from Bhagavad-gita on the cycles of ages, are the first in what we hope will be an extensive series of articles at StrangeSkyes on points of comparison between Vedic cosmology and history and the current Planet X phenomenon.

Vedic science is undoubtedly the most precise, exacting, and well documented science available on the planet. Unfortunately, it is regularly misinterpreted by mundane scholars who do not understand the transcendental nature of the scriptures, and attempt to impress their literal understandings onto the Vedas. For example, we often hear academics refer to the dates of Sanskrit texts, or 'pre-Vedic' evidence being used as markers for timeline comparison of the origination of Vedic science and literature as compared to other bodies of historical evidence. But this is a fundamentally flawed analysis because it ignores the explicitly documented history of oral tradition through which the Vedas were passed for millennia. This oral tradition is not simply a matter of cultural storytelling. The Vedas set down the names of personalities, in lineage, who passed the knowledge down over exceedingly long periods of time.

Suffice to say, there is conclusive evidence that the Vedas predate every school of thought and every piece of evidence that can be brought to bear in these conversations – including the highly speculative celestial histories like the Casseopeians, Pleadians, etc. The well documented Vedic history of the manus and manvantaras, the originators of the solar races, make these 'starseed' histories seem quite modern in comparison. More on that at another time.

One of the great contemporary scholars of Vedic cosmology was my friend and spiritual brother, Sadaputa dasa (Dr. Richard L. Thompson), who unfortunately departed this life in late 2008. He left behind an amazing collection of research and writings on the cosmology of the Bhagavata Purana, and we find in his work many important connectors that can help us make sense of the current Planet X phenomenon.

Another student of the Vedas who follows the same spiritual practice I do, and Sadaputa dasa did, is Michael Cremo (Drutakarma dasa), who co-authored Forbidden Archeology with Sadaputa (Dr. Richard L. Thompson). Their book is now being widely read by many who are seeking information on Planet X, 2012 and the earth changes, and rightly so. It contains an amazing wealth of evidence and data relevant to these fields of inquiry.

I'm not a scholar or a scientist, and don't mean to represent myself as even understanding a great deal of this information. I am a long-time student of the Vedas and fortunately, Sadaputa dasa packaged much of his research in layman's terms that non-science readers can understand. Of course, it helps if one can read Sanskrit and understands Vedic philosophy, and this is a pursuit I encourage everyone to take up. The amazing correspondences between Vedic cosmology and modern science aren't confined to the celestial realm. The corollaries can be found in many areas of science and art.

A number of years ago, a business partner and I were developing a quantum encryption system comprised of tamper-proof digital containers. These 'Heisenberg boxes' embodied virtual user states that were perturbed by outside observation. Any observation constituted a security breach that broke the trusted connection, causing digital content to vaporize before it could be stolen. As Sadaputa dasa and I discovered during our discussions of the technology, the 'observer principle' we incorporated in the encryption system can be said to play out in much the same way as when one is observing cosmological elements.

Heisenberg's 'Uncertainty Principle' (1927) addresses the relationship of near simultaneous, co-locations of the basic elements that make up the universe. "The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa." This principle is not simply a philosophy; it predicts real properties of electrons. The theory is that electrons jump at random from one energy state to another state which they could never reach "except that their energy is momentarily uncertain".

The corollary between Heisenberg and Vedic cosmology gets interesting when you consider who the observer is. For example, if a mundane scientist is looking at the known elliptical paths of celestial objects, and a Vedic (transcendental) scientist likewise observes those objects, but instead from the context of the Bhu-mandala, or the earth plane as a flat-earth planisphere, can their observations actually effect the properties of electrons in the elliptical? If one has access to ancient technologies and therefore observes from a very different perspective than modern science, can the act of observation actually effect the element (or elliptical) being observed?

Before we venture too far down that rabbit hole, let's come back to the issue of timeline markers in the Vedic tradition. Following are brief comments Sadaputa dasa made on the issue of assigning dates to some of the great events discussed above. This will lay some groundwork for our ongoing exploration of these topics here at StrangeSkyes.


The Mysterious Epoch of 3102 B.C.

"The traditional date in India for the beginning of Kali-yuga is February 18, 3102 B.C., as measured by the Gregorian calendar. According to the Puranas, Lord Krsna departed from the earth at this time. Thus it is the closing date for the main events of the Mahabharata, in which Krsna was a major participant.

According to Indologists, 3102 B.C. is far too early for the events of the Mahabharata, which portray an Iron Age civilization in the Ganges basic of India. Some archaeologists place the advent of the Indian Iron Age in about 1000-700 B.C. (Agrawal, 1974, p. 147), and others push it back to the second half of the second millennium B.C. or somewhat earlier (Shaffer, 1984). So how did people arrive at 3102 B.C. in the first place?

We begin with the astronomical tables produced for Alfonso X of Castile, which list the date of Noah's Flood as February 17, 3102 B.C. Similar Flood dates were produced by many medieval and renaissance Christian chronologists, but this one turns out to be exactly one day earlier than the traditional Indian date for the beginning of Kali-yuga (North, 1977, p. 317)(. This date was widely reproduced in medieval Western astronomical works. But it belongs to the yuga system of India, and in that system Kali-yuga does not begin with a flood. So how did it find its way into European literature?

It turns out that this date can be traced back to the Book of Thousands written by Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi in the ninth century. Abu Ma'shar taught that planetary motions repeat with a period of 360,000 years and that a deluge occurs every 180,000 years. According to his calculations, the last deluge occurred on February 17, 3102 B.C., and it was marked by a conjunction of all the planets in the beginning of Aries, the first sign of the zodiac (van der Waerden, 1987, p. 539). This combines a typical date for what looks like the Biblical Flood with huge periods not at all in line with the Biblical thinking. This is puzzling, and we still have to explain the connection with the floodless Kali-yuga of India.

The mathematician B.L. van der Waerden offered a speculative reconstruction, in which Hellenistic astronomers living somewhere in the Near East developed methods for theoretically computing planetary conjunctions by about 200 B.C. (van der Waerden, 1987). These astronomers were inspired by the idea of a deluge that would occur when all of the planets lined up at the beginning of the zodiac. They may have based their ideas directly on the Babylonian traditions of the deluge, bypassing the Bible. Thus the Babylonia priest Berossus in about 300 B.C. is said to have connected the deluge with a conjunction of all the planets in Capricorn, and the Hellenistic astronomers may have followed this tradition.

According to van der Waerden, these astronomers worked backwards in time using conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in an effort to calculate the time of the most recent mean alignment of planets. The result, using their data, was February 17, 3012 B.C.

Later on, astronomers in this school developed "eternal tables," based on the assumption that all planets return to their starting points in a great year of 360,000 years. Their work filtered into Persia and then India, where it was taken up by the astronomer Aryabhata in the fifth century. Aryabhata multiplied the length of the great year by 12, yielding a period of 4,320,000 years. He also replaced the deluge with the beginning of Kali-yuga. Subsequently, Aryabhata's calculations were used in the revised Persian Tables of the Shad, ordered in A.D. 556 by King Khosro Anoshirvan. Abu Ma'shar's work made use of the Tables of the Shah."

(To be continued)