Pulsating Insights: Exploring similarities between Spanda Kārikas and String Theory

Back in the 9th century CE, in the modern-day Kashmir region of India, there evolved a new text called the Spanda Kārikas in the Kashmiri Shaivism tradition. Written by Vasugupta, it consists of 52 verses divided into three chapters.

The text’s context is based on the idea that Shakti (Dynamic) and Shiva (Static) form the nature of reality. It explores the nature of existence, consciousness, and the relationship of the self (Jiva) with the universal consciousness.

According to the A-Theory and B-Theory of time coined by J.M.E. McTaggart, time can be thought of as dynamic and static, respectively. The dynamic theory suggests that the present moment “now” shifts from the past to the future, resulting in three categories of time: past, present, and future, whereas the static theory suggests that all events exist simultaneously in a static block. It argues that the passage of time that we perceive as the past, present, and future is an illusion created by our limited perspective. Here, events are ordered not by their temporal location but by their position in the four-dimensional space-time continuum.

String theory is a theoretical framework that describes fundamental particles as existing in the form of tiny vibrating strings as opposed to point-like particles in space. The different vibrational patterns of these strings are what give them their properties like mass, charge, etc. Though the theory doesn’t explicitly delve…