Transontology (transcendental ontology) is a new technology of consciousness enhancement based on the ancient Esoteric Teaching of the Sanskrit Vedas. Formerly it was carefully handed down for over 5,000 years as a secretive religious teaching. Transontology demystifies and open-sources this powerful technology so that interested professionals can develop new problem-solving applications in their areas of interest and expertise, and everyone can benefit from it. Previous versions of the Vedic Esoteric Teaching available in the West have been cripple-ware: deliberately distorted and incomplete copies of the original. The original source code and more powerful methods have been kept secret by esoteric traditions. Transontology provides the original, complete source code and an integrated development environment to the public for the first time.

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Foreword

The Background of this Work

The deep roots of Transontology are in the ancient esoteric Vedic scriptures Vedānta-sūtra and Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, and their exegetical commentaries by the great spiritual masters of our lineage. The role and power of ontology is neither well-known or well understood. Philosophy and science are commonly considered to be the highest realms of thought; but both science and philosophy are firmly based on ontology. Without ontology they would have no context, and thus no meaning. But the connection of science and philosophy with ontology is not appreciated in the West, which is more interested in practical applications and effects than in deep causes or the possible existential development of consciousness.

The only thing that makes a work such as this possible is that at last Western thought has developed to the degree where highly abstract subjects such as ontology can be discussed conveniently at all. This is a very new development; until very recently there was no commonly agreed-upon formal scientific language for representing ontological relationships. An ontology is not fuzzy or imprecise, but a system of relationships of meaning as clear and scientific as, for example, Boolean or Aristotelian logic. The ontology underlying a sophisticated science, such as Quantum Mechanics, may have many layers and dimensions of meaning, both mathematically expressible and experimentally quantifiable.

Who would guess that such a sophisticated system of thought would be found in a 5,000-year-old esoteric scripture? My spiritual master Śrīla Prabhupāda wrote:

“The human society, at the present moment, is not in the darkness of oblivion. It has made rapid progress in the field of material comforts of life, education and economic development of the entire world. But it suffers a pin-prick somewhere in the social body at large and therefore there is large scale quarrel even on less important issues. Therefore there is the want of the clue as to how they can become one in peace, friendship and prosperity by the common cause. Srimad Bhagwatam [sic] will fill up this gap by ontological aspect of human education. It is therefore a cultural presentation for re-spiritualisation of the entire human society.” [Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, Preface, original 1962 Delhi edition]

Our research into the origin of our esoteric lineage reveals an interest in ontological matters going all the way back to its founders, more than 5,000 years ago in what is now called ‘India’. I am not going to belabor the reader with a formal exposition on the meaning and practice of ontology, a question that can be satisfied with a quick web search or a lifetime of intense study and apprenticeship, depending on the level of one’s intelligence and interest. Our interest here is in the appropriateness of ontology as ideal material for bridging modern Western and traditional Vedic thought.

Ontology in essence is about the meaning of meaning, and there is no meaning to our existence until and unless our language and science develop a transcendental dimension. In Relativity Theory, Quantum Mechanics and allied fields we approach this level of thought because of Einstein’s assertion that each conscious observer has an independent coordinate system. We may never know whether he intended this to imply the transcendental nature of consciousness, yet it certainly does; and we also know that Einstein read and appreciated Bhagavad-gītā, and perhaps other Vedic works that discuss the subject.

Quantum Mechanics took this independence of the observer and elevated it to the status of an absolute, the full scope and implications of which are still being debated. But it is worthy to note that the fundamentals of neither Relativity or Quantum Mechanics have been falsified by experimental data. So in these advanced fields of Western thought, we finally have a platform for discussing consciousness as a transcendental object with absolute properties; and this is also the view of Vedānta-sūtra and allied Vedic works.

While attempting to express the ontology of the Vedic literature in formal scientific terms, I saw an opportunity to build a bridge between the Vedas and Western sciences of consciousness in the OWL language, which allows the formal expression of an ontology in computer-readable symbols. I will not bore the reader with a detailed exposition of this symbolic language, but mention it because of its potential in communicating the subtleties of Vedic transcendental ontology to the mathematically-inclined reader.

My investigation of the Vedic ontology of consciousness using OWL (Ontological Web Language) also allowed me to reach certain esoteric conclusions that advanced my personal practical understanding and realization of my conscious spiritual nature and qualities that were very useful in my personal spiritual life and advancement. So for those with the insatiable curiosity and spirit of adventure required to comprehend such deep mysteries, I leave this discussion with a reference to my website transontology.org, where this background work has been recorded in detail.

The general reader will find much herein that is usually considered the realm of arcane specialists in religion, science, philosophy, psychology and the human-potential movement (or whatever it is called this year). Transontology is such a broad subject that it touches on all these subjects, and not superficially but to their common core. Indeed, the division of human knowledge into specialties and sub-specialties will tend to obscure the insights of a high-level subject like Transontology. Each specialty tends to treat its subject in isolation; yet in reality, no subject can have meaning without a basis in ontology—just as without consciousness, nothing else matters.

Ontology and consciousness are intimately related; in fact, it can be shown that it is very difficult to be conscious of an object that does not have a place in one’s ontology. For example, encountering an unfamiliar or misdefined word while reading can produce symptoms of unconsciousness and even somatic reactions. This happens to people all the time, but because they are unfamiliar with ontology and related fields such as General Semantics, they are often unconscious even of their unconsciousness. Not understanding the cause-and-effect relationship between meaning and consciousness, they ignore the experience, or rationalize it away as something that does fit into their limited model of reality.

So ontology and related subjects are of great practical value and importance, because the quality and acuity of our consciousness are principal factors of the quality of our life experience. It is not impossible, knowing what we know now, to assert that a deep knowledge of transcendental ontology can lead to a general solution for all human problems by the development of a state of consciousness in which that solution is obvious. We would like to share this powerful insight with the reader, and hope that this little book can spark his curiosity and provoke a deeper exploration of the science of transcendental ontology and the mysteries of the Vedic Esoteric Teaching.