How Did We Know?

Conciousness is a strange thing.

On one hand it is easy to grasp that there could be a world beyond the reach of our five sense organs, but on the other it is not often that you come across proof that hits you like a ton of bricks. In books like "Autobiography of a Yogi" and "Apprentice to a Himalayan Master", there are numerous illustrations of paranormal perceptions, of yogi's being aware of events taking place thousands of miles away, of fantastic realms and parallel universes, but every now and then, you are confronted with facts that are difficult to brush aside.

First, the questions raised by Kurshed Batliwala:

• How did the ancients know that the earth was round? (Varaha-avatar, "Bhu-gol")
• Antares star (15th brightest) was called "Jeshtha" (the eldest, biggest) is actually 40,000 times larger than the sun, and one of the biggest celestial objects known to man. How did they know this 7000 years ago?
• In the Great Bear constellation (Ursa Major), the tail has a bright star called Mizar which -- when seen through telescopes - turns out to be a  twin star. In ancient India, it was always called the Arundhati-Vashishta which actually goes around each other -- a kind of stellar tango. How did they figure this out?
• Rust-proof Iron Pillars - (1) Qutub, Delhi (2) Kollur, Karnataka - been around for at least 2400 years...built to welcome Shankaracharya (?)
• Extracting Zinc from ore. Melts at 997C, but vapourises at 1000C -- "Indians built an innovative up-side-down furnace to extract zinc...a process that was secret for 4000 years...first the Chinese stole it from us, then the British stole it from the Chinese". Process was patented by William Champion (1543) who made the first Zinc Distillery in England. 
• (According to Wiki, Champion used a scaled-up process similar to that used at the Zawar mines in India where this process was available centuries before William Champion rediscovered it, since the 12th century AD)
• Katapaya-dhi Sankhya in a sloka praising Krishna gives the value of Pi up to 30 decimal places! What was the point in encrypting Pi into a Sanskrit sloka?
• Vasco-da-Gama's 'discovery of India' - in the Purtuguese journals,he was 'escorted' by a Gujarati trader who had ships 12x larger than Vasco's ships, and yet, in the European narratives, he is depicted as a mere 'guide'!

And then we have the questions raised by Graham Hancock in his controversial TED presentation:

• Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a potent psychedelic drug. Usually it is smoked because in the stomach it gets broken down by an enzyme (monoamino-oxidase). However, the Indians in South America mix it with juice extracted from a vine which is a MAO inhibitor. How did the Indians know that out of the 150,000 vines available, this particular one had the MAO inhibitor?

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REFERENCES & LINKS

* BharathGyan -- http://www.bharathgyan.com/

* Khurshed Batliwala's videos -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9aR_xfm-gE

* Autobiography of a Yogi (Yogananada)

* Apprentice to a Himalayan Master (Sri M)

* Graham Hancock -- https://grahamhancock.com/ted-war-on-consciousness-hancock/