4 More Bizarre Predictions From Ancient Indian Texts | Unveiled

4 More Bizarre Predictions from Ancient Indian Texts

The various ancient texts of India have helped to guide and shape humanity to this point. But could they also be portals to the future? There are certainly a number of stories and lessons within them that appear to project future events… with some of them falling spectacularly close to what happens in real life.

This is Unveiled, and today we’re exploring four more bizarre predictions from ancient Indian texts.

First things first, this video is the second in a two-part series. There’s a link to the first video at the end of this one, and in the description below. Both episodes can be watched in any order, with each one covering four bizarre (but separate) predictions. So, be sure to check the original out after this!

The oral and written traditions of Indian mythology have enthralled generation upon generation. One of the overriding messages we take from them, however, isn’t exactly a positive one. It’s that humanity is now in what’s known as the Kali Yuga… and unfortunately this is a period of deprivation, suffering, and misery, that’ll one day be capped off with a huge war. Scientists all over the globe have debated World War Three for decades now, and what form it could take, with most depictions revolving around the catastrophic use of nuclear weapons. Which takes us to our first prediction today, as it seems that the power and potential of nuclear weapons was well-known to the ancients.

The Mahabharata, an eighteen book Indian epic, narrates the events of the Kurukshetra War, a power struggle between two groups of cousins: the Kauravas and the Pandavas. It’s actually the climax of this war of the past, in the year 3,102 BCE, that’s believed to have ushered in the Kali Yuga that we’re experiencing today. In the seventh book of the Mahabharata, there’s the tale of a warrior named Drona who is commander-in-chief of the Kaurava army. And it’s through Drona’s experience of the war (and of one weapon, in particular) that we find descriptions that are hauntingly close to nuclear warfare.

The aftermath of a massive weapon released against Drona’s enemies describes a landscape totally and terribly transformed. One passage details how the elements “seemed to be perturbed. The sun seemed to turn. And the universe seemed to be in a fever”. It goes on that the creatures caught in the blast of the weapon became “exceedingly uneasy and seemed to burn”, before finishing that “the world had never before heard of (or seen) the like of that weapon”. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that some scholars suggest that the results of this blast foreshadow those observed after the devastating atomic bombing of the Japanese cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the close of World War Two.

For today’s second prediction, however, the seeming link between legend and real life isn’t only a suggestion. While this is perhaps more a revelation than a prediction, for those who subscribe to it there’s physical proof that this next ancient Indian story has been revealed to be true. Here, we find ourselves in the city of Mahabalipuram, and specifically at the Shore Temple along the Bay of Bengal. Dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva, it’s generally believed the temple - which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site - was built around the year 700 AD. Its origin remains disputed to this day, though, thanks to a lack of clear written records.

But, for more than a thousand years, one legend has endured… that the Shore Temple is (or was) in fact one of seven, with six other temples also standing along the Bay of Bengal at one time. This Legend of the Seven Pagodas suggests that the Hindu god Indra, the god of lightning and thunder, harboured a jealousy over the beauty of Mahabalipuram... and so, he’s said to have brought down his rage upon the city, to sink it during a violent storm. As a result, six of the original seven pagodas were engulfed within the seas, leaving only the current Shore Temple as the sole survivor of Indra’s wrath. The suggestion has always been, then, that there should be six ruined pagodas somewhere, beneath the waves.

Incredibly, according to some accounts, that part of the legend may have been seen during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - which hit the Bay of Bengal among many other regions and countries. Locals and tourists reportedly observed the possible remnants of the six other pagodas as the shoreline pulled back more than 1,500 feet, prior to the disaster. One year after the tsunami, in 2005, the Indian Navy investigated… and did discover the remains of three submerged temples in the area. And, since then, even more ruins have been found off the coast. All of which means that scientists now believe that the Legend of the Pagodas might actually represent an accurate account - perhaps of another tsunami that struck the city, more than 1,000 years ago.

For our remaining two predictions, however, we go beyond this planet called Earth and move truly into the realm of the gods. Into the cosmos. Hindu scriptures famously touch on many cosmological concepts, with some texts providing incredibly detailed descriptions of the universe and even of its physical structure. It’s one particular text, though, the Bhagavata Purana, which provides the basis for our third prediction from ancient Indian writings: the existence of a multiverse.

Despite being composed as early as the sixth century AD, the Bhagavata Purana seemingly refers to the world of the micro and multiverse… two concepts that have only really been spoken about at length by modern scientists in the last few decades. The text says that there are “innumerable universes besides this one… that move about like the atoms in you”. It also refers to “countless universes, each covered in its own shell, and compelled by the wheel of time”. While we may not be able to claim this as an outright prediction of the multiverse (nor of quantum mechanics), it certainly suggests a level of thinking that was way ahead of its time.

Generally speaking, the Many Worlds Interpretation argues that there are worlds and universes that exist parallel in space and time to us. Increasingly, today’s scientists and academics arrive at the multiverse whenever they’re trying to formulate a so-called theory of everything - with many of the leading contemporary thinkers now describing the multiverse as inevitable. The ancient texts reformulate the arguments of the Many Worlds Interpretation, though, by describing it more from a human perspective… highlighting an individual’s intrinsic relationship (through matter and energy) to the greater universe. And they do it all around 1,400 years before the modern debate.

Finally, it’s also in the grand scales of space and time that we find our fourth prediction. Much like modern astronomy does, ancient Hindu cosmology tends to deal with extremely large numbers… but the impressive thing is that some of those numbers, it turns out, are also extremely accurate. And very close to matching the physical observations of Earth and the universe that we have today.

For example, the full cycle of yugas (as predicted by the ancient texts, and ending with the current kali yuga) is said to be 4.32 billion years… which is strikingly close to the current scientific estimate of the age of the Earth, which is around 4.5 billion years. The apparent accuracy hasn’t gone unnoticed, either… with the American astronomer Carl Sagan, in his “Cosmos” TV series, once describing Hinduism as “the only religion in which time scales correspond, no doubt, by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology”.

Accident or not, there are other similarities between the ancient teachings and modern science, too. Hinduism, for instance, strongly promotes the idea of the universe evolving via life cycles, where it undergoes endless deaths and rebirths. This doesn’t quite match up to the more widely accepted Big Bang theory, but it does tally with the Big Crunch… another model of the universe’s potential origin. In this case, it remains to be seen whether the notion of universal rebirth will prove correct… and, indeed, even if it was correct, then we (the human species) more than likely will never live on a high enough plane of existence to realise it. But, regardless, that these seemingly new age ideas, these apparently high-level concepts, were being spoken about hundreds of years ago... is pretty amazing.

In this video, we’ve seen some predictions that it could be argued have already come to pass, and some others that are still to arrive. But what we can say is that they’re all tied together with the creativity and wisdom of ancient philosophers, and of an ancient civilization, and that that wisdom still shines through. Because those are four more bizarre predictions from ancient Indian texts.