Hinduism and the Universe

How centuries-old texts from the oldest living religion in the world are in agreement with the scientific inquiry on the origins of the universe and concepts of time dilation and cyclicity

The entirety of Cosmos, Carl Sagan’s magnum opus, can be read on the Internet Archive. In Chapter 10, titled “The Edge of Forever”, Sagan talks about the origin of the Universe and relates it to various mythos from across the world. He elucidates on how most cultures focused on a single starting point, where the deity they worship creates the world out of nothing.

That is it — a linear progression from start to finish.

However, Hinduism has the concept of cycles. Cycles spanning billions of years — Brahma creates the universe, Vishnu nurtures and preserves it, and at the end of its lifetime, Shiva destroys it, annihilating it into nothingness, and the cycle starts anew. Like a phoenix rising from its ashes, Shiva’s actions spurn the next cycle of creation.

Every culture has a myth of the world before creation, and of the creation of the world, often by the mating of the gods or the hatching of a cosmic egg. Commonly, the universe is naively imagined to follow human or animal precedent. Here, for example, are five small extracts from such myths, at different levels of sophistication, from the Pacific Basin:

In the very beginning everything was resting in…