Mount Sumeru? The Center of the Milky Way Might Not Be a Black Hole After All

For the question you ask above, I don’t mind to repeat myself, the reference sutta I have already gave above is DA30, full translation you can find in bdkamerica.org. See also: https://suttacentral.net/an3.80/en/sujato
https://suttacentral.net/search?query=sineru

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Also noted that, in AN3.80, Bhikkhu Sujato translated quite liberally, so I think you will find a more accurate translation from Bhikkhu Bodhi.

So this is mahayana canon? Just to be clear because when you say “The suttas said that there is a Mount Sumeru at the center of a world-system” it might be misunderstood by people as being included in the pali sutta pitaka.

This is Dharmaguptaka Dirghagama, not Mahayana, EBTs are not just Pali exclusive. The Pali Tripitaka do have its extensive parallel in Paramatthajotika mahā abhidhammamattha saṇgahaṭīkā, chapter 4 and 5. Anyway, I won’t be answering any questions any further, a true man should do his own research first.

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Thanks for clarifying, as i understand it is included in Mahayana canon and is a dharmaguptaka text without a parallel to pali suttas.

As to Sineru being a black hole there is also this an7.66 which contradicts the theory

There comes a time when, after a very long period has passed, a sixth sun appears. When this happens, this great earth and Sineru the king of mountains smoke and smolder and give off fumes. It’s like when a potter’s kiln is first kindled, and it smokes and smolders and gives off fumes. In the same way, this great earth and Sineru the king of mountains smoke and smolder and give off fumes. So impermanent are conditions …

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This is link for Dr. Aggrawal who researched very deep in various religious texts, for the most probable explanation of location of Mount sumeru and trust me it seems quite true. Please go through this article once.

@Namo

…Alongside this vertical stacking of realms, there was an infinite horizontal extension com­bined with a complex pyramidal structure. (The details that follow are derived from the Abhidharmakosa of Vasubandhu, a Sarvastivada text.) The sixteen brahma worlds can be divided into four tiers, corresponding in human terms to the four jhanas. Below each first-tier brahma level there were one thousand world systems, each complete with its own Mount Meru, seven ranges, seven oceans, four continents, and enclosing wall. This constituted a “thousand-fold world system.” Below each second-tier brahma level, there were one thousand of these thousand­fold world systems, for a total of one million Mount Merus, etc. Below each third-tier brahma realm, there were one thousand of the second order grouping, for a total of one billion Mount Merus, etc. Below each fourth-level brahma world, there were again one thousand of the next-lower level grouping, making for one tril­lion Mount Merus and four trillion continents. (In one possible interpretation of the text, there are an infinite number of the highest-tier brahma worlds. In another equally plausible interpreta­tion, there is only one with an infinite number of third-tier worlds below it. The total of terrestrial world systems is infinite in either case.)…

Above is paragraff from article by venerable ajahn punnadhammo …link is following…(you may have read this)

"Some beings see water as wondrous blos­soms, but they do not use blossoms as water. Hungry ghosts see water as raging fire or pus and blood. Dragons see water as a palace or a pavilion. Some beings see water as a forest or a wall. Some see it as the dharma nature of pure liberation, the true human body, or as the form of body and the essence of mind. Human beings see water as water. Water is seen as dead or alive depending on causes and conditions. "

—from Dogen’s Mountains and Water Sutra, translated by Arnold Kotler and Kazuaki Tanahashi

Above text is para from article from lion’s roar by venerable ajahn punnadhammo…link for that I shared above.

I think it’s there but we can’t see it. Because it’s true different beings perceive reality differently. Texts say night and day are due to Mount Meru, when Sun goes past Mount Meru it’s shadow falls on the side which experiences night. Actually if we take this literally we cannot say it might not be true, just because we can’t see it(for me atleast). What I think is that…as texts say at its base 4 continents float, it must be pointing out to North pole only, that Mount Meru starts at north pole, and we can’t see or more correctly we can’t recognise it, only because we don’t have enough merits! Earth is definitely special planet(for us) out of all planets in solar system, so it seems true that Mount Meru must be in direct contact with earth if not anything else.

I may be wrong as well but that’s what I can think of based on two articles I shared, plz try to take a look at them if you haven’t already.

The singularity within a black hole does not actually “wobble”, because the singularity does not have dimensions in which to move. It’s a 0 dimensional point.

If you’ve ever heard the explanation of how faster than light travel may be possible with an Alcubierre drive, with the vessel not moving at all, but space bending around it, you may draw on those explanations as analogy. But truly, to say a black hole moves is incorrect. What is correct is to say spatial positions relative to it change. On the human scale “movement” and “change in relative position” are so correlated they seem like synonyms, but on a cosmic scale they are not.

It’s actually incredibly similar to the Buddha’s elaborated metaphor of Nibbana. The categories of dimensions no longer apply to the singularity, so the fourfold negation applies to any question relating the singularity to dimensions.

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Where did you hear that? Can you provide a link to a scientific article stating such a thing?

Last I checked, no experiments have been done inside a black hole… and everything about what goes on inside a black hole is pure speculation, not facts.

A gravitational singularity, spacetime singularity or simply singularity is a condition in which gravity is so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically. As such, a singularity is by definition no longer part of the regular spacetime and can not be determined by “where” or “when”

This is all definitional and speculative. By definition (not by observation), a singularity cannot move. If it turns out that the thing in the center of the galaxy can move, it is not a singularity.

But practically that is impossible to observe directly. Rather, some other implication of singularities existing would need to be observed to not exist.

Really, whether they exist or not, I think it is highly worthwhile to contemplate how position and movement do not apply to a singularity, and yet it can seem from the outside like they do. It is a very grounded example of the fourfold negation.

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You realize we have things like LIGO which detect black hole mergers on a regular basis… right?

Black holes move… they merge… we have scientific evidence that black holes do indeed move.

Yes. That happens without the singularities moving.

An even more basic situation which draws out the central issue is observing a black hole in more than one moment. You see a black hole at 7:43 AM November 19th 2021, and then at 7:44 AM November 19th 2021. That makes it seem like the singularity traveled through time. But it didn’t. It seems like the singularity has a duration in time of at least a minute, but it doesn’t. There is no time in the singularity (again, by definition).

First I think it’s helpful to just break down the assumption that relative position can only change via movement. I think the least difficult example of this are distant galaxies whose distance is growing faster than the speed of light, despite the fact that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. How is this possible? Well, it’s because space is itself expanding. It’s like if you draw two points on opposite ends sides of a deflated baloon. Their distance is 1/2 the baloon’s circumfrence, which starts at being 1/2 an inch. Then you blow up the baloon. Their distance is still 1/2 the circumfrence, but now that distance is 6 inches. The points didn’t move, the space between them expanded.

That’s relatively easy (still very difficult!) to grasp, because the points at least have position. But singularities don’t. It is never truly correct to say that a singularity is at a time or a place. What is approximately true however is to express a relation between spaces and times and singularities. For example, if our sun was suddenly replaced by a black hole of equal mass, you could use a model of the solar system where everything was orbiting an object with mass equal to the sun, and a center of gravity equal to the sun’s center of gravity, and that model would only be wrong inside of the black hole’s event horizon.

That’s how you get this sense of black holes “wobbling” - everything outside of the event horizon in this scenario acts as if there was a mass where the sun would be. When the sun’s center of mass would be 0.99 AU from earth, there’s 0.99 AU in between the singularity and the earth. When the sun’s center of mass would be 1.01 AU from the earth, there’s 1.01 AU in between the singularity and the earth. What’s different is that the sun’s center of mass has a position, and the singularity doesn’t. The sun’s center of mass is moving in space. Space moves around the singularity.

If you’re thinking, “that doesn’t make sense,” that’s fantastic! It’s so easy to lapse into a false sense of understanding, and very difficult to break out into acknowledging mystery. Again, whether or not singularities actually exist, these very weird ideas are the necessary definitional implications of their supposition. This is how profoundly extra-ordinary the fourfold negation is when applied to position. How much more so must it be when you apply it to existence.

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Yes… it is, isn’t it?

Evidence/Proof?

According to Occam’s Razor, the simplest explanation is the most likely… the simplest explanation is that black holes follow the same gravitational laws as the rest of the universe, and move because of gravitational effects. This has been observed in black hole mergers as they orbit each other dozens of times, getting closer each orbit due to effects like “drag” until they finally merge.

There is no science which shows black holes merge without moving. You are making a very complicated explanation out of a simple one (which is indicative of an incorrect hypothesis).

I am not making an empirical claim, so evidence is not pertinent (whether or not singularities are real is a separate issue that can only be shown via other implications - I’ll quickly say that I generally believe the most solid evidence is cosmic background radiation)

The relevant proof is mathematical and suppositional in nature. E.g. the Penrose–Hawking singularity theorem. IDK if you’ll be able to follow this link, but here’s one.

Occam’s razor doesn’t refer to simplicity in some colloquial sense of ease of comprehensibility. Rather it states, “do not multiply entities without necessity.” It is why we say there is one force of gravity, not two forces, each equal to one-half the supposed force of gravity, and why we say there are three spatial dimensions (the ones we observe) instead of supposing there’s a fourth spatial dimension that just has no variation in it. I can make a model of physics where there’s an infinite number of forces, or an infinite number of dimensions, and it will work exactly as well as our current models, but be needlessly complex.

So, for example, I can take a model of the solar system, and to every spatial vector, add a fourth element which is always zero. That model works, but so does the one where we remove that fourth element. So we use say that the fourth element is not necessary. If there were a way to have spatial vectors only have two elements and still get correct predictions, then we would do so, following Ockham’s razor. The only reason we don’t in ordinary situations is because we can’t.

It is precisely because of Ockham’s razor that we say a singularity has no dimensions. We get rid of them as soon as they become meaningless. When we replace the mass of the sun with a black hole of equal mass, dimensions become meaningless inside of the event horizon.

Yes, all of the phenomenon you’re referring to happen without the singularities ever having position or moving in spacetime.

However, I think you’re getting way too bogged down in issues of correctness. It doesn’t really matter whether or not singularities are real (it’s conceivable there’s an object of finite density, with dimensions, inside of event horizons, and that’s certainly more appealing to a lot of physicists, it’s just that nobody has been able to produce a model which predicts that, everything else, and something new we can observe to verify it). The pertinent issue is just this: people consider them.

Again, a gravitational singularity, spacetime singularity or simply singularity is a condition in which gravity is so intense that spacetime itself breaks down catastrophically. As such, a singularity is by definition no longer part of the regular spacetime and can not be determined by “where” or “when”

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I think perhaps we are talking about 2 different things.

I’m referring to black holes, which have evidence that they exist. Black holes move due to gravity (as all things do). Our black hole wobbles due to stars in close orbit. It also moves towards Andromeda. It also moves towards “the great attractor”.

You seem to be talking about singularities, which are purely theoretical and might not even be a real phenomenon. According to the wikipedia article you linked, “Physicists are undecided whether the prediction of singularities means that they actually exist”