I used to keep these two worlds in separate drawers of my mind:
- Drawer A: Thirumanthiram, verse 2955–2958 — the mystic poetry of a Tamil Siddha who lived (maybe) 2,000 years ago.
- Drawer B: Conformal Cyclic Cosmology — Sir Roger Penrose’s equations scribbled on blackboards in Oxford, 21st century.
Then one quiet tea morning, the drawers slid open by themselves.
The leaf outside my window was trembling in exactly the same rhythm as the cosmos.
Read them side by side and tell me you don’t hear the same voice.
**Thirumoolar (circa 5th–8th century CE)**
“To sustain the myriad lives in countless universes is indeed a miracle that staggers the imagination.
But even after the destruction of the cosmos at the end of aeons,
He draws all jivas to Himself and sustains them in quiescent slumber,
until the next cycle of creation commences again.”
**Roger Penrose (21st century)**
“At the remote future of one aeon, when all matter has decayed and only massless photons remain, the universe loses all sense of scale.
Through conformal rescaling, the conformally smooth infinite future of the previous aeon becomes the Big Bang of the next.
Information from the previous aeon can, in principle, cross over into the new one.
The cycle is endless — no beginning, no final end.”
Same heartbeat, different languages.
| Thirumanthiram (poetry of the heart) | Penrose’s CCC (mathematics of the mind) |
|------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------|
| Countless universes | Infinite previous and future aeons |
| Destruction of the cosmos (pralaya) | Heat-death-like state with only radiation |
| All jivas drawn back into Him | All massive particles decay; only conformal field remains|
| Quiescent slumber in the Absolute | Loss of scale → smooth conformal boundary |
| He sustains them there | Geometry itself “holds” the information of the old aeon |
| Next cycle of creation commences | Conformal rescaling → new Big Bang |
| No ultimate beginning or end | Eternal succession of aeons |
Thirumoolar saw it in samadhi.
Penrose sees it in the language of Riemann spheres and Weyl curvature.
One calls the crossover moment “the grace-filled embrace of Shiva.”
The other calls it a “conformal factor Ω that goes to infinity and then restarts.”
Both say the same liberating thing:
The end is never abandonment.
The end is a lullaby.
Every soul, every photon, every bit of information is gently gathered into the simplest, scaleless silence…
and then breathed out again as a brand-new Big Bang,
a brand-new chance to play, to love, to remember.
The leaf falls.
The leaf returns as next spring’s green fire.
The aeon dies.
The aeon wakes up as the next universe’s first light.
Same dance.
Same Dancer.
Thirumoolar ends his verse with tears of wonder.
Penrose ends his papers with cautious hope that future CMB observations will find the echoes.
I just close the laptop, look at the heart-shaped leaf, and smile.
They were both right.
Hara Hara Mahadeva…
and thank you, Sir Roger, for giving the ancient song a new set of equations.