Is Asha Vahishta just a glorified version of the Ten Commandments - a set of religious rules writ large? Not really. Asha is not like the "Ten Commandments," because the Commandments, and the Torah, are prescriptive. Asha is descriptive. The commandment says, for instance,"Thou shalt not steal." What Asha would say, if it could talk, would be: "If you steal, you may get the owner of what you stole angry, and he will punish you or the civil law will do that; and if you get away with it in this world, when you die and come to judgement, it will be remembered that you stole."Asha is not "rules," but "law," not in the sense of "thou shalts" or "thou shalt not's" but in the sense of geometric axioms, or the laws of physics. I like to think of Asha as "the software of the universe" or perhaps its "operating system" in that it orders the working of all things, whether we like it or not. And unlike software, it can't be changed. Can the speed of light be changed, or the laws of mathematics or physics? The scientific method applies to Asha. There is no immutable Scripture telling us what Asha is; we learn by experience, hypothesis, experiment, proof, and demonstration. If what seems to be Asha doesn't make sense, it is not that Asha is wrong, but our own idea of it, our ignorance of Asha as it truly is.
