The Earthquake in Christchurch on September 4 brought the message of the fragile nature of our lives too close for comfort. Fortunately, we did not lose any lives, although the cost of damage is expected to run in the billions. The majority of people only want one thing in the aftermath of the Earthquake – get back to their normal lives as quickly as possible.
One message that the Earthquake again failed to impress on our minds is the reality of how we as a species are inter-related, that we live in the interconnected world of nature and are as open to the vagaries of nature as anyone in any part of the world.
However, much and which ever way we protect our borders and our way of life, natural disasters don’t recognise these demarcations. Nor does something like global warming or climate change or any other global event like El Nino or La Nina.
While the Earth has been divided up in countries and regions, oceans and stratosphere and other spheres, it remains for all intents and purpose a ‘single operating system’ – connected in so many ways that we only starting to understand. It is rightly said that the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Wales will eventually lead to a storm in the Amazon, that is how interconnected we are.
Why the Earth is continually changing
The Earth has been around for some time now and in that time it has experienced change that is not only mind-boggling but beyond our scope (science or otherwise) to truly understand.
Several ice ages, dinosaurs, mass extinctions, different species of humans and hominids, secrets deep in the ground, under the seas, pole reversals, and other climatic ‘disasters’ – the planet is in a state of continuous change, all the time.
It is the nature of things, or, if you will, the nature of the Earth to do these things to maintain its balance. After all, it is but a satellite of the sun, and has to keep up pace and decorum with the others in the grand design of things.
Forget the universe, the Earth is a very tiny entity in the galaxy itself. In the solar system, it has to play a role in the general balance of things, spinning at great speed around the sun while itself spinning at head-snapping speeds on its axis. On top of it, it is wobbly and slanted in its circuit around the sun.
Every planet circulating the sun exerts its own force on every other planet in some way, influencing their movement one way or another. Imagine the solar system as a three dimensional freeway, with lanes marked out for each planet and traffic management and traffic lights in place. Then imagine an acrobat whirling a number of dinner plates on sticks, getting the balance just right and ensuring the rotating plates do not collide as he moves the sticks around on his hands and forehead. Put the acrobatics and freeway image together and you can get an idea of how the solar system operates.
When Sir Isaac Newton was talking of gravity, it was this balance, poise and movement of the planets that he was talking about. (And we have taken this great man’s computations of the planets and shoved it in the inane illustration of an apple falling on his head to illustrate what gravity is.)
As the Earth continues its relentless, yet varying, march around the sun with the other planets, and the sun spins around in the galaxy around some other pivotal point (many agree it is the galactic centre), and the galaxy itself travels in its relation to the other billions of galaxies in the universe, this gravitational pull, working in so many different ways, keeps a tight rein in the movement of planets, solar system and galaxies.
All this while, what happens on its surface has to be noted and attended to by the Earth. In the past millions of years, the Earth survived the dinosaurs, and it survived the extinction of the dinosaurs. It is still here, 65 million years after the dinosaurs, sustaining us. It has seen several races of people live and become extinct, seen civilizations start, dominate and fade away from memory, has spawned several species of flora and fauna, lost them, had more species come up to replace those lost.
At different stages of its journey in the cosmos, the Earth is a different thing at different times. What it is now is near-perfect for the life forms on it. What it will be next (whenever this happens) may not be as good for us (or it could be better, who knows?). We, the human race, may just be a passing phase for the Earth however much we want to believe that we are the rulers of Earth.
So, who is in charge?
The Earth, apparently, is in charge here. If we believe that we, as a species, have dominated the Earth and wrought our changes on its face, we are sorely mistaken. The day we control the weather or stop dead a natural disaster is the day we can claim to have a semblance of control over the Earth.
Until that day comes, we can only say we have been given leave to live on this planet, that we are here at the tolerance of Mother Earth. What we really do is exist within the bounds of the conditions that have been established by the Earth.
And she is a marvellous host, giving us the bounty of her land and seas, allowing us to go forth and multiply, and multiply, and multiply. As a species, we have ‘conquered’ almost all kinds of obstacles and made a good life for ourselves amid conditions detrimental to our existence including the heat or the cold, the dry or the wet.
But at all times we remain but a subset of the entity we call the Earth. There is little or no chance of this species surviving outside of the Earth, however much we may want to live on the moon.
Just another disaster?
Disasters on Earth is always a given – from our point of view. For the huge entity that is Earth, it is only a matter of maintaining its poise and balance. It has a habit of reversing its poles to balance its magnetic fields – the Earth has reversed its poles 200 times in the past 178 million year, the last one being 730-750,000 years ago. After all, the Earth is also a dynamo, with its solid inner core using solar magnetic energy to throw up a deflecting field against the solar winds that could burn the Earth to a crisp.
But there are disasters that even the Earth may not be able to take in its stride.
Now science is telling us that the solar system is careening towards the centre of the galaxy, where, it is believed, awaits it a supermassive blackhole. So say scientists who have been keeping a extremely close eye on the workings of the galaxy. They also say that this supermassive blackhole could be benign – meaning it is well-meaning and perhaps may not swallow up the Earth, or the solar system.
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory revealed in 2000 what was long-suspected - a black hole does exist at the centre of the galaxy. Instead of the highly active monster that most other galaxies have, our blackhole is less active. Apparently a supernova exploded close to it sometime back and masked its pulling capabilities with enough dust to make it a starving blackhole.
Nevertheless it can still eat up a comet or two if they come close enough, as was shown in 2001 when the blackhole swallowed a comet and released enough x-rays to brighten a nearby star by 45 times its normal brightness. So its devouring capabilities are largely intact. By the way, blackholes cannot be seen and so are only discerned by the x-rays they emit.
On the face of it, careening headlong towards a blackhole is a mother of a disaster. Maybe not. The galactic centre is a massive area – a radio signal associated with the centre and called Sagittarius A emanates from an area with a diameter of 44 million kilometres.
There are a thousand stars and systems already very near the galactic centre, including a ‘sun’ that is seven times as big and 15 times as heavy as our sun, called the S2. It is so close to the centre that it only takes 15.2 years to orbit it (our sun does it in 50,000 plus years). In fact there are some 100 new stars, ‘born’ and evolved near the centre and scientists are baffled as to why this happened if a blackhole exists near to them.
No-one is absolutely sure how far away the centre of the galaxy is away from us presently. In the great scheme of things it could be trillions of kilometres away or ‘just around the corner’. For all we know, it could take the solar system a twinkling of time to cover the enormous distance, or it will not never happen in our lifetime. So far, so good as far as science is concerned
The creation of our galaxy
Now, our ancients had a good idea of what’s happening in the galaxy. Let’s look at our so-called mythology and see what these ancients have been trying to tell us.
Our galaxy is called the Milky Way, because of the dusting of the white that accompanies its spiral formation. And Lord Vishnu, the all-pervading, lies in the ocean of milk (Ksheer Sagar) on the endless coils of the serpent Anantha/Shesha Naag. The allegory is so right: the Ocean of Milk for the Milky Way, the coils of the serpent to indicate the spiralling nature of the galaxy. And Vishnu (the name means that which pervades all) right in the middle of it all, or forming the basis of it.
Vishnu in his preserver role, is either non-active or active, depending on whether creation (shristi) is in progress, or is in abeyance. When creation is in abeyance, Vishnu rests and the serpent lies coiled. Come creation, the serpent uncoils and everything starts happening, including the spinning off of solar/star systems and galaxies.
To start creation, a lotus pops out of Vishnu’s navel on which is borne Brahma, the creator. This is called Vishnu Naabhi and correlates to the centre of the galaxy (the seat of Brahma). And planets, suns, star and systems are spawned out of this centre. It is all a matter of expansion, for creation is expansion. As the systems evolve, they start their elliptical journey from the centre in an outward direction, growing, spawning and ‘living’.
For our solar system, this journey takes some 26,000 years before it comes back to the periapsis or pericentre( the point of closest approach to the centre) and it will take a similar timeframe to do the circuit in the opposite direction. Many of our astrologers are saying the elliptical journey for the sun is halfway done now and it is approaching the centre, where the solar system will be the closest to the Naabhi in the past 26,000 years.
Now all this galaxy creation is a microcosm of the greater role of creation, where Vishnu pervades the universe and Brahma starts creation of the galaxies and systems (or lokas). The process of creation is passed down intact to the lowest level so that any small creation is similar to the ultimate creation and vice versa. What is above is below and what is inside is outside. Or is our galaxy really the centre of the universe if it actually has the Vishni Naabhi at its centre?
The end of creation
And with creation comes dissolution, as it should be. The Naabhi started the creation and its here where dissolution must take place. As stars and systems spawned out of the centre, so must they come to the centre to be ‘consumed’.
The blackhole can be said to be the destroyer of the trinity, Shiva. The tandav dance of Shiva is the crackling, electrifying, super heavy, all-swallowing, x-ray emitting processes of a blackhole. It is the ultimate dissolution and destruction. Nothing escapes Shiva when he sets out to destroy something, not even light.
But dissolution is an ongoing business, not a one-time event only. Of course, for a planet about to be destroyed, it is a one-off thing but there are myriad of planets and each will eventually be destroyed. And each destruction will be termed a pralaya (dissolution).
Alternatively, followers of Shiva believe it differently. Shiva is the creator, preserver and destroyer all rolled in one, as represented by Natraja. The Tandav is itself the ongoing story of creation, preservation and destruction; a creation ringed by fire, keeping rhythm to the Anahat Sound, represented by Shiva’s damaru (drum).
Each of Natraja’s four arms symbolises the four aspect of divinity: beating the rhythm of the universe with the damaru; blessing us and telling us not to fear anything (abhayahasta); holding fire to show the destruction of both the universe and the ego; and, most importantly, pointing to the demon pinned under his foot that is not upraised in dance. The demon Apasmera represents ignorance, especially ignorance that is an offshoot of dualism. Others call the dwarf demon, Mara (illusion) or Maya (illusion).
Whichever way one will have it, the ancient knew a thing or two and tried their best to pass it on to us. Wrapped in allegory, metaphor and downright-in-your-face imagery, the workings of the universe was told to us. Yet, we failed to understand them.
Now, as science counts down the headlong rush of planet Earth to the centre of the galaxy, it is an apt time to look to our mythology and see what happened in such situations, and find counters to it, if we can. And to ask questions that we have dared not ask before.
Are we heading right into the jaws of this suppermassive blackhole? Is it Earth’s time to experience pralaya?
According to our scriptures, NO. The benign blackhole will certainly exert a force, a tremendous force but not enough to break the sun’s orbit of the centre. There is a great chance of survival for the Earth. But for the people and the other species that reside on Earth, it may be another thing.
Like I said, from the point of view of Earth, the adjustments to the planet may be minor indeed. But the trickle down effect on things living on it may be enormous. What awaits mankind as we speed ahead to this tryst?
The things that have been predicted could happen to us:
Cataclysms – major upheavals, including monster volcano eruptions (there is talk of the nine mountain gods erupting in several mythologies), Earthquakes, tsunamis of giant proportions. A vast majority of humanity will suffer and the planet will reface itself (resurfacing).
Cleansing - a virtual wiping out of many species without much damage to the planet itself. This includes solar winds that pass through the Earth’s protective magnetic shield and change the very molecular structure of things on the planet. It may also just burn every thing up, leaving no chance of cultivation on the surface, and thus little chance of civilisation surviving for very long. Electrical storms would disrupt communications and cut off everyone from everyone.
Consciousness – several cultures and several noteworthy scholars believe the closer we come to the centre of the galaxy the more in tune we become to the pervading consciousness of the universe (God, Brahman, Vishnu, Shiva, Shakti, etc). This rise in consciousness will, of course, come at a price. We will need to give up our body awareness (maybe even our bodies?) – either voluntarily or be forced to do so.
Our ancients have been calling for a new way of living for millennia, in which we are to go beyond body consciousness into the unified field consciousness. Our body is only a vehicle and we have to realise our real self to understand the part we must play in understanding the workings of the universe.
Has the time arrived for major upheavals to take place in our lives, in our very existence? If yes, are we ready for it? Most probably, no. The unrelenting sequels of natural disasters taking place on Earth should teach us something but we are too enamoured by life to see the deadly destruction. It is Yuddhistar who said (when asked by Yama) what was the most astounding thing on Earth: “Thousands are dying everyday but people believe that they will go on living forever. This is the most astounding thing”.
It is the killing of ignorance, especially of the duality of this world, that Shiva’s tandav is teaching us. Maybe it is time to actually look at what we really need to do and see how we can actually live while we still have a body and a mind to understand things.
Asato maa, Sad gamaya
Tamaso maa, Jyotir gamaya
Mrityo maa, Amritam gamaya
NOTES
Black holes
The intense gravity of the black hole prevents any light from escaping it, and it is therefore invisible. Its vicinity, however, contains a fairly high density of stars, including one big star--about 15 times the mass of the Sun and 7 times its radius--which was recently found to go around the centre with an orbital period of only 15.2 years. That star, designated S2 by astronomers, follows an ellipse which at its closest comes within about 124 astronomical units (1 AU=mean Sun-Earth distance) of the centre of the galaxy. At that time it speeds up to about 5000 km/sec--close to 2% of the velocity of light! Its side facing the black hole is somewhat closer to the black hole than the side facing away, and is therefore pulled more strongly; on a very close approach, such a difference could tear a star apart, but S2 would have to get some 70 times closer before that would happen, at a distance comparable to the orbital radius of Mars.
Galactic Centre of Milky Way
The central parsec around Sagittarius A* contains thousands of stars. Although most of them are old red main sequence stars, the Galactic Center is also rich in massive stars. More than 100 OB and Wolf-Rayet stars have been identified there so far. They seem to have all been formed in a single star formation event a few million years ago. The existence of these relatively young (though evolved) stars was a surprise to experts, who expected the tidal forces from the central black-hole to prevent their formation. This paradox of youth is even more remarkable for stars that are on very tight orbits around Sagittarius A*, such as S2.
A world-ending prophesy
Pope Leo IX (Pope from 1513-1522) wrote in 1514 of what is coming: "I will not see the end of the world, nor will you my brethren, for its time is long in the future, 500 years hence." 500 years hence would be 2014, just two years after the Mayan Prophecy End Date, and as Leo was obviously rounding the date to a full sum, it is very possible he is even referring to the year 2012.
Mayan Calendar and yuga separation of the Hindus
The now famous date December 21, 2012 is the date that the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, used by the preColumbian Maya civilization, and known by them and by the Aztecs as the Fifth Sun, completes a "great cycle" of thirteen b'ak'tuns. This means that since the last creation date on August 11 3114. or 13.0.0.0.0 in the Long Count calculation, the "clock hand" will have reached 13.0.0.0.0 again for the first time, marking the completion of this cycle.
Yet this period, lasting c. 5125 years, is just one last (fifth) part of an even longer cycle that turns out to be the same as the Great Year. Knowledge of the Great Year is found in other ancient astrological-astronomical records (i.e. in India) and so with further study the Mayan 2012 calendar end finds roots in other cultures too. With the ending of the last part of this age, the Mesoamerican cycle of five ages also completes. Herewith a large time period of five x 5,125 (c. 25,625 years) is also drawing to a close.
The second coming?
Mention of nine godlike figures is found in many ancient cultures - Maya, Egyptian, Chinese and Tibetan and if you do enough reading of the ancient texts it is quite clear that these nine were volcanic mountains.
They were connected to a very ancient plan that has been copied and kept alive in different areas of the world (you can begin to recognize the connection by reading on Nine Tibetan Mountain Gods). The Return is, then, of fallen or lost mountains, which might cause a certain amount of Earthquakes, tsunamis and eruptions. Moreover they were connected in the plan to one central volcanic mountain that marked the centre of the whole Earth, a mountain that has completely disappeared, sunk below the seas and into our own subconscious
Thursday, December 23, 2010
2012 – the year of reckoning?
As 2012 draws near, a growing number of people are proclaiming massive changes that will be taking place on Earth. Much of the speculation is due to the Mayan (large) calendar which ends on December 21, 2012 (according to its relation with our modern calendar, of course). The movie 2012 has some information about this, and the web is full of it.
Type “2012” into a search engine and you will get 332,000,000 results. The web is buzzing with the ‘end of days’ sites, with much greater emphasis than the Y2K bug could ever have generated. All kinds of outcomes are offered, from a meteorite hitting the planet, to utter collapse of civilisation due to greed, to the third world war.
All religions are being tapped into for “clear signs” of the catastrophe, as well as prophets and science. Pseudo-scientists have either the Planet X (also Nibiru, or sometimes as having Nibiru, with its Planet X) crashing into earth in or around that date. Other “prophets” say the people of planet Nibiru (or Planet X) will arrive to earth to see what their “creation” (the Human race) is up to.
Others still talk of comets or other heavenly bodies striking the planet, causing a climatic change of such proportions that only a half billion people will be able to survive. They imagine a “nuclear” winter that will either send the earth into another ice age, or turn large parts of it into searing deserts. The list of catastrophes is endless on the web.
December 2012 is an important time in many calendars and prophesies, including the Hindu calendar, the Hopi prophesies and, interestingly, Maori lore. In Maori lore December 2012 or thereabouts is when the curtain is lifted. Or is dissolved or comes down – depending on the various translations of the phrase in old Maori - "ka hinga te arai".
This speaks of the reunification of “Rangi” (the Sky) and “Papa” (the Earth). The creation legend goes thus – in the beginning Rangi and Papa were partners and were closely clasped together. They had a number of children, who lived in between these two parents, squashed and without light. One day these children (who were all Gods - God of the Wind, God of the Sea, God of War etc) decided to push their parents apart so they could have room to move. They all tried and failed, till one of the Gods, Tane, pushed them apart, separated them, and there was light.
Ka hinga te arai then could mean the Earth and Sky becoming one (what would be consequence of such a move, or does it mean something other than coming together?); it could mean the blotting out of the sun due to some kind of covering (whether from an explosion that send dust and debris into the atmosphere to block out the Sun’s rays) or (my favourite) it could mean an opening of the dimensions through an upsurge of the human consciousness so things previously unknown to us becomes apparent.
One meaning of the phrase is the removal (dissolving) of the planes separator - basically the merging of the physical and spiritual planes. Some translate this as a time when the unknowables become known through a shift in perception that is forced onto mankind. This, for once, is one of the saner interpretations of what could happen in 2012.
In the Hopi Indian prophesies 2012, or thereabouts, is seen as the return of the Pahana (the White Brother from the skies) with whose coming will come the dawn of the
Fifth World. We are presently at the end of the fourth world, according to Hopi Indians. Out in South America it is the Sons of Light returning to Earth to help mankind onto the next step in their evolution.
There are many people around the world who believe in something close to this understanding of what will happen in 2012 – humanity will undergo a change of sorts to their consciousness in that time, with or without help from others. Some web pages are dedicated to this approach, with a number talking of the galactic centring where our sun, for the first time in thousands of years, will hit the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
This alignment to the galaxy will have profound impact in the way we use our senses, our brain and our consciousness. Gravitation forces and other cosmic forces (including the cosmic background radiation) will work together in ways that will change us, and everything else, associated with our planet. This includes some major changes to the alignment of the planet, it is said.
“But our old ways of thinking, including our biology will change as the Sun, Earth and Pleides line up in space. This will cause an increase in discharge of photons from the sun which is bound to cause changes in our brain pattern,” – astrologer and modern day guru Dattatreya Siva Baba.
Others still are saying that around December 2012, several wormholes will open at the centre of our galaxy, allowing “others” from around the universe to finally contact use. Various ideas and descriptions have been given of these others, including the Sons of Light, and a host of “aliens” who are not aliens but our friends from far across the universe.
In Hinduism, the field of speculation is vast as far as 2012 is concerned. Several people are putting forth the idea that Kali Yuga will end in 2012, and Satya (Krita) Yuga begins. Other are saying the Kali Yuga has a few thousand years to go, some say 5000 years, others 427,000 years.
Some modern “thinkers” believe that the yuga calculations are all wrong and, yes, the Satya Yuaga (the Golden Age) is about to begin. But with a proviso – there will be calamities, natural and otherwise – like financial problems, wars and global warming.
These thinkers take the likes of Sri Aurobindo and use his proclamations like "India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples" to show the changes the end of the next two years will bring for the Earth.
India has long been touted as the guru of the world by the many modern sages and thinkers and innovators of the spirit. They, including Swami Vivekananda, have said that India will rise as the teacher of the world when the rest of the world is surfeit of its childishness and is willing to learn the way of wisdom from India.
Keeping such prophesies in mind, it is no wonder that the younger generation in India and the Indian Disapora is leaning towards a consciousness shift rather than catastrophe in 2012. But as long as we, the Indians of today, continue aping the West, this guru aspect of India will remain in abeyance (but that is another story).
All and good, as this writer also believes in something positive and even good happening in 2012. After snuffling through the thousands of ideas surrounding the year 2012, one thing was very clear – mankind is desperately looking at ways to stop the wounding of its psyche and the planet.
The escalation of the war against the planet and its people has reached a peak that even WWII could not achieve. When children start dying at the rate one every six minute (due to disease, abuse and lack of clean water and food) then it is time to re-look at the way we have been doing things.
As it is said: the solution of a problem that exists today cannot be found in the methods of problem solving that we were using yesterday. So we must look to the extraordinary and as yet “unthought” of solutions to our present problems.
Every idea of governance that we have seen has its pitfalls, some more than others as shown by the collapse of “communism” in the recent past. The so-called collapse of “capitalism” in the recent years has also shown us what happens when greed and rampant consumerism is let loose upon the people.
The so-called liberations and revolutions have, in fact, not liberated people, just made us more like the people who had held us off from that world of power for so long. Children appear to be more abused worldwide than maybe ever before – with child slavery on the rise, and child prostitution even being condoned by parents in the less developed sections of the world, where a father can sell a daughter to pimps for less than $100.
Food production is the highest it has ever been and so much of it is wasted, yet a third of the population find it hard to put together three square meals each day for the family. Water, the most abundant element on earth, is getting expensive to have as more waterways are poisoned and fewer places of clean water become available to the world’s population.
And nature is taking its toll (or its revenge) on every sphere of the globe. Mankind, it appears, is finding harder to adjust to the new ways that the Earth is reacting to its perilous situation.
These are the problems that have been besetting mankind for a very long time now. And we still haven’t any answer to them. Is the “end of days” phenomenon (this attitude to the years 2012) a subliminal cry of help from the collective psyche of mankind? Why is it that so many from several parts of the planets are concerned so much over a little date?
I, for one, don’t believe the Earth will be destroyed. Yet, I can’t help feeling something will happen in 2012. I think it will be a bit of almost everything – some calamity will hit us at a pace and proportion that will force our hands into living a better life. Whether this is a global catastrophe or an event of such proportion that mankind finally says “enough is enough”, I don’t know.
One of the prophesies I abide by is that there will be “minor adjustments” to the planet, with minor adjustments seen from the point of view of the planet and not us. This is already happening. Few of us know that the magnetic poles has already shift by several degrees southward over Europe. Some say it is as much as 15 degrees (?). This would explain why Spain and Portugal are presently experiencing snowfall in areas where it was previously sunny at this time of the year.
Could it get worse? Yes, it has been steadily getting worse. The nature and scope of natural disasters in the past few years has been unprecedented. Earthquakes and tsunamis are getting more frequent, global warming (whether man-made or natural) is a fact, and the weather patterns around the world is throwing up surprises almost every day.
The level of human suffering will have to peak before “realisation” of the evils of greed, selfishness, partisan leanings and racism takes place for humans. It has to get worse before it gets better. Maybe it is up to us to ride out this ‘worse’ phase before we can get to the golden age.
The way of wisdom as shown by our ancient seers is to hold everything in trust – there is no ownership of anything, including the resources of the earth. Just as a school headmaster will look after the property of the school with diligence and with faith, so should every human being look to the things he or she owns, individually and as a collective.
But just as when the headmaster is transferred and he give up the ‘ownership’ of the school properties without a fuss, so should human being be ready to give up anything they ‘own’ – their family, their property, their very life. This is the way of detachment that our ancients showed.
Notes:
Golden Age Could Begin in 2012
The ancient Hindus mainly used lunar calendars but also used solar calendars. If an average lunar year equals 354.36 days, then this would be about 5270 lunar years from the time when the Kali Yuga started until 21 Dec 2012. This is the same year that the Mayans predict rebirth of our planet. It is also about 5113 solar years of 365.24 days per year, and is day number 1,867,817 into the Kali Yuga. By either solar or lunar years, we are over 5000 years into the Kali Yuga and it is time for Lord Krishna's prophecy to happen according to the ancient Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna's Golden Age could easily begin in 2012.
Ka hinga te arai (from the internet)
Basically the other more secretive legend that follows on from this (Creation mythology) says that there will come a time when the children of Tane (that's you and me) are so busy, so distracted with fighting, with greed, with lust etc, so separated from our original parents (Rangi and Papa - so that kinda means we have lost our links with the natural order of things) that Rangi and Papa will take that opportunity - while no one is looking - to quickly come back together...destroying everything in the process. There has been much meditation done on this event and yep...2012 seems to be the year the old people are coming up with.
What the more grounded among the Indian astrologers says - The widely accepted belief of Hindus is that Kali Yuga will see total annihilation. Creation will once again begin after total destruction. This will be Satya Yuga.
So connecting 2012 to Hinduism and Vedic astrology is done by those people who want to create fear and optimism at the same time among people – and earn a living by predictions and writing books.
Hinduism teaches that all animate and inanimate is Brahman. Doomsday predictions and 2012 are products of ego or ignorance, which hampers self realisation. To the realised there is no beginning and end.
So – No, the world will not end in 2012. Many such predictions had come and gone and this too will go as will the many such doomsday predictions that will come in future.
It is widely believed that Kali Yuga began in 3102 BC.
Now there are several people quoting Puranas to indicate that Lord Krishna had predicted an end the Kali Yuga after 5000 years and the beginning of the Golden Era.
But traditional scriptures do not agree to this as Kali Yuga will last for 432,000 years.
Now those who are stating that Kali Yuga will end after 5000 years are indicating the beginning of Golden Age in 2012. They are scrupulously using a mix of solar and lunar calendars used by Hindus to suggest that Kali Yuga will end in 2012.
In the “Brahma-Vaivarta Purana”, Lord Krishna tells Ganga Devi that a Golden Age will come in the Kali Yuga - one of the four stages of development that the world goes through as part of the cycle of eras, as described in Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna predicted that this Golden Age will start 5000 years after the beginning of the Kali Yuga, and will last for 10,000 years.
Type “2012” into a search engine and you will get 332,000,000 results. The web is buzzing with the ‘end of days’ sites, with much greater emphasis than the Y2K bug could ever have generated. All kinds of outcomes are offered, from a meteorite hitting the planet, to utter collapse of civilisation due to greed, to the third world war.
All religions are being tapped into for “clear signs” of the catastrophe, as well as prophets and science. Pseudo-scientists have either the Planet X (also Nibiru, or sometimes as having Nibiru, with its Planet X) crashing into earth in or around that date. Other “prophets” say the people of planet Nibiru (or Planet X) will arrive to earth to see what their “creation” (the Human race) is up to.
Others still talk of comets or other heavenly bodies striking the planet, causing a climatic change of such proportions that only a half billion people will be able to survive. They imagine a “nuclear” winter that will either send the earth into another ice age, or turn large parts of it into searing deserts. The list of catastrophes is endless on the web.
December 2012 is an important time in many calendars and prophesies, including the Hindu calendar, the Hopi prophesies and, interestingly, Maori lore. In Maori lore December 2012 or thereabouts is when the curtain is lifted. Or is dissolved or comes down – depending on the various translations of the phrase in old Maori - "ka hinga te arai".
This speaks of the reunification of “Rangi” (the Sky) and “Papa” (the Earth). The creation legend goes thus – in the beginning Rangi and Papa were partners and were closely clasped together. They had a number of children, who lived in between these two parents, squashed and without light. One day these children (who were all Gods - God of the Wind, God of the Sea, God of War etc) decided to push their parents apart so they could have room to move. They all tried and failed, till one of the Gods, Tane, pushed them apart, separated them, and there was light.
Ka hinga te arai then could mean the Earth and Sky becoming one (what would be consequence of such a move, or does it mean something other than coming together?); it could mean the blotting out of the sun due to some kind of covering (whether from an explosion that send dust and debris into the atmosphere to block out the Sun’s rays) or (my favourite) it could mean an opening of the dimensions through an upsurge of the human consciousness so things previously unknown to us becomes apparent.
One meaning of the phrase is the removal (dissolving) of the planes separator - basically the merging of the physical and spiritual planes. Some translate this as a time when the unknowables become known through a shift in perception that is forced onto mankind. This, for once, is one of the saner interpretations of what could happen in 2012.
In the Hopi Indian prophesies 2012, or thereabouts, is seen as the return of the Pahana (the White Brother from the skies) with whose coming will come the dawn of the
Fifth World. We are presently at the end of the fourth world, according to Hopi Indians. Out in South America it is the Sons of Light returning to Earth to help mankind onto the next step in their evolution.
There are many people around the world who believe in something close to this understanding of what will happen in 2012 – humanity will undergo a change of sorts to their consciousness in that time, with or without help from others. Some web pages are dedicated to this approach, with a number talking of the galactic centring where our sun, for the first time in thousands of years, will hit the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way.
This alignment to the galaxy will have profound impact in the way we use our senses, our brain and our consciousness. Gravitation forces and other cosmic forces (including the cosmic background radiation) will work together in ways that will change us, and everything else, associated with our planet. This includes some major changes to the alignment of the planet, it is said.
“But our old ways of thinking, including our biology will change as the Sun, Earth and Pleides line up in space. This will cause an increase in discharge of photons from the sun which is bound to cause changes in our brain pattern,” – astrologer and modern day guru Dattatreya Siva Baba.
Others still are saying that around December 2012, several wormholes will open at the centre of our galaxy, allowing “others” from around the universe to finally contact use. Various ideas and descriptions have been given of these others, including the Sons of Light, and a host of “aliens” who are not aliens but our friends from far across the universe.
In Hinduism, the field of speculation is vast as far as 2012 is concerned. Several people are putting forth the idea that Kali Yuga will end in 2012, and Satya (Krita) Yuga begins. Other are saying the Kali Yuga has a few thousand years to go, some say 5000 years, others 427,000 years.
Some modern “thinkers” believe that the yuga calculations are all wrong and, yes, the Satya Yuaga (the Golden Age) is about to begin. But with a proviso – there will be calamities, natural and otherwise – like financial problems, wars and global warming.
These thinkers take the likes of Sri Aurobindo and use his proclamations like "India of the ages is not dead nor has she spoken her last creative word; she lives and has still something to do for herself and the human peoples" to show the changes the end of the next two years will bring for the Earth.
India has long been touted as the guru of the world by the many modern sages and thinkers and innovators of the spirit. They, including Swami Vivekananda, have said that India will rise as the teacher of the world when the rest of the world is surfeit of its childishness and is willing to learn the way of wisdom from India.
Keeping such prophesies in mind, it is no wonder that the younger generation in India and the Indian Disapora is leaning towards a consciousness shift rather than catastrophe in 2012. But as long as we, the Indians of today, continue aping the West, this guru aspect of India will remain in abeyance (but that is another story).
All and good, as this writer also believes in something positive and even good happening in 2012. After snuffling through the thousands of ideas surrounding the year 2012, one thing was very clear – mankind is desperately looking at ways to stop the wounding of its psyche and the planet.
The escalation of the war against the planet and its people has reached a peak that even WWII could not achieve. When children start dying at the rate one every six minute (due to disease, abuse and lack of clean water and food) then it is time to re-look at the way we have been doing things.
As it is said: the solution of a problem that exists today cannot be found in the methods of problem solving that we were using yesterday. So we must look to the extraordinary and as yet “unthought” of solutions to our present problems.
Every idea of governance that we have seen has its pitfalls, some more than others as shown by the collapse of “communism” in the recent past. The so-called collapse of “capitalism” in the recent years has also shown us what happens when greed and rampant consumerism is let loose upon the people.
The so-called liberations and revolutions have, in fact, not liberated people, just made us more like the people who had held us off from that world of power for so long. Children appear to be more abused worldwide than maybe ever before – with child slavery on the rise, and child prostitution even being condoned by parents in the less developed sections of the world, where a father can sell a daughter to pimps for less than $100.
Food production is the highest it has ever been and so much of it is wasted, yet a third of the population find it hard to put together three square meals each day for the family. Water, the most abundant element on earth, is getting expensive to have as more waterways are poisoned and fewer places of clean water become available to the world’s population.
And nature is taking its toll (or its revenge) on every sphere of the globe. Mankind, it appears, is finding harder to adjust to the new ways that the Earth is reacting to its perilous situation.
These are the problems that have been besetting mankind for a very long time now. And we still haven’t any answer to them. Is the “end of days” phenomenon (this attitude to the years 2012) a subliminal cry of help from the collective psyche of mankind? Why is it that so many from several parts of the planets are concerned so much over a little date?
I, for one, don’t believe the Earth will be destroyed. Yet, I can’t help feeling something will happen in 2012. I think it will be a bit of almost everything – some calamity will hit us at a pace and proportion that will force our hands into living a better life. Whether this is a global catastrophe or an event of such proportion that mankind finally says “enough is enough”, I don’t know.
One of the prophesies I abide by is that there will be “minor adjustments” to the planet, with minor adjustments seen from the point of view of the planet and not us. This is already happening. Few of us know that the magnetic poles has already shift by several degrees southward over Europe. Some say it is as much as 15 degrees (?). This would explain why Spain and Portugal are presently experiencing snowfall in areas where it was previously sunny at this time of the year.
Could it get worse? Yes, it has been steadily getting worse. The nature and scope of natural disasters in the past few years has been unprecedented. Earthquakes and tsunamis are getting more frequent, global warming (whether man-made or natural) is a fact, and the weather patterns around the world is throwing up surprises almost every day.
The level of human suffering will have to peak before “realisation” of the evils of greed, selfishness, partisan leanings and racism takes place for humans. It has to get worse before it gets better. Maybe it is up to us to ride out this ‘worse’ phase before we can get to the golden age.
The way of wisdom as shown by our ancient seers is to hold everything in trust – there is no ownership of anything, including the resources of the earth. Just as a school headmaster will look after the property of the school with diligence and with faith, so should every human being look to the things he or she owns, individually and as a collective.
But just as when the headmaster is transferred and he give up the ‘ownership’ of the school properties without a fuss, so should human being be ready to give up anything they ‘own’ – their family, their property, their very life. This is the way of detachment that our ancients showed.
Notes:
Golden Age Could Begin in 2012
The ancient Hindus mainly used lunar calendars but also used solar calendars. If an average lunar year equals 354.36 days, then this would be about 5270 lunar years from the time when the Kali Yuga started until 21 Dec 2012. This is the same year that the Mayans predict rebirth of our planet. It is also about 5113 solar years of 365.24 days per year, and is day number 1,867,817 into the Kali Yuga. By either solar or lunar years, we are over 5000 years into the Kali Yuga and it is time for Lord Krishna's prophecy to happen according to the ancient Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna's Golden Age could easily begin in 2012.
Ka hinga te arai (from the internet)
Basically the other more secretive legend that follows on from this (Creation mythology) says that there will come a time when the children of Tane (that's you and me) are so busy, so distracted with fighting, with greed, with lust etc, so separated from our original parents (Rangi and Papa - so that kinda means we have lost our links with the natural order of things) that Rangi and Papa will take that opportunity - while no one is looking - to quickly come back together...destroying everything in the process. There has been much meditation done on this event and yep...2012 seems to be the year the old people are coming up with.
What the more grounded among the Indian astrologers says - The widely accepted belief of Hindus is that Kali Yuga will see total annihilation. Creation will once again begin after total destruction. This will be Satya Yuga.
So connecting 2012 to Hinduism and Vedic astrology is done by those people who want to create fear and optimism at the same time among people – and earn a living by predictions and writing books.
Hinduism teaches that all animate and inanimate is Brahman. Doomsday predictions and 2012 are products of ego or ignorance, which hampers self realisation. To the realised there is no beginning and end.
So – No, the world will not end in 2012. Many such predictions had come and gone and this too will go as will the many such doomsday predictions that will come in future.
It is widely believed that Kali Yuga began in 3102 BC.
Now there are several people quoting Puranas to indicate that Lord Krishna had predicted an end the Kali Yuga after 5000 years and the beginning of the Golden Era.
But traditional scriptures do not agree to this as Kali Yuga will last for 432,000 years.
Now those who are stating that Kali Yuga will end after 5000 years are indicating the beginning of Golden Age in 2012. They are scrupulously using a mix of solar and lunar calendars used by Hindus to suggest that Kali Yuga will end in 2012.
In the “Brahma-Vaivarta Purana”, Lord Krishna tells Ganga Devi that a Golden Age will come in the Kali Yuga - one of the four stages of development that the world goes through as part of the cycle of eras, as described in Hindu scriptures. Lord Krishna predicted that this Golden Age will start 5000 years after the beginning of the Kali Yuga, and will last for 10,000 years.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Sai Baba and Human Values
Followers from some 85 countries around the world, the President and Prime Minister of India and various Chief Ministers, some of India’s top industrialists, and many noted personalities attended Sathya Sai Baba’s week-long 85th birthday celebrations earlier this month. Click here to see the Indian Weekender photogallery.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was deeply impressed by the free educational institutes that Sai Baba runs and said he was going back with some good ideas that he would like to see implemented into the national system. Sai Baba offers education through free universities, colleges and schools throughout India but with the added dimension of human values as an integral aspect of the curriculum.
The President, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, chief guest at the Women’s Day function at Prashanti Nilayam, the abode of Sai Baba, called on women-related issues to the forefront. Governors E.S.L. Narasimhan (Andhra Pradesh) and Shivraj Patil (Punjab) and State Minister for Information and Public Relations J. Geetha Reddy were present for the Women’s Day celebration which is part of the birthday celebrations.
Sai Baba is not a religious movement, cult or sect. His organisation is based on a few very simple affirmations – Help Ever, Hurt Never; Love all, Serve all, and God is Love and Love is God. While apparently simplistic in the first instance, Sai Baba has spent the past few decades honing the understanding and practice of such axioms for his followers the world over. That is why he is regarded as a Satguru (a teacher of truth), a world teacher (jagat guru) and an avatar in line with Krishna, Rama, Buddha and Jesus.
His teachings have reverberated every teaching of every scripture, his followers are from every religion: Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, followers of Judaism, Shintoism, - the list is endless.
He has always said all religions have the same basis of attesting to truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence. These human values make up the foundation of his service organisations in more than 167 countries around the world.
The adherents of his philosophy of divinity in all number over 100 million, many of them registered to the organisations in their country, including New Zealand.
Every religion is celebrated at Prashanti Nilayam – with annual celebrations of Eid, Christmas, Hindu festivals and many more. Sai Baba does not tolerate any differences in the practitioners of any religion – every follower of the Sai philosophy is asked to treat everyone else as himself/herself, without an iota of otherness.
It is a philosophy that has held true for the past 60 years. While initially people are drawn to Sai Baba because of his miracles, the past few decade has seen a massive growth in followers based on the social commitment Sai Baba has to humanity. He says his life is an example of service to humanity and his followers need to follow that.
His services include free super speciality hospitals that undertake heart surgeries and other high-level surgeries, his water projects that bring potable water to millions of villagers in several states in India and offering free education up to university level. His overseas branches are geared to assisting local issues as and when they rise, as well as starting free schools and medical facilities in their own countries.
Sai service organisations operate on a simple maxim - help fellow man without any conditions whatsoever. While no money or subscription is every asked for in the organisation, these national and regional bodies have been carrying out successful relief work for years in their areas.
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Sai Baba – Man of Miracles
The Western world was introduced to the godman, Sathya Sai Baba in a book by an Australian journalist Howard Murphet. While since that book – Sai Baba Man of Miracles - several hundred other books on Sai Baba have been written, the simple beauty and deliverance of that book remains a must-read for all followers.
Murphet spent years in India in the 1960s in search of ancient knowledge, and then dedicated himself to Sai Baba after finding in him everything he wanted as guru. A practising Christian, he freely acknowledges Sai Baba as an avatar, as god walking on Earth.
Books on Sai Baba have been written in many languages. While many dwell on the miracles that he has been doing for the past six decades, there are dozens of books about the his mission, his accomplishments and his methods. Many more exist of the personal experiences of people who have stayed with him, tested him and accepted him as an avatar of the age.
Sai Baba says he has come to clear the path to spirituality that has been overgrown with the five diseases of humanity: anger, greed, attachment, pride and lust.
Sai Baba does not advocate one religion over another, saying that each is a pathway to god and each provides a particular way for people to reach that goal. He asks that his followers become better in the religion they have been born in: a Hindu to become a better Hindu, a Muslim to become a better Muslim, A Christian to become a better Christian.
In all, he says one thing – everyone has to become a better human being to attain anything in life. Humanism is the basis of all religion and with the appropriate reasoning and intellectual discrimination, one can understand what it is to be a true human being. It is this message of Sai Baba that appeals to all, no matter what state their minds may be in.
International Sai Organisation website - http://www.sathyasai.org/
Sai organisation – India - http://www.srisathyasai.org.in/
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was deeply impressed by the free educational institutes that Sai Baba runs and said he was going back with some good ideas that he would like to see implemented into the national system. Sai Baba offers education through free universities, colleges and schools throughout India but with the added dimension of human values as an integral aspect of the curriculum.
The President, Pratibha Devisingh Patil, chief guest at the Women’s Day function at Prashanti Nilayam, the abode of Sai Baba, called on women-related issues to the forefront. Governors E.S.L. Narasimhan (Andhra Pradesh) and Shivraj Patil (Punjab) and State Minister for Information and Public Relations J. Geetha Reddy were present for the Women’s Day celebration which is part of the birthday celebrations.
Sai Baba is not a religious movement, cult or sect. His organisation is based on a few very simple affirmations – Help Ever, Hurt Never; Love all, Serve all, and God is Love and Love is God. While apparently simplistic in the first instance, Sai Baba has spent the past few decades honing the understanding and practice of such axioms for his followers the world over. That is why he is regarded as a Satguru (a teacher of truth), a world teacher (jagat guru) and an avatar in line with Krishna, Rama, Buddha and Jesus.
His teachings have reverberated every teaching of every scripture, his followers are from every religion: Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, followers of Judaism, Shintoism, - the list is endless.
He has always said all religions have the same basis of attesting to truth, right conduct, peace, love and non-violence. These human values make up the foundation of his service organisations in more than 167 countries around the world.
The adherents of his philosophy of divinity in all number over 100 million, many of them registered to the organisations in their country, including New Zealand.
Every religion is celebrated at Prashanti Nilayam – with annual celebrations of Eid, Christmas, Hindu festivals and many more. Sai Baba does not tolerate any differences in the practitioners of any religion – every follower of the Sai philosophy is asked to treat everyone else as himself/herself, without an iota of otherness.
It is a philosophy that has held true for the past 60 years. While initially people are drawn to Sai Baba because of his miracles, the past few decade has seen a massive growth in followers based on the social commitment Sai Baba has to humanity. He says his life is an example of service to humanity and his followers need to follow that.
His services include free super speciality hospitals that undertake heart surgeries and other high-level surgeries, his water projects that bring potable water to millions of villagers in several states in India and offering free education up to university level. His overseas branches are geared to assisting local issues as and when they rise, as well as starting free schools and medical facilities in their own countries.
Sai service organisations operate on a simple maxim - help fellow man without any conditions whatsoever. While no money or subscription is every asked for in the organisation, these national and regional bodies have been carrying out successful relief work for years in their areas.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sai Baba – Man of Miracles
The Western world was introduced to the godman, Sathya Sai Baba in a book by an Australian journalist Howard Murphet. While since that book – Sai Baba Man of Miracles - several hundred other books on Sai Baba have been written, the simple beauty and deliverance of that book remains a must-read for all followers.
Murphet spent years in India in the 1960s in search of ancient knowledge, and then dedicated himself to Sai Baba after finding in him everything he wanted as guru. A practising Christian, he freely acknowledges Sai Baba as an avatar, as god walking on Earth.
Books on Sai Baba have been written in many languages. While many dwell on the miracles that he has been doing for the past six decades, there are dozens of books about the his mission, his accomplishments and his methods. Many more exist of the personal experiences of people who have stayed with him, tested him and accepted him as an avatar of the age.
Sai Baba says he has come to clear the path to spirituality that has been overgrown with the five diseases of humanity: anger, greed, attachment, pride and lust.
Sai Baba does not advocate one religion over another, saying that each is a pathway to god and each provides a particular way for people to reach that goal. He asks that his followers become better in the religion they have been born in: a Hindu to become a better Hindu, a Muslim to become a better Muslim, A Christian to become a better Christian.
In all, he says one thing – everyone has to become a better human being to attain anything in life. Humanism is the basis of all religion and with the appropriate reasoning and intellectual discrimination, one can understand what it is to be a true human being. It is this message of Sai Baba that appeals to all, no matter what state their minds may be in.
International Sai Organisation website - http://www.sathyasai.org/
Sai organisation – India - http://www.srisathyasai.org.in/
Manas, the Hindu perspective of the mind
In Hinduism, the mind is a double-edged sword. It is the centre of all we consider either good or evil. In contrast to philosophies that separate us from God, where good or evil is attributed to external agents, in Vedanta the mind is, in reality, the creator of everything.
This is the one concept of Hinduism that is hardest to get one’s head around – that the world as we know is unreal in actuality, and that all we experience is only true to a certain extent and no more. It is this one concept of Maya and the subterfuge of the mind that finally stops us from truly realising our true self. In most cases, it is much easier to just think of God as someone or something external and attribute characteristics to him/her/it and get on with life.
The unreality of the universe is not outright unreal. It is relatively unreal, that is, unreal compared to the reality of the foundation or the basis of the universe. Thus it is called mithya – unreal real. It is this concept of the unreality of our reality that people from time immemorial have butted their heads against, some with success and others with despair.
All schools of philosophies in Hinduism, from dualism (dwaitham) to non-dualism (adwaitham) to special approaches to adwaitham (Vishist Adwaitham) agree on the universe being unreal. Only the approach they adopt in illustrating this unreality differs or only the method they offer in overcoming this unreality differs.
Thousands of years ago, our ancients broke down how the mind works, and what it can do for us (or against us) depending on the control we have over it.
In life, we humans go through our ‘reality’ based on our reaction to stimuli from our environment. The stimuli is sorted out by our senses and our brains and presented to the mind for decision-making, for storage as memory and for stitching together the mosaic of our lives.
This sorting out is initiated by the senses (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell) which send electrical impulses to the brain for collating into either a visual picture, a memory or an action response which ‘we’ as the mind/personality/ego decide to act on. In general, this process is supposed to follow the basic input, process, output method of dealing with everyday things.
But not quite, since the information has to be fed into a background and shot off in the appropriate zone to find a collaborative piece for it to make any sense. That means we already have a field of information that we need to relate new stimuli for it to work at all. New material without a corresponding fill-in in our brain puts us in a panicky state and this is clearly seen in babies, who need to be introduced to new things gradually.
The ancients went a bit further than most when delving into the workings of the mind. They started with ten senses, five of action and five of mental understanding. The five senses of action – the karmendriyas (Karma/Indriyas ) – are the five elements that make us act – eliminating, reproducing, moving, grasping and speaking. The five sense of understanding (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell) are called the jnanendriyas (jnana/Indriyas).
In all philosophies of Hinduism, the senses are deemed as unreliable. What you sense is not the truth or reality. It is only the sum of what we receive through our senses and this will vary according to what our minds are attuned to.
So, right from the start, we are duped by the senses because they are designed only to take in/receive information to the limits of their function and can do no more than what is demarcated as their boundaries. They do not present the world/universe as it really is, only as what they perceive the world to be. And they can be defective (see note below on synaesthesia).
And it doesn’t get any better. The mind, that elusive thing called manas in Sanskrit, has its own agenda. In the first instance, the manas is ruled by one or the other of the trigunas - Tamas, Rajas and Satthwa. It is this triple strand of attributes or qualities that determine how we respond to any given situation. The trigunas are tamas (indolence/dullness), rajasic (fieriness or active) and satthwa (balanced or pure) gunas.
The closest English translations we have of this gunas is ‘attributes’ or ‘qualities’ but it does not explain everything. In lay terms the gunas tinge our minds, and either ‘force’ or ‘allow’ it to make decisions based on a preset ranges of habits or behaviour. ‘Forced’ in that the conditioning is so great that the individual has no chance of making a decision other than what is stored up. This can be called a character trait or tendency. Or that overpowering impulse that you have to give in to.
‘Allowed’ in the sense that when one has worked at making the conditionings more malleable, one can make a decision that can go against our instinctual behaviour (against that reaction of our mind that is so conditioned so as to appear as our innate nature). This is achieved by rational analysis of one’s own self – one of the hardest endeavour ever taken by man.
It is our mind, then, which decides based on how we are tinged in our personality.
Tamas, Rajas and Satthwa. Modern day researchers talk of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, with the latter seen as being same as the unconscious mind by some and as a separate entity from the unconscious mind by others.
The mind, according to the ancients, is made up of our unconscious mind, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. What we in daily lives say is the conscious mind is actually the subconscious mind that the ancients talk of.
For example, we can be unconsciously swayed in the way we act or make a decision based on an external factor. Rather than our instincts coming in play or we being aware of what we are doing, external factors continually prime us in making a decision in which a judgement is passed without any analysis on our part. This comes from our subconscious mind which operates when we are awake and in action mode but of which we are not aware of.
New studies by psychologists at Yale, based on experiments to alter people’s judgments, have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
These reactions have been analysed to the nth degree and are most apparent in how marketing ‘helps’ us in making choice – through advertising and other marketing tactics. These subliminal tactics are part of our everyday lives, employed by our own selves in reacting to both overt and subtle stimuli.
The autopilot mode takes care of a very large percentage of our waking lives. While there are many things our lives that need concentration – from shaving to crossing the road to eating - many of these activities, because of their repetitive nature, are shunted off to the subconscious. How many of us can recall how we crossed the road, or how we ate this morning? Or how we hold the razor when we shaved? How do sportspeople continually keep making those amazing shots, or the perfect dive? How do people have a gut feeling that is spot on? Or never forget how to ride a bike or drive a car? The list is endless. And all are forms of our subconscious mind.
On the other hand, the conscious mind as demarcated by the ancients is one of concentration and awareness. This is called being mindful.
The conscious mind comes into play when there is a need to concentrate, to bring about a situation where all our abilities are required. This means we are very much aware of what we are doing and how we are doing and we are storing away this experience as something new and unique, or important to us.
In creating our reality, the mind uses all three states of consciousness, but with more emphasis on the unconscious minds.
Some researchers say the human unconscious mind resides along the spine and the nub of the brain, which is also called the reptilian brain (reptilian complex/R-complex). This part of the brain is enclosed by the mammalian brain (the paleomammalian complex (limbic system)) and both of these are covered by the human brain (neomammalian complex (neocortex). Please note that presently this theory of brain triune is accepted as true only by a smaller section of the scientific community.
And it is this lower brain that is the dominant power of our minds and which lends us our animal ways. It probably is the basis of the self-deluding, self-indulgent power that the ancients said was a mix of moha and maya; a power that leads to ego-preening, fault-shifting, making allowances for ourselves and those important to us, of hidden subjectivity that one can’t acknowledge and rejecting that which will not fit into our framework of references.
This deluding power is a mixture of both individual and cultural conditioning, a nurturing of ideals, creeds, traditions that aims to do one thing and one thing only – protect the ego, namely the mind and its waves of thoughts. This is the mind baggage that our ancients targeted through the spiritual efforts of sadhana, meditation to raise our awareness from the base level to a level where we could develop our intellect through vivek (discrimination) and vichar (analysis).
The mind, then, creates our personal reality, and each personal reality is based on a ‘background’ reality that is shared by others in the vicinity, or from knowledge factored into that reality through becoming aware of more information.
But none of these reality can be the same. Similar, but never the same as it is all invented inside of individual heads. It has no basis in the external, if an ‘external’ exists.
Science states is this way:
If we look at the nervous system there are basically two functions. One is sensory—the ability to respond to the outside world—and the other is the ability to do something about it, the ability to modify the world. As the nervous system gets more complex in higher animals there's another totally astounding property, which is the ability of the nervous system to invent things inside the head, which it can then make into reality.
- Neuroscientist Rodolfo R. Llinás, Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine.
Now this property/aspect of the mind to invent things inside the head and then making it our reality is what the ancients concentrated on. What this means is that we have a field of awareness inside of us, based on information we have stored up in the years we have experienced and we see this as the field of operations. Like the operating system in a computer, it is the RAM in the background that can make computing possible.
The triune, the trinity, the trimurti is an ongoing element of Hinduism and the ancients were spot-on in determining the brain/mind function according this tri-sectioning. The tamas or conditioned element is said to be found in the instinctive reptilian mind, the active element or rajasic bhava (attitude) is played out in daily life in the subconscious mind while man finds the truth of things/purpose of life only through the balanced approach of the satthwic attitude. The satthwic attitude comes about when the mind or manas is motivated by the buddhi or intellect and is in a state of mindfulness.
A higher stage of this conscious mind is called Constant Integrated Awareness (Prajnanam) - when one is mindful of everything in creation. In fact it is said that one achieving this state is God himself or herself, as stated in the mahavakya Prajnanam Brahman (Consciousness is God).
We call this the super-conscious mind – that which is aligned to the divine/cosmic awareness. This is where the reality of the world is known, where the cosmos and you become the same, in which your true identity is discovered.
Swami Vivekananda “criticises most popular religious ideas to the extent that they are based on faith and belief alone (which is mind-based), rather than direct personal experience (which goes beyond the mind)”. In his search of God, the Swami tested gurus by asking if they had a direct experience of god. Ramakrishna Paramhansa said he had, and Vivekananda accepted it as true based on the conviction with which it was stated.
This direct perception is what the ancients urge people towards – to know the divine, the truth or the reality through realisation. Call it enlightenment or anything, the direct perception is the final step in all religions. Because it goes beyond the limits of the mind, it is accepted as the true way of discovering that “which by knowing, everything else is known”.
It is not easy, this discovering of the self. Through meditation and control of sense, it can come about. The ancients gave some ideas of how this can be done.
Laya, Vikshepa, Kashaya and Rasasvada are the other four obstacles to getting this direct experience. Laya is sleepiness, when the mind in a state of quietude brings on sleepiness to counter the prolonged inactivity it is subjected to.
Vikshepa is excessive tossing of mind from one object to another object, the making of castles in the air or holding conversations with one’s own self. This is the excessive monkey-nature of the mind.
Kashaya is Goodha Vasana (hidden subtle desires) which one never thought were there and the unconscious ambitions within the mind. They can take endless shapes.
Finally, Rasasvada is the bliss of Savikalpa Samadhi (lower Samadhi). This itself is an obstacle so long as it prevents you from enjoying the Highest Nirvikalpa Bliss. Vichara (analysis), viveka (discrimination), Pranayama, further earnestness and struggle in meditation will remove the above four obstacles.
Notes
A person bound by objective desires will try in various ways to fulfil them. He becomes a slave to his senses and their pursuits. But if he withdraws the senses from the world and gets control over their master, the mind, and engages that mind in thapas (penance), then he can establish Swa-rajya or Self-mastery or independence over himself. Allowing the senses to attach themselves to objects is what causes bondage. When the mind that flows through the senses towards the outer world is turned inwards and is made to contemplate on the Atma, it attains liberation or Moksha. – Satya Sai Baba
Synaesthesia - Sensory connections can even be crossed: One of the ways that it is easy for us to understand the unreliability of the senses is by considering the neurological disorder called synaesthesia. With this disorder, a person's brain connections are different from the typical. When, for example, light comes in the eyes (normally used for sight), the neurological connections might be to the smelling centers of the brain. Thus, one might experience smell when looking at certain objects, or may hear some particular color. How very different would be our descriptions of external reality if all human brains operated this way. (It is estimated that approximately 1 in 25,000 people naturally experience synaesthesia.)
The triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the paleomammalian complex (limbic system), and the neomammalian complex (neocortex), viewed as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution. The triune brain hypothesis became familiar to a broad popular audience through Carl Sagan's Pulitzer prize winning 1977 book The Dragons of Eden. Though embraced by some psychiatrists and at least one leading affective neuroscience researcher, the model never won wide acceptance among comparative neurobiologists.
Dr. Paul MacLean, Chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. says there are essentially three brains, each of which developed during a particular stage of evolutionary history. The earlier part of the brain, found in reptiles, could be called the reptilian brain, or R-complex. In mammals another structure appeared: the paleomammalian brain, with a new range of particularly mammalian behavior--care of the young, affection, mutual grooming, etc. This is the home of the limbic system and the capacity for feeling and emotion, for the sense of smell and sexuality. With the development of human beings came the most recent evolutionary structure, the neomammalian brain -- with a hugely expanded neocortex in the prefrontal lobes. The neomammalian or "thinking" brain brought with it the capacity for language, visualization, and symbolic skills unique to human beings.
As Vivekananda said: Imagine if you had an additional sense, an electric one – how would you see the world then? How indeed? Many people attest to seeing auras, that electrical or magnetic emanation that comes from every living thing. Many see halos and various other things. These people either have developed their senses to a higher level or are in possession of a ‘sense’ in addition to the ones all regular people have.
This is the one concept of Hinduism that is hardest to get one’s head around – that the world as we know is unreal in actuality, and that all we experience is only true to a certain extent and no more. It is this one concept of Maya and the subterfuge of the mind that finally stops us from truly realising our true self. In most cases, it is much easier to just think of God as someone or something external and attribute characteristics to him/her/it and get on with life.
The unreality of the universe is not outright unreal. It is relatively unreal, that is, unreal compared to the reality of the foundation or the basis of the universe. Thus it is called mithya – unreal real. It is this concept of the unreality of our reality that people from time immemorial have butted their heads against, some with success and others with despair.
All schools of philosophies in Hinduism, from dualism (dwaitham) to non-dualism (adwaitham) to special approaches to adwaitham (Vishist Adwaitham) agree on the universe being unreal. Only the approach they adopt in illustrating this unreality differs or only the method they offer in overcoming this unreality differs.
Thousands of years ago, our ancients broke down how the mind works, and what it can do for us (or against us) depending on the control we have over it.
In life, we humans go through our ‘reality’ based on our reaction to stimuli from our environment. The stimuli is sorted out by our senses and our brains and presented to the mind for decision-making, for storage as memory and for stitching together the mosaic of our lives.
This sorting out is initiated by the senses (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell) which send electrical impulses to the brain for collating into either a visual picture, a memory or an action response which ‘we’ as the mind/personality/ego decide to act on. In general, this process is supposed to follow the basic input, process, output method of dealing with everyday things.
But not quite, since the information has to be fed into a background and shot off in the appropriate zone to find a collaborative piece for it to make any sense. That means we already have a field of information that we need to relate new stimuli for it to work at all. New material without a corresponding fill-in in our brain puts us in a panicky state and this is clearly seen in babies, who need to be introduced to new things gradually.
The ancients went a bit further than most when delving into the workings of the mind. They started with ten senses, five of action and five of mental understanding. The five senses of action – the karmendriyas (Karma/Indriyas ) – are the five elements that make us act – eliminating, reproducing, moving, grasping and speaking. The five sense of understanding (sight, taste, hearing, touch and smell) are called the jnanendriyas (jnana/Indriyas).
In all philosophies of Hinduism, the senses are deemed as unreliable. What you sense is not the truth or reality. It is only the sum of what we receive through our senses and this will vary according to what our minds are attuned to.
So, right from the start, we are duped by the senses because they are designed only to take in/receive information to the limits of their function and can do no more than what is demarcated as their boundaries. They do not present the world/universe as it really is, only as what they perceive the world to be. And they can be defective (see note below on synaesthesia).
And it doesn’t get any better. The mind, that elusive thing called manas in Sanskrit, has its own agenda. In the first instance, the manas is ruled by one or the other of the trigunas - Tamas, Rajas and Satthwa. It is this triple strand of attributes or qualities that determine how we respond to any given situation. The trigunas are tamas (indolence/dullness), rajasic (fieriness or active) and satthwa (balanced or pure) gunas.
The closest English translations we have of this gunas is ‘attributes’ or ‘qualities’ but it does not explain everything. In lay terms the gunas tinge our minds, and either ‘force’ or ‘allow’ it to make decisions based on a preset ranges of habits or behaviour. ‘Forced’ in that the conditioning is so great that the individual has no chance of making a decision other than what is stored up. This can be called a character trait or tendency. Or that overpowering impulse that you have to give in to.
‘Allowed’ in the sense that when one has worked at making the conditionings more malleable, one can make a decision that can go against our instinctual behaviour (against that reaction of our mind that is so conditioned so as to appear as our innate nature). This is achieved by rational analysis of one’s own self – one of the hardest endeavour ever taken by man.
It is our mind, then, which decides based on how we are tinged in our personality.
Tamas, Rajas and Satthwa. Modern day researchers talk of the conscious mind and the subconscious mind, with the latter seen as being same as the unconscious mind by some and as a separate entity from the unconscious mind by others.
The mind, according to the ancients, is made up of our unconscious mind, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. What we in daily lives say is the conscious mind is actually the subconscious mind that the ancients talk of.
For example, we can be unconsciously swayed in the way we act or make a decision based on an external factor. Rather than our instincts coming in play or we being aware of what we are doing, external factors continually prime us in making a decision in which a judgement is passed without any analysis on our part. This comes from our subconscious mind which operates when we are awake and in action mode but of which we are not aware of.
New studies by psychologists at Yale, based on experiments to alter people’s judgments, have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
These reactions have been analysed to the nth degree and are most apparent in how marketing ‘helps’ us in making choice – through advertising and other marketing tactics. These subliminal tactics are part of our everyday lives, employed by our own selves in reacting to both overt and subtle stimuli.
The autopilot mode takes care of a very large percentage of our waking lives. While there are many things our lives that need concentration – from shaving to crossing the road to eating - many of these activities, because of their repetitive nature, are shunted off to the subconscious. How many of us can recall how we crossed the road, or how we ate this morning? Or how we hold the razor when we shaved? How do sportspeople continually keep making those amazing shots, or the perfect dive? How do people have a gut feeling that is spot on? Or never forget how to ride a bike or drive a car? The list is endless. And all are forms of our subconscious mind.
On the other hand, the conscious mind as demarcated by the ancients is one of concentration and awareness. This is called being mindful.
The conscious mind comes into play when there is a need to concentrate, to bring about a situation where all our abilities are required. This means we are very much aware of what we are doing and how we are doing and we are storing away this experience as something new and unique, or important to us.
In creating our reality, the mind uses all three states of consciousness, but with more emphasis on the unconscious minds.
Some researchers say the human unconscious mind resides along the spine and the nub of the brain, which is also called the reptilian brain (reptilian complex/R-complex). This part of the brain is enclosed by the mammalian brain (the paleomammalian complex (limbic system)) and both of these are covered by the human brain (neomammalian complex (neocortex). Please note that presently this theory of brain triune is accepted as true only by a smaller section of the scientific community.
And it is this lower brain that is the dominant power of our minds and which lends us our animal ways. It probably is the basis of the self-deluding, self-indulgent power that the ancients said was a mix of moha and maya; a power that leads to ego-preening, fault-shifting, making allowances for ourselves and those important to us, of hidden subjectivity that one can’t acknowledge and rejecting that which will not fit into our framework of references.
This deluding power is a mixture of both individual and cultural conditioning, a nurturing of ideals, creeds, traditions that aims to do one thing and one thing only – protect the ego, namely the mind and its waves of thoughts. This is the mind baggage that our ancients targeted through the spiritual efforts of sadhana, meditation to raise our awareness from the base level to a level where we could develop our intellect through vivek (discrimination) and vichar (analysis).
The mind, then, creates our personal reality, and each personal reality is based on a ‘background’ reality that is shared by others in the vicinity, or from knowledge factored into that reality through becoming aware of more information.
But none of these reality can be the same. Similar, but never the same as it is all invented inside of individual heads. It has no basis in the external, if an ‘external’ exists.
Science states is this way:
If we look at the nervous system there are basically two functions. One is sensory—the ability to respond to the outside world—and the other is the ability to do something about it, the ability to modify the world. As the nervous system gets more complex in higher animals there's another totally astounding property, which is the ability of the nervous system to invent things inside the head, which it can then make into reality.
- Neuroscientist Rodolfo R. Llinás, Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine.
Now this property/aspect of the mind to invent things inside the head and then making it our reality is what the ancients concentrated on. What this means is that we have a field of awareness inside of us, based on information we have stored up in the years we have experienced and we see this as the field of operations. Like the operating system in a computer, it is the RAM in the background that can make computing possible.
The triune, the trinity, the trimurti is an ongoing element of Hinduism and the ancients were spot-on in determining the brain/mind function according this tri-sectioning. The tamas or conditioned element is said to be found in the instinctive reptilian mind, the active element or rajasic bhava (attitude) is played out in daily life in the subconscious mind while man finds the truth of things/purpose of life only through the balanced approach of the satthwic attitude. The satthwic attitude comes about when the mind or manas is motivated by the buddhi or intellect and is in a state of mindfulness.
A higher stage of this conscious mind is called Constant Integrated Awareness (Prajnanam) - when one is mindful of everything in creation. In fact it is said that one achieving this state is God himself or herself, as stated in the mahavakya Prajnanam Brahman (Consciousness is God).
We call this the super-conscious mind – that which is aligned to the divine/cosmic awareness. This is where the reality of the world is known, where the cosmos and you become the same, in which your true identity is discovered.
Swami Vivekananda “criticises most popular religious ideas to the extent that they are based on faith and belief alone (which is mind-based), rather than direct personal experience (which goes beyond the mind)”. In his search of God, the Swami tested gurus by asking if they had a direct experience of god. Ramakrishna Paramhansa said he had, and Vivekananda accepted it as true based on the conviction with which it was stated.
This direct perception is what the ancients urge people towards – to know the divine, the truth or the reality through realisation. Call it enlightenment or anything, the direct perception is the final step in all religions. Because it goes beyond the limits of the mind, it is accepted as the true way of discovering that “which by knowing, everything else is known”.
It is not easy, this discovering of the self. Through meditation and control of sense, it can come about. The ancients gave some ideas of how this can be done.
Laya, Vikshepa, Kashaya and Rasasvada are the other four obstacles to getting this direct experience. Laya is sleepiness, when the mind in a state of quietude brings on sleepiness to counter the prolonged inactivity it is subjected to.
Vikshepa is excessive tossing of mind from one object to another object, the making of castles in the air or holding conversations with one’s own self. This is the excessive monkey-nature of the mind.
Kashaya is Goodha Vasana (hidden subtle desires) which one never thought were there and the unconscious ambitions within the mind. They can take endless shapes.
Finally, Rasasvada is the bliss of Savikalpa Samadhi (lower Samadhi). This itself is an obstacle so long as it prevents you from enjoying the Highest Nirvikalpa Bliss. Vichara (analysis), viveka (discrimination), Pranayama, further earnestness and struggle in meditation will remove the above four obstacles.
Notes
A person bound by objective desires will try in various ways to fulfil them. He becomes a slave to his senses and their pursuits. But if he withdraws the senses from the world and gets control over their master, the mind, and engages that mind in thapas (penance), then he can establish Swa-rajya or Self-mastery or independence over himself. Allowing the senses to attach themselves to objects is what causes bondage. When the mind that flows through the senses towards the outer world is turned inwards and is made to contemplate on the Atma, it attains liberation or Moksha. – Satya Sai Baba
Synaesthesia - Sensory connections can even be crossed: One of the ways that it is easy for us to understand the unreliability of the senses is by considering the neurological disorder called synaesthesia. With this disorder, a person's brain connections are different from the typical. When, for example, light comes in the eyes (normally used for sight), the neurological connections might be to the smelling centers of the brain. Thus, one might experience smell when looking at certain objects, or may hear some particular color. How very different would be our descriptions of external reality if all human brains operated this way. (It is estimated that approximately 1 in 25,000 people naturally experience synaesthesia.)
The triune brain consists of the reptilian complex, the paleomammalian complex (limbic system), and the neomammalian complex (neocortex), viewed as structures sequentially added to the forebrain in the course of evolution. The triune brain hypothesis became familiar to a broad popular audience through Carl Sagan's Pulitzer prize winning 1977 book The Dragons of Eden. Though embraced by some psychiatrists and at least one leading affective neuroscience researcher, the model never won wide acceptance among comparative neurobiologists.
Dr. Paul MacLean, Chief of the Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behaviour at the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. says there are essentially three brains, each of which developed during a particular stage of evolutionary history. The earlier part of the brain, found in reptiles, could be called the reptilian brain, or R-complex. In mammals another structure appeared: the paleomammalian brain, with a new range of particularly mammalian behavior--care of the young, affection, mutual grooming, etc. This is the home of the limbic system and the capacity for feeling and emotion, for the sense of smell and sexuality. With the development of human beings came the most recent evolutionary structure, the neomammalian brain -- with a hugely expanded neocortex in the prefrontal lobes. The neomammalian or "thinking" brain brought with it the capacity for language, visualization, and symbolic skills unique to human beings.
As Vivekananda said: Imagine if you had an additional sense, an electric one – how would you see the world then? How indeed? Many people attest to seeing auras, that electrical or magnetic emanation that comes from every living thing. Many see halos and various other things. These people either have developed their senses to a higher level or are in possession of a ‘sense’ in addition to the ones all regular people have.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
The scriptures versus the interpretation of the scriptures.
Think of religious scriptures as a live thing, a thing with an awareness of its own, of being able to impart knowledge to one who wants it. On its own volition.
What this means is that scriptures have a power of their own – if given the chance by people to allow it to teach them, scriptures will do so without any fuss or prejudice. Unlike religious organisations or gurus or the like, scriptures don’t see class, creed, race or sex – but only the effort of an individual in the journey towards truth/god/absolute.
Let’s not think of scriptures as a collection of books, dusty from non use or falling apart from overuse. Do not think of them as pages containing ideas put together by someone ‘wise’. Or a set of ideas or creeds that one has to follow to ‘attain’ the grace of god.
The scriptures of any ancient religion never started out like this: that is, as a set of beliefs offering salvation to its followers. Initially, scriptures were nothing but sounds. Sounds as similar to the cosmic sounds as humanly possible that seers isolated and identified as conducive to spiritual growth. The scriptural sounds were designed to raise our own vibrations in concert with the vibrations of the universe.
These sounds were voiced (with the proper intonations, nuances and the like), and it was memorised and then it was given a form that today we call mantras or chants. For millennia these chants or mantras remained the basis of spiritual development for mankind. It formed the basis of language and other auditory interaction for mankind also.
Then man developed writing. With this began the dubious work of ‘translating’ sound and giving them arbitrary symbols. The sounds of the universe now could be put down in writing.
Few people know that Sanskrit has never been a ‘written’ language but one that is vocalised only. Only in the past thousand years or so has Sanskrit been encrypted into writing. Sanskrit in India is written in the Devnagri script, the Tamil script, the Telugu script, the Bengali script, the Gujrati script and any other script you can think of. The textual rendering of the sounds of Sanskrit is based on the vocal traditions that India had been passing on through the generational lines – from father to son – for millennia before it being written down.
In the past 100 years of so, it has been written in English as well. Each rendering of the sounds of Sanskrit in a different language loses some of the nuance of the vocalised language in its traslation.
Almost all religions agree that in the beginning was the Sound/Word and everything else emanated from it. Sound and resound, and reflection and vibration intermingling gives rise to this universe. The elements of this sound, its reflection and vibration, make up the universe, as we see it as well as what we can’t see.
For example the true intonation of Om or Aum is very long and drawn out, it is described as an all pervading sound. Science can also confirm that a radiation, called the cosmic background radiation or the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, also pervades the universe as a faint background glow in the darkness of space seen by a radio telescope.
So two things are established – sound vibrations do pervade the universe alongside a cosmic background radiation. We are dealing with sound here presently.
This Universal Sound, and the various forms it has taken over the past four billion years of so, appears to be the basis of almost all religious teaching in this world. As can be seen from the scripture selections below.
In the beginning was the Word, says the Bible. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Islam calls the Universal Sound Nada-e-Asmani, Celestial Sound or Awaz-i-Mustaqim. It is said of Prophet Mohammed that he heard the Eternal Sound, Awaz-i-Mustaqim, for fifteen years before receiving the Koran.
Hindus call it the unstruck, endless sound - Anhat Shabda. Or Naad, the sound which created the entire universe.
Anhat Shabda does not have a cause we humans can think of. Imagine it: a sound that is not produced by hitting something or without any cause behind it. It is impossible to imagine it – any example of a sound we have - whether it is speaking, music, crashing, grinding, anything - has a cause and beginning.
The Universal Sound does not have a beginning, it is endless and knows no limit.
So what does science say about all this? Scientists know that a vibration of sorts permeates the entire universe – a vibration that strums a rhythm through the length and breadth of space, forming a foundation of ‘music’ echoed by all things in the universe. Planets, stars and other celestial bodies emanate notes of music/sound and scientists are using these notes as identifying elements of particular heavenly bodies.
This from www.universetoday.com:
Astronomers have been able to monitor the sound waves of a star 100 light years away and found a magnetic cycle analogous to our Sun‘s solar cycle. “Essentially, the star is ringing like a bell,” says scientist Travis Metcalfe from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a co-author of a new study. “As it moves through its starspot cycle, the tone and volume of the ringing changes in a very specific pattern, moving to higher tones with lower volume at the peak of its magnetic cycle.”
Scientists recently also discovered that black holes emit a strong sound, one that modifies its gigantic appetite for nearby stars by offering a counter force of sound waves. This sound emanation from black holes stops the black hole from swallowing entire galaxies – it puts up a parameter of operations for black holes; to be active enough but not to too active that entire galaxies disappear into it.
How strong is the sound that comes from black holes? Sound waves can travel 100s of thousands of light years from a black hole, and remain constant for 2.5 billion years (see below).
This latest from the NASA website:
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found, for the first time, sound waves from a supermassive black hole. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.
The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have travelled hundreds of thousands of light years away from the cluster's central black hole.
In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C. For comparison, a typical piano contains only about seven octaves. At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing.
If so, the B-flat pitch of the sound wave, 57 octaves below middle-C, would have remained roughly constant for about 2.5 billion years.
Far from being ‘dead’, the space element of the universe that take up 95 percent of the volume of the universe is a throbbing, filled-with-activity entity. It is filled with magnetism, electricity, radiation, sounds beyond our hearing, sights beyond our eyes. Only now is science starting to pick up these sounds while the ancients were aware of it, and its importance, for millennia.
Our ancients - Hindus, practitioners of Islam, Zoroastrians, practitioners of Judaism – all knew of this throbbing element of the universe based on sound. Every mystical approach to god is based on this sound – the endless, boundless sound of the universe. Call it what you may – anhat shabda, the Word, Nada-e-Asmani, Awaz-i-Mustaqim, 'Udgeet' (the song of the Heavenly Regions) or Pranav (OM) – it is the sound of the universe that science is now starting to hear.
The ancient Greek philosophers also mention this sound. Socrates states that he heard within him a sound which took him to indescribable spiritual regions. Pythagoras called it the "Music of the Spheres."
Musica universalis (lit. universal music, or music of the spheres) is an ancient philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of musica (the Medieval Latin name for music). This 'music' is not usually thought to be literally audible, but a harmonic and/or mathematical and/or religious concept. (Wikipedia)
In Buddhism and Hinduism it is believed that one can literally hear this music when one develops siddhis after extensive meditation practice. This siddhi is sometimes called clairaudience, the talent of receiving messages in thoughtform from another frequency or realm. It is considered a form of channelling.
* Clairaudience or clear hearing, is the psychic ability by which the psychic can hear sounds and voices that are not audible to common people.
All ‘scriptures’ or revelations in all religions are based on this universal sound. Thus, stating again, scriptures are not the books that we consider holy but the set of knowledge based on the Universal Sound. In some religions it may be the basis of all revelations, such as Hinduism and Buddhism; or be the basic process by which God can be reached (Sufism and Sikhism); or play only a part in the overall set-up, as in Christianity.
In Hinduism, the Universal Sound is the basis of every religious process – the pranav (Om recitation), the mantras, the naamasmaran. This sound is the basis of all our original ‘religious’ books, the shrutis. The name for revelation in Sanskrit is Shruti, which means hearing. The revelation of god is ‘heard’ in the sound of the universe.
All else is either cultural or historical or philosophical – a shown by The Laws of Manu, which are not a revelation; they are not Sruti, but only Smriti, which means recollection of tradition. As are the Puranas, the Brahmanas (not to be confused with Brahman, or the Brahmin caste), Agamas, etc.
Only the Vedas are considered shruti – the Vedas are apauruseya "not human compositions", being supposed to have been directly revealed, and thus are called shruti ("what is heard").
Even the Upanishads and Arayanaks (forest books) are considered philosophical speculation, not really revealed scriptures, although they are part of the Vedas.
For the earnest seeker, God provides a personalised Gita as good as what Krishna provided for Arjun. One has to prepare himself/herself for receiving this Gita – this sound of the universe – by recitation of Om, namasmarana, etc.
This personal Geet emanates from the Universal Sound, the Udgeet or Song of the heavenly regions. It another way of saying that a seeker of spirituality has to align or harmonise himself/herself to the Universal Sound first before ‘receiving’ enlightenment.
The Udgeet is divine energy, which regulates the entire functioning of the universe. It is the Pranav, the Om/Aum and, by reciting it with awe and reverence, you link yourself to this energy. Thus are you part of the geet of the universe, a part of the udgeet.
Endnotes
The Shastras (scriptural directives) direct and counsel everyone. People yield to delusion and become one with the darkness caused by false values and attachment to the unreal, the “me” and “mine”. But scripture is the mother; she does not give up. She persists and pursues; she reminds people of their goal in order to ensure that they will be saved. One need not drink the entire ocean to know its taste; placing just one drop on the tongue is enough. Similarly, it is impossible to understand all the contents of the scriptures. It is enough if one grasps the important lesson that is elaborated therein and puts that lesson into practice. The lesson is: Constant thought of God.
- Satya Sai Baba
Sound in general is an integral component of the universe/s – some of it can heard, a whole lot beyond the scope of our instruments of hearing - the ears. A good example is ultrasound, the cyclic sound pressure with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing (which is approximately 20 kilohertz). The production of ultrasound is used in many different fields, typically to penetrate a medium and measure the reflection signature or supply focused energy, for example sonography which produces pictures of fetuses in the womb.
Within everyone there is a subtler force, an inner vibration named Vital Air (Prana). The mind (Manas) within is subtler still, and deeper and subtler than the mind is the intellect (Vijnana). Beyond the intellect, people have in them the subtlest sheath of spiritual bliss (Ananda).
What this means is that scriptures have a power of their own – if given the chance by people to allow it to teach them, scriptures will do so without any fuss or prejudice. Unlike religious organisations or gurus or the like, scriptures don’t see class, creed, race or sex – but only the effort of an individual in the journey towards truth/god/absolute.
Let’s not think of scriptures as a collection of books, dusty from non use or falling apart from overuse. Do not think of them as pages containing ideas put together by someone ‘wise’. Or a set of ideas or creeds that one has to follow to ‘attain’ the grace of god.
The scriptures of any ancient religion never started out like this: that is, as a set of beliefs offering salvation to its followers. Initially, scriptures were nothing but sounds. Sounds as similar to the cosmic sounds as humanly possible that seers isolated and identified as conducive to spiritual growth. The scriptural sounds were designed to raise our own vibrations in concert with the vibrations of the universe.
These sounds were voiced (with the proper intonations, nuances and the like), and it was memorised and then it was given a form that today we call mantras or chants. For millennia these chants or mantras remained the basis of spiritual development for mankind. It formed the basis of language and other auditory interaction for mankind also.
Then man developed writing. With this began the dubious work of ‘translating’ sound and giving them arbitrary symbols. The sounds of the universe now could be put down in writing.
Few people know that Sanskrit has never been a ‘written’ language but one that is vocalised only. Only in the past thousand years or so has Sanskrit been encrypted into writing. Sanskrit in India is written in the Devnagri script, the Tamil script, the Telugu script, the Bengali script, the Gujrati script and any other script you can think of. The textual rendering of the sounds of Sanskrit is based on the vocal traditions that India had been passing on through the generational lines – from father to son – for millennia before it being written down.
In the past 100 years of so, it has been written in English as well. Each rendering of the sounds of Sanskrit in a different language loses some of the nuance of the vocalised language in its traslation.
Almost all religions agree that in the beginning was the Sound/Word and everything else emanated from it. Sound and resound, and reflection and vibration intermingling gives rise to this universe. The elements of this sound, its reflection and vibration, make up the universe, as we see it as well as what we can’t see.
For example the true intonation of Om or Aum is very long and drawn out, it is described as an all pervading sound. Science can also confirm that a radiation, called the cosmic background radiation or the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, also pervades the universe as a faint background glow in the darkness of space seen by a radio telescope.
So two things are established – sound vibrations do pervade the universe alongside a cosmic background radiation. We are dealing with sound here presently.
This Universal Sound, and the various forms it has taken over the past four billion years of so, appears to be the basis of almost all religious teaching in this world. As can be seen from the scripture selections below.
In the beginning was the Word, says the Bible. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
Islam calls the Universal Sound Nada-e-Asmani, Celestial Sound or Awaz-i-Mustaqim. It is said of Prophet Mohammed that he heard the Eternal Sound, Awaz-i-Mustaqim, for fifteen years before receiving the Koran.
Hindus call it the unstruck, endless sound - Anhat Shabda. Or Naad, the sound which created the entire universe.
Anhat Shabda does not have a cause we humans can think of. Imagine it: a sound that is not produced by hitting something or without any cause behind it. It is impossible to imagine it – any example of a sound we have - whether it is speaking, music, crashing, grinding, anything - has a cause and beginning.
The Universal Sound does not have a beginning, it is endless and knows no limit.
So what does science say about all this? Scientists know that a vibration of sorts permeates the entire universe – a vibration that strums a rhythm through the length and breadth of space, forming a foundation of ‘music’ echoed by all things in the universe. Planets, stars and other celestial bodies emanate notes of music/sound and scientists are using these notes as identifying elements of particular heavenly bodies.
This from www.universetoday.com:
Astronomers have been able to monitor the sound waves of a star 100 light years away and found a magnetic cycle analogous to our Sun‘s solar cycle. “Essentially, the star is ringing like a bell,” says scientist Travis Metcalfe from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a co-author of a new study. “As it moves through its starspot cycle, the tone and volume of the ringing changes in a very specific pattern, moving to higher tones with lower volume at the peak of its magnetic cycle.”
Scientists recently also discovered that black holes emit a strong sound, one that modifies its gigantic appetite for nearby stars by offering a counter force of sound waves. This sound emanation from black holes stops the black hole from swallowing entire galaxies – it puts up a parameter of operations for black holes; to be active enough but not to too active that entire galaxies disappear into it.
How strong is the sound that comes from black holes? Sound waves can travel 100s of thousands of light years from a black hole, and remain constant for 2.5 billion years (see below).
This latest from the NASA website:
Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found, for the first time, sound waves from a supermassive black hole. The "note" is the deepest ever detected from any object in our Universe. The tremendous amounts of energy carried by these sound waves may solve a longstanding problem in astrophysics.
The black hole resides in the Perseus cluster of galaxies located 250 million light years from Earth. In 2002, astronomers obtained a deep Chandra observation that shows ripples in the gas filling the cluster. These ripples are evidence for sound waves that have travelled hundreds of thousands of light years away from the cluster's central black hole.
In musical terms, the pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C. For comparison, a typical piano contains only about seven octaves. At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing.
If so, the B-flat pitch of the sound wave, 57 octaves below middle-C, would have remained roughly constant for about 2.5 billion years.
Far from being ‘dead’, the space element of the universe that take up 95 percent of the volume of the universe is a throbbing, filled-with-activity entity. It is filled with magnetism, electricity, radiation, sounds beyond our hearing, sights beyond our eyes. Only now is science starting to pick up these sounds while the ancients were aware of it, and its importance, for millennia.
Our ancients - Hindus, practitioners of Islam, Zoroastrians, practitioners of Judaism – all knew of this throbbing element of the universe based on sound. Every mystical approach to god is based on this sound – the endless, boundless sound of the universe. Call it what you may – anhat shabda, the Word, Nada-e-Asmani, Awaz-i-Mustaqim, 'Udgeet' (the song of the Heavenly Regions) or Pranav (OM) – it is the sound of the universe that science is now starting to hear.
The ancient Greek philosophers also mention this sound. Socrates states that he heard within him a sound which took him to indescribable spiritual regions. Pythagoras called it the "Music of the Spheres."
Musica universalis (lit. universal music, or music of the spheres) is an ancient philosophical concept that regards proportions in the movements of celestial bodies—the Sun, Moon, and planets—as a form of musica (the Medieval Latin name for music). This 'music' is not usually thought to be literally audible, but a harmonic and/or mathematical and/or religious concept. (Wikipedia)
In Buddhism and Hinduism it is believed that one can literally hear this music when one develops siddhis after extensive meditation practice. This siddhi is sometimes called clairaudience, the talent of receiving messages in thoughtform from another frequency or realm. It is considered a form of channelling.
* Clairaudience or clear hearing, is the psychic ability by which the psychic can hear sounds and voices that are not audible to common people.
All ‘scriptures’ or revelations in all religions are based on this universal sound. Thus, stating again, scriptures are not the books that we consider holy but the set of knowledge based on the Universal Sound. In some religions it may be the basis of all revelations, such as Hinduism and Buddhism; or be the basic process by which God can be reached (Sufism and Sikhism); or play only a part in the overall set-up, as in Christianity.
In Hinduism, the Universal Sound is the basis of every religious process – the pranav (Om recitation), the mantras, the naamasmaran. This sound is the basis of all our original ‘religious’ books, the shrutis. The name for revelation in Sanskrit is Shruti, which means hearing. The revelation of god is ‘heard’ in the sound of the universe.
All else is either cultural or historical or philosophical – a shown by The Laws of Manu, which are not a revelation; they are not Sruti, but only Smriti, which means recollection of tradition. As are the Puranas, the Brahmanas (not to be confused with Brahman, or the Brahmin caste), Agamas, etc.
Only the Vedas are considered shruti – the Vedas are apauruseya "not human compositions", being supposed to have been directly revealed, and thus are called shruti ("what is heard").
Even the Upanishads and Arayanaks (forest books) are considered philosophical speculation, not really revealed scriptures, although they are part of the Vedas.
For the earnest seeker, God provides a personalised Gita as good as what Krishna provided for Arjun. One has to prepare himself/herself for receiving this Gita – this sound of the universe – by recitation of Om, namasmarana, etc.
This personal Geet emanates from the Universal Sound, the Udgeet or Song of the heavenly regions. It another way of saying that a seeker of spirituality has to align or harmonise himself/herself to the Universal Sound first before ‘receiving’ enlightenment.
The Udgeet is divine energy, which regulates the entire functioning of the universe. It is the Pranav, the Om/Aum and, by reciting it with awe and reverence, you link yourself to this energy. Thus are you part of the geet of the universe, a part of the udgeet.
Endnotes
The Shastras (scriptural directives) direct and counsel everyone. People yield to delusion and become one with the darkness caused by false values and attachment to the unreal, the “me” and “mine”. But scripture is the mother; she does not give up. She persists and pursues; she reminds people of their goal in order to ensure that they will be saved. One need not drink the entire ocean to know its taste; placing just one drop on the tongue is enough. Similarly, it is impossible to understand all the contents of the scriptures. It is enough if one grasps the important lesson that is elaborated therein and puts that lesson into practice. The lesson is: Constant thought of God.
- Satya Sai Baba
Sound in general is an integral component of the universe/s – some of it can heard, a whole lot beyond the scope of our instruments of hearing - the ears. A good example is ultrasound, the cyclic sound pressure with a frequency greater than the upper limit of human hearing (which is approximately 20 kilohertz). The production of ultrasound is used in many different fields, typically to penetrate a medium and measure the reflection signature or supply focused energy, for example sonography which produces pictures of fetuses in the womb.
Within everyone there is a subtler force, an inner vibration named Vital Air (Prana). The mind (Manas) within is subtler still, and deeper and subtler than the mind is the intellect (Vijnana). Beyond the intellect, people have in them the subtlest sheath of spiritual bliss (Ananda).
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Stephen Hawking needs to know what God is
Stephen Hawking has declared that God did not create the Universe.
In his latest book, The Grand Design, Professor Hawking said: ''It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.''
The respected scientist claims that no divine force was needed to explain why the universe was formed. That I cannot agree with.
What Hawking does is take the model of God as shown by the Judeo Christian religions and state that this God cannot have created the universe. And he means create in the sense to come into being, as in an external force moulded the universe into something from some material.
I find Hawking’s statement to be based an assertion that does not take in account the sublime philosophies of Hinduism, or the philosophies of any other religion that has plumbed the depths of the mystery of God. Here is a scientist who dismisses God, maybe based on his experience of religion. Maybe religion did not work for him (as it does not for many, many people) and he found some solace in science - enough solace to come up with the assertion that God does not play a part in the universe.
Here is a scientist making an assertion that people will take as a fact based on the reputation he has. This is highly irresponsible of someone of his standing.
Has Stephen Hawking’s understood God as depicted in religions other than Christianity, or maybe Judaism? Has he spent time trawling the depths of the philosophies that make up the foundation of all religions? He has not. He cannot have for the simple reason the mystical aspects of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism has apparently escaped his notice.
While science has been around in its present form for about two centuries, a science of another kind that looks into the mysteries that surround us has been around for millennia.
This science tells of the immanence of God in the universe, of a power indescribable, almost unknowable, of a universe guided and guarded by a supreme intelligence. This Absolute Entity is the material that shapes the universes, in which the universes exist, in which takes place the so-called creation of universes.
It is a designer of such unsurpassed intelligence that the full brunt of human reasoning makes nary a dent in the knowing of it.
In declaring that God has no place in the creation of the Universe, Hawking goes a step further than that great scientist Albert Einstein who also did not believe in the Judeo Christian religious concept of God creating the universe, or anything that sits on high passing judgement on mankind. Yet Einstein believed in a power that governed the workings of the universe. Einstein’s quote is below:
• I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
o In response the telegrammed question of New York's Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in (24 April 1929): "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words." Einstein replied in only 25 (German) words. Spinoza's ideas of God are often characterized as being pantheistic.
o Expanding on this he later wrote: "I can understand your aversion to the use of the term 'religion' to describe an emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself most clearly in Spinoza... I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason."
As quoted in Einstein : Science and Religion by Arnold V. Lesikar
Einstein posited a governing power that ‘did not play dice with the cosmos’. To him God was the underlying order of the universe, something that is demonstrated ably in the Vedantic philosophies of Hinduism. And Einstein trusted in the rational nature of this reality.
Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. (See notes below on what Spinoza thought of God)
Hawking, on the other hand, seeks to isolate the universe into a thing of spontaneity, where things happen because some elements or aspect come together, governed by laws of science. There is no design as such, just the universe coming together haphazardly and blurting out new substances according to ‘scientific’ rules of engagement.
Hawking makes the mistake of taking ‘God’ at face value of the religions, if any, he has ‘studied’. Here is a man blinkered by his intellect to the extent he is unable to see an alternative. He believes the universe is governed by the laws of science, clearly forgetting the so-called science is an evolving thing and laws keep changing.
Findings in quantum mechanics in recent times show a different view of the universe than what classical physics has been offering us for the past 150 years.
In their quest of a theory for everything, science has been going through theory after theory to explain the universe: string theory, brane theory and quantum foam theory being some of the takes on how the universe works.
While these problems remain unsolved, even with giant strides in quantum mechanics/physics:
Is there a preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics? How does the quantum description of reality, which includes elements such as the "superposition of states" and "wavefunction collapse", give rise to the reality we perceive?(Wikipedia)
But not for Vedanta. The jnana yoga aspect of Hinduism has been mulling the question of the universe, the reality of it, and the part we play in it since time immemorial. The answers found in this yoga has been accepted as supreme even by some Western scientists.
The universe originally is a singularity, a point: as depicted in the bindu of the Om . While science is debating the wave function collapse, Hindu seers have been accepting it as a fact, on a very large scale. The universe expands out of the singularity and then collapses back into it periodically. The time frames here are massive but this function can also be seen in its minute form when a wave function is reduced to a single point after interaction with an observer.
What we see at quantum level is a replication of how the universe works (according to Vedanta) in which all the possibilities of an event is encompassed into a singularity upon observation.
The universe operates, according to Vedanta, a like the obverse and reverse (head and tail) of a coin, the flip of which decided whether the Absolute Entity is in action or in abeyance. Comes the flip when the Absolute Entity is at rest and the active element of the Absolute Entity, what Hindus call Maya, comes into play. Maya has two aspects: first of veiling the Absolute and then superimposing something ethereal onto it. This veiling projection is the universe as we see it.
Thus starts the day of Brahma, a colossal 4 plus billion years in which Maya manifests as the tangible and expanding universe. The collapse of this, the laya, results in everything enfolding on itself as the night of Brahma starts.
This time span is told of in our shastras as a night and day of Brahma, equating to some 8.6 billion years in total. And science says the universe started about 4.3 billion years ago, which makes it a day of Brahma?
The reality that quantum mechanics is striving towards is explained by Vendanta as the mind and senses working together to ‘make sense of the superimposition that shrouds the Absolute Entity. As Swami Vivekananda pointed out, if humans had a sixth sense - maybe an electrical sense - they would see the world totally differently from what we perceive it with our present five senses and the analysis of the sense perceptions by the brain.
The concept of the universe as a hologram, rather than a substantial thing of matter, does a better job of explaining the universe than many of the scientific theories around.
‘This superimposition of states’ equates to the lokas that even we as Hindus have trouble getting our heads around. The Brane theory talks of dimensions and the Hindu loka is a dimension that actually exists within another dimension.
This Absolute Entity is known by many names and yet is unknowable. For Maya shrouds its reality and only through understanding Maya can one know of this Entity. All of the forms and names associated with ‘knowledge’ that we know stops short and within this field of Maya.
This sublime thought that everything is God comes the ‘fact’ that the material of the universe is the Supreme Entity in its active mode. This is what Hawking should have looked at in understanding God before he made his statement.
Spinoza’s God
For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, and Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.
Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13). Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.
In his latest book, The Grand Design, Professor Hawking said: ''It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going. Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.''
The respected scientist claims that no divine force was needed to explain why the universe was formed. That I cannot agree with.
What Hawking does is take the model of God as shown by the Judeo Christian religions and state that this God cannot have created the universe. And he means create in the sense to come into being, as in an external force moulded the universe into something from some material.
I find Hawking’s statement to be based an assertion that does not take in account the sublime philosophies of Hinduism, or the philosophies of any other religion that has plumbed the depths of the mystery of God. Here is a scientist who dismisses God, maybe based on his experience of religion. Maybe religion did not work for him (as it does not for many, many people) and he found some solace in science - enough solace to come up with the assertion that God does not play a part in the universe.
Here is a scientist making an assertion that people will take as a fact based on the reputation he has. This is highly irresponsible of someone of his standing.
Has Stephen Hawking’s understood God as depicted in religions other than Christianity, or maybe Judaism? Has he spent time trawling the depths of the philosophies that make up the foundation of all religions? He has not. He cannot have for the simple reason the mystical aspects of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and Hinduism has apparently escaped his notice.
While science has been around in its present form for about two centuries, a science of another kind that looks into the mysteries that surround us has been around for millennia.
This science tells of the immanence of God in the universe, of a power indescribable, almost unknowable, of a universe guided and guarded by a supreme intelligence. This Absolute Entity is the material that shapes the universes, in which the universes exist, in which takes place the so-called creation of universes.
It is a designer of such unsurpassed intelligence that the full brunt of human reasoning makes nary a dent in the knowing of it.
In declaring that God has no place in the creation of the Universe, Hawking goes a step further than that great scientist Albert Einstein who also did not believe in the Judeo Christian religious concept of God creating the universe, or anything that sits on high passing judgement on mankind. Yet Einstein believed in a power that governed the workings of the universe. Einstein’s quote is below:
• I believe in Spinoza's God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.
o In response the telegrammed question of New York's Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein in (24 April 1929): "Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words." Einstein replied in only 25 (German) words. Spinoza's ideas of God are often characterized as being pantheistic.
o Expanding on this he later wrote: "I can understand your aversion to the use of the term 'religion' to describe an emotional and psychological attitude which shows itself most clearly in Spinoza... I have not found a better expression than 'religious' for the trust in the rational nature of reality that is, at least to a certain extent, accessible to human reason."
As quoted in Einstein : Science and Religion by Arnold V. Lesikar
Einstein posited a governing power that ‘did not play dice with the cosmos’. To him God was the underlying order of the universe, something that is demonstrated ably in the Vedantic philosophies of Hinduism. And Einstein trusted in the rational nature of this reality.
Spinoza equated God (infinite substance) with Nature, consistent with Einstein's belief in an impersonal deity. (See notes below on what Spinoza thought of God)
Hawking, on the other hand, seeks to isolate the universe into a thing of spontaneity, where things happen because some elements or aspect come together, governed by laws of science. There is no design as such, just the universe coming together haphazardly and blurting out new substances according to ‘scientific’ rules of engagement.
Hawking makes the mistake of taking ‘God’ at face value of the religions, if any, he has ‘studied’. Here is a man blinkered by his intellect to the extent he is unable to see an alternative. He believes the universe is governed by the laws of science, clearly forgetting the so-called science is an evolving thing and laws keep changing.
Findings in quantum mechanics in recent times show a different view of the universe than what classical physics has been offering us for the past 150 years.
In their quest of a theory for everything, science has been going through theory after theory to explain the universe: string theory, brane theory and quantum foam theory being some of the takes on how the universe works.
While these problems remain unsolved, even with giant strides in quantum mechanics/physics:
Is there a preferred interpretation of quantum mechanics? How does the quantum description of reality, which includes elements such as the "superposition of states" and "wavefunction collapse", give rise to the reality we perceive?(Wikipedia)
But not for Vedanta. The jnana yoga aspect of Hinduism has been mulling the question of the universe, the reality of it, and the part we play in it since time immemorial. The answers found in this yoga has been accepted as supreme even by some Western scientists.
The universe originally is a singularity, a point: as depicted in the bindu of the Om . While science is debating the wave function collapse, Hindu seers have been accepting it as a fact, on a very large scale. The universe expands out of the singularity and then collapses back into it periodically. The time frames here are massive but this function can also be seen in its minute form when a wave function is reduced to a single point after interaction with an observer.
What we see at quantum level is a replication of how the universe works (according to Vedanta) in which all the possibilities of an event is encompassed into a singularity upon observation.
The universe operates, according to Vedanta, a like the obverse and reverse (head and tail) of a coin, the flip of which decided whether the Absolute Entity is in action or in abeyance. Comes the flip when the Absolute Entity is at rest and the active element of the Absolute Entity, what Hindus call Maya, comes into play. Maya has two aspects: first of veiling the Absolute and then superimposing something ethereal onto it. This veiling projection is the universe as we see it.
Thus starts the day of Brahma, a colossal 4 plus billion years in which Maya manifests as the tangible and expanding universe. The collapse of this, the laya, results in everything enfolding on itself as the night of Brahma starts.
This time span is told of in our shastras as a night and day of Brahma, equating to some 8.6 billion years in total. And science says the universe started about 4.3 billion years ago, which makes it a day of Brahma?
The reality that quantum mechanics is striving towards is explained by Vendanta as the mind and senses working together to ‘make sense of the superimposition that shrouds the Absolute Entity. As Swami Vivekananda pointed out, if humans had a sixth sense - maybe an electrical sense - they would see the world totally differently from what we perceive it with our present five senses and the analysis of the sense perceptions by the brain.
The concept of the universe as a hologram, rather than a substantial thing of matter, does a better job of explaining the universe than many of the scientific theories around.
‘This superimposition of states’ equates to the lokas that even we as Hindus have trouble getting our heads around. The Brane theory talks of dimensions and the Hindu loka is a dimension that actually exists within another dimension.
This Absolute Entity is known by many names and yet is unknowable. For Maya shrouds its reality and only through understanding Maya can one know of this Entity. All of the forms and names associated with ‘knowledge’ that we know stops short and within this field of Maya.
This sublime thought that everything is God comes the ‘fact’ that the material of the universe is the Supreme Entity in its active mode. This is what Hawking should have looked at in understanding God before he made his statement.
Spinoza’s God
For Spinoza, our universe (cosmos) is a mode under two attributes of Thought and Extension. God has infinitely many other attributes which are not present in our world. According to German philosopher Karl Jaspers, when Spinoza wrote "Deus sive Natura" (God or Nature) Spinoza meant God was Natura naturans not Natura naturata, and Jaspers believed that Spinoza, in his philosophical system, did not mean to say that God and Nature are interchangeable terms, but rather that God's transcendence was attested by his infinitely many attributes, and that two attributes known by humans, namely Thought and Extension, signified God's immanence.
Even God under the attributes of thought and extension cannot be identified strictly with our world. That world is of course "divisible"; it has parts. But Spinoza insists that "no attribute of a substance can be truly conceived from which it follows that the substance can be divided" (Which means that one cannot conceive an attribute in a way that leads to division of substance), and that "a substance which is absolutely infinite is indivisible" (Ethics, Part I, Propositions 12 and 13). Following this logic, our world should be considered as a mode under two attributes of thought and extension. Therefore the pantheist formula "One and All" would apply to Spinoza only if the "One" preserves its transcendence and the "All" were not interpreted as the totality of finite things.
What I like about Hinduism
What sets Hinduism apart is its all-encompassing nature: there is every kind of name for God and verily every kind of form of God. Everything is God.
Hindus don’t joke when they say they have something like 33 million Gods. That is like a God for every person in small country of 33 million, like Uganda.
And our practices are catholic. Catholic here means: broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal; universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all; universal; relating to all men; all-inclusive.
And because of this, Hinduism does have its mystifying habits, practices and forms. This is largely due to the millennia we have spent looking at the idea of God and contended on how we are to work towards understanding our relationship with this entity. This search for the proper approach to God has seen seekers throughout the ages put forward any and every way of realising God.
In allowing millions of seekers to have had their say on God for over 20,000 years does have an effect on our understanding of the nature of God. Apart from the seers, there have been so many realised souls that no-one actually knows how many there have been. Hinduism is virtually sprouting with realisations of God. Some of the realisations are generic and work across the board. Some don’t.
The most common one is the efficacy of the name of God. There is a potency associated with the name of God, a potency verified and accepted by the ranks and file of Hinduism. For almost all Hindus, the name of God is a mantra in itself. And it can be any one of the millions of name for God. There are also many sayings on this adage: God’s name is more powerful than God himself/herself/itself. The most common of this is “Raam se bada Raam ka naam” (the name of Rama is more potent than Rama himself).
Hindus continually add to their ever-growing pool of names for God. We even have special bhajans (religious songs) called naam sankirtan in which the various names of God are interlaced together to invoke the power of the deity.
The most basic form of worship, in fact, is the chanting of God’s name, not in vain but with a desired purpose behind it. Kids are named after gods, just another way of recalling God when the name is called by anybody. It may seem like a dying trend nowadays but naming children after God is still prevalent in India and among orthodox Hindus all over the world.
The name of God is sacred, yes, but also ubiquitous. It infiltrates every aspect of a Hindu’s life, or should. Hindus find, or nowadays try to find, every opportunity to take God’s name. This includes the basic greetings like Ram Ram, Sita Ram, Hari Om, Om, etc. It is like a worship in progress.
Then there is praying. We pray in temples, out of temples, in shrines, on the roadside, on the road itself, anywhere and everywhere. It does not matter where one prays, God is everywhere, we say. We see God in rocks, in trees, in the waterways, in the very wind itself.
And prayers can be in any format, including not having a format. You can have formalised prayer session through an intermediary (namely a priest or a sadhu), a congregational prayer session with peers, an individual session or a cry from the heart. In most cases we just get down to it and pray, and hope it is heard.
We also don’t have any problem (well, some of us don’t) in praying to gods of other religions. You want us to pray to Jesus? – no problem. To Buddha? to Allah? no problem. They are but just names of the One.
We can take any religion in this world and find a complementary and corresponding element in Hinduism. The Buddhist element is very well represented in the monastic (sanyasi) traditions and in the raaj yoga traditions. The love for Jesus/God that Christians have is shown in our bhakti movements. The formless Allah equates to the formless Brahman of the Vedantic tradition. For Hindus, at least. Others may have a different and maybe even a violent reaction to such assumptions.
Even the atheist can feel at home in Hinduism. Generally, atheism is valid in Hinduism, but the path of the atheist is viewed as very difficult to follow in matters of spirituality (Wikipedia).
The Indian Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen in an interview with Pranab Bardhan for the California Magazine published in the July-August 2006 edition by the University of California, Berkeley states:
In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than what exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is "Atheism" - a very strong presentation of the argument in favour of atheism and materialism. (Wikipedia).
The word Sarvadharshansamgraha means the compendium of every type of path towards God, and every path is considered valid. A path is made valid not only by its practitioner but is made valid through acceptance by practitioners of other paths, who must (and the emphasis is on must) respect the path of every other practitioner.
This, in effect, makes Hinduism a religion that is very much misunderstood and, sometimes, much maligned. This is largely due to the fact that Hinduism has it all: the sublime, the ridiculous and the profane and they can be found together and mostly in harmony with each other in almost all levels of any belief system. All of these levels, by the way, are to be considered valid.
Sublime aspects of Hinduism: the highest philosophies of science, arts and cosmology is available to us. Hinduism guides us to the highest levels of logic, reasoning and intellectual powers by its processes. Only by using the thinking process can one actually think beyond the process. This is a task of such magnitude that few indeed have accomplished it. Hinduism does this daringly by asking one to remove oneself from the equation when considering the equation.
Ridiculous aspects of Hinduism: some of practices and philosophies are ‘easily disproved’, some even considered childish, especially by outsiders. These are the perplexing stories of the Gods; their families; their apparently ‘human’ weaknesses; the forms of some God (the most lovable being Ganesha, the most respected probably Hanuman); the materialistic elements (offerings and worship for a better job, children, money, etc); the superstitions and the downright contrary (some Tantrik paths which have anti-conventional practices). But all are valid at some level of development, however foolish they may appear to outsiders.
Profane aspects of Hinduism: Hinduism also has its ‘left hand’ path, also considered valid. Aghora elements of incorporating sex, meat-eating, intoxication and other ‘undesirable’ elements are recognised as valid, even if they are looked down upon by the majority. These practices are generally judged for what they deliver to their practitioners and not how they fit in our understanding of what is the right way to worship God. Most Hindus cannot fault the reasoning behind Aghora practices though they may not agree with the actual practice itself: If everything is created by God, then everything that exists must be perfect, and to deny the perfection of anything would be to deny the sacredness of all life in its full manifestation, as well as deny God/Goddess and the demiGods' perfection. (Wikipedia)
Why is this all possible in Hinduism?
It is simply because the endgame in Hinduism is this: You are God. You may not know it, or know of it, or are unwilling to accept it but you are God.
It is very hard to bring to mind any religion that makes such bold statements with such force. The mahavakayas are given below:
Sanskrit: English:
1. Brahma satyam jagath mithya
Brahman is real; the world is unreal (though mithya is more a mixture of real and unreal rather than just unreal)
2. Ekam evadvitiyam Brahma
Brahman is one, without a second/i.e. without conditioning
3. Prajnanam Brahman
Brahman is the supreme/absolute knowledge
4. Tat Tvam Asi
That is what you are, That thou Art (also interpreted sometimes as you are the base (tat))
5. Ayam Atma Brahma
Atman and brahman are the same
6. Aham Brahmasmi
I am Brahman (the Absolute)
7. Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma
All of this is (verily) Brahman
These are statements of power, to be assimilated and then owned by those using it as mantras. Here you are urged to believe that you are God, and by believing, to become God.
For many this will border on blasphemy, yet for the Hindu it is a fact. Hinduism posits a heaven but only as an interim measure where your good deeds pay some dividends for some time. Its hell is purgatory – a time of removing the dross of materialism and wickedness from you, and not an eternal pit of fire. You have to come back to mrityu loka (Earth known by its name ‘the world of the dead’) again from heaven or hell to continue on your bid to understand and accept that you are God.
Hindus call this yoga (yoking) with God moksha (liberation), and it equates to Nirvana. It is this yoga with God that we strive for through our numerous lives in all our incarnations. Some are closer to it, others bringing up the rear.
It is also known as Samadhi (equanimity, or equal mindedness).At the first level Samadhi makes you like God (Savikalpa Samadhi) and at a the highest level you become God (Nirvikalpa Samadhi).
This moksha or Samadhi is a realization of the self's identity with the Absolute or Brahman. It is not becoming God as depicted in the cultural art of India – of ending up looking like Vishnu or Shiva or Ganesha. It is finding the true ‘form’ of God, or, as it is said, the ‘form’ of the formless God (Nirakaar roopa). It does get a bit ambiguous here: how do you realise the form of the formless? It is a journey one has to take to understand it for what it really is.
The journey begins with the realisation of the duality of life, that every element of life is made of a thing and its opposite. Day must have night, good must have bad, up must have down for one or the other to operate. Then it is a matter of making this duality disappear into the awareness of the One. It becomes a matter of realising that everything is but sat chit ananda: being (reality), awareness (consciousness ) and bliss (pure joy).
It is a journey few choose to take. For it also means death: the death of the ego, the little self, the duality of existence. Your existence is wiped out in the yoga with God. The individual personality is dissolved, made redundant, dies because the little self cannot endure the power and the force of the big Self (Atman).
As stated above, to realise the duality of the universe, one has to divorce oneself from that pervasive duality to understand it properly. This is called taking yourself out of the equation to understand the equation.
And on top of it all, the whole caboodle above puts the Hindu in a unique self-effacing position (he has to work towards becoming God but without treading on anyone else’s toes for they are also God). He has to accept that every other path to God is valid, that any other name or form of God is as valid as his own. What he does with his name and form of God is his business. What others do with their names and forms of God is their business.
Being a Hindu is a solo act, then. An act of personal effort through a self-defined path to a personal goal. For all alone a Hindu has to forge out a form of God, and name it. He then makes a lonely and personal effort to accept it by worshipping it. Finally, he makes the final leap, all alone, in becoming it. All else is of little matter.
Notes
Please note that He/he is generically used here because of convenience. In no way it is insinuated that only men can tread the path to God. Women, it is said, are better equipped to tread the spiritual path because of their innate nature comprising of stoic forbearance, compassion and maternal instincts.
In ancient India, the women enjoyed equal status with men in all fields of life, this status only deteriorating in medieval times.
Hinduism is replete with great names of women like Gargi, Maitreyi, Aditi, Indrani, Savitri, Andal and Meera and the recently by women of such status as Shantala Devi, the beautiful queen of Vishnuvardhana, Ahalyabai Holkar, the Rani of Indore, [1735-1795], Ananda MoyiMa [1896-1982], and the Holy Mother, Sarada Devi.
Hindus don’t joke when they say they have something like 33 million Gods. That is like a God for every person in small country of 33 million, like Uganda.
And our practices are catholic. Catholic here means: broad or wide-ranging in tastes, interests, or the like; having sympathies with all; broad-minded; liberal; universal in extent; involving all; of interest to all; universal; relating to all men; all-inclusive.
And because of this, Hinduism does have its mystifying habits, practices and forms. This is largely due to the millennia we have spent looking at the idea of God and contended on how we are to work towards understanding our relationship with this entity. This search for the proper approach to God has seen seekers throughout the ages put forward any and every way of realising God.
In allowing millions of seekers to have had their say on God for over 20,000 years does have an effect on our understanding of the nature of God. Apart from the seers, there have been so many realised souls that no-one actually knows how many there have been. Hinduism is virtually sprouting with realisations of God. Some of the realisations are generic and work across the board. Some don’t.
The most common one is the efficacy of the name of God. There is a potency associated with the name of God, a potency verified and accepted by the ranks and file of Hinduism. For almost all Hindus, the name of God is a mantra in itself. And it can be any one of the millions of name for God. There are also many sayings on this adage: God’s name is more powerful than God himself/herself/itself. The most common of this is “Raam se bada Raam ka naam” (the name of Rama is more potent than Rama himself).
Hindus continually add to their ever-growing pool of names for God. We even have special bhajans (religious songs) called naam sankirtan in which the various names of God are interlaced together to invoke the power of the deity.
The most basic form of worship, in fact, is the chanting of God’s name, not in vain but with a desired purpose behind it. Kids are named after gods, just another way of recalling God when the name is called by anybody. It may seem like a dying trend nowadays but naming children after God is still prevalent in India and among orthodox Hindus all over the world.
The name of God is sacred, yes, but also ubiquitous. It infiltrates every aspect of a Hindu’s life, or should. Hindus find, or nowadays try to find, every opportunity to take God’s name. This includes the basic greetings like Ram Ram, Sita Ram, Hari Om, Om, etc. It is like a worship in progress.
Then there is praying. We pray in temples, out of temples, in shrines, on the roadside, on the road itself, anywhere and everywhere. It does not matter where one prays, God is everywhere, we say. We see God in rocks, in trees, in the waterways, in the very wind itself.
And prayers can be in any format, including not having a format. You can have formalised prayer session through an intermediary (namely a priest or a sadhu), a congregational prayer session with peers, an individual session or a cry from the heart. In most cases we just get down to it and pray, and hope it is heard.
We also don’t have any problem (well, some of us don’t) in praying to gods of other religions. You want us to pray to Jesus? – no problem. To Buddha? to Allah? no problem. They are but just names of the One.
We can take any religion in this world and find a complementary and corresponding element in Hinduism. The Buddhist element is very well represented in the monastic (sanyasi) traditions and in the raaj yoga traditions. The love for Jesus/God that Christians have is shown in our bhakti movements. The formless Allah equates to the formless Brahman of the Vedantic tradition. For Hindus, at least. Others may have a different and maybe even a violent reaction to such assumptions.
Even the atheist can feel at home in Hinduism. Generally, atheism is valid in Hinduism, but the path of the atheist is viewed as very difficult to follow in matters of spirituality (Wikipedia).
The Indian Nobel Prize-winner Amartya Sen in an interview with Pranab Bardhan for the California Magazine published in the July-August 2006 edition by the University of California, Berkeley states:
In some ways people had got used to the idea that India was spiritual and religion-oriented. That gave a leg up to the religious interpretation of India, despite the fact that Sanskrit had a larger atheistic literature than what exists in any other classical language. Madhava Acharya, the remarkable 14th century philosopher, wrote this rather great book called Sarvadarshansamgraha, which discussed all the religious schools of thought within the Hindu structure. The first chapter is "Atheism" - a very strong presentation of the argument in favour of atheism and materialism. (Wikipedia).
The word Sarvadharshansamgraha means the compendium of every type of path towards God, and every path is considered valid. A path is made valid not only by its practitioner but is made valid through acceptance by practitioners of other paths, who must (and the emphasis is on must) respect the path of every other practitioner.
This, in effect, makes Hinduism a religion that is very much misunderstood and, sometimes, much maligned. This is largely due to the fact that Hinduism has it all: the sublime, the ridiculous and the profane and they can be found together and mostly in harmony with each other in almost all levels of any belief system. All of these levels, by the way, are to be considered valid.
Sublime aspects of Hinduism: the highest philosophies of science, arts and cosmology is available to us. Hinduism guides us to the highest levels of logic, reasoning and intellectual powers by its processes. Only by using the thinking process can one actually think beyond the process. This is a task of such magnitude that few indeed have accomplished it. Hinduism does this daringly by asking one to remove oneself from the equation when considering the equation.
Ridiculous aspects of Hinduism: some of practices and philosophies are ‘easily disproved’, some even considered childish, especially by outsiders. These are the perplexing stories of the Gods; their families; their apparently ‘human’ weaknesses; the forms of some God (the most lovable being Ganesha, the most respected probably Hanuman); the materialistic elements (offerings and worship for a better job, children, money, etc); the superstitions and the downright contrary (some Tantrik paths which have anti-conventional practices). But all are valid at some level of development, however foolish they may appear to outsiders.
Profane aspects of Hinduism: Hinduism also has its ‘left hand’ path, also considered valid. Aghora elements of incorporating sex, meat-eating, intoxication and other ‘undesirable’ elements are recognised as valid, even if they are looked down upon by the majority. These practices are generally judged for what they deliver to their practitioners and not how they fit in our understanding of what is the right way to worship God. Most Hindus cannot fault the reasoning behind Aghora practices though they may not agree with the actual practice itself: If everything is created by God, then everything that exists must be perfect, and to deny the perfection of anything would be to deny the sacredness of all life in its full manifestation, as well as deny God/Goddess and the demiGods' perfection. (Wikipedia)
Why is this all possible in Hinduism?
It is simply because the endgame in Hinduism is this: You are God. You may not know it, or know of it, or are unwilling to accept it but you are God.
It is very hard to bring to mind any religion that makes such bold statements with such force. The mahavakayas are given below:
Sanskrit: English:
1. Brahma satyam jagath mithya
Brahman is real; the world is unreal (though mithya is more a mixture of real and unreal rather than just unreal)
2. Ekam evadvitiyam Brahma
Brahman is one, without a second/i.e. without conditioning
3. Prajnanam Brahman
Brahman is the supreme/absolute knowledge
4. Tat Tvam Asi
That is what you are, That thou Art (also interpreted sometimes as you are the base (tat))
5. Ayam Atma Brahma
Atman and brahman are the same
6. Aham Brahmasmi
I am Brahman (the Absolute)
7. Sarvam Khalvidam Brahma
All of this is (verily) Brahman
These are statements of power, to be assimilated and then owned by those using it as mantras. Here you are urged to believe that you are God, and by believing, to become God.
For many this will border on blasphemy, yet for the Hindu it is a fact. Hinduism posits a heaven but only as an interim measure where your good deeds pay some dividends for some time. Its hell is purgatory – a time of removing the dross of materialism and wickedness from you, and not an eternal pit of fire. You have to come back to mrityu loka (Earth known by its name ‘the world of the dead’) again from heaven or hell to continue on your bid to understand and accept that you are God.
Hindus call this yoga (yoking) with God moksha (liberation), and it equates to Nirvana. It is this yoga with God that we strive for through our numerous lives in all our incarnations. Some are closer to it, others bringing up the rear.
It is also known as Samadhi (equanimity, or equal mindedness).At the first level Samadhi makes you like God (Savikalpa Samadhi) and at a the highest level you become God (Nirvikalpa Samadhi).
This moksha or Samadhi is a realization of the self's identity with the Absolute or Brahman. It is not becoming God as depicted in the cultural art of India – of ending up looking like Vishnu or Shiva or Ganesha. It is finding the true ‘form’ of God, or, as it is said, the ‘form’ of the formless God (Nirakaar roopa). It does get a bit ambiguous here: how do you realise the form of the formless? It is a journey one has to take to understand it for what it really is.
The journey begins with the realisation of the duality of life, that every element of life is made of a thing and its opposite. Day must have night, good must have bad, up must have down for one or the other to operate. Then it is a matter of making this duality disappear into the awareness of the One. It becomes a matter of realising that everything is but sat chit ananda: being (reality), awareness (consciousness ) and bliss (pure joy).
It is a journey few choose to take. For it also means death: the death of the ego, the little self, the duality of existence. Your existence is wiped out in the yoga with God. The individual personality is dissolved, made redundant, dies because the little self cannot endure the power and the force of the big Self (Atman).
As stated above, to realise the duality of the universe, one has to divorce oneself from that pervasive duality to understand it properly. This is called taking yourself out of the equation to understand the equation.
And on top of it all, the whole caboodle above puts the Hindu in a unique self-effacing position (he has to work towards becoming God but without treading on anyone else’s toes for they are also God). He has to accept that every other path to God is valid, that any other name or form of God is as valid as his own. What he does with his name and form of God is his business. What others do with their names and forms of God is their business.
Being a Hindu is a solo act, then. An act of personal effort through a self-defined path to a personal goal. For all alone a Hindu has to forge out a form of God, and name it. He then makes a lonely and personal effort to accept it by worshipping it. Finally, he makes the final leap, all alone, in becoming it. All else is of little matter.
Notes
Please note that He/he is generically used here because of convenience. In no way it is insinuated that only men can tread the path to God. Women, it is said, are better equipped to tread the spiritual path because of their innate nature comprising of stoic forbearance, compassion and maternal instincts.
In ancient India, the women enjoyed equal status with men in all fields of life, this status only deteriorating in medieval times.
Hinduism is replete with great names of women like Gargi, Maitreyi, Aditi, Indrani, Savitri, Andal and Meera and the recently by women of such status as Shantala Devi, the beautiful queen of Vishnuvardhana, Ahalyabai Holkar, the Rani of Indore, [1735-1795], Ananda MoyiMa [1896-1982], and the Holy Mother, Sarada Devi.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
FAQS on Sathya Sai Baba
GOD WALKS ON EARTH
Who is He?
In one aspect he is a benevolent guru, respected by many millions and, not shockingly, vilified by thousands others. His name is Satya Sai Baba, of Prashanti Nilayam, in Puttaparthi, Annantpur District of Andhra Pradesh, India. For over 60 years, he has been mentoring the world’s distraught and its believers. Now he is 85 years old, confined to a wheelchair much of the time. He is in the public but still glowing with the power that made Him beloved to over 60 million followers world-wide.
Why is He in a wheelchair?
A pelvis bone that has been broken and mended and a number of other ailments makes him use a wheelchair for mobility, at the behest of his devotees. He has been known to carry on with His ‘duties’ – discourses, managing the ashram, looking after the people – in spite of great pain.
Can’t He cure Himself?
He can. He has done this before. Will He again?
What is He?
An avatar. One that has no comparison in living memory. The closest correlation is of Krishna (5000 years ago) or Rama (25,000 years ago). He has all the compassion and grace of a living Christ, comparable to Jesus’ work as related in the Bible. Except He does say there was more to Jesus than is in the Bible, and that He is the one that Jesus said would come to save the human race.
What is an Avatar?
An avatar is a spark of the universal consciousness that takes shape as a human being for some vital work on Earth. Technically we all humans are a spark of that consciousness, but an Avatar makes a concerted effort to take a human form whereas normal humans are born within the karmic cycle of causality (cause and effect).
The Avatar is a formation of benevolence and compassion but that is only an aspect of His. His true aspects may not be wholly clear to us humans.
The mission of an avatar is only clear in hindsight for he operates at levels incomprehensible to the human mind at its present level of awareness.
When Rama came He undertook a massive war that disseminated a land, killed off soldiers in the hundreds of thousands, propagated His messages of dharma (right conduct) and set the standards for ruling a realm. His life is a role model that has been followed by generations, despite only one book being available of His avatar-hood. Even that book, the Ramayana, has undergone so many changes as to be a point of contention for non-believers, as well as among believers.
When Krishna came, he stole the hearts of his devotees, killed off ‘demons’ and evil doers and master-minded an internecine and global war that set the scene for a further decline of dharma because of the loss of so many elders and followers of Dharma in the war. The survivors of the war are part of our present-day humanity.
The present Kali Yuga is the result of that war, perpetuated by the continual decline of right conduct, growth of avarice, reckless use of resources and argumentative disposition.
Is there anything good He does?
He has set up free hospitals - including super speciality hospitals - free universities and schools and provided free water for millions as part of His example to His followers to serve humanity.
He raises the level of consciousness among human, by sheer force of will as well as teachings and examples. He enables humans to believe in themselves as sparks of the divine rather than a collection of atoms designed to live off the Earth.
For Him, the time on Earth is a crucible for purifying people. Forget heaven, forget hell. These are constructs of organised religions designed to inculcate fear of the unknown, and the possibility of super-sized earth happiness or misery.
This Avatar is here to wring out man from his conditioned behaviour, of preventing the falling back on set pieces to seek solutions, and to bring about a life of cooperative and sustainable living. More importantly, he is here to make man a god.
What can He do?
The biggest hurdle facing Him is organised religion and fanaticism - be it Christianity, Hinduism, Islam or any other religion with a set of followers who believe they only have the truth of the matter. But they are hurdles only from our point of view, not from His.
He has shown extraordinary capabilities; miracles, visitations, cures and safeguarding, including bringing people back from dead. What He does is beyond comprehension of people brought up in either a linear aspect of time or a three-dimensional aspect of space.
What He says is that He has the ability to change situations and circumstance but would rather change the thinking of people to ensure a consciousness level in keeping with our abilities. Our abilities, whether it is of the brain or the DNA, is only a tenth of what it could be. His mission is to raise that ability to more than it is presently.
As can be seen (if one is keeping tabs), worldwide organised religions are taking a battering from the people of the Earth. And it is as it should be. So is the economic models, the political establishments and the social structures. This is all His doing.
What is the purpose behind His mission?
What is in store for humanity can only be assumed. These are, as the writer said, the best of times and the worst of times.
Humanity is poised at the brink of something extraordinary – be it a raise in the conscious level, a catastrophe of unimagined proportions or a golden age. Satya Sai Baba is here to ensure it is a golden age that dawns and not a catastrophe. That is not to say that there will not be calamity or destruction. There will be minor adjustments to the planet, says Baba. How we take to that is what he wants to bring about.
Who are His people?
Everyone is His people. He is everyone. One of the sustained teachings of Satya Sai Baba is the oneness of everything, living and inanimate. And that everything we can sense is a construct of the mind. The background consciousness or the latent ‘divinity’ is what He wants everyone to experience. And those who work towards it, he aids. Those who strive against it, he also aids but in a way that enlightens them of the drawbacks of being enamoured by the senses and the mind. In our terms this could be seen as cruel and vindictive but is done with utmost compassion.
What powers does He have?
The greatest weapon at His disposal is the karmic cycle of cause and effect that rules humanity. As the master of karma, he can dissolve it, telescope it, nullify it, dampen its effect, etc. Karma is generally accepted as the payment, or the fruit of the action, of receiving the benefit or consequences of an action. As everything is interrelated, bound to each other and to everything else, action that benefits the whole is beneficial and action that diminishes the benefit to the whole is unwanted.
This is the sublime lesson that Satya Sai Baba teaches. Of the Onenness of the universe, the Oneness of divinity.
He can accelerate the karmic cycle, of individuals, of clans, of nations, of planets, to achieve what He wants. And He does. He is also the controller of the universe in the sense of a traffic controller – Automatiku Lightsuku Adi Pedda Vadu.
The greatest tool he has at His disposal is the life-affirming grace he can bestow.
His grace is for everyone – but only those who work towards the good of humanity can tap into it. Or anyone with confidence in one’s self.
Technically that would mean that even the atheist has a chance to experience this grace, if he has developed his confidence to a high level. Confidence here does not equate to arrogance, hubris or pride of achievement or skill.
What does He want from you?
Ah! From each He wants the best the person is designed for. The word designed tells all. Each person has a purpose, defined and subtle. The purpose of life is make that purpose apparent, to live up to the full capacity.
Everything and every one is working towards an alignment of purpose, of reaching a ‘decision’ to be One.
What about evil people?
There are no evil people, no sinners. Just people not aligned to the great work that is the play of the universe.
There are only evil deeds: some agreed to as being evil by all of humanity and some which are considered ‘evil’ because they fall out of the explanation we have of good as per culture, creed or conditioning.
Sai Baba teaches universal values, values that agreed on by all of the major religions and ethical societies. These human values, once practiced, shift our perception away from what is bad to what is good. Practice of the good automatically and invariably forces us to move away from doing anything evil.
He also demarcates universal ‘bad’ behaviour and how to stay away from them. These ‘bad’ attributes are anger, lust, greed, attachment and ego, or pride. Practice of humility through service to all and the continued chanting of a divine name(naamsmarana) culminating in the merging of a name with a form (japa dhyan) are the only prescribed doctrines of Satya Sai Baba.
What is naamsmarana?
To steady the mind, it has to be unhinged from the assault of the senses on it and allowed to operate in alignment with the intellect.. There are number of ways to do this – meditation, japa, yoga, etc. Sai Baba would much rather have everyone fill up the mind with the glory of the divine, gradually pushing out anything that disrupts the continued expression of one’s devotion to the divine.
Naamsmarna is the continual chanting of a chosen name of God, over and over again while trying to picture or visualise the form that goes with that name. The end result of this japa dhyan (where the name instantly evokes the form, and the form reminds you of the name repeatedly) is Samadhi (equanimity). It is important to align the name with the form and not to change either the name or the form as it disrupts the mind.
Chanting is not only the vocalisation of the name but the integration of the name within yourself so that it becomes a part of your mind (thinking) through which everything else is perceived. Any thought that rises then is weighed in against the base of the thought on the Divine.
Is Sai Baba God?
Yes. In the sense that everything thing else in creation is God. All we perceive through our senses must be made from something – that something is the material of God, that consciousness
No. God is beyond the comprehension of the human mind/brain. This entity is the basis of creation, the sustenance from which creation emerges and sustained.
Sai Baba is a coalescing of the all-pervading consciousness that is known by the wise by different names, brought together by the need of mankind for a guide to move them towards humanity. He is the focal point of the agonised calls for deliverance from ages of mistreatment and mismanagement. He himself says this is the main reason He takes a shape and moves among people as one of them.
The other ‘important’ aspects of world regeneration, sustaining dharma, and bringing on a new age is incidental to the answering of calls by the sadhus to take avatar on Earth
Sai Baba is the mirror unto humanity itself – reflecting what each of us is. By making us vividly aware of our shortfalls, Sai Baba is carrying out the education programme of the ages. Once we get to know our shortfalls, we can then look at Him as the example of living our lives. My Life is My Message, says Sai Baba and he asks us to follow His example in everyday life.
What is His mission?
To clear the pathway to divinity. Modern man is encumbered by his short-sight approach to living. The conditionings of individuality, family ties, group attachments, regionalism, nationalism and pride of ownership splits humanity apart. Sai Baba is here to destroy these conditionings, these tethers to ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
What is attachment?
This is the feeling of belonging that a person cultivates in his interactions with the world. Called Moha, these are the feelings we vest into an object, a relationship or an idea we subscribe to. It is a very personal feeling, making us what we are in the social circles, in the world and in our minds.
Sai Baba asks us to practice a certain level of detachment when dealing with the world. Seek not the ownership of anything, seek not the subscribing of ourselves to a creed at the expense of unity, seek not even moksha (liberation) – leave this precious gift to His Grace.
Attachment tethers the soul through the mind to mundane things. Once relieved of these tethers, the soul shines forth, illuminating the intellect which then controls the mind and the senses.
It is attachment which causes our separateness from the One, of individualising us through an ‘ego’ that needs to be sustained with gratification. The ego is the warp and weft of thoughts that are generated in our minds. Sustained over many lives, it is also our karma that determines our purpose and station in life once we are ‘born’.
What is life?
Life is a jail term; a sentence to be carried out to learn a lesson. We are sentenced to ‘life’ to learn the lesson of Truth, Right Conduct, Peace and Love, leading to non-violence of thought, word and deed.
Life is not mere living – it is an exploration of ideas, an expanding of the mind, of looking for the thread that links us all, of identifying the string that keeps the garland intact. Of going beyond the obvious and the apparent to the subtle and true.
Life is not about living well only. It is about dying well too. Everyone has to die. How one dies is more important than how one lives, although how one lives plays a major part in the way one dies.
First step is accepting the fact you are going to die. To accept that death is the only friend one has in this ‘life’. Once this decision is made, life falls into its place. Everything then becomes one massive move towards understanding why we die. Once that is understood, knowing why we are born is also known.
What is detachment?
It is being dispassionate, unaffected by the ebb and flow of life. It does not mean giving up on life but accepting life for what it is, an ebb and flow of events demanding our reaction. Choosing not to reaction is being detached. What is, is to be. Making an input into what is will not change the consequences. How you handle a reaction to a situation determines you level of detachment.
Detachment is based on isolating the mind from the continual bombarding from the sense organs. To train the mind to seek an identity based not on the reactions to sense stimuli but on something more grounded, the intellect. And then to go beyond the intellect, harnessing the consciousness that pervades everything.
Detachment is not disinterest or apathy. It is applying the correct interest in a given situation. To be involved, yet not to an extent that sees one getting wrapped up in a situation, emotionally and physically.
It is like the involvement of a good judge; impartial, objective and yet empathetic. You feel for them, yet are divorced enough not to become them. Detachment is a grinding out of the spontaneous reaction from your involvement with others. It is a thought-out approach based on compassion (of all the things!) for everyone – that means not taking sides!
It means not belonging to any group, creed or thought which would isolate you from any one else. It is NOT saying ‘yes’ to everything that comes your way but seeing that thing for what it is and acting, or not acting, accordingly. It is being a witness of events, unruffled by its consequences. Yet being able to plunge in with no holds barred to help, aid or change a situation so that it serves someone else better. If you plunge in only so that the situation can be changed to help you, it is an act based on pure selfishness.
Detachment is dispassion. Detachment is not apathy. Detachment is equanimity. It is Samadhi.
Who is He?
In one aspect he is a benevolent guru, respected by many millions and, not shockingly, vilified by thousands others. His name is Satya Sai Baba, of Prashanti Nilayam, in Puttaparthi, Annantpur District of Andhra Pradesh, India. For over 60 years, he has been mentoring the world’s distraught and its believers. Now he is 85 years old, confined to a wheelchair much of the time. He is in the public but still glowing with the power that made Him beloved to over 60 million followers world-wide.
Why is He in a wheelchair?
A pelvis bone that has been broken and mended and a number of other ailments makes him use a wheelchair for mobility, at the behest of his devotees. He has been known to carry on with His ‘duties’ – discourses, managing the ashram, looking after the people – in spite of great pain.
Can’t He cure Himself?
He can. He has done this before. Will He again?
What is He?
An avatar. One that has no comparison in living memory. The closest correlation is of Krishna (5000 years ago) or Rama (25,000 years ago). He has all the compassion and grace of a living Christ, comparable to Jesus’ work as related in the Bible. Except He does say there was more to Jesus than is in the Bible, and that He is the one that Jesus said would come to save the human race.
What is an Avatar?
An avatar is a spark of the universal consciousness that takes shape as a human being for some vital work on Earth. Technically we all humans are a spark of that consciousness, but an Avatar makes a concerted effort to take a human form whereas normal humans are born within the karmic cycle of causality (cause and effect).
The Avatar is a formation of benevolence and compassion but that is only an aspect of His. His true aspects may not be wholly clear to us humans.
The mission of an avatar is only clear in hindsight for he operates at levels incomprehensible to the human mind at its present level of awareness.
When Rama came He undertook a massive war that disseminated a land, killed off soldiers in the hundreds of thousands, propagated His messages of dharma (right conduct) and set the standards for ruling a realm. His life is a role model that has been followed by generations, despite only one book being available of His avatar-hood. Even that book, the Ramayana, has undergone so many changes as to be a point of contention for non-believers, as well as among believers.
When Krishna came, he stole the hearts of his devotees, killed off ‘demons’ and evil doers and master-minded an internecine and global war that set the scene for a further decline of dharma because of the loss of so many elders and followers of Dharma in the war. The survivors of the war are part of our present-day humanity.
The present Kali Yuga is the result of that war, perpetuated by the continual decline of right conduct, growth of avarice, reckless use of resources and argumentative disposition.
Is there anything good He does?
He has set up free hospitals - including super speciality hospitals - free universities and schools and provided free water for millions as part of His example to His followers to serve humanity.
He raises the level of consciousness among human, by sheer force of will as well as teachings and examples. He enables humans to believe in themselves as sparks of the divine rather than a collection of atoms designed to live off the Earth.
For Him, the time on Earth is a crucible for purifying people. Forget heaven, forget hell. These are constructs of organised religions designed to inculcate fear of the unknown, and the possibility of super-sized earth happiness or misery.
This Avatar is here to wring out man from his conditioned behaviour, of preventing the falling back on set pieces to seek solutions, and to bring about a life of cooperative and sustainable living. More importantly, he is here to make man a god.
What can He do?
The biggest hurdle facing Him is organised religion and fanaticism - be it Christianity, Hinduism, Islam or any other religion with a set of followers who believe they only have the truth of the matter. But they are hurdles only from our point of view, not from His.
He has shown extraordinary capabilities; miracles, visitations, cures and safeguarding, including bringing people back from dead. What He does is beyond comprehension of people brought up in either a linear aspect of time or a three-dimensional aspect of space.
What He says is that He has the ability to change situations and circumstance but would rather change the thinking of people to ensure a consciousness level in keeping with our abilities. Our abilities, whether it is of the brain or the DNA, is only a tenth of what it could be. His mission is to raise that ability to more than it is presently.
As can be seen (if one is keeping tabs), worldwide organised religions are taking a battering from the people of the Earth. And it is as it should be. So is the economic models, the political establishments and the social structures. This is all His doing.
What is the purpose behind His mission?
What is in store for humanity can only be assumed. These are, as the writer said, the best of times and the worst of times.
Humanity is poised at the brink of something extraordinary – be it a raise in the conscious level, a catastrophe of unimagined proportions or a golden age. Satya Sai Baba is here to ensure it is a golden age that dawns and not a catastrophe. That is not to say that there will not be calamity or destruction. There will be minor adjustments to the planet, says Baba. How we take to that is what he wants to bring about.
Who are His people?
Everyone is His people. He is everyone. One of the sustained teachings of Satya Sai Baba is the oneness of everything, living and inanimate. And that everything we can sense is a construct of the mind. The background consciousness or the latent ‘divinity’ is what He wants everyone to experience. And those who work towards it, he aids. Those who strive against it, he also aids but in a way that enlightens them of the drawbacks of being enamoured by the senses and the mind. In our terms this could be seen as cruel and vindictive but is done with utmost compassion.
What powers does He have?
The greatest weapon at His disposal is the karmic cycle of cause and effect that rules humanity. As the master of karma, he can dissolve it, telescope it, nullify it, dampen its effect, etc. Karma is generally accepted as the payment, or the fruit of the action, of receiving the benefit or consequences of an action. As everything is interrelated, bound to each other and to everything else, action that benefits the whole is beneficial and action that diminishes the benefit to the whole is unwanted.
This is the sublime lesson that Satya Sai Baba teaches. Of the Onenness of the universe, the Oneness of divinity.
He can accelerate the karmic cycle, of individuals, of clans, of nations, of planets, to achieve what He wants. And He does. He is also the controller of the universe in the sense of a traffic controller – Automatiku Lightsuku Adi Pedda Vadu.
The greatest tool he has at His disposal is the life-affirming grace he can bestow.
His grace is for everyone – but only those who work towards the good of humanity can tap into it. Or anyone with confidence in one’s self.
Technically that would mean that even the atheist has a chance to experience this grace, if he has developed his confidence to a high level. Confidence here does not equate to arrogance, hubris or pride of achievement or skill.
What does He want from you?
Ah! From each He wants the best the person is designed for. The word designed tells all. Each person has a purpose, defined and subtle. The purpose of life is make that purpose apparent, to live up to the full capacity.
Everything and every one is working towards an alignment of purpose, of reaching a ‘decision’ to be One.
What about evil people?
There are no evil people, no sinners. Just people not aligned to the great work that is the play of the universe.
There are only evil deeds: some agreed to as being evil by all of humanity and some which are considered ‘evil’ because they fall out of the explanation we have of good as per culture, creed or conditioning.
Sai Baba teaches universal values, values that agreed on by all of the major religions and ethical societies. These human values, once practiced, shift our perception away from what is bad to what is good. Practice of the good automatically and invariably forces us to move away from doing anything evil.
He also demarcates universal ‘bad’ behaviour and how to stay away from them. These ‘bad’ attributes are anger, lust, greed, attachment and ego, or pride. Practice of humility through service to all and the continued chanting of a divine name(naamsmarana) culminating in the merging of a name with a form (japa dhyan) are the only prescribed doctrines of Satya Sai Baba.
What is naamsmarana?
To steady the mind, it has to be unhinged from the assault of the senses on it and allowed to operate in alignment with the intellect.. There are number of ways to do this – meditation, japa, yoga, etc. Sai Baba would much rather have everyone fill up the mind with the glory of the divine, gradually pushing out anything that disrupts the continued expression of one’s devotion to the divine.
Naamsmarna is the continual chanting of a chosen name of God, over and over again while trying to picture or visualise the form that goes with that name. The end result of this japa dhyan (where the name instantly evokes the form, and the form reminds you of the name repeatedly) is Samadhi (equanimity). It is important to align the name with the form and not to change either the name or the form as it disrupts the mind.
Chanting is not only the vocalisation of the name but the integration of the name within yourself so that it becomes a part of your mind (thinking) through which everything else is perceived. Any thought that rises then is weighed in against the base of the thought on the Divine.
Is Sai Baba God?
Yes. In the sense that everything thing else in creation is God. All we perceive through our senses must be made from something – that something is the material of God, that consciousness
No. God is beyond the comprehension of the human mind/brain. This entity is the basis of creation, the sustenance from which creation emerges and sustained.
Sai Baba is a coalescing of the all-pervading consciousness that is known by the wise by different names, brought together by the need of mankind for a guide to move them towards humanity. He is the focal point of the agonised calls for deliverance from ages of mistreatment and mismanagement. He himself says this is the main reason He takes a shape and moves among people as one of them.
The other ‘important’ aspects of world regeneration, sustaining dharma, and bringing on a new age is incidental to the answering of calls by the sadhus to take avatar on Earth
Sai Baba is the mirror unto humanity itself – reflecting what each of us is. By making us vividly aware of our shortfalls, Sai Baba is carrying out the education programme of the ages. Once we get to know our shortfalls, we can then look at Him as the example of living our lives. My Life is My Message, says Sai Baba and he asks us to follow His example in everyday life.
What is His mission?
To clear the pathway to divinity. Modern man is encumbered by his short-sight approach to living. The conditionings of individuality, family ties, group attachments, regionalism, nationalism and pride of ownership splits humanity apart. Sai Baba is here to destroy these conditionings, these tethers to ‘me’ and ‘mine’.
What is attachment?
This is the feeling of belonging that a person cultivates in his interactions with the world. Called Moha, these are the feelings we vest into an object, a relationship or an idea we subscribe to. It is a very personal feeling, making us what we are in the social circles, in the world and in our minds.
Sai Baba asks us to practice a certain level of detachment when dealing with the world. Seek not the ownership of anything, seek not the subscribing of ourselves to a creed at the expense of unity, seek not even moksha (liberation) – leave this precious gift to His Grace.
Attachment tethers the soul through the mind to mundane things. Once relieved of these tethers, the soul shines forth, illuminating the intellect which then controls the mind and the senses.
It is attachment which causes our separateness from the One, of individualising us through an ‘ego’ that needs to be sustained with gratification. The ego is the warp and weft of thoughts that are generated in our minds. Sustained over many lives, it is also our karma that determines our purpose and station in life once we are ‘born’.
What is life?
Life is a jail term; a sentence to be carried out to learn a lesson. We are sentenced to ‘life’ to learn the lesson of Truth, Right Conduct, Peace and Love, leading to non-violence of thought, word and deed.
Life is not mere living – it is an exploration of ideas, an expanding of the mind, of looking for the thread that links us all, of identifying the string that keeps the garland intact. Of going beyond the obvious and the apparent to the subtle and true.
Life is not about living well only. It is about dying well too. Everyone has to die. How one dies is more important than how one lives, although how one lives plays a major part in the way one dies.
First step is accepting the fact you are going to die. To accept that death is the only friend one has in this ‘life’. Once this decision is made, life falls into its place. Everything then becomes one massive move towards understanding why we die. Once that is understood, knowing why we are born is also known.
What is detachment?
It is being dispassionate, unaffected by the ebb and flow of life. It does not mean giving up on life but accepting life for what it is, an ebb and flow of events demanding our reaction. Choosing not to reaction is being detached. What is, is to be. Making an input into what is will not change the consequences. How you handle a reaction to a situation determines you level of detachment.
Detachment is based on isolating the mind from the continual bombarding from the sense organs. To train the mind to seek an identity based not on the reactions to sense stimuli but on something more grounded, the intellect. And then to go beyond the intellect, harnessing the consciousness that pervades everything.
Detachment is not disinterest or apathy. It is applying the correct interest in a given situation. To be involved, yet not to an extent that sees one getting wrapped up in a situation, emotionally and physically.
It is like the involvement of a good judge; impartial, objective and yet empathetic. You feel for them, yet are divorced enough not to become them. Detachment is a grinding out of the spontaneous reaction from your involvement with others. It is a thought-out approach based on compassion (of all the things!) for everyone – that means not taking sides!
It means not belonging to any group, creed or thought which would isolate you from any one else. It is NOT saying ‘yes’ to everything that comes your way but seeing that thing for what it is and acting, or not acting, accordingly. It is being a witness of events, unruffled by its consequences. Yet being able to plunge in with no holds barred to help, aid or change a situation so that it serves someone else better. If you plunge in only so that the situation can be changed to help you, it is an act based on pure selfishness.
Detachment is dispassion. Detachment is not apathy. Detachment is equanimity. It is Samadhi.
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