Hmmm... 100 posts and I vanish. Well things have been a little busy for the fast few days. But I think I can now get back to my regular posting. My stint with Zeus Numerix is almost up. Another week and I'll temporarily become an unemployed youth (yes! I still fall under the category of youth :P). I have plans of travelling a bit during my brief unemployed status but the way things are going, I do not know where I'll end up. I was looking forward to making plans to visit Leh/Ladakh. I had only thought of making plans and the freaking place gets flooded and cut off from the rest of India. Army personnel are rescuing people. And to think, Leh is in a rain shadow area. Bloody Hell!
Alright, so here is a brief about things I talked about with my Dadi aka my godmother. I'll probably elaborate on posts later on but for now, just a jist.
I had a doubts about life, it's purpose and whether this existence is all that its about. Always made the whole idea of life pretty pointless. You are born, you push, pull and trod on others all your life to get ahead (of what I do not know) and then you die. The concept of souls, re-births, past lives intrigued me quite a bit. The idea seemed interesting and probably as these concepts are present in all religions and parts of the world.
I asked her about it and this is what I understood, your soul is your energy or the entity which remains and is indestructible. Follows the same funda as that in science. Energy cannot be created or destroyed. It can only change its form and state. Soul can be thought of as an intelligent energy entity which initiates in a basic raw form and grows into a state when it can join in to the singular energy source (call it what you may. God is an option). The soul enters the living world in the form of various living organisms and with each birth grows and becomes more powerful. You are born as various animals, worms, trees and other organisms till your soul reaches a state where it can be born as a human. As a human, its main aim is to live a life in such a manner that the soul need not be born again. And this is possible through, positive things in life and doing things such that you are remembered after you are gone in a positive way. Only when you are debt free, will you cease to be born.
The soul has no gender. As a result you may be a man in one life while a woman in another. Sounds logical, as I always wondered, how is it possible that a woman will never know what it feels like to be a man and vice versa. How will you empathize and understand the opposite sex unless you have lived their life?
Questions such as why should I be proud or jealous of someone else, when your aim is to advance, not in your living realm but in your soul realm. Your aim is to merge with the source of energy. Everyone will. It only depends how fast. And the speed depends on how you live your life. Would you like to be in debt with other souls, so that you are reborn till you pay it off or rather live a life such that you die content, satisfied and at peace.
Apparently that is what life is. Spend your life in such a way that people remember you after you are gone and help others advance in the journey towards the light. For your progress depends on their adavancement.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Do you actually believe all this rebirth and soul fiction... I admire that, it is the best philosophy man could ever come up with, that gives answers to all the philosophical questions about life, meaning and suffering, in such a way that everything fits perfectly. But this quality can only make it a good fiction like harry potter or matrix. Truth has different tests to pass. You cant base your life on it. . and I believe we became victim of our own success. This best fictional story no other culture could come up with made us to stop asking questions, we started accepting and adjusting to situations, thinking its our pichle janam ka paap...rather than challenging and trying to change, and went from a golden era to a barbarian, poor, superstitious society. while other societies world over challenged, changed and progressed.
ReplyDeleteShubhayu at least once come out of your admiration phase of your grandma n try and ask some real questions... and please, please don't make a mistake of going trough your whole life based on fiction, to later realize the truth...(And please don't call it science)..
Hmmmm... interesting to hear your point of view. To tell you the truth, I am still hunting for answers, there are a lot of things that have happened to me lately, which I have not been able to explain using my rational, scientific part of my brain. I am searching for the truth about life and I am not satisfied with the current explanation of things. My brain fails to comprehend that I was a result of one night's passion.
ReplyDeleteMaterialistic pleasures have never satisfied me and fortune doesn't inspire me. I want to be successful but society defined success doesn't make me happy. I believe I am here for a purpose and I meed to find what it is. And only when I have found it will I be truly happy.
Based upon the little reading that I have done, I have realized one thing and that is never undermine what you do not understand. I am not here to preach nor force anyone to follow what I find interesting. There are a lot of things I believe and some of them contradict each other. Maybe I am unable to grasp a unified theory as of now. But if light can exist both as a particle and a wave, I believe there are a lot of things that can co-exist.
By the way if yesterday's fiction can be today's fact, I believe today's fiction could have been yesterday's truth.
Its a human nature ... "To find the ultimate meaning / purpose" and its completely understandable to feel passionate about once life and a quest to give it meaning. But we feel passionate about thing that we hold most dear and love. Like our parents, our children, our love. We hope and pray for extraordinary things for them. In a difficult situation we would do anything for them, but what if something bad is in sight and is sure.. I think we will rather choose the path to fool ourselves and keep expecting miracle than accept the truth, anybody would do that, its normal.
ReplyDeleteBut would that change the truth, Damn not. I know you would say your Kaynat philosophy. But ask someone who is less privileged, How hard they pray for each days meal and how often they get. Tell them the kaynat philosophy and See if they believe. And also try to come up with some justification for their situation if you can. expand your horizons, before accepting a philosophy try to generalize it as much as possible.
Similarly we are too much in love with ourselves that we go to any length to give it meaning and believe anything we sane ppl would otherwise not. we don't like the certainity of death and we do everything to avoid it even if it means fooling ourselves. And this being an eternal problem man has come up with different stories and versions of it. Like, God ( Different versions in different religions), Heaven ( For us after death), Hell (For others),
reincarnation, eternity of soul, judgment day etc etc. . Do u see the link...No religion would tell you there is nothing after death. . . cause it wont survive otherwise.. That's the core purpose of religion.. To give you some story / belief (even if fictional) to hold on to so that you don't fear death and live peaceful life giving it some kinda (fictional) meaning. . . and man needs this cause he can comprehend the certainty of death... animals don't know they are going to die so they don't need religion or reincarnation or meaning...
So dear if you wanna know and accept the truth you gotta let go fear of death, not easy but there is a really liberating feeling at this end and a true one.. So your move buddy Red pill or Blue pill ..! and stop sitting on the fence, take a side...
Everyone gets a choice at one point or the other in their lives. There are hundreds of rags to riches stories and thousands that no one knows. Convincing you about the idea of soul, rebirth is not on my agenda. My idea is simple. What you make of your life depends upon the choices you make. You start with a given set of circumstances but from that point onwards, every decision you make changes the future circumstances you will be in. The Kayanat thoery doesn't mean you stop working towards what you wish for. It is a very simple concept if you see it from my point of view.
ReplyDeleteTo me it means, that if you really want something you work towards it and not let any negativity creep in. That is where this comes in. If you believe in the fact that the universe will help you get it, it keeps the negativity out and it helps you focus on the task at hand. That is the bottomline of it. And yes, there are times when in such situations, things mysteriously happen (you could attribute it to Chaos Theory which by the way is not fiction and is actually science).
Everyone doesn't have the same level of understanding and comprehension. I have believed for quite sometime that God, religion is a way of bringing order and good way of life for everyone. A bad analogy would be, if u want people to watch television, you don't need to teach them its working, just give them the buttons and the remote. How the viewer uses the remote is different thing. Now out of these there maybe a few who would be intrigued to understand its working. Similarly, if you want people to live in order and maintain a peaceful life, give them religion. Some will use it as intended, some won't. A few would want to understand it.
Does death scare me? I don't know. I have never really thought about it. My thought does not come from my fear of death but for the pointlessness of life. It doesn't mean that I am not living my life to its fullest, but one lifetime is just too less to experience everything and if this is an idea which comes to everyone, then there must be something worth understanding and finding out.
1. That's what I am stressing, Kaynat Theory or Religion makes you "feel" positive giving you a hope to hold on to. You can say its a psychological programming or manipulation or twisting of truth that you do, so that you are not over stressed about the results of your Karma and get along even if results are not favorable. But this does not make it true. its only as true as Hitlers theory about Jews. He believed that he is doing some worth, giving meaning to his life.
ReplyDeleteChaos theory is completely opposite to your theories, It says there is no meaning only randomness of events.
2. About TV analogy the question is are you happy with the remote? I thought you were set out to search meaning of life and which means you want to understand the working of TV and are not happy with only surfing the channels remote like many others. If you are happy and any fictional story handed out to you about working of TV is going to be good enough why bother..?
3. I agree that's what the purpose of religion was when it was set out.
a) to solve these philosophical problems for a layman and fill in the gaps in factual knowledge of society (science) with some fictional story temporarily so that life goes on.
b) and to bring order to society. Fear of God would produce lesser bad ppl as there were no police and law and order.
But now we don't need religion or God. We have a law and order system for it based on basic rights and not what God said in Bible or Shariah or Manusmriti. And science is sufficiently advanced to give answers to most of the problems though not all yet. but we got to acknowledge from our past experience that if science can not give answers surely nothing else can. They can fill up with fitting fictional stories but not answer the real question.
3. Good possibility that Life is pointless. But nevertheless its up to us to give it meaning worthy to us us. like what is a rose?, just some petals and twigs, but we bestow it with meaning when we give it to someone we love, or offer it to God. The meaning is to us, its our story.
Even now when you are trying to give it meaning by believing in one of the fictional stories at par with truth it is going to give you satisfaction, a much needed one, but a fictional one like masturbation, producing nothing. And I am not totally against it as long as you recognize that its fictional like a placebo and don't hold on too dearly to it.
Cause if you do that's when the bad effect starts, like superstitions, wearing rings, going to shirdi, Yagnya and what not. The story which was made just to fill in the gaps and soothe us temporarily, start becoming big enough to consume your sanity and reasoning. And then ppl start killing in the name of religion and the solution creates a bigger problem than it was set out to solve.
there is famous a quote by Steven Weinberg - "With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion" think over it...
1. Kayanat Theory :
ReplyDeleteAssumption - Everythng is made up of the same basic constituent material and can eventually be broken down into energy.
Chaos Theory - Tries to find out the underlying order in random systems. It says that a miniscule effect in the initial condition can lead to catastrophic change or effect in the final output.
Now it can be said that everything is built up by some form of energy and it can only be transformed from one form to the other and cannot be created nor destroyed. It would also hence lead to the fact that different forms of energy can interact with each other. Wishes are nothing but thoughts which are brain waves and hence is a form of energy. So when someone strongly thinks about something, he is emanating this energy continuously. Applying the chaos theory, it simply means that this tiny effect in the initial condition of making something happen increases the probability of that happening since the person is anyway woring towards it.
This is the reason I feel that it can work. Refer to Illusions by Richard Bach or the recent best-seller The Secret. You can either discard it or try following it for a while and see if it works.
2. Religion : I gave the TV analogy to explain religion. I have always been saying that I want to understand the working of it and the underlying science, specially Hinduism. But everyone may not be inclined to do so or are not mentally evolved enough to do so. From what I have gathered about religion, I have realized that the originators of religions must have understood the secret but felt that it was not somethig that could have been easily grasped by everyone. So create religion, god etc to put in guidelines and rules which would generally help the common people follow a path of righteousness and fulfilling life. Like any idea, the conceptualization and execution of an idea can be initiated by the same person but cannot be guaranteed to remain constant over time. Once the initiator dies, the course taken by the idea depends on the interpreters of the concept and not the owner. And thus it fails. Exactly what has happend to religion. The interpreters have taken over and used religion to gain control over the masses. But one must also realize that there are millions of god-fearing people living peaceful and holistic lives because of religion. One cannot deny that. Law and Order cannot replace religion for the simple fact that the same problems plague it too. The judiciary and administration can be manipulated just as easily. So will u blame the law for it? It is the executors of law who is to be blamed, not the law.
The more I learn about all this, I have realized the orhodoxness is in the genes. A person becomes an atheist because he cannot stand/relate to the orthodox believers but don't realize that they end up becoming orthodox non-believers. 2 sides of the same coin. Telling other people that what they believe is the truth and others are wrong.
3. Soul : The idea of consciousness and intellect bothers me. There are a lot of information which don't fit in. Same is the case with memories. There are a lot of unexplained cases of memories from previous birth, premonitions, intuitions, deja vu which is yet to be understood and science apparently are still grappling with the fact or are plainly denying them since they have no explanations. Science cannot even tell what is it in the brain that makes a person appreciate humor, art, etc. Science can say what part of the brain it originates in but it cannot explain what causes it. I think the idea of spiritualism is deeply connected to souls and the more one walks the path, the more he believes in it. The idea of soul as an evolved form of energy appeals to me and it explains the concept of spiritual growth. Apart from that science has also been trying to prove the existence of soul. Read about the work by Duncan MacDougall and Dr. Brain Weiss (an extremely famous practicing psychiatrist)
4. Science : It is the way to go. I think I am quite educated enough to say that I understand science and I also understand its limitations. It has explained a lot of things and I am sure one day it'll be able to explain everything. But to say that it gives solutions to most of the problems is just plainly being adamant. 2 points to remember about science and acknowledge from past experience.
ReplyDeletea. Whatever science debunks today or calls fiction ends up being proved in the future.
b. Current science theories are over ridden by new theories. Children will laugh today if someone tells them that atoms are the smallest particle. But people swore by it then.
So simply put, the greatest scientists aren't adamant enough to say that thre cannot be more to what can be seen. I suggest students of science shouldn't either. Science and spirutualism are both trying to find the same thing. Origin of life, its meaning, trying to make it better. Their paths are different. And if you check it, most of the greatest scientists were philosophers. Science and spiritualism will merge. It is inevitable. Agreeing or disagreeing is a personal matter and I dont want to comment on that.
5. As far as fiction goes, I'll not comment on it. Its a personal view and I have no interest in trying to convince otherwise. Just remember, space travel was fiction too.
1. Kaynat Theory:
ReplyDelete1.1 you take in consideration about we being part of whole cosmos energy but you ignore how big a part are we? large enough to affect anything? If we take of all forms of possible energies and put them together then we are an impossibly small part of the total energy and our thinking creates even smaller energy variations to affect any other significant part of the total energy.
1.2 Chaos theory talks about how even deterministic systems without any random events which are susceptible to initial condition create Chaos and random output. That directly means a small orderly(?) process as your thinking abt your girlfriend(if we assume it has effect on cosmos) can create a complete unrelated random events like a tsunami in America, let alone putting things in order to make your wish come true.
1.3 Still this is all thinking, lets try to generalize your theory. Lets say if what we wish increases probability of it. This means if many people wish for a same one thing (pray) there energy should combine and its probability should increase proportionally to no of ppl wishing it to happen. This does not explain why majority of population in the world is poor, why hitler, stalin, mao could do mass killing and numerous other things.
1.4 Lets see if there have been experiments. There have been many statistical studies conducted around efficacy of prayers (In 1872, Francis Galton for longevity of Royal Family to In 2001 double-blind study of the Mayo Clinic Patients) and it has found no or only placebo effect.
1.5 Is it that you are selectively manipulating science to fit your theory (like many religions need to do now a days) may be subconsciously because you are biased towards it?
1.6 It doesn't matter I discard it or not; I cant discard gravity, can I? We are trying to find the truth. So don't do like all religious preachers "you will only see God, if you believe in one"
Religion:
ReplyDelete2.1 Its very unlikely (Probability = Bertrand Russell's Flying Tea pot) that more complex or more knowledgeable thing existed in the past, be in terms if omnipotent God or all knowing religion originators.
Evolution / progress works forward. Complexity of systems increases going forward. Today's knowledge and society is not individual effort its a collective wisdom of society made possible through various intricate networks of information only possible today.
So Its like a huge collective brain of nearly 6 billion ppl working (or at least as many are connected to network). So thinking and believing that an all-knowledgeable super brainy person or Klan existed before and possessed more knowledge and brain than today's collective wisdom and gave directions to low IQ, mere mortals like us is naive.
2.2 And whom would you call all knowing a person, one says do as I say don't ask why? or the one who says If I can do it you can do it too, I will show you how? Which teacher would you like?
What would a real all knowing person would do? create God and stupid rituals which people will eventually manipulate or teach them really what they knew and take them forward.
I think they will teach what they knew. and that's what they did. They really though the world was flat, and made up of five elements and all originated from Om and Yagnyas can bring rains. so they taught us that. Why try to make a connection where there is not? why make simple things complex? Religion has served its purpose and its expiry date is over now.
Do you see any new religions sprawling as it used to, no more messiahs ? Because only ignorance can breed religion. look at the statistics of ppl turning atheist or non religious in 50 years there will be no religion.
2.3 Law and order has flaws but its a manly system and we can improve it and that's the way forward. Religion is God made and nobody can dare change it. there is the difference. And good ppl are good not because of religion they are good because they are good human beings.
2.4 About atheism I agree with you and believe Atheism is also a religion cause its a belief without proof. What I preach here is a logical way of thinking and outlook and that says God as we generally believe is only as likely as Harry Potter and your theories don’t fit logically.
3. Soul:
ReplyDelete3.1 Soul: Whole is more than the sum of its parts, but its still sum of its parts. Take for exp a watch made up of X and Y material. but when they come together in a specific way, it shows time and we call it a watch. It has value more than X + Y. But it still is X + Y only and nothing more.
similarly we are made up of some X+Y+Z when come together we have consciousness but still we are X+ Y+ Z nothing more nothing less no extra element called soul is added and persisted.
3.2 Trying to prove is not good enough, let me know if they do. Even I am trying to prove there is a flying spaghetti monster which controls the universe but nobody believes.
4. Science:
ReplyDelete4.1 That's the beauty of science that it changes and religion does not. Science is a way of thinking, religion preaches it has all the answers.
4.2 Philosophy and science are always together, Philosophy's purpose is to fill in the gaps of current factual knowledge with something that fits in. And as factual knowledge advances science will completely take over philosophy. The only thing is we should take it as what its meant to be, it is something sort of prediction or judgment that what could be, just a thought, without any proof to fill in the gaps for the time being and should stop giving it more importance than that and claim it to be truth.
The difference in philosophy and religion is philosophy tries to apply critical thinking to this prediction also, while religion can get away with talking snakes and let there be light.
5. Fiction:
ReplyDelete5.1. I am trying to apply critical thinking to fiction. Tell me how different is believing in Harry Potter to be true from believing in any religions fiction. What if we were told since childhood that Harry potter was true and Bible is a fiction by J. K. Rowling.
5.2 In old days too many questions were unanswered and it affected day to day life. So believing in one of the fiction (mostly given to you at birth depending on your religion) was a must. But now we don’t need to follow this practice. We have three ways to go about unanswered questions.
1. if its high priority for us, start scientific research on it.
2. If its moderate priority, Apply critical thinking to the fiction that we believe.
3. If its low priority for us, we can suspend judgment.
What say?