Swami Sivananda
Death is separation of the soul from the physical body. Death becomes the starting point of a new life. Death merely opens the door to a higher and fuller form of life. Birth and death are jugglery of maya. He who is born begins to die. He who dies begins to live. Life is death and death is life. No one comes, no one goes. Brahmn or the eternal alone exists. Just as you move from one house to another, the soul passes from one body to another to gain experience. Just as a man casting off worn-out garments takes new ones, so the dweller in this body, casting off wornout bodies, enters into others which are new. Life is a continuum. Death is necessary for further evolution. Dissolution of the body is no more than sleep. Birth is like waking up. Death brings new life. A man of discrimination is not afraid of death. Death unlocks the door to a wider existence. The soul is a circle whose circumference is nowhere but its centre is in the body. Death means the change of this centre from one body to another. The supreme soul or paramatman is deathless, decayless, timeless, causeless and spaceless. It is the source and substratum for body, mind and world. There is death for the physical body, a compound of five elements. The eternal soul is beyond time, space and causation. To free yourself from birth and death, you must become body-less. Body is the result of karmas or actions. If you free yourself from raga-dvesha, or likes and dislikes, you will be free from karma. If you annihilate ignorance through knowledge of the imperishable, you can annihilate the ego. The root cause for this body is ignorance. He who realises the eternal soul, which is formless and attributeless, infinite and unchanging, frees himself from death. The individual souls or jivas build various bodies to display their activities and gain experience from this world. They enter the bodies and leave them. The process goes on. This is known as transmigration of souls. The entrance of a soul into a body is called birth. The soul’s departure from the body is death. Man has always tried to know what happens after the death of an individual. Science has been struggling to unravel the mystery of what lies beyond death.Experiments have yielded many interesting facts. Natural death, it is said, is unknown to unicellular organisation. When life on earth consisted of these creatures, death was unknown. The phenomenon appeared only when from unicellular the multicellular evolved. Laboratory experiments have shown that whole organs such as thyroid glands, the ovary, suprarenal gland, the spleen, heart and kidneys isolated from the body of a cat or a fowl, can be kept alive in vitro to show increase in size or weight due to the appearance of new cells or tissues. It is also known that after the cessation of an individual parts of the organisation can continue to function. The white corpuscles of the blood, if cared for, can live for months after the body from which they were withdrawn has been cremated. Death is not the end of life. It is merely cessation of an individuality. Life flows on to achieve the universal till it merges in the eternal.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Beyond human concepts or ideas
VITHAL C NADKARNI
STEVEN Spielberg’s ET is an alien. So is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. But the two characters could not have been more different. Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial grew out of an autobiographical impulse to fill the void created by his parents’ divorce. ET was “a friend who could be the brother I never had and a father I didn’t feel I had anymore,” the film-maker said. In contrast, the Polish sci-fi writer believed that we can never understand the alien other: Solaris is a planet-sized organism with a ‘mind’ so inconceivably different from human consciousness that all attempts at communication are doomed. Cosmonauts who try to connect with the ‘ocean’ suffer bizarre hallucinations. Solaris is apparently manipulating their memories and inner traumas without revealing anything about itself. Solaris is presented and perceived by the protagonists as a God-like being beyond comprehension. Is it reflecting their collective subconscious? Does it represent a sort of universal record of all memories, every thought or event that has ever occurred? All Lem will say is that Solaris “cannot be reduced to human concepts, images, or ideas”. This may sound similar to the stance taken in Advaitic Vedanta and apophatic theology of Eastern Christianity. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for example, students ask the Sage Yajnyavalkya to describe God. “The Divine is not this and it’s not that (neti, neti),” he replies. Thus, the Divine is not real as we are real, nor is it unreal. The Divine is not living in the sense that humans live; nor is it dead. It’s not compassionate in the sense we understand the term, nor is it uncompassionate and so on. If this sounds too nihilistic or escapist, the sages assure the seekers that their mantra neti, neti is not really a denial. It only asserts that human beings inevitably fail when they try to capture certain ‘realities’ in verbal nets. Contrast this with the position taken by the so-called ‘philosophy of the flesh’ propounded by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Mind and cognitive processes are inherently ‘embodied’ they argue; thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. That reverses centuries of dualism in western culture that splits the mind from the body, reason from emotion and thought from feeling. But it also locates the limits to our conceptual understanding right into the core of our being.
STEVEN Spielberg’s ET is an alien. So is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. But the two characters could not have been more different. Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial grew out of an autobiographical impulse to fill the void created by his parents’ divorce. ET was “a friend who could be the brother I never had and a father I didn’t feel I had anymore,” the film-maker said. In contrast, the Polish sci-fi writer believed that we can never understand the alien other: Solaris is a planet-sized organism with a ‘mind’ so inconceivably different from human consciousness that all attempts at communication are doomed. Cosmonauts who try to connect with the ‘ocean’ suffer bizarre hallucinations. Solaris is apparently manipulating their memories and inner traumas without revealing anything about itself. Solaris is presented and perceived by the protagonists as a God-like being beyond comprehension. Is it reflecting their collective subconscious? Does it represent a sort of universal record of all memories, every thought or event that has ever occurred? All Lem will say is that Solaris “cannot be reduced to human concepts, images, or ideas”. This may sound similar to the stance taken in Advaitic Vedanta and apophatic theology of Eastern Christianity. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for example, students ask the Sage Yajnyavalkya to describe God. “The Divine is not this and it’s not that (neti, neti),” he replies. Thus, the Divine is not real as we are real, nor is it unreal. The Divine is not living in the sense that humans live; nor is it dead. It’s not compassionate in the sense we understand the term, nor is it uncompassionate and so on. If this sounds too nihilistic or escapist, the sages assure the seekers that their mantra neti, neti is not really a denial. It only asserts that human beings inevitably fail when they try to capture certain ‘realities’ in verbal nets. Contrast this with the position taken by the so-called ‘philosophy of the flesh’ propounded by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Mind and cognitive processes are inherently ‘embodied’ they argue; thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. That reverses centuries of dualism in western culture that splits the mind from the body, reason from emotion and thought from feeling. But it also locates the limits to our conceptual understanding right into the core of our being.
Meditation that works in real life
- K VIJAYARAGHAVAN
To behold, in praise of wonder
MUKUL SHARMA
WITH classic self-referential of irony, Shakespeare ended one sonnet: “For we which now behold these present days, have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.” Never mind that the great bard had enough gift of the gab, the likes of which the rest of us can’t even dream of acquiring in more than 400 years, he still took one thing most certainly for granted: that at least we had eyes to wonder. Actually, most of us don’t. This doesn’t mean we should all of us immediately, as Blake put it, begin to “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,” but should there not even be an E for effort extended here? Because, for whatever reason the act of creation — or evolution — may have had, it has limited our vision to an extremely narrow band of the entire electromagnetic spectrum; what we call “visible” light. Our brains are simply not wired to experience any other wavelength besides those of the rainbow, whereas various other animals’ very lives depend on being able to perceive infrared, ultraviolet and polarised light — besides being able to “see” things like electricity and magnetism. Our eyes don’t possess the visual acuity of a hawk that can spot a minute meal moving miles away, nor that of an owl whose optics allow 360 degree night-vision for detecting a dormouse in near total darkness. What we do have, however, are great minds that have produced marvellous inventions to amplify and augment our sight — such as telescopes and microscopes — which are probably the closest technological approximations to poetry. In fact, the New Age American social thinker and writer, Theodore Roszak, says: “Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.” Yet how many of us ever look through their lenses to get a glimpse of what lies beneath or beyond? These are our present days too for us to behold now, as were those in Shakespeare’s time. To watch the pall of ennui evaporate from the eyes of an eight or 80-year-old child, show him the clarity of life in a drop of stagnant pond water magnified a thousand times. Or let her watch in astonishment as the clouds of the Milky Way resolve themselves into million pinpoints of separate suns in the sky. Moreover, wonder is not a one-way street; whatever is wondered at must surely wonder back some time and, who knows, perhaps it doesn’t lack our tongue to praise what it sees.
WITH classic self-referential of irony, Shakespeare ended one sonnet: “For we which now behold these present days, have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.” Never mind that the great bard had enough gift of the gab, the likes of which the rest of us can’t even dream of acquiring in more than 400 years, he still took one thing most certainly for granted: that at least we had eyes to wonder. Actually, most of us don’t. This doesn’t mean we should all of us immediately, as Blake put it, begin to “see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower,” but should there not even be an E for effort extended here? Because, for whatever reason the act of creation — or evolution — may have had, it has limited our vision to an extremely narrow band of the entire electromagnetic spectrum; what we call “visible” light. Our brains are simply not wired to experience any other wavelength besides those of the rainbow, whereas various other animals’ very lives depend on being able to perceive infrared, ultraviolet and polarised light — besides being able to “see” things like electricity and magnetism. Our eyes don’t possess the visual acuity of a hawk that can spot a minute meal moving miles away, nor that of an owl whose optics allow 360 degree night-vision for detecting a dormouse in near total darkness. What we do have, however, are great minds that have produced marvellous inventions to amplify and augment our sight — such as telescopes and microscopes — which are probably the closest technological approximations to poetry. In fact, the New Age American social thinker and writer, Theodore Roszak, says: “Nature composes some of her loveliest poems for the microscope and the telescope.” Yet how many of us ever look through their lenses to get a glimpse of what lies beneath or beyond? These are our present days too for us to behold now, as were those in Shakespeare’s time. To watch the pall of ennui evaporate from the eyes of an eight or 80-year-old child, show him the clarity of life in a drop of stagnant pond water magnified a thousand times. Or let her watch in astonishment as the clouds of the Milky Way resolve themselves into million pinpoints of separate suns in the sky. Moreover, wonder is not a one-way street; whatever is wondered at must surely wonder back some time and, who knows, perhaps it doesn’t lack our tongue to praise what it sees.
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