Multiple truths and Higher dimensional space

As we evolve, we begin to seek. We seek to know. We seek to know about the phenomenal world, life, and our place in it. We seek to get answers. We try to explain. There are myriad approaches and a million explanations.

From infinitesimally small to the impossibly large, from the inanimate to the most dynamic, from non-living to highly evolved living beings, there is a vast range in the texture of life. What is totally insignificant to one plane is of utmost important to another.

Then there is something that seems rational, that seems to be beyond inconsistencies, and it tries to explain life, systematically. Sometimes we seem to get answers. sometimes not, and more importantly all questions are not answered. Then comes religion, which in itself comes in a million flavors. It helps us understand, but in a million ways. Here again at times we seem to get an answer.

Then there are philosophers, they seem to give us some glimpse of the truth. again the answers seem to be coming in trickles. Sometimes love and loss and emotions seem to give us an answer. Art seems to give us some clue.

As we observe the various such systems, there are definitely cases where we seem to get into a certain moment of truth. Where we emotionally and intellectually seem to have that moment of enlightenment. But that seems momentary. It has a certain space and time attached to it. It doesn't seem to last and we get back to our clueless state again. 

But this seemingly accidental brush with truth, has an analogy.

Space as we know is three dimensional. But it need not be absolute. If we were a single dimensional creature, living in a single dimensional world, we would live on a line. we move back and forth, and that's about it. But if the world were two dimensional, then we as single dimensional creatures would experience anomalies, such as some one disappearing in front of us and appearing behind us. This is a simple possibility in two dimensions. with a line traversing from the front and goes behind me.

The same can be extended to two dimensions, and also to the third dimension.Each dimension offers a certain view which is standard, and experiences an anomaly when the next higher dimension intersects. Also it becomes obvious that a higher order truth introduced into a lower order reality is bound to appear as an anomaly!

Just as these anomalies point to the existence of higher dimensions in space, the accidental glimpse of truth and moments of enlightenment points to the existence of a higher order truth. Seeking and reaching that results in a Joyful life.

Tasting your own Blood

The world is a place of entertainment,  experience and enjoyment. Myriad things form part of the place we call earth. Shopping malls, fast cars, Theater, Sports Arena, Sky scrapers, Cruise ships, ski resorts, Temples, Hospitals, Hospices and so many many other things. News keeps us entertained, new ideas keep us excited. Gadgets bring you delight. In this seemingly never ending sequence of events, there seems to be many sources for happiness.

A tiny little tale from the ancient lore, talks about a dog chewing on a dry bone, and as it keeps chewing, its gums begin to bleed, mistaking the blood to be coming from the bone, the dog chews even more enthusiastically, and tasting its own blood and feeling happy.

The happiness we derive out of objects and events and people and places, are compared to the happiness derived from the bone. The world in itself is like the dry bone and cannot provide happiness, it is the inherent happiness in our own self that gets expressed by engaging with the world. The wise understand this fallacy and give little importance to the events of the world.

There are two parts to this story, the first lets us know that the world is not the source of happiness, and hence we can care less about it and be blissful ourselves. This tells us that a fancy car, or a luxurious house is not essential for us to be happy. Though they provide us with comforts we need not crave for it mistaking for the source of happiness. 

The second part tells us that though the bone is not the source for the blood, and similarly the world is not the source for happiness, the bone does enable the dog to taste its own blood. Similarly the world enables us to reflect our own happiness on it and express itself. Similar to the Sun unable to see itself, can only see its very own light by being reflected by objects outside, the world and its events provides us with materials to reflect our own happiness.

Knowing this, and putting the world in its right place, liberates us from the cravings of specific events and possession of objects, titles and stuff and enables us lead a joyful life.

Perfect imperfection

We all are perfectionists at various levels. We need certain things in a certain way. We want people to obey traffic rules, our kids to listen to us, our neighbors to be friendly, a plastic free world, and our politicians to be corruption-free, well that desire we have overcome. Point is we have our set of things to be in a way we want them to be, and certain other things we learn to live with.

Our experiences are only interpretations of events. Events themselves lack the power to create an experience, its our faculty of interpretation that enables us to experience things. As we get to understand this, we learn to see the happenings of life, in a different manner. Be it day to day events, or life altering things. As we become more refined in this, and we begin taking things on our stride, life gets into a monotonic rhythm. 

Then out of the blue something happens that makes you go mad beyond your wildest dreams. Now how did that happen? In spite of our composure, and our complete understanding of the meaninglessness of life, and the fallacy of taking anything hard, some events do get us! This is the greatest feature of life! It keeps bringing up surprises, and makes you feel alive. You think you have got it all, and then this happens!

A totally desire less state will liberate us from the negativity of such situations, contemplating on the nature of reality, and beauty and depth of this creation, helps us stay at the right distance from life.

The world is an illusion, and the frameworks of likes and dislikes create endless structures for living. Realizing this, and staying in this knowledge, helps us get back on our feet after feeling the blow that life just gave. If you think about it, this life is indeed perfectly imperfect!

Theories, theories and more theories ..

Was this world created, or did it evolve? Did humans evolve or were they designed? Is matter a particle or a wave? After Higgs-boson, what? Does the Sun have an awareness? Is the body Intelligent? What is the world made off? Are there higher dimensions?

Humans are destined to questions. Thoughts that probe, thoughts that lead, thoughts that open up a pathway to knowledge. We as humans are more than anything, knowledge seekers. Of course like the rest of the beautiful living kingdom, We are born, eat, procreate and sleep, and die. but we also seek. Somehow what we know, what we understand and what we experience doesn't seem to be enough. We do not take this to be a WYSIWYG world, we want more than what we see.

When we question What is it that we see? what is it that we experience? it boils down to our faculty of the senses. We experience life through our sensations, perceptions and representations of these perceptions. But what dominates is an interpretation of these perceptions, an explanation into the happenings, causal connections and a theory for everything. Our lives are bundles of interpretations. 

Conflicts arise when we have more than one theory, more than one explanation for what we observe. Not a single field of human experience is an exception to multiple views, Politics, Medicine, Science, the Arts, Economics, Philosophy, Religion and Entertainment, you name it you will see it. When multiple explanations confront each other there is a contest, a bitterness and unhappy oppositions. The more we look at something, the more open ended the questions become. With no clear distinction of right or wrong, no black and white answers, humanity progresses towards an increasing entropy. The more we structure our knowledge, we discover more unstructured material.

Will there be an end to this quest of understanding? will there be an end to theorizing? Will we understand it all?

Theories and explanations are for that faculty called intellect. A need for meaning and reason behind everything is for that faculty called the mind. When one transcends both the mind and the intellect, the necessity for knowledge, and theory and explanation for what we experience, ceases. 

The way to transcend the mind is to look for it. Look at the thoughts, thoughts disappear, look for the one who experiences and that experience-r disappears. Having rid of the thoughts and the mind and the individual to experience, all this craving for understanding appears amusing and leads to a joyful experience of life.

Who is experiencing life?

Life in its infinite variety offers endless experiences. There appear plenty of people, with individual lives, unique in several ways. The experiences that each one seems to have is so different from one another, sometimes it appears for the good, sometimes for the worse.

As long as life presents favorable situations and experiences, one's individual story provides happiness and not much to complain. The individual script in fact provides a reason for pride. The moment things begin to take unfavorable turns, we begin to complain, we scramble to fix it, when things get out of hand and we loose hope, we become miserable. There are situations that hurt us and make us suffer so much, we question the point of life. The individual story is no longer fun. One begins to look at other stories, and almost all of them appear to be better.

Life is a sequence of experiences. depending on how we look at things, some are favorable some are not. we seek a sequence that is always favorable. Little do we realize that a sequence gets its meaning and sense only by a mixture. A monotonous sequence of either case will never provide us any experience.

Leaving aside the impossibility of a monotonous sequence, if we probe deeper into who is it that is experiencing life, we get an even more interesting answer. A physical analysis of the self, and an attempt to identify it, results in an absence of such a thing as the Self. Assuming the most common object of one's  body to be the self, we easily get past the parts of the body one by one, including the heart and the brain, abstract notions of thoughts, emotions, feeling and intellect, since all of this is observable by the self, we come to a point where the observer is not to be observed! 

If there is no one to observe, or experience, then could there have been an experience?  When there is no experience , then what sense does it make to classify it to be favorable or not? Realizing this liberates one from the consequences of apparent experiences. Life becomes an interesting sequence.

Wormholes, space, time and event horizon

Interestellar is a fascinating movie, with great visuals and intriguing concepts and is a good science fiction movie in a while. stories such as these capture the imagination , and expands our experience. It takes us into possibilities beyond the ones that we are accustomed to, and when stories are told very convincingly toeing along the lines of science pretty closely, we loose track of what is possible and what is not.

Can we travel in time?, are there higher dimensions?,what happens when we get to the event horizon of a black hole? wouldn't it be anomalous if we aged slower than others? can we travel vast distances across the Universe through wormholes? These are fascinating questions, that might very well motivate people to eventually realize these. Some in the near future, some  further down. We cannot rule any of them out. 

When Galileo pointed to the planets and said they were worlds like ours, people thought he was insane. A little spark and burn down an entire forest, ideas are more powerful and leads people on journeys that alter life. It is amazing to see how the world evolves, how change is constant.

As an individual living in a certain point in time, some times one may feel, overwhelmed and  very meek. So many new possibilities, and life and time seems running out. Questions haunt people, such as what would the world be in a century from now?, How will my daughter look like when I am gone? what happens to our beautiful loved ones when they say good bye and leave us for good? The more intensely one contemplates, the more emotional one becomes.

Coming back to wormholes, time travel and black holes, while new discoveries are made, they are but an iteration of this fractal Universe. The more closer you look, the more it generates details. It generates as we look, and not independently. No matter how believable this whole world is, its but an illusion. It breaks down physically into an anomaly of wave and particle, energy and matter and, into a vast nothingness of space.

The only reality is the present Now, and the awareness of I. no past, no future, no here and no there. when time and space dissolves into a constant singularity, travel in present becomes impossible, leave alone travelling in time. Parmenides tried to explain this to the world and his pupil Zeno did very well with his paradoxes. Yet the fascination to chase fractals keeps people engaged and entertained.

Knowing this leaves the mind at rest from the anxieties of missing  a future, resulting in a joyful present.

Guru or Painkiller?

While the United States is known as the land of opportunities, India can be called the land of Swamijis. Every now and then a new Godman emerges out of nowhere, every state and city has its own quota of Swamijis of all kinds, helping people from all walks of life connect with the Divine.

God and Godmen become necessities of life when what life offers is not adequate. Life in its splendor can be colorful at times and cruel at others. People want to run towards what they like and run away from what they dislike. Sometimes they are stuck. Godmen help push the wheel forward. They help us connect with the Divine and clear our hurdles to reach our goals.

There are a few reasons why people head to the Swamiji. When they have a problem, or when they are venturing into an unknown, when they need more than what they can get, and mostly when they do not know how to go about a situation, and it appears that logic is functioning against them.  What the Swamiji does is ease the situation and help folks get past their troubles. This he does with a combination of tools, from divine talisman to rituals, to penance, to tactical and strategic advice. 

Rarely one comes across a Swamiji who tells us we are helpless, there is always help at hand. 

If one analyzes the workflow of consulting a Swamiji, one will become aware that it is similar to a painkiller. Pain happens, its part of life, to endure is wisdom. But we need to move on with our busy lives without a rest, and hence a painkiller becomes inevitable. The danger however lies in the fact that the solution is temporary, worse than that, it is no solution at all. Soon we realize the habit forming addictive nature of the process. A relationship is built with the painkiller. The Swamiji becomes part of family, to such extent that he knows more about our problems than ourselves. We stay comfortable with the notion that we have divine help. The cycle of consultations go on and pain gets converted into pleasure momentarily continually.

A rare and true Swamiji however is more than a pain killer. He gets to the root of the problem, and rather than providing a sugar coated pill for the symptom to subside, he provides the bitter medicine and perhaps a lengthy treatment for the cure of the disease. Self Knowledge is the treatment for the disease of suffering, and one who gives that to the seeker is Guru (literally, One who removes darkness). Self knowledge delivers us from all forms of pain and results in an ever joyful life.

So next time you prepare for a Swamiji visit, check if he is a painkiller or a Cure.