MORTAL MEMORY IN AN IMMORTALLY SHIFTING KALEIDOSCOPE

TO MY DAUGHTER WHO RESPONDED TO MY BLOG ON IMMORTALITY



(These were my thoughts after visiting my grandmother's memorial during my adolescence. I slightly refine it to make it more intelligible. )



Where my grandmother lies, grass has grown. And flowers. Not only flowers; from those flowers, bees will suck out honey, feed their young ones, who would cross-pollinate other plants and flowers in nature; other birds, animals will feed on this grass, these plants and will produce young ones who will carry my grandmother's innumerable forms in their veins . These animals will perhaps be devoured soem day by some predators, who will carry the blood and flesh of their victims transformed into life down through their ( the predators') progeny. And carry my grandmother's million, million reincarnations in them The ashes that contain the particles that were once my grandmoteher's flesh have gone up in the viens of the blades of grass and plants that I now see growing here.

There is no such thing as death in this universe, except perhaps the death of memory of one form seen in a flash of a moment through the narrow aperture of a given form of life. We often confuse mortality with memory. Memory perhaps dies as we scatter only to spring forth later in billions and billions of life forms. We want to be re-born with the memory of who we are...no one really wants an immortality in which he will never remember in his next life what he was in his last. What we love is not immortality, then, but the preservation of the memory of the life that has been. Otherwise, as biology, physics, astronomy, mysticism -- all show: nothing that is here will ever go. Only, it will not stay in the form in which we see it for a flitting moment.. Our love for fixed forms is all we understand by immortality. Nothing could be more laughable when we already know that this universe is not a sequence of well partioned parts but a flux in which fixed forms have meanings only as stages in an endless continuum, running back and forth and possibly in all directions, with time losing its linear character which it has for the limited human mind.
Immortality as deathlessness of memory is pure nonsense. It has a profound meaning only as an endless chain of forms morphing back and forth into a myriad shapes un-discernible to the helplessly slow exposure of human mind - this morphing too moves at a speed not observable either by the naked human eye nor by the tools of logic. It needs a leap of imagination to grasp the totality of the fast changing patterns in which everything is there for ever in a whole which is for ever changing both as a whole and in its astounding variety of parts, moments meaning nothing but the endless churning in a process of endless transformations. Say the scientists and the mystics alike: the essential nature of life as of the entire universe is dynamic. Nothing ever stays as we see it in a given moment. Immortality of the universe alone has a meaning -- and we survive with the universe in its endlessly shifting kaleidoscope.
As for preserving anything for ever, well, not a single moment even in our piteously short life can be preserved. Every single moment is overtaken by another before we realise what has happened. Our mind moves too slowly for the rapidity of the change of scenes around us and in our lives. What you are reading now has already passed into a flux and is being overtaken this very moment by the ceaseless and imposing march of crowded instants, each new instant forcing the old to give way, quietly, helplessly, inevitably -- unnoticeably but unmistakably.