Two things lend meaning to lfie

Two things that lend meaning to life -- agony and ecstasy, pain and happiness. All else is mere boredom, another name for death.

A Dialogue on God from Facebook

The concept of God.

by Sanjeev Ahluwalia on Friday, September 16, 2011 at 12:29am

This is in response to the note by Sunnymindcaves regarding the debate on the concept of God. I have put together my two cents of thoughts on this topic and would like my friends to share thier views. Thanks.

I might be labelled an athiest as till date I have not been able to comprehend the existence of God as explained by different religious thoughts or outfits that I have come across so far. My mind simply refuses to accept God as portrayed in practically all the religions as some “all powerful” entity that is eternally engaged in meticulously pulling the strings for each and every act that is staged on this planet or for that matter in the whole universe as defined by the realms of scientific world. As per my perception, science is based on evidence and the concept of God is based on faith, and that seems to be the fundamental difference. When you have faith in something, it requires that you not ask for evidence. It is opposed to the scientific mindset. Harvard paleontologist Steven G. Gould called science and religion "two non-overlapping magisteria." In other words, science and religion are discrete realms of knowledge capable of co-existing. The fundamental question is this possible, or are science and religion really opponents squared off against each other? Science has provided logical answers to many mysteries that have transcended the formation of this universe and beyond. However, there is a plethora of unexplained phenomenon for which science is still groping in the dark and that darkness enlightens the concept of God for most of us. Also, it is convenient for us to surrender ourselves to the concept of some omnipotent existence whose shape and purpose is governed by the orthodox philosophy of a particular religious sect, we start subscribing to, as dictated by the specific domain of our very existence in this universe. One thing that I can admit is that though science has successfully explained most of the mysteries but it does not give us by itself a value system, a set of guidelines for how to behave? Whereas, the religious system, it’s institutions and beliefs, do provide a pattern for the social construction for our society. The theory propagated by the religious scholars for the existence of God has an interesting explanation to provide for the creation of God vis a vis this universe. As per their rationale, the first postulate is that God exists outside of time. They believe that God has no need of being created, but, in fact, created the time dimension of our universe specifically for a reason. However, since God created time, cause and effect would never apply to His existence. The second postulate forwarded is that God exists in multiple dimensions of time. Things that exist in one dimension of time are restricted to time's arrow and are confined to cause and effect. However, two dimensions of time form a plane of time, which has no beginning and no end and is not restricted to any single direction. A being that exists in at least two dimensions of time can travel anywhere in time and yet never had a beginning, since a plane of time has no starting point.

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    Sunnymindcaves Caves

    Sanjeev: Replace the expression 'God' with 'Cosmos' or 'Universe' in the second half your note, and you would have changed nothing of the meaning --, for example, in these sentences:f "God exists outside of time. They believe that God has no need of being created, but, in fact, created the time dimension of our universe specifically for a reason. However, since God created time, cause and effect would never apply to His existence. The second postulate forwarded is that God exists in multiple dimensions of time. " I am a 'theist' in that I believe in an immortal, ever present, all- embracing power that moves everything; I an 'atheist' in that I do not believe that this power is anything except the sum total all the cosmos we know and the laws that prevail in it. Universe and its laws are not indistinguishable -- not for me at least. I deliberately used the words " cosmos" or "universe" in my first sentence instead of "creation" because a creation presupposes a creator. I believe that cosmos and creator are one - which translates into saying that cosmos is self created --without a beginning, without an end, beyond time, a law unto itself and the begetter, destroyer and re-generator of everything that is. Interestingly, most oriental religions are pretty close to this definiton of God and cosmos. There is only one cosmos (Ik Onkar), this cosmos alone is the supreme doer ( Karta purkah) it is impartial to everything, everyone, without love, without hatred (Nirbhau, nirvair) it is immortal (Akal Murat) Ajooni (beyond the cycle of life and death) Saibhun ( Self created).....The Upnishads make no distinction between God and Cosmos neither does Gurbani (Khaaliq khalik, khalik main khaaliq, poor rahio sabh thaain) or Balihaari Kudrat Vassia ....If God exists in multi dimensions, so does cosmos...as the theory of black holes and the shoe string theory clearly demonstrate. Time as we understand it has since long ceased to have any meaning at all. Time is both Timeless as well as timelessness.It is free of any arrow pointing in one direction. Time, in mysticism and in science, has a multi directional movement - at the cosmic scale. The more you talk about cosmos in terms of modern science, the closer you get to a mystic's vision of God. To be a theist, you must believe in cosmos -- or in God, which is the same thing. But to be religious in a narrow, sectarian and theological sense, you would need to call upon all that body of rubbish thrown around dictatorial icon, and then burden Him with all the petty jobs of the world. Of course, even while being religious, I do not subscribe to an external God that stands doling out summary justice from outside the cosmos. God stuff for children's comics, though.

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    Sunnymindcaves Caves correction: Last sentence " Good stuff for children's comics" ( Although 'God stuff for children's comics' is also not wrong!!!)

    4 minutes ago ·

Romancing pain -- but do not trifle with it: saints and heroes don't

Romance suffering -- but do not trifle with it: heroes and saints don't

I have often romanced pain in life and writings. But pain is not to be trifled with. Nor is the search for meaning in pain a resort to superficial sentimentalism -- which is the domain of the mentally juvenile, or is plain masochism or a mere school girlish indulgence in the idea of suffering. Suffering is a serious business and must never be talked about in haste or flippantly. Only those who have known suffering in its darkest and terrifying form can afford to talk about a search for meaning in it. Never fall in love with pain or suffering or else you will be a victim of a permanent and sickly love for grievance. Take pain and suffering seriously. Sentimentalism and profound suffering are two completely different things. Never confuse one with the other. Suffering can be uplifting -- sentimentalism almost never. In fact, a sentimentalization of pain, suffering or sadness can result in a chronic morbidity in character. Heroic courage to bear, face and confront suffering with equanimity does not belong to the same class as mere indulgence in self-pity or even pain. Do not love pain or suffering but value them if they come. And most importantly, dig deepest into your emotional, moral and spiritual reserves to face suffering with dignity. Then -- and then alone -- can suffering lend character to your life. And character alone lends meaning to life.And peace -- abiding peace - can flow only from an ability to take on suffering with mind ready for success or failure alike - a mind ready to face life with cool courage and accept its share of suffering with equanimity. Fighting odds and acceptance of the inevitable are both heroic acts. And only the heroic know the value of peace and happiness because only they understand the relevance of suffering. And a character shaped by such an approach will be defined two basic traits: poise and humility. Failure to accept the relevance of suffering breeds anger and arrogance; understanding and acceptance of it breed peace and humility. Two types of people symbolize the underlying meaning of all this: saints and heroes.

• Two things that lend meaning to life -- agony and ecstasy, pain and happiness. All else is mere boredom, another name for death.

• My faith -- no matter how strong - in God does not mean that there is One just as my denial does not mean that there isn't. Neither would my faith or denial make any difference to the ultimate nature of truth on the subject.

  
  

We are all scattered centers of the universe- Hazel

We are all scattered reference points for the universe. Each one of us is a center from which the universe expands outward into endlessness.

The difficulty of separating shadows from substance

One of the most difficult tasks to accomplish in life is to separate shadow from substance. Most of our life, we keep confusing one with the other, and battling against we know not what. There are times when we take shadows for real and times when reality seems but a shadow. The wise ones of course know that the entire drama is no more than a play of light and shade on our senses. The wise one do not try to separate one thing from the other. They love the hide and seek.

A particle's experiments with immortality

Life is hard and stiff - all said; and the price of being born is existence. That spoken, we must find a way of ensuring that the quality of of our lives measures at least up to the scale of price we pay. There is no rosy high road to untarnished happiness, and pain is woven into the fabric of living. There will be disease and death where there is no poverty and deprivation; pangs of separation where there is no loveless-ness; hard, unbearable struggle where there is no failure, emotional wounds where is no physical pain.Even the most celebrated act of creativity - birth - is overhung with toil, labour and uncertainty for both the parent and the progeny. There will be times when the honest shall encounter insults and disgrace and even punishment. A Cross awaits every Christ. And even if one escapes all these conditions, there is the specter of death mocking the little drama of life. In short, there is more than enough to support a dark, despairing view of life, enough to make us hum with Shelley:" We look before and after/ And pine for what is not/ Our sincerest laughter/ With some pain is fraught/ Our sweetest songs are those that tell us of our saddest thought." Keats will speak for the secret pain of our souls in a world "where men hear each other groan/ Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.."

No one will deny this landscape of despair. And yet, our only opportunity for joy and celebration lies precisely in this landscape being what it is. Just as death lends meaning and intensity to life, so does the stiff of existence make us romance our flirtations with danger and despair. Through pain alone is pain conquered. Happiness would be meaningless in a world where it lacks a reference point and pain is the only reference point it has. Pain demarcates pleasure from boredom. And the pressure death creates opens up the casements to immortality of any given moment.

But Immoratliity is nothing but the ability to shut the past and future out of the present; there indeed can be no immortality for the individual soul once it has lived out its romance with the phenomenon called life; that kind of immortality wouldn't even be desirable. In fact, that would be the most selfish pursuit, if at all it were possible.It would amount to refusal of the ego of a unit to lose itself in the whole of which it is only a part and from which alone it had originally sprung.The finest human minds - believers or non-believers in God alike - have romanced the idea of dissolving themselves into the Energy that permeates the whole creation - or Cosmos. Dissolving is another name for terminating the experiment of a particle glowing upon the floors of space for a brief moment. While the experiment lasts, the glow is immortal. Experiment over, it is time to be lost forever into the embrace of the universe that made your fleeting creation possible in the first place.The Hindus call it losing oneself int he lap of Mother; the Sikhs call ti merging with the Parmatma. Other religions have similar other expressions for it. Mystical traditions all across the globe celebrate this death -- or permanently losing oneself back in where one came from. And scientists term it as transformation of forms into various expressions that Energy seeks. Kirsna symbolizes these myriad transformations as reality and the desire to cling to a single identity as the source of all pain. Buddha thoughtfully articulated what the mystics turned into choreography of intelligence and soul. The desire to cling to memory of one's identity has pulled many a tall edifice to dust.

One of the lasting thrills of living is the ability to reflect -- to reflect on the endless, boundless nature of reality as it seems to unfold before us. As long as we are in our present avatar, which is the only way for us to exist, we have this remarkable ability to lift ourselves to a truly blissful levels of existence and turn our difficult destiny into a rollicking plaything. Never forget though that all this can be rendered utterly meaningless by something as mundane as physical pain (Incomplete)

Privately religious and market place religiosity

Just rambling thoughts) Privately religious: an expression for someone having strong but quiet faith in a religion without observing its outer symbols and rituals or without sloganeering his/her faith. Its opposite: Market-place religiosity. ...(Just rambling thoughts)

Tentative thoughts on science and religion : Neither can afford to be snobbish towards the other.

Science and religion are often set one up against the other. But at their core, they point to the same reality: all the various forms of matter, including living organisms, are merely collapsible "in-carnations" ( em-bodiments) of energy. Energy sprouts into bodies or forms and relapses back into whence these were formed. Nothing comes into or goes out of this universe because nothing can - because there is nowhere beyond the universe to escape into. Life and death are thus meaningless phrases, since nothing can either be created or destroyed.Things, as both science and religion know, merely change forms.

Both science and religion agree on the existence of some order or 'Laws' (hukam) underlying this universe. God is nothing but the sum total of all these laws and all that is -hence nothing mysterious. That may be why men and women who have attained 'enlightenment' have generally laughed at the simplicity of their task once accomplished.

'God' is all that there is, and another name for all that there is, is cosmos. An inspired scientific insight is as much an act of 'enlightenment' as is a 'spiritual vision'. 'Kan kan main bhagwan' is translated into ' every particle is a universe in miniature form and is fired by the same energy.'

The Hindu system talked of billions of casements in human body opening into the vast, eternal reality; science talks of every centimeter in any form of matter, including the human or any other body, as a cluster of unvierses.

There is no place for God as a figurehead either in a mystical vision of truth or in science. Both however recognise the permanence and omniscience of Energy, though they address it with somewhat different nomenclatures. Both recognise the immortality of creation, and the mortality of forms. Death of forms is a cool fact; but forms die only into a 'whole' which is immortal. (Individual souls merge back with the universal spirit from which they seemed to have sprung. And even the springing forth is not separation because there is no seprate reality to spring into. The entire drama is play-acted witnin one, indivisble and unfathomable whole.

The distinction between science and reliigion is maintainable only throgh a distorted versions of both. Neither can afford to be snobbish towards the other. I think science and religion as pursuits of the same reality have no issues with each other, but their followers and students do sometimes seem to have. Unfortunately, their petty quarrels are carried out at he expense of the very truth they claim to pursue.

Comments: 1:

I thought the religious folks would ahve objected to such de-mystification of their concepts about what they call the "supernatural"....About your references to 'out of body experiences, telepathy etc, yes this is an area that requires more research. Religious thought need not be arrogant on this and science need not close its doors on further research into such phenomenon. And I seriously believe that science does not close its doors on anything.

Comments: 2: Believers in a scientific way of life must not allow their open-ness of mind to become a victim of prejudice against the place of religious thought in the progress of human intelligence. All that religion says need not be taken as a final statement on truth but must be viewed as tentative ploddings of the human mind into the zone of knowledge. Much that many religions profess is just a bunch of nonsense, but there is much else which is highly valuable as an attempt to make sense of this universe and life. There is no need to reject the entire body of religious thought on the basis of errors committed in its path of progress; that would be a highly unscientific approach. And when I tried to reduce something as supernatural as God to something as simple and explainable as energy, I thought the followers of faiths rather than the students of science would have objected. I still believe that religion represents man's first attempt to make sense of the world around him. It may not have been a totally successful attempt but it went a long way in underlining the need for a unified ( theory?) system of thought to comprehend the universe in which we live. Science and religion at their core are marked by humility, but the same could not be said about all the followers of these two approaches that represent a single urge: the urge to understand the universe.

(Sammy Gill: ..."There is no place for God as a figurehead either in a mystical vision of truth or in science. Both however recognise the permanence and omniscience of Energy, though they address it with somewhat different nomenclatures. Both recognise the immortality of creation, and the mortality of forms. Death of forms is a cool fact; but forms die only into a 'whole' which is immortal. ..." ( The following statement is in brackets and is a reference to what religion professes...) I thought the religious folks would have objected to such de-mystification of their concepts about what they call the "supernatural"....About your references to 'out of body experiences, telepathy etc, yes this is an area that requires more research. Religious thought need not be arrogant on this and science need not close its doors on further research into such phenomenon. And I seriously believe that science does not close its doors on anything, including the mysteries of the universe. The last word is yet to be heard. But before that, one that can be safely avoided is a needless haste to prove that only religion or only science has all the answers. Persisting with such haste would itself be unscientific - and even irreligious.Believers in a scientific way of life must not allow their open-ness of mind to become a victim of prejudice against the place of religious thought in the progress of human intelligence. All that religion says need not be taken as a final statement on truth but must be viewed as tentative ploddings of the human mind into the zone of knowledge. Much that many religions profess is just a bunch of nonsense, but there is much else which is highly valuable as an attempt to make sense of this universe and life. There is no need to reject the entire body of religious thought on the basis of errors committed in its path of progress; that would be a highly unscientific approach. And when I tried to reduce something as supernatural as God to something as simple and explainable as energy, I thought the followers of faiths rather than the students of science would have objected. I still believe that religion represents man's first attempt to make sense of the world around him. It may not have been a totally successful attempt but it went a long way in underlining the need for a unified ( theory?) system of thought to comprehend the universe in which we live. Science and religion at their core are marked by humility, but the same could not be said about all the followers of these two approaches that represent a single urge: the urge to understand the universe.

Comments 3: To Mohindra Singh: Your grasp of science is way better than mine. I am attempting only a 'tentative' reconciliation between two seemingly opposite disciplines. If you seriously believe these must be treated as inimical to each other, I have no issues. But, no, my idea of reincarnation is not the immortality of a single unit in creation, as is commonly understood. I DO NOT believe in the immortality of individual souls or persons. I pretty much subscribe to the view that once dissolved, the entity known as 'person' ceases to be. I was only referring to the immortality of what science calls energy and religion sometimes refers to as "universal spirit'. I see neither energy nor universal spirit, except as expressed in some form of active or latent force. Again, I thought opposition to these ideas would have come from those who profess a faith in the immortality of individual souls - the followers of the Pharaohs. I do not believe in such immortality, though I am willing to be proved wrong. I am also not comfortable with the evidence on the phenomenon known as 'rebirths'. This - along with some other similarly intriguing phenomena - need to be looked at closely and their claims be either conclusively rejected or conclusively proved. Personally, I have not yet met anyone who remembers his previous life nor have I met anyone who may have met someone who did remember. Yet, I am not closing my mind on the possibility. I need more evidence to make up my mind either way. In sum, I lean towards a scientific explanation of universe but do not see in this a conflict with the possibility of a different layer of existence. I have strong faith in the ability of science to reveal to us the final truths about universe and our place in it. That hasn't happened yet -- as some of the greatest scientific minds have gracefully conceded -- but science is a self-correcting and self-updating exercise. It can not be dismissive of any claims till these are conclusively disproved just as it can not be absolutely certain of anything until that has been conclusively proved..

Acts of worship

Our greatest act of worship, our most dignified conduct, our finest tribute to humanity can be this: that we stop lying and cheating, that we live by what we earn through honest deeds, that we spread love without judging who deserves it and who deserves it not. In a religion like this, there will be no need to search for a God. And if there is God, She will be more than happy to make Herself redundant.