What is life? What are we here for? Why do we exist? Is there a bigger scheme of things?
Sometimes I feel may be I am a little too young to think about stuff like this. But I cannot keep myself from thinking about it cuz it is just far too interesting a topic to ignore or shy away from. It is almost a rhetoric that keeps running through my head. It am told that great philosophers of the world have spent entire lives thinking about this, effectively lives wasted. Lives wasted? I disagree. It was their goal in life to try to understand the meaning of life. They did try to understand the meaning of life, the best way they knew how to. They, I believe, have achieved more than what most people do.
It is interesting isn't it..... that you think best when you converse, converse either with yourself or with others. I wonder why that happens. I feel that it has something to do with "living in the now". the concept of ridding your mind of thoughts that are irrelevant to the current, of the now, where the mind is in a state of absolute consciousness, with the mind active, full of thought of nothing but the current moment, "the now" - source : what little I understood of the first few pages of "The power of now" by Eckhart Tolle.
Going back to where we started: Life! Life is that energy that distinguishes a carcass from a living being. Now what sort of energy is that? It beats me! But it sure is intriguing.
The Gita says, just like many other religions suggest, that there exists a certain phenomenon (I can’t find the right word) within us called the soul. Now is this soul that energy? The Gita says so. The Gita calls it the Jeevathma. This Jeevathma is described as the light within us. It is common knowledge that many religions/cultures associate light as the symbol of purity and energy. The Gita also explains the Jeevathma as a drop of the ocean Paramathma. Somehow, this makes profound sense to me. I associate with it in a way that I feel comfortable with and it makes sense to me.
There is energy all around us. There are several kinds of energy, Gravitational, Nuclear, electromagnetic, etc. The Unified Field Theory, though not complete yet, suggests that there must exist a certain rule of Physics that unifies all of the phenomena that happen in the universe, so as to imply that all these energies are merely different forms of the same energy. It is the same energy that flows through our body; the same energy that makes us think, through neurological electrical signals/pulses; the same energy that makes the heart beat; the same energy that provides us with motor skills. This is pretty much the same energy that is all around us. Now, does it not make sense that this energy, the soul or the Jeevathma is but a part of the energy that is all around us.
This energy that is around us is referred to as Paramathma in the Gita. Effectively, it makes sense that the Jeevathma is a drop of the ocean, Paramthma. It also makes sense that when a living entity dies, the energy (Jeevathma) within the body that has hitherto kept it alive escapes the confines of the body and becomes indistinguishable from the rest of the energy around us (Paramathma). “The soul leaves the body of the dead and becomes one with God”. Familiar concept isn’t it! So what I am ultimately arriving at is that God is energy and vice versa.
A parallel school of thought: It is common belief that matter and energy are two totally different things. This, despite Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2. The fact that one is can transform into the other suggests that they are both different forms of the same thing. So to say, that energy and matter are the same and as established earlier, energy is God. Therefore, so is all matter. We are therefore, in effect, surrounded by God.
“God is on earth.”
- P. V. Ashwin
www.godsonearth-peevs.blogspot.com
