The quest for truth

This post may be heavy on philosophy, but I have no qualms about discussing it, because unlike what I have heard from most of the junta, reading up more on philosophy, has only served to show me a more meaningful way to live life. Books that I have read up on philosophical texts throwing light on spirituality and religion, have not made things more fuzzy, rather they have only deepened my understanding on certain facets of life and death which I had never thought about or even if I had, they seemed like things which were better left unexplored.

'What is the purpose of life', 'Why are we born here', are age old questions which have attracted considerable discussions for probable answers and still do. These and many more such questions nagged me even during my schooling. 'Who is God?', is there some one out there above the clouds, much far away in some distant planet, so far away from earth that even the most sophisticated radio-telescopes currently available can't even dream of fathoming that distance? What about death? What happens to one after death? Is there something called after life? These are questions that have been dismissed by us at first sight as those riddles which are better left to be solved by philosophers and/or jobless people as we are busy playing the rat-race game.

But what if while trying to answer these very questions, knowing very well that we may not get any answers immediately or ever, our attitude and perspective towards life undergoes a sea of change that helps us deal with the fluctuations of life easily. Someone rightly said happiness is a state of mind. What is the use of being a CEO of a company, if you are always in a very perturbed state of mind, due to the inability to handle the pressures that accrue due to the huge responsibility that comes as a side-string to that position. You have the money, you have the status,
you have access to almost all material riches and comforts, but you don't enjoy any of them. This indeed is a very pathetic way of living life.

Coming to the questions themselves, one particular incident sticks out in my memory. I was in my 10th class and things weren't going too well then for me. I had to deal with the pressures of attending classes at a coaching centre which promised to grant me admission to another coaching center(yep 'ramiah' it is) which would finally see me through to the portals of IIT!!. Commuting to this coaching centre itself proved very stressful to me as we were then located in a place that was quite faraway from the city centre. As fate would have it, I dropped out of the coaching center, not able to juggle the school work and the tutorials from the coaching classes. As if this were not enough, I had to bear the brunt of facing my worst fear then - death. I don't rememeber how and why this phobia began, but it demanded serious attention. I somehow managed to comeover it after much struggle, but I needed some quick answers.
I laid my hands on a book by Swami Vivekanada,'The complete works', a quite heavy book in terms of content and depth of the subject(advaita and vedanta philosophy), but this served to only compound my misery. Not wishing to waste my time further on these books and focus on my school work, I left it at that.

That book proved to be the opening of a pandora's box for me, as I was bothered by a whole host of equally frightening questions. There began my quest for the answers to these puzzles of life, the beginning was a bumpy ride no doubt, but as I read many more texts over the past few years, I started getting a more or less lucid picture of the reality, so to speak. One may question the basis for this reality preached by the 'books', to which I would say, yes you don't know if it is the truth, but there is no harm in testing it out.

The reality as stated in the 'texts' could be understood easily if I drew a parallel to the funda behind the movie 'matrix'. Infact the movie matrix has derivations from oriental philosophy. The analogy of matrix being an artificial world can be applied with suitable modifications to the what we think of oursleves. Here, the question of 'Who am I' should be posed. Indeed who am I? If I were to think I am karthik, the body-mind complex, well the matrix has got you. If I were to believe that I am not the body-mind complex but 'the great soul' of which the body-mind is a sheath, then voila, you have come out of the matrix - you have come out of your ignorance of this truth. And if I were infer that while being in matrix, the matrix is just a master program, as Neo does at the end of the movie, I have attained Nirvana - That is, I now know for sure, rather than believe, that I am 'the great soul' or 'the Atman'( to bring in the vedic terminology), also known as the 'GOD'.

What about death? Death seems to be just a transition, that is your identity, for example 'I am karthik', will stay with me after death. That is to say, I don't have a form now, the body, but I am able to think, that is my intellect is carried forward.
The basic funda is that you keep evolving yourself(read soul) throughout the process of life and death. Even after the so called death,the process of learning and evolving doesn't stop.It may happen at some obscure place in the universe 'D(earth)', but after that happens, you are back on earth as a new-born one to lead another one of the innumerable lifes on earth.
This also explains why geniuses are born, their intellect had been carried forward from the previous lifes. It is not that they were born intelligent. Intelligence is a measure of one's hardwork over many lives could be a possible inference.

Now, you may ask, all this is theory and may be true but what relevance does it have to my life - right now. Well, hardwork always pays! That's one take-home lesson. Work hard this life and you may be better off in the next. Work hard now and you may be better off a little later in life - That's law of karma for you. The law of karma states that all actions shall bear fruit. It sometimes happens that, you work hard for a particular exam and don't do well there and it also happens that you aren't so prepared for some other exam, but do well there. The law of karma, does tell you that
'as shall yer actions, so shall yer fruits', but it doesn't say when these fruits will take birth, which explains the previous case of aberration in the exam results.

But if we were indeed to be perfect beings(the great soul) and not limited ones(mind-body complex) as we assume ourselves to be, why at all be born on this earth and be subject to the suffering here??, is a pretty good question.

Science and religion actually complement each other. Big-bang theory states that the universe we currently see now exploded out of a point mass. In religion, this point mass is referred(not literally)to as 'pralayam' - That is the dissolved world or universe. When there was no world, pure being existed. That is before big-bang, there was only 'the great soul'. This great soul, as you might have guessed, had no attributes, and was the only thing that existed - only thing. Both the subject and the object melted away in this existence. Now, the great soul wanted to know its greatness - To know one's greatness, one has to compare it with a reference greatness - But the great soul was all that existed - There was no reference to compare its greatness - What was the solution?? Create the world where you had subjects and objects for comparision. The subjects and the objects are us human beings - and we came out of the great soul( Nay we are all great souls), but we conveniently forgot that fact when we entered this world - And there starts our struggle for identity- - we seek to know our greatness, we seek to know the truth - The truth being our greatness - Is it really true that we are infact the great soul? That is the truth, my friend, the ultimate truth of life we seek!