Spirituality
Spirituality is the quest for Enlightenment or Realization. Spirituality is knowing answers to eternal questions like: Who am I? Who is Brahman? What is life and death? Is there any purpose to life? Why is there so much misery and suffering in life? According to Indian spiritual wisdom, the entire creation is a projection of the cosmic mind of which we are but miniscule parts. Enlightenment means connecting the individual consciousness with the Universal consciousness and enjoying eternal bliss (Sat-Chit-Ananda). It is the realization that we are not the body, not the mind or the intellect, but our individual consciousness. Our scriptures – the Vedas, Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita – describe Brahman as the omniscient, omnipresent, all-knowing consciousness.
What characterizes an enlightened person? An enlightened person will be calm, composed, loving and compassionate. He looks at all beings as one and accepts them as they are without feeling superior or inferior. He works for Universal welfare. He ceases to have expectations from others and engages in benevolent actions without expecting approval from others. He does not compare himself with others, and is always happy and content. He is without attachment to others and material objects.
India is a reservoir of spiritual knowledge and attracts spiritual seekers from all over the world. A number of enlightened persons like the Buddha, Mahaveera, Shankara, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Ramana Maharshi and Guru Nanak were born here. Each one of them found his own path to realization. There is no single path to realization. The Bhagavat Gita, which is a summary of the Upanishads, talks of Jnana yoga (path of knowledge), Karma yoga (path of selfless action), Raja yoga (path of meditation) and Bhakti yoga (path of devotion) according to the capacity of each individual. Jnanis meditate on the formless Brahman, whereas the Bhakta meditates on forms such as Shiva, Rama, Krishna etc. However, Enlightenment is not easy. There are several hurdles or obstacles in the process. Most important is our mind Patanjali yoga sutra begins with “Chit Vritti Nirodha” (controlling the mind). Other hindrances are desire to be rich and famous; attachment to material things and relations and ego ( me, mine myself). Each one of them have to be overcome by constant practice and meditation.
Religion
Interestingly, all the religions in the world have been created by the followers of enlightened persons like Buddha (Buddhism), Mahaveera (Jainism), Jesus (Christianity), Mohammad (Islam), Guru Nanak (Sikhism). Only Hinduism has no single name associated with it and is known as “Sanatana (Eternal) dharma”. Each religion has its own holy book; Hindus – Bhagavat Gita; Muslims – Quran; Christians – Bible; Sikhs – Guru Granta Saheb etc. Some common features of all religions are: sacred images and symbols, rituals, manifold rules and regulations, dos and don`ts supported by a set of beliefs and practices based on their respective scriptures and interpreted (often wrongly) by religious leaders. All religions preach peace, harmony and happiness. Hinduism says “Sarve Janah Sukhino Bhavantu” meaning “May everybody be happy” and “Vasudaiva Kutumbam” which means the whole universe is one family. Its greatest quality is tolerance. That is why every religion has survived and prospered in India.
There are two streams of thoughts in Indic philosophy – Asthik (Theists) and Nasthik (Atheists). Asthiks believe in rebirth, in God, in paapa and punya. Nasthiks do not believe in rebirth or God, paapa and punya. Both Jainism and Buddhism schools do not believe in God and are considered Atheistic. Surprisingly, Theists (Asthiks) are more creative than Athiests. All great monuments, pyramids, cathedrals, churches, temples, mosques are built by people who believed in God. World famous artists, painters, musicians, sculptures, architects were all Theists.
However, religion restricts free thinking and questioning. Many religious leaders misguide their followers saying that “Our God is the only God” and “Our path is the only path” leading to fanaticism and wars in the name of religion such as Hindu-Muslim riots, Israeli-Palestinian encounters, Buddhist up-risings in Vietnam etc. This belief in particular gods and deities has indeed had a negative influence on individuals too. Some examples being Mahatma Gandhi`s murder by a Hindu fanatic, Nathuram Godse and recent killings of activists like; Narendra Dhabolkar, Govind Pansare, Gauri Lankesh and Prof.Kalaburgi by religious fundamentalists or so-called Sanatana dharmis.
Science
Science like Spirituality is also a search for the truth (Brahman), but unlike spirituality which is intuitive, science believes in finding answers through experiments. It involves hypotheses (assumption), theory and experiment. In the scientific method, we test hypotheses by carefully making observations and proving them experimentally. For example, for millennia, everybody believed that all matter consists of five basic elements (pancha mahabootha) viz air, water, earth, fire and space (akasha). Today, we know that water is nothing but a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. Similarly, earth is the source of all metals like copper, silver, gold, iron etc, and air contains oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide. Fire is an exothermic chemical reaction between a fuel containing C, H, or metal and an oxidizer like halogen or oxygen. Lastly, space is not empty. Empty space devoid of any matter is vacuum. According to Quantum theory, it is the seat of nature’s infinite dynamism due to the presence of quantum fields.
The Big bang theory: The scientific face of “Brahman” the Universal Consciousness (Creator and Created)
The discovery of the minute changes in the microwave background radiation through the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite has given us a treasure trove of information about our Universe. A significant realization to reach from this discovery is that the primary structure of the universe we observe today – from the Milky Way to the largest structure – originates from “quantum seeds”. This revelation provides the most direct and compelling evidence that quantum physics and cosmology are inextricably intertwined in the making of our universe. One of the most mysterious aspects of quantum physics is that elementary particles such as electrons, are absolutely identical everywhere in the universe, no matter when and where they originate. The amount of their mass, charge and spin are always exactly the same, whether they are created in a lab anywhere in the world or through astrophysical interactions in space, and even in the early moments of the universe following the Big Bang.
The most satisfactory answer came after decades of intensive research involving many experimental and theoretical investigations. The largest of such experimental facilities costing more than 10 billion dollars is located at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Switzerland. As a mark of respect to Indic Philosophy, the statue of Nataraja (dancing Shiva) has been erected at the entrance. Ten thousand scientists from 60 countries around the world were involved in this experiment. Particle accelerator (reaching velocity of light) and particle detector (CMS) that was built at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) were used. The colossal machine is housed in a 27 km long circular, underground tunnel containing supercooled magnets that allow collisions of two opposing beams of protons travelling close to the speed of light. These collisions momentarily simulate some circumstances of enormous temperature of up to ten thousand trillion degrees that existed in the early universe, a mere trillionth of a second after the big bang beginning of our universe. Scientists were able to detect the so called “GOD PARTICLE” on July 4, 2012. The results of these experiments were in agreement with the studies in theoretical physics conducted worldwide over 5 decades and earned Nobel prizes to several Physicists. It culminated in the Standard Model of particle physics that categorises 24 observed particles , all predicted by the effective quantum field theory.
Consciousness
Consciousness is a subject that has engaged spiritualists, philosophers and scientists since time immemorial. Scientists have been working for centuries to break the conundrum of consciousness, sub consciousness, unconsciousness, the multiple-self and body-mind dualism. Despite several centuries of research on the brain, communication through language and gestures remains the only way we can discover the conscious thoughts and experiences of others. But, if thoughts and feelings arise from patterns of neural activities in the brain, then it should be possible to directly decode such conscious experiences from brain activity alone. Recent advances in human neuron imaging raise just such a possibility, by showing that it is possible to accurately decode peoples’ conscious experiences based on non-invasive measurement of brain activity. Such brain reading abilities may transform our understanding of the brain and provide important new medical insights, but they also raise important ethical issues concerning the privacy of the personal thoughts. For each one of us, our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is our private domain.
Consciousness is a subjective experience. To each one of us, the world appears divided, comprising an inner world of a conscious subject “I” who is aware, and an outer world manifesting the objects and things that we observe. This is known in Philosophy as subject – object split. While we are able to analyze the phenomena that occur in nature, it becomes virtually impossible to analyze the subject, the very consciousness (inside) that makes us aware of natural phenomena. Philosopher David Chalmers has introduced two terms for these as “Easy problem” and “Hard problem” of consciousness. The easy problem of consciousness deals with the objective component. The hard problem of consciousness is deciphering, encoding and coupling of the far more subjective component of emotion. It is a cycle of thought patterns that determines attraction or repulsion to all objective sensory inputs. The brain might be just an instrument (device) of quantum computing, a database of unlimited data that processes every bit of incoming data in real time and generating that unique sensory experience.
The assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain is no longer viable. New theories such as panpsychism which states that consciousness exists throughout the physical universe are gaining momentum. The brain is more likely just a device that processes or modulates consciousness, rather than one that creates it. Individual consciousness may be like personal computer (PC) and Universal consciousness (Brahman) is a Supercomputer, with Realization being a contact between the two.
By
Prof K.C.Patil,
Urbana Irene Retirement Community