Are they worth celebrating after your sixteenth birthday? What do they signify if not just the passage of time? I suppose once, long time ago, we used birthdays as the chance to evaluate our lives during the past year, reflect on what we did or didn't accomplish, and then make plans for the coming year. But now, with the institutionalization of New Year's Eve, we seem to have replaced the meaningful anniversary of our birth with the meaningless singing of Robert Burns' "Auld Lang Syne" (approximate translation for those not versed in Gaelic, "The Good Old Days").
Birthdays remind me of the fact that we are born spiritually incomplete and that our primary goal should be one of self analysis. Christopher Dewdney said it best: " Our primary goal as humans is to disentangle ourselves from our familial and socio-historical matrices until we are standing clear. Imagine not being absolutely sure about even the first two terms of Descarte's Cogito." Oh yeah. It was my birthday on Monday!
Peace and Love!
3 comments:
Please accept my belated though warm greetings for your sweet sixteen birthday mate.
Your comment on the fact the all humans are born spiritually incomplete has merit. However, if the sole purpose of life is to disentagle ourselves from the familial and other related socio-historical accoutrements that accompany our landing on planet earth (per Dewdney), then why is it that there are not too many Gautama Buddhas?
I am a sole believer in the religio-traits of Karma and Dharama - one a sense of destiny and the other a sense of duty. One accepts their destiny no matter what and through the journey of life performs their Dharama with grace, dignity, and honesty. So, how does this tie in with spirituality and materialism. I think the best scale to weigh that is one's conscience. Of course we are getting into different territory here - that which always asks the question that has plagued us in modern times - Why does the West turn to the East for spirituality and why does East turn to the West for material comforts ? I can provide some interesting anecdotal insight. One quick one before I leave - Many years ago, late, actually very late one night in Manhattan's only remaining genuine Bohemian and artistic enclave - the Lower East Side, as my mate and I escaped the rain and jumped into the tiny Creperie on Ludlow Str., we ordered food, and got chatting with the Israeli fella manning the counter who had just returned from Rishikesh, a very beautiful town of Hindu and Buddhist temples up in the Himalayan valley in Northern India. He claimed to have found the meaning he exclaimed! All of us are so lost here he remarked. Look around he said. It is 3 am in Manhattan - why are so many people trying to get into "so hard to get into clubs", why are they putting on a show to seek out their soul mates. Isn't there something of a higher calling in their lives? Upon being asked what was he doing manning a Crepe Station at that ungodly hour - he replied " I seek but to earn a little money which will allow my girlfriend and I to live for another year without any worries in Rishikesh, where we have found it!!!" Found what I asked - You don't get it he said. If you are happy here, then you have found it here. But you have to be truly enlightened to find it here, too many pressures cloud your judgement here.
As I stepped back out and walked up to E. Houston Str. trying to get a cab to bring me uptown, I realized, so much time spent in the Capital of Capitalism and wondered what I had found. Couldn't answer that, but as I sat in the cab and rolled down the window to let the rain hit me on my face, I reached deep inside of me to unlock those special memories, and I knew right then at that instant what I had lost.
Why don't we have more Gautama Buddhas? Because it's just too darn hard to let go of those learned responses from our childhood. We are after all the sum of our experiences, and that makes each one of us unique, a "one-of-a-kind software" running only on a specific computer, so to speak. When the computer runs out of power, the software goes...where? deletion? That's the mystery of our existence, and in that resides the explanation of our existence.
Science and Mathematics are melded into the Hindu Philosophy of Life - The Bhagvad Gita.
Kaal - the Cosmic Time Factor or
The Eternal time factor, the controller of destiny of all beings on mother earth ... Is responsible for maintaining the balance, an equilibrium in the physical manifested world of ours.
Someone dies, Atman (the soul within) leaves the body. Where does it go? It remains in this world but in a dimension unseen by us. Who takes care of this happening? Prompted by the resultant karma (destiny) of a Jiva (life) at any given moment of time, Kaal (the eternal time factor) performs this act by bringing about the death of one.
Unless Kaal has come, life of not one be snatched away. When Karma exceeds the allotted hours, the body is forced to leave the Atman (the soul within). Kaal has no fixity in time. With the ever expanding Universe like a blowing balloon, the edge of the Universe remains undefined. If one travel faster than the speed of light, there is always a possibility to reach the frontier of time (the boundary of the cosmos).
Such a happening can never take place in the physical World. Bodily transportation of human beings would never be possible. Fantasies like Star Trek etc., keep our imagination alive. For scientists and physicist it shall always remain a theory on paper. In the World of Atmans (the soul within) such a happening is a common feature. Atmans (the soul within) are not governed by time. They travel to any part of the cosmos as and when they wish.
Entering the domain of Atman (the soul within), all is pure energy. Physical manifested form has no significance for it except for the fact that every Atman (the soul within) has to manifest a body to gain purity. Only then alone can the Atman (the soul within) be liberated forever from the clutches of Maya (ignorance).
We are all controlled by God through the irreversible laws of Karma and Kaal. He is invisible. Those who speak of God having a form are ignorant of the fact that God lives in a domain beyond the perception of senses.
Post a Comment