Freedom, Death And Immortality : The Vedic Yoga Perspective — I

There is a world that inludes us, in which our being is apparently born, and there is this world we each have, as we grow up, in particular to ourself. The two are not the same, not just in their expanse but also as entities.

Truth Value

of  World–Body–Prana–Mind–I

The first — the world which includes us all — is like a word, a sound without a listener; the second is what it means to us. We are optional, dispensable to the first, the One. The second — the world we hold within, as meanings — is diverse and impossible without us. We do not know the One in truth and always have this urgent need to know. The second already forms to ourself, among many such worlds we are not even aware of, particular to other individual beings who we do even know. We have an equally constant, lifelong need to question this world, particular to ourself, for its truth value. This questioning remains a passive one in all of us except with a few in whom it shapes up as an urgent quest.

One of the first reduction we observe of ourself starts with physical, mentally proximate objects, places, things or people that are included in the world particular to ourself, their respective meanings for ourself, and happenings or events in our experience involving them that we must live or deal with, hate or desire. They are our world in particular to which our senses are drawn and our mind preoccupies with.

That spatial extension of ourself, anchored in things we possess and people who possess ourself, starts from our body, with which our self identifies. Its surface demarcates the spatial domains we regard as within, internal to ourself, and without, external to us.

As an existential individual being, we are the World-Body-I or simply the Body-I. It manifests the desires and hates, wants and apathy we each carry for things and people in our world.

A look further within reveals the prana, the vitality coursing through the body, functioning in and taking inputs from the senses, powering our drives, and moving our organs and limbs to their respective functional freedoms. It packs energy into emotions and becomes available to our will or resolve.

The emotional flares are largely involuntary and the power available to our will mostly dissipates or is overtaken by the next one that seizes our willfulness.

As this sensing and empowered existential being, the aware individual with capacity to choose and act, we are the World-Body-Prana-I or simply the Prana-I. It holds the power of One but, in the absence of a higher calling or focus on a larger purpose, is spent largely on basic survival needs, food and sex, unexamined wants and fears, selfish desires and personal hates.

That is, it is restated, until we acquire the ability to subject our emotion to scrutiny by our mind, which is the still more immediate or proximate inner domain to our self than the body. The mind is both a tool to doubt, analyse and investigate, and a repository of known consequences we have suffered or enjoyed in past, on account of actions flowing from our will-backed emotions or mind-mediated choices, most of which “knowledge” changes and modifies in time. Our memory includes mutating ideas and knowledge of few settled truths learnt by consistent results in experience over time.

Finally, the mind also weaves this cloak of ideated qualifications we have of ourself, of the person we believe we are to our self from moment to moment, depending on the prevailing emotion, thought, concern or purpose preoccupying us.

In the light of presentation so far, we are the World-Body-Prana-Mind-I or simply the Mind-I, as which we present ourself and interact with others, if we have not deliberately modified the true-to-ourself persona for role-playing purposes.

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… to be continued …

 

Journal : Giving, Atheists, The Run

The one who gives to the other instantly becomes the elder in a relationship. But who doesn’t, if we discount the occidental economics-alone value system. That is one way the oriental is so diametrically different : how it keeps the 360 degree 3-D view, suggests and exalts the skill in its heritage and tradition. It has found wide acceptance in the West, not by any ‘rational’ ground at its foundation but by how nature itself really has little value for money in its working. The child suckles at the the tangible breast-milk but it is the mother who takes the intangible ‘everything’ from the child.

I saw the movie INTERSTELLAR because the younger man wanted me to. Alongwith the MATRIX series earlier, these productions kind of shock its audience into ‘opening their eyes’ into another reality… ones other than and far removed from this material focus on tangibles : money and goods, in short. To me, they all seemed so imagined, so hyped up and crafted ! They are nowhere close to truth, the facts evident in our threefold being : material, mental and spiritual… one gross space pervaded by the subtler one, space within space, each with access limits and laws of their own. Existence is stranger than fiction, and simpler if you happen to know.

Inevitably, the discussion runs into ‘God’ ! I tire of this Christian Big Daddy in the sky the word has come to imply — another occidental export to the orient that, unfortunately, preys upon the yet unevolved who the oriental thought-system embraces and allows to ‘utilise’ whatever symbols they might prefer to aid their spiritual awakening. It doesn’t surprise that the Vatican’s conversion program is backed by billions of dollars to materially lubricate the individual come-over process !

The theist and atheist position are more simply etched, in say the way people deal with worry. The anxiety a parent has while sending his son off to faraway place is killing : very physiological, material and tangible. The theist prays and actually finds his comfort and quiet in virtually an instant. What does the atheist do ? Reason, rationalise and intellectualise ? Does it quell his anxiety ? I think, no. And, no one needs to quarrel with me over this : just try, observe in others, and watch for the effects. You will know. And we do not even need to know who or what does the theist prays to !

In this same thread, I find it strange that the celestial song — BHAGVAD GITA — is sold in streets in the West. The wonder is genuine : what and how do they make sense of the Lord’s exhort … Work to ensure success, giving your all; the result however, the consequence, the fruit so to say, is of no concern of yours, of no value to you ! There is no way to decode the suggestion without the knowledge that the two parts refer to different spaces in which our being is tri-compartmentalised. What integrates it, the fourth, is wholly another matter.