Who Am I?

   Who am I?  What is the purpose of existence? What is my role in the same? How best can I play this role? For the last six years, day and night these existential questions play in my system whether meditating, thinking, reading, working or discussing.... I presume that this must be true for many. Answers and understandings of these issues have come to me in meditation with great vehemence and clarity. I must have examined these understandings thousands of time from all scientific and logical angles, but have not been able to change a millionth of its fraction. Since the time I have got these answers in meditation, I have used the mind for verification, validation, searching for the right words (however inadequate),explanation and logic to explain to myself. I am not a grammarian - I cannot create arguments, refute others nor quote scriptures, philosophers or religion. In short, I am not a wordsmith, not someone who could write a brilliant recipe book - but one who has t...

  Today, in a simple, laymen language without using religious or didactic language - let me try and explain my concept of reality and its implication on my life and thought process.... Till the sixth century BC - Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers professed that science, culture, philosophy and religion were not separated but an indivisable one. Then the Eleatic worldview of the west started prevailing with assumption of a Divine Principle standing above all Gods and men. This principle eventually led to an intelligent,personal, benevolent God standing above the world and directing it. Thus began the separation of matter and spirit and led to the dualism in western thought. The dualistic religious movements in the west along with the Eastern religiosity consisting of various Gods, their messengers and their books created a worldview where humans were only connected directly one-to-one with the creator and sent to the world for various purposes - leading to claims and counter cl...

  Around 6 and half years back, in Feb '04 - I had an intense, life transforming spiritual experience that changed the course of my life. From an atheist, from someone who was never exposed to religious thoughts or books, for someone who mocked religion and spirituality - this experience led to a series of amazing changes and events in my life and had a tremendous impact on my life, thoughts, feelings and my complete existence. The prolonged enlightenment led to some major transformation taking place in my body, in my feelings, heart, mind and thinking, almost a discontinuity from the past. Was this experience and the subsequent transformation real? Could these be part of a hyper active, overworked mind? Could some scattered reading or hearing added up in the subconscious mind and played a mind game? Never having read religious books, articles or exposed to these subjects - it was surely not an end product of a trend of thought, nor was it an intellectually arrived conclusion. So h...

  The Feb '04 spiritual experience, at the age of 44 years, was a precursor to a constant upward movement of energy in the body, leading to interesting repercussions. The linolic flow of energy from top down had changed once and for all to a reverse flow called the "kundalini flow" and I could feel the same all the time. My body hair which used to point downward, has now changed direction and the entire back hair is facing upwards, due to the change in energy flow. My body, not used to this direction and increase of energy could not cope and went through some terrible months of tremendous heat, discomfort, and a constant fear of "waking up dead or mad". And, because it was spontaneous and not guided nor prepared, the obsession to understand it was all the more. While most of the understanding of the new reality came through meditation (I had involuntarily become a meditation junkie - meditating hours on end, especially at night, many-a-times losing control of my...

  The evolutionary energy that began operating within me after my spiritual awakening has become a constant companion and in the last blog (part 4), I did mention about its impact on my worldview and behaviour. In view of the immense significance of this transformation in my body which ultimately resulted in the development of various psychic and other abilities, it is absolutely necessary to dwell on this vital process which will have a major impact on the future evolution of mankind. For simplicity, I will call this spiritual awakening as Kundalini awakening - for that is the popular name given to this mystical, regenerative process, which is the end product of a deeply experimented and researched Hindu science. I repeat, that it has nothing to do with a particular God or set of Gods or a religion, but a universal phenomena that can be achieved by anyone who meets the standards and follows the processes. There is nothing in the whole mass of knowledge, gathered by mankind so...

  While, in the earlier blog - I did try to explain the critical importance of kundalini or mystical awakening to the future of mankind , it is very necessary to protect the image of the true mystical vision from distortion by the ambitious or the dabbler or the uninformed. Awakenings are not altered consciousness (that can be achieved temporarily by using mind altering drugs), nor superficial and transitory experiences but illuminated consciousness. Distinction must be made between the fanciful, colourful and sensational narratives of sorcery, magic, miraculous and weird paranormal, bizarre and fantastic experiences and an increased clarity of thoughts along with an indescribable state of glory, love and happiness with the wonderful direct experience of an all pervading consciousness. Since the past six and half years, I can say emphatically that I have been testing my body, mind, experiences, events and theories probably more scrupulously than any scientist. Exploring multi disci...

  As I sat on the window porch, overlooking the hills merged with dark, rain-filled clouds at Khopoli on a mid august Sunday morning of 2006, my mind was still whirling with the questions. The questions refused to leave. Is life determined? Do we have a free will? These questions had been chasing me every single day for many months. Answers during my meditation led me to believe that there was both - determinism or destiny as well as free will. But, various saints, be they Ramana Maharishi, Nisarga dutta Maharaj, to philosophers like Ramesh Balsekar and others - talked about God and his control, not just over me, but the entire universe. A complete and rigid control, which does not allow any leeway or deviation - making me just an actor, a pawn, playing a readymade script - unable to even alter a single word in the unfolding drama. Determinism is roughly defined as the view that all current and future events are causally necessitated by past events combined with the laws of nature....

  While, the earlier blogs on "Who am I?" has tried to explain some of the basic principles - from the next blog, I'll try and go deeper into energy dynamics and quantum relationships of existence, our relationships based on the same, relationship between mysticism and present knowledge of science and free will options to go with the flow. Anything that is nuanced, complex, multi dimensional, multi layered and symbolic can be viewed and perceived at various levels of understanding. For example, at the most superficial level - one can see various Hindu Gods as idols or forms, or at less superficial level as part of a mythology with an interesting story, or going still deeper as moral stories and lessons of life or deeper still as symbols of values. It is at the final, most subtle level of energy dynamics and the movements of the quantum particles that one truly understands the symbolisms and the deep knowledge which created these symbols. For example, Ganesha, the elephant...

  In the first two parts of my Who Am I ? blogs, I tried to give an overview of the prevalent philosophies. In the next three, I wanted to share my process of self realization and the necessity to study and validate the realization process, that I underwent. The last three blogs have tried to describe some of the megatrends of Reality like design, intelligence, evolutionary tendencies of existence, free will, determinism, the law of karma and self healing. In the next blogs, I shall try and write about some of the unexplored mysteries like intuition, co-incidence, synchronicity, paranormal and parapsychology, relationship of metals, inanimate objects to feelings, psychic healing etc and then finally - I will try and interweave all these like the warp and the weft to create a seamless fabric of understanding. While each of the previous subjects and the next ones can be dissected in details and tomes have been written and probably could be written, I have chosen to just skim the surf...

  I am writing a personal account of some of the my experiences as well as others to create the base for the unified explanation in scientific terms, which I shall start from the next blog. The intellectual brain was teeming with unanswered questions when I had the spiritual experience / the spontaneous kundalini awakening in Feb '04 (description in part 3). Strange things were happening inside my body all the time as I felt snake-like movement of energy flowing upwards from the base of the spine and hitting my head releasing a white light in the brain, again and again every minute. Sometimes, the movement seemed like a ravenous hungry snake moving at extreme pace around the spine, while most times it was a languid, slow paced movement. I had never experienced anything like this in the past 44 years. Had I had gone crazy and was I imagining things? What is this incessant movement that I could not ignore? Fortunately, not coming from a religious background and being an atheist or ag...

   From today, I shall attempt to explain a theory to understand existence and several of the issues mentioned earlier. Let us try to demystify the complex, profound, nuanced, layered and brilliantly designed existence, which has been shrouded in mystique, esoteric theories and religious garbs. While I will attempt to simplify, it might become necessary to re-read some of the parts to understand. My experience and acquisition of subjective understanding was around 6 years back, and hence am trying to recollect and retrofit using writings of others as a reference point of my description. The unfolding will necessarily have to be detailed, slightly technical and languid, so, please bear with me. Is God "transcendent (  independent of  the universe )? Is God immanent (one which exists within — within us, within the universe)? or is God transcendent and immanent? Or is there a God at all? We shall allow these questions to go unanswered, for now, as we deal with the "how"...

   What is space? Space is a  complete-state  in total equilibrium. Space is present everywhere, in each of existing units and outside it. It is present within cells, between cells and outside cells. Each cell or unit is in an active state and is engulfed by Space, soaked in Space and energized - being saturated in Space. What is the extent of space? Our imagination boggles at the distances and numbers, and therefore instead of calculating distance in miles or kilometres, we measure it in terms of light years (186000 miles / second, or seven times the circumference of the earth per second). So while calculating in terms of light years, let us look at some facts at the macro level:  A handful of sand contain around 10000 grains. The total number of stars in the galaxy would be approximately the number of grains on the entire earth.  The nearest galaxy from our milky way is 2,00,000 light years away. The distance from earth to the farthest galactic body is ...

  From this blog, I shall write my conclusions, rather than interpretations of various books, saints and scientists. That would make the process faster. In case, anyone would like to go into further details, they just have to Google, or ask me, and I could suggest more reading material. Once, I am through explaining Reality, I would like to ruminate on my views on various subjects and trust me, these would be pretty original and interesting. The materialists' model of existence is bottoms- up or upward causation. It postulates the cause rising upwards, starting from elementary particles to atoms to molecules, to cells (including neurons) and so on to the more complex conglomerates that include the brain. In this view, consciousness is a brain phenomenon whose efficacy comes solely from the elementary particles - the base level of matter. But, in my view, existence is created by consciousness and is thus top-down and not vice versa. Light or Energy contains  the wave-particle d...