Dr. Vijai S Shankar MD.PhD India Herald Houston, USA 16th September 2009 |
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“Why man cannot do it”
Man knows that the world is made up of five fundamental elements, fire, water, air, earth space and time. Man believes that everything is physical in space including vegetation, animal kingdom and man. He also knows that all exist in time.
Man believes that birth and death happen in space and time and he needs time to make his life, prolong life and prevent death. And these in turn involve the participation of the fundamental five elements.
In short, the daily life of man, be it professional life, family life or social life is action- filled, and can and should be controlled, shaped and maintained. In order to do this man can and should prevent life that he does not need.
Obviously, man has not prevented life that is not needed as yet, and therefore there is no guarantee that he would or could. In order to be relieved of the problems and unpleasantness of unpreventable life, man resorts to achieving enlightenment.
Time is precious to man, so he believes that it should not be wasted. He is convinced time is precious, for he believes it is required not only to achieve as much as his heart wants and desires, but also to achieve enlightenment. He knows time is easily available for it is present, so he believes, in life.
But has man ever wondered where time comes from? Has he wondered who could have put time in life for him to utilise productively or to his own benefit? Man surely wakes up either on time every day, or whenever he does wake up, to go about working his day the way he wishes and plans or to a routine, which includes in some instances efforts to achieve enlightenment.
This is possible because he believes there is time in life. His future is time-related and so he knows that he has to make the best use of time. Man seems to be in a hurry for he realises, sooner or later, that he will know he has not enough time.
He knows that time exists only when he thinks about it and not otherwise. Life happens every moment and man does not know what unit of time is that moment. The unit of a moment is less than an ato second, which is a billionth of a billionth of a second.
Life happens in a time-unit, which is less than an ato second, and this unit of time cannot be measured. It cannot be measured because the last bastion of anything physical is the atom, and atomic oscillations have been used to measure an ato second.
Therefore, time is a thought and not anything physical. The fundamental five elements, which make up life, are thoughts too, for they need time to exist and time exists only as a thought.
Man too is a thought, for he is made up of the fundamental five elements. If he is a thought and not of substance, it means that actions, events, situations and all that is known are only thoughts and not of substance.
The knowledge about enlightenment, including how to go about achieving it, exists only as thoughts. Man needs to understand that thoughts are an auditory illusion of sound and do not imply reality, but only an appearance of reality.
To achieve enlightenment some advocate: “We have to learn to deal with suffering”. This sounds logical, but the question is: is man the doer so that he could ‘learn to deal’? Suffering is dealt with the moment suffering is understood to be illusory. Man cannot bring about this understanding; it will happen when it is meant to happen
There are schools that propagate: “A lot of people suffer because they have become the victim of their own wrong way of thinking.” This is what the conditioned mind is set to believe, but it is not man who does the thinking: thinking happens to man. They add: “To hold on to certainties like your job, relationship, religion and dogmas is not right.” This is correct: life projects such thoughts so that an understanding can happen that such thoughts are illusory and not real.
Man is advised: “The embracing of emotions is the best way to get rid of them.” Man needs to understand that embracing any emotion still preserves the embraced emotion as real. Emotions need to be understood as being illusory and this understanding is equivalent to getting rid of them. Man needs to understand that thinking per se is illusory.
Newton’s laws of motion operate neither in the macrocosm or space, as man knows it, nor in the microcosm, wherein the building block of life exists. Newton’s laws of motion are operative only between the macro- and microcosm as thoughts and that too only in man’s mind.
The body is in the timeless ‘now’ and the nameless ‘here’ and not in the mind. For this reason, conclusions, opinions or interpretations of life or enlightenment cannot and do not hold any ground. They are merely deceptive and make the illusory appear real.
The world, man and mind are illusory, which means life is enlightened in every moment, so much so that the moment there is includes reality, which is pure light, and the optical and auditory illusion of light.
Man does not think: thinking happens to man; man does not speak: speaking happens to man; man does not do: doing happens to man, albeit illusory. To understand that the world, man and the mind are illusory is enlightenment.
© Copyright 2009 V. S. Shankar
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