GOD COSMOS AND ENLIGHTENED WAY

MAN:

      I was born in West Bengal, where folk-culture was dominated by worships of gods and goddesses and celebrations of colorful festivities related to agricultural cycle. My parents were atheists and they denounced the existence of any spiritual being. Instead, they sympathized with the Marxist ideas related to the political philosophy of dialectical materialism.

       As a young man I followed the convictions of my parents, and got interested in political philosophy of Hegel, Marx and the existentialists like Jean Paul Sartre. Although, from early childhood, I experienced the presence of a being existing beyond the sentient world,  the intellectual interests in philosophy in my young days were fully concentrated on atheism and pursuit of existential freedom.

        When I was a child the school did not attract me much. I was more interested in playing with street children. Most of my friends in my childhood came from poor and destitute families. I became very concerned about the suffering people. I had a dream to do something against the injustice and for ameliorating  the suffering of the poor. So Marxism became a very attractive ideology in those days.

       Freedom became my concern of life - freedom for myself and freedom for the others. The religion, culture and the way people were educated appeared to me as fetters. I wished to work for freeing the human beings from the beliefs which robbed them of their freedom and enslaved them in a cultural paradigm, which was meant to exploit the weak, and the unprotected.

 As a corollary I was concerned about my own freedom too. Like a young initiate in existentialism I was worried about loosing  the possibilities of freedom by falling in the trap set up by religion, culture and social and educational institutions. I became watchful of the decisions and steps I took in pursuing the journey of life. Sartre became my guide.

       Entering the adulthood I became attentive to routines of life so that no moments would go in waste. I constantly dreamed, planned and tried to visualize the outcome of life in the future and acted so that I did not miss my life`s set goals. In this process I broke away from conventional thoughts. I experienced the surrounding as a machine moving to crush freedom, and destroy possibilities of development of human mind beyond what institutions and culture had prescribed.

      I became rebellious: rejected religion, cultural values, and educational priorities meant to build career. Sartre taught me not to strive to be anything like what all others were striving for. Instead, I wanted to be Myself by preserving my freedom and possibilities. Thus my journey of life started in search of Myself.

I dreamed to fulfill the possibilities which life had given me: I wanted to explore the mystery of the cosmos, and know where I was existing in the universe, why did I exist, and what was the meaning behind the existence of life? Beside exploring the outer cosmos, I dreamed to explore the inner realm. I wanted to create arts which would open up visions of  

existence I could not see with normal sights; I wished to arrive at the  deepest realm of the mind by using words of poems, which were not possible to reach by using the language and sounds of daily life; I wished to bring changes in the social-political order and create a spiritual uprising of human civilization.  

As I pursued  these dreams I failed to cope with the reality of the world. I found myself alone and alien in a world, where others lived. I felt it needed complete transformation to accommodate my view and vision of life. By the time I had finished my doctoral thesis in theoretical Nuclear Physics. I became a nuclear scientist because my father had implanted this idea in me when I was a child.

       I planned about my future and dreamed about the career of a scientist, whose fame and name would one day spread everywhere and surpass everybody. I planned about prizes, awards and professional recognition, which no sane mind with a sense of reality, should ever imagine. I wanted to start the great scientific career in the US or in the UK.

       However, all went wrong in the start. By a series of accidental happenings, instead of the US or the UK, I ended up in Norway - a country lying outside the region of scientific excellence in areas of my interest. However, I could not resist the offer of a government fellowship to Norway which was known for its natural beauty and advanced social system. With it all plans of becoming a famous scientist got disrupted.

       Soon a storm of unplanned things engulfed my life. I fell in love, married, and got dragged into a family life, which was not in my plan. The confrontation with the beauty of nature together with the people, possessing pragmatic orientation to life and living in a challenging climatic condition, molded my views and inspired me to see other dimensions of life, which I did not know about from before.  

       With the new transformation combined with an academic atmosphere, which did not offer much challenges and inspirations, the dream to accomplish the success as a great scientist began to wane.  It was further compounded with another development which was also not in my plans. My wife joined the Foreign Service of Norway and I followed her to her diplomatic postings. By then our son was born.

       The way, I once though that life would develop, had little resemblance to the way I started moving from one place to the other with my wife.  However, this new situation opened up new opportunities of freedom and possibilities of life. It  helped me to free myself from the academic research. I used this opportunity to change my field of research from Nuclear and Elementary Particle Physics to cosmology because it was the cosmos which always had fascinated me. I began my journey in the universe.

       My new interests soon got messed up with the increasing presence of the inner guide who was suggesting things about the nature of the world and reality, which had no relation to science. Still holding on to the hope that I may regain my scientific dream, I pursued theories involving extremely complicated mathematics. The big dream still lurked and I waited for an opportunity of resurrection. Finally all ended up in melancholy and despair. The inner voice surged stronger and stronger, and brought an end  to the hopeless pursuit of science.

        So began a turmoil. We lost our only son in an accident on the Alps.

        I abandoned science and started writing about the journey of  the universal man instead. The Guide of the Soul, who had been speaking since my childhood, started clarifying the meaning of the journey of life passing through different spheres of consciousness. It was a poetic and philosophical journey through the world of the senses of pleasure and suffering, the realm of music, poetry and arts, the sphere of contemplative knowledge of science and mathematics, the realms of philosophies of reason, idealism and existentialism, the arena of the cosmos and the realm of the Buddha-mind - the cosmic manifestation of the consciousness which pervades all and exists in all. The book appeared as another Divine Comedy where the inner guide was accompanying the universal being, of whom all human beings were parts, life after life across many spheres. In this process I learned a lot about religions, mythologies, philosophies and spirituality of many different parts of the world. I made an audio version of this poetic journey, which included music as well. Thus it also opened up a vast spectrum of the music world. In the final part of the book I confronted God in a dialogue about the existential questions which had occupied my mind since my childhood.

       With this triumph of the spiritual world over intellectual rational introspection, world of art also emerged. I created the oil paintings “An Art Without Beginning and End Moving Through Life Death and Resurrection” where dream, myth, reality all merged as one. The artist, who once played in the inner corner of the mind with the child, now came out in big canvases bringing the messages of philosophy, religion and mythology which were the archetypes of the universal human mind.  

        After the mind had calmed down from turmoil with visions and knowledge of a greater world, the time to investigate the universe returned again. I entered studying the nature of the cosmos once more. This time I wanted to know the reality of the universe, as observed in different wavelengths and not pursued it through theoretical mathematical model as I had been doing before. It revealed a new cosmos without any beginning and end. The universe existed as a fractal arrangement of cosmic structures hierarchically packed in smaller and smaller dimensions. In each scale the universe followed similar design. It was  a fractal entanglement of knots inside knots inside knots...  which seemed beyond the capacity of formulation by any mathematical model known to man.  I felt awe in realizing the profound way by which the universe brought forth birth, evolution, death and regeneration everywhere, without the cosmic design ever disappearing from existence or appearing in existence following the passage of time. The design seemed eternal and timeless.  This understanding of the universe, where time existed as phenomena of change occurring via the cosmic processes of birth and death, while maintaining a timeless design in all scales everywhere, brought the fulfillment of  my childhood dream to know about the mystery of creation.

 This understanding and vision of the cosmos, in turn, brought forth the ideas of a new social-political order in my mind. The entanglement of the small and the large with all, the dependence of the large on the small and vice versa in order to uphold the design lying behind the existence of the universe, inspired me to envision the way the social-political order of the world could be molded. All existence were tied together, where each object played its role as equally valuable and necessary participants in the cosmos. This understanding of the unity supported by cooperation of all, which may secure the existence of the large as well as the small in the same way, and bring forth the same cosmic design in all, led me to conceive a new social-political structure. In the centers of all beings there existed a spiritual being, who helped to weave the network of mutual support for creating  and sustaining a profound design of living in the cosmos. It rose as a symphony in the mind, where every human being was a part of the whole, and equally necessary tones in playing the cadences of the whole. This comprehension of the respect for the existence of the others, and one`s role in supporting the profound design of life of the cosmic being, through one`s selfless co-operation with all for the benefit of  mankind, led me to understand the meaning of altruism and love which people had talked about since time immemorial. Thus I had walked a long way from the days when I believed in Marxism as the way to free suffering people in the world.

        However, much of what I once saw in the future, have gone wrong. I have not yet come any close to any success regarding the impact of my ideas and works on the society. I have received no prestigious prizes or awards. I live more or less banished from the academic world, which dominates the stage of knowledge and truth. I feel more as an alien looking for opportunities to communicate to the fellow human being about what I know and I have experienced. I still dream of the days, when I would be heard!

       When I calculate and make a balance sheet of life I realize that as I have lost, so I have also gained. In my plans I could never image the way life would open up its doors to the world to me: I have traveled all over the world, encountered people from all corners of  Earth,  closely interacted with a wide spectrum of colorful people from many areas of  professions, enjoyed a high social status and  lived comfortable life in many very beautiful homes. If I look back in time all these appear as dreams!

       I do not know how this life will end in the day when I shall cease to exit. However, I still dream to fulfill the goals towards which I had once set my sails in the journey of life. I still believe that my works may leave impacts on Earth as I had once dreamed. But I now know that  life can not be planned. It takes its own course. The desire and dream may set the navigation instrument towards the “archipelagos” which one may wish to visit. Storms, tides and shipwrecks are destined to follow in such an unknown journey. After passing through turbulence, which throw the sails in disorderly directions, one may finally arrive somewhere close by where one once had desired to reach.

 So I still dream. Now I would like to know from you how an enlightened man should understand the happenings of life, which I have described.

ENLIGHTENED MAN:

      The dreams you had and the way you had planned and acted in life in order to fulfill those dreams were not the dreams and plans of any normal human being. Your dreams had been triggered by a force which resided in the mind of a man who was more than a man of ordinary birth. They originated in a realm beyond the world where one sees and perceives. It is God who had destined so and therefore your dreams had origin in the will of God. You had pursued your actions and plans as willed by Him.

       You may ask why the dreams were so immature and bound to the worldly plan tied to fame and recognition as when you started to make your journey? You may ask, if your dreams were inspired by the will of God, why were your plans so distorted by the mind bound to the worldly thoughts? Why had you gone wrong and fallen into despair and melancholy before God had rescued you from the dismay?

       Know that by being born as a man you are bound to the laws of nature and the power of the will which moves the world in which all life proceed. With human birth you have also inherited the errors and faults of human life as parts of the genes which decide the growth  and evolution of life. You can call it as the darkness of the world. Like a seed at birth you have inherited the characters of the ancestors who had preceded your birth.  

 You may ask why did God choose to reveal Himself in you in the body of  a man where you possessed all worldly attributes of life. Why did not God appear in a body which was made of supernatural stuff more than human flesh and blood. You surely understand that God has willed to communicate with man, and therefore has taken His abode in the man in order to make things accessible to the human mind. Unless man can understand things which has counterpart in one`s own thoughts and experiences, man can never grasp what one may say.  So God has willed to reveal Himself in a state where human will can be felt and understood. For this to be possible God needs a body of man of blood and flesh, who is darkened by the nature of the will and the world.

      The darkened will  had been the source of your plan of actions and will to succeed in life. It had created those faulty concepts of success as you had once imagined. To correct you from the erroneous path He had appeared in you as the desire for freedom and compassion and love for all.  He had implanted in you the vision of the Higher-man and inspired you to follow a different path than what your fellow human beings had pursued. In pursuing your will to freedom and serve human beings who are suffering in the world, you had moved away from the darkened path and entered the enlightened realm. As a consequence of this transition from the world of will of man to the sphere of the Higher-man you have lost the bondage to the world where you once desired to succeed. Though you had entered the journey along the enlightened path your mind had still been darkened by the will of the world and the experiences of the human life around you. The freedom to choose and reject the world in order to follow the enlightened path had caused conflicts in the man, who was still living in you. The period of despair and melancholy which you had undergone is the result of this movement of the mind crossing the will-bound world to the will of God. It is like casting the darkened body of the man and entering a new body possessing a self where God could reveal its mystery without being hindered by the darkness of the human mind.

       You may ask why did you suffer, why did you loose your son who was a source of love in your life? Was it God who had acted to bring these suffering to your life? Know that God has no will of a man and he does not will to act to create suffering or joy. Though all exist in God, He wills not, acts not and creates not the events which create sufferings or joys.

       So what did happen and why?  You should understand it as a movement of God. This is the way God moved the power of love in your mind. You may repeat the question: Was such a way really willed by God? Did God act in this cruel way to move you in a different path? If God does not act to bring suffering and joy why did it happen in this way? You should know that God can not be known by man. Will of God is not any will of man; will of the Divine moves in the world as the will of the enlightened-mind. The event of death of your son, was a work of the Divine love, who worked for the movement of love in the world. By sacrificing the life of your beloved son God has moved you to pursue the path of love for all. God had acted and acted not; worked and worked not; willed and willed not. Divine act is an enigma which can not be explained.

      The loss of love had flowed as the power of love in your life since you had lost your son. This event of death had transformed you and brought a renewal to your life. It had removed the last shades of the darkened world from your mind and taken you in the journey along an enlightened path of the Higher-mind. It was like breaking the rind of darkness and freeing the spirit of light. The suffering you had undergone had caused the outpouring of light which one day will lighten the world. So grieve not for the loss. God exists in you as love you feel for your son.

      What has happened in the life, which you have described, is a process of awakening. The darkened rinds, covering the light of the higher-mind have gradually broken and fallen apart in the process of living in the world of the will of man. The renewal you experience is a state which you should convey to the world and bring the light of enlightenment to the fellow human beings, who are still enshrouded in the darkness of the mind. This is the way God has moved in your life to pass the messages of the Divine love to mankind.

      Like God is moving in your life, He also moves beyond the realm of the will and the world. The way He moves can not be understood and foreseen by human mind. The way God has awakened you from darkness, and led you to the path of light is similar to when He moves in the world to awaken it from the darkness. As you could never imagine, or guess how God will move in your life, no man can ever guess  how God will move and what events would follow in the world which will bring forth renewal. It can not be calculated and predicted by following the causal events in the world, or assumed to occur as a process of chance.

       Follow the enlightened path as willed by God, and bring the messages to the world that God is moving to bring renewal. Now this is the remaining task you need to fulfill as willed by God.