Religion and Spirituality

धर्म, अध्यात्म और जीवन

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Life, Religion and the Spiritual.

What is the meaning and purpose of Life?

When one comes across this question, the answer depends on how one deals with this question and how it is approached at. 

There could be an objective approach where one tries to think over in this way and then a religion comes into existence.

It is assumed notion on the very onset that life is itself an objective and though one who lives this life is related with life in some way, is not well enough clear to him.

So there is a religion that tells one what is or may be the goal and meaning of life. There could be a God or so many Gods or perhaps no God at all as such, that governs the life.

Accordingly, one has to follow some beliefs and teachings as are instructed or pointed out in the scriptures.

There could be a God, the Supreme, and also a messenger of this assumed God and one has to accept them as the only authority if one has to fulfill the goal that is life. There is  no any other means whatever to attain this meaning and purpose to life.

And any religion has a philosophy of its own.

Even an atheist religion too has a philosophy. But then this philosophy itself becomes only the ultimate and also the Supreme authority. Because the religion couldn't indeed survive in absence of any such authority.

So there is Veda and the many other books or the religious teachers in whatever name and form. 

And then accordingly, there are rituals and traditions of philosophy and philosophical knowledge.

There is always this division between what is called "The Life" and the one who lives the life. One simply believes that the goal of this life should be or will be attained in this very life or even when one is dead, in the after-life, in whatsoever way.

Thn there could be a quite different another approach where one is aware to the fact that what could be called "The Life", is ever so a Reality that is always now, and could never be visited in some assumed past, nor in any imagined future.

Past and future are but the physical truths, quite incomprehensible and intangible as well, while this now is inevitably so real a movement of the present only. 

Assuming the past and the future as some-thing real causes a false sense of time and the now also becomes a part of the same. 

Though essentially, the now is immovable reality, it is categorized in terms of the past and the future that are mistaken as if having a movement in the (assumed) time.

So this illusion of the existence of time as an independent entity captures the mind, and one looks at life as well, in terms of the past and the future, in context, with reference to time.  

Then there is again a time which is kind of repetitive. Sun rises up and sets repeatedly in a cycle. And it is accepted and assumed that there is this cycle of time, where time moves in so many such cycles, and all such cycles are together well-organized in a way. Looks very true, but it is so all because one thinks. What is there if or when you have so far not learnt or / and started thinking? Thinking is based upon a language how-so-ever crude, refined, primitive, developed or cultivated.

A language is again a system of words only. How-so-ever cleverly it might be structured, it is confined within the thought. No doubt it is very useful in normal day-to-day activities of life, but fails utterly in understanding the life itself. Life is such a vast phenomenon, it couldn't be compressed into thought, words  and meaning and turned into some abstract notion. Simply, as in thinking. It is only when the thought stands still and silent, the bare truth is revealed and seen, is realized and learnt. Thought / thinking could never grasp, comprehend this tremendous thing that is Life. Again, like-wise the thought, the one, who is supposed to be the thinker is also a thought only. Neither the thinker, nor the thought exist for long. They emerge out and disappear together instantaneously, in now.  This division of a thought and a thinker is again an illusion. This whole play has never-the-less a ground firm, unshakable what we call 'Terra firma'. That is, - 'Terra incognita' to thought and thinking.

This is pure knowing, not through senses, feeling, words, intellect or even kind of the extra-sensory. It is where-in everything takes place, appears and subsequently disappears repeatedly.

This is called Atman, -literally, what one is, who breaths.

Who breaths?

Isn't the one, who knows "I breath"?

But it is again thought that says "I". The one who breaths never says "I" or anything else.

Atman is ever so speechless.

Knowing is being and being is knowing. 

Knowing is, and what is,  -knows.

Thought knows nothing, but knowing knows it. 

This is the approach where no philosophy, no ritual could help nor is needed.

This is the Spiritual aspect of the Reality.

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