God and his Merit System

The idea of penning down this post occurred, when there was a casual discussion with my friends and colleagues about the interesting values behind Ramayana and Mahabharata.

In my observations, I noted that believers of God, had always sought or resorted to God, during their tough times. Generally believers of Hinduism, not only put the onus of their tough situations on God, but also on their own fate. So what is fate or destiny or karma?

Fate (leaving aside the bookish definitions) can be considered as a meritorious system of effects for the deeds done by a person – which we either construe as rewards or punishments; rewards for good deeds and punishments for bad deeds; which in Hinduism, not only relates to what one does in his current birth but also had carried forward from his/her previous births (what else can explain about a child being born to poor parents, while at the same time and almost at the same place, another child being born to rich parents).

The role of God is to serve as an administrator or that of an implementer of the fate or meritorious system. God may give solace, reduce the impact, or effect of a bad fate, and even may help you to completely pass you through the tough times, but then wise men say that, it is how the fate has been defined for you – that you will be blessed and be guided by God.

Therefore, God as an administrator (though very much could be the creator) of this system, reserves the right to add/increase/decrease/remove the effects, therefore bringing in the flexibility to the otherwise rigid system of cause (deeds) & effect. However it should be noted that whatever the deeds and effects may be, they once again gets added up to one’s list, and will be evaluated again as the cycle (of birth and death) continues.

P.S: May be this merit system can be thought of a well-balanced zero-sum game, another example highlighting the art of delicate balancing.

My two cents worth of view on Hinduism

Fortunately I had umpteen opportunities to discuss about Hinduism with many diverse people; people who were orthodox, who were moderate and liberal, who were atheists, and also people who were either orthodox or liberal followers of other religions.

Well, first the disclaimers. I am neither a Pundit, nor a orthodox follower (hence the title – two cents).  My views given below are my own, and that I had realized or evolved over long periods of time.

To start with, Hinduism is a label attributed (probably by the Britishers) to the people who followed a certain culture and were living around the current Indian geographical regions. Over the years,  it became branded as a religion, though it is not an organized religion unlike   many others. Also, as mentioned in my earlier posts, a religion is only a path to spirituality, and many texts, like Ramayan or Gita, that are attributed to Hinduism, reinforce the same – in other words, an orthodox following of Hinduism (or any religion for that matter) may not necessarily make a person spiritual! 

If I had to share one most important facet or fundamental trait of the religion of Hinduism, then this would be the one.

Every thing you do or believe will have an effect.

Though this may be sound too simplistic, this forms the basis for many other concepts or philosophies in this religion. The point to be noted is that even an intangible thing or even as abstract thought or belief will have a resultant effect. Also, even if you claim to do nothing, or even think of nothing (Meditation!), it will have its own result / effect.  Belief (a strong thought with conviction, as I would like to put it) is emphasized very much in numerous ways through out Hinduism.  If you have a strong and unshakable belief or faith, you will get the results of your belief.

The implications of this simple concept are phenomenal and in-numerous. Add to this, the resultant effects get carried forward to your next re-birth, and that’s Karma in the most simplistic sense. In Hinduism, this concept of Karma, leads to the cycle of birth and death and therefore reincarnation of our soul.  This leads to the concept of destiny or fate, which is determined by your actions not only in this current birth, but also from the actions of your previous births or incarnations! 

The concepts of karma, destiny or fate has the potential to answer any question that one may encounter or realize for oneself, generally during the toughest times or during their peaks in life. To give an example, How two children born at same date and same time, and probably even the same place and the same environment get their lives shaped up differently ?

The Secret Success Sutra and Mantra

First the Disclaimer: This is an abstract model that I believe, defines success. Success can mean many things to many people, but I go with the view that Success is something that creates a positive impact on the humanity and meant for the long-term. It is not momentary and definitely not a short-cut. This formula must work 95% of the time, and the remaining 5% have to be resigned to fate, or ill luck or there may be something better waiting to happen.  Here the Sutra means Formula and Mantra refers to the activity done repetitively (as pronouncing a sound during meditation). 

With enough preludes, let me start it.

Passion, is the base or the pivot point or the binding force that stitches many things and gives a new meaning to what you do. Passion is the most critical element and I had already dealt with it in several of my previous posts – starting with similiarities among great achievers and then bringing out differences between Emotions and Passion and about the minute differences between Passion Vs Feelings.

To explain with a different perspective, people who may have in-born talent or a skill that they can master like a fish to water, will generally have difficult time in managing themselves, and without a passion that binds their talents and skills, they will not be able to shine and generally lose their focus. In the same vein Passion has the power to equalize even a novice or a person without any of the required skills or in-born talent and a person who has those skills.

Now let’s get into the the Success formula, which has been depicted through the below figure. Passion is the seed for Success. With passion, you practice, persist and then perfect a skill or a job to be a master. A key ingredient or a catalyst in all these activities is Patience. Patience is critical to understand and learn; and requires a lot of self-motivation. Practice and Patience are required for Persistence, and to attain Perfection, you need Practice, Persistence and the key binding element of Patience.  

If you have Patience and Persistence it is easy to develop a passion and if you practice it to perfection, success will be in your way.  Other parameters like your attitude will help you a lot, but only Practice and Persistence can take you to the path of success.  If you are already possessed by passion, then you will automatically have Patience, and with enough of practice and persistence, you can master it to Perfection! – indicated as the convergence point at top of the image.  

You may be wondering that I had missed out on Planning and Preparation. But they can only serve as tools to push oneself and help in sharpening the focus. However, without passion, planning and preparation will simply be monotonous activities, and unfortunately they are overemphasized and drilled into our minds. The most common example is that of the competitive examinations, where everyone is urged to plan and prepare, but largely without a passion for the subject, or we find the passion being misplaced – to emerge as the topper.  This may lead to success in the exams, but that will be a success without a soul in it.  

Now, you may be wondering why the outer circle or eclipse? It’s to indicate we keep running around or moving around circles, or in elliptical orbits doing things routinely. To go to the next level, either we need to revolve around at very high speed, or we need an external force that will displace us to a new orbit. Generally, we find ourselves comfortable and settled in a orbit, over a time period, which will lead to complacency, but we need to keep pushing ourselves till we go near Perfection. 

Passion Vs Feelings

You would have heard and used these two words often, sometimes even without really meaning it, and sometimes even interchangeably also. However there exists a difference between these two words and this post explores that. 

Though ‘Passion’ and ‘Feeling’ both represent an emotion, ‘Passion’ represents a stronger emotion, or a stronger desire than a ‘Feeling’. 

Feelings in general can fade fast, but Passion may not!  If you are watching your favorite comedy show, then you will have feelings of laughter and joy, but those feelings are likely to fade away quickly as moments pass by.  Feelings are instantaneous in nature and do not change easily.  For instance even if you watch the comedy show, years later,  your feelings of laughter may not change to that of crying.  

Passions are stronger emotions that sucks you in! and makes you feel restless when thoughts or activities concerning those passionate entities crops up. One’s passion may change over a long-time period. What you are passionate about today, you may not have the same passion on the same entity, years later. 

Feelings and Passion are both important. Feelings have the ability to shape your attitude! – the more positive feelings you develop and nurture, and keep away the negative feelings (like anger, greed etc…) you start developing a positive outlook and hence a better attitude. Similarly choosing the right positive passion is one of the most important steps to future success, and combined with the right attitude, and persistence, you are already there in the success path. 

The Fine Art of Delicate Balancing

Warning: This post might sound like a philosophical rambling, though it’s not. 

 

Balancing is a critical aspect, and required in all aspects of our life, especially for us – the so called evolved and intelligent species on earth!

Balancing, especially Delicate Balancing is required in all situations, and if everyone of us could master it,  there won’t be conflicts or war, despite difference of opinions and perceptions.   

Though this may sound odd, we try to perform this art (or exercise) many a times in our daily lives. Starting with learning to balance a bicycle, or driving a car, we do the act of balancing every day, and almost every moment. We require this quality to achieve any objective, and also to keep the wheels of our lives moving.  

Delicate Balancing is present abundantly in nature, as in case of Water – the most basic and essential element of life – we can find a delicately balanced perfect liquid – composed of water molecules that mingle in a perfect way that are neither tightly bonded (solid/ice) nor completely independent of each other (gas/vapor).   Few more examples derived from Nature, Mythology, Philosophy and from real life are given below:

• Planetary System and their orbits that make earth conducive for life 
• Even ‘Amruth’ – a drink that is supposed to give eternal life, as in Hindu Mythology, is advised only to be taken in the right quantum; excessive dosage will function as a poison – as per a Tamil proverb – (அளவுக்கு மீறினால் அமிர்தமும் நஞ்சு) . 
• The concept of Yin and Yang emphasizes the concept of delicate balancing – as balancing between two opposing forces; balancing between positive and negatives and so on …  
• Equilibrium between Supply and Demand in a (free) market, wherein both the producers and consumers will benefit (Consumers pay the minimum possible cost or the minimum sustainable profit in the producer’s perspective)
• If you are a typical Indian married male, you know that balancing the intellectual (!) arguments between your wife and mother, requires delicate balancing, and you know the results of failure 🙂 

 

Yin and Yang is all about Balancing

To put this in a general perspective, let us consider The Internet – a revolutionary tool created by the mankind – that could eventually allows us to connect with anybody in this world, breaking all borders and barriers (Wish this continues and grows for ever) and where all kinds of information can be found, and sometimes one might find information that is provocative or information that is false. 

The Father of Internet, Dr. Vinton Cerf advises on the issue of dealing with such emotional and sensitive information on Internet by applying the Critical Thinking Capability – to know and understand all aspects of an issue or an event or an argument, and this, essentially requires us to develop  a trait – the art of delicate balancing to enable us to move forward.  

We all know that everyone of us are unique and will serve a purpose in this big Universe. Hence there will be frictions and arguments due to difference of opinions and perceptions, but there will be some valid point in all sides of an argument. To gear up ourselves and to move forward, we need to equip ourselves with abilities to achieve the delicate balancing without which we shall remain stagnant and vanish. 

Delicate Balancing is like balancing a coin without taking sides – of the head or tail, but understanding them – and only such a delicately balanced coin will be able to move easily .

Though we are capable of practicing this art of delicate balancing, we tend to ignore it when we are under emotional stress or when we want to willingly disconnect from this quality of ours to achieve a emotional high. We often tend to loose this quality when we deal with situations that provoke us. 

It’s difficult, but not impossible, for us to practice this art at every small step that we take in our day-to-day lives, and like every art, this too requires persistence, patience, and practice.

P.S: Well, I understand preaching is easy, while practicing is difficult. I hope and wish I will master it one day and will be able to figure it out in every situation. 

Why new religions find it difficult to evolve?

I feel, this time, I have a more introspective topic to write about – about the evolution of new religions – continuing with my previous post on “Religions and Institutionalization“.

As usual it started with a ‘controversial’ discussion on religion and God, and as we sifted through topics like Scientology and Tom Cruise an interesting question emerged – why we do not have any new religions emerging recently? This is despite having a much smaller world – interconnected in many ways, including the Internet and its latest social networking platforms, when propagation of messages can go viral!

A quick survey on the Web did not reveal much, (though it revealed interesting religions as in this link) and an extensive search would be required considering this list. Though  many of them are referred as ‘religions’ and some were found as late as in 1980’s they do not seem to have any significant following. But at the same time, we cannot underestimate them, because today’s popular religions also would have started in the same way, but took atleast 3-4 centuries to spread and establish themselves across the world. So, we never know! despite the connected world we live in.

In my analysis, I believe that there are two strong characteristics that are exhibited by today’s popular religions, which will stop or delay the arise of any new religion – one is continuous propagation (and propagation through all new media) by identified leaders – and the other is the embedding of the sense of community among their members, which is done by regular and mandatory gathering of their members in a place for worship. The latter ideal ensures that people don’t get distanced too much from their current religious practice and instills a sense of ‘belonging’ and probably ‘pressure’ on who are not inclined.

Disclaimer: I don’t intend to start a new religion! and I am not an atheist!

Religions and Institutionalization

We had an interesting discussion on “Institutions” in one of my classes where I was explaining about the quality processes that has to be inculcated in an organization, and work towards insitutionalization of the same to reap the benefits. Well this blog is not about it, but about religions.

Religions serve as an excellent example of institutionalization – institutionalization of beliefs on God, and the processes represent the rituals and customs carried out by the followers of that religion.  Now the question: Does institutionalization really benefit here?  My answer: NO.

When we institutionalize the beliefs on god, and evolve them as religions, it becomes one more identity for a person. However the purpose of any religion is to lead its followers to the spiritual path, and largely that requires an individual’s own effort and will.

A religion can provide an identity, impose conditions of behavior, that might lead to the spiritual path, but can’t guarantee it. Also here we are dealing with abstractness and results or effects would not be tangible always to measure. A goodness of a person has to be judged over his/her lifetime giving appropriate weight to their environments and circumstances – well that’s what GOD  would supposedly do in one’s after life, according to many religions.

In quality processes, there is a scope for review and continuous improvement, which can lead to new and different processes over time. However today’s religions does not allow to redefine or re-orient or even re-look at the changing needs and hence constrain you to the same beliefs that were set long ago, often justified by saying that all of the processes (rituals, beliefs, and customs)  followed in a religion relate to “core values” and hence are sacrosanct and there’s only one choice – either you subscribe to it or get left out. 

Disclaimer: I am NOT an atheist.

God – Representations & Manifestations

This world has an inherent knack of giving numerous representations to a single object!. So, it may not be surprising when we see or create many representations for a single concept or entity that we deal upon. The main point behind these numerous representations is that everyone would like to visualize a particular object or concept or entity in their own way, based on their perceptions, thereby leading to multiple representations. When these multiple representations or visualizations are correlated they could give a much deeper and probably better understanding of a subject.

By nature, all objects themselves can have different forms or manifestations, based on a lot of factors. The underlying base for these factors is time; As time changes the forms or manifestations also differ!. To illustrate this, look at the Sun; It appears or lends itself to different forms (to other planets)- in the morning, during the day, and during the evening. Ofcourse, there are scientific explanations behind it; but speaking abstractly, as time passes, these forms or representations also change!. Not only the way in which we see the sun changes from time to time, but the sun by itself also changes from time to time – as a star it has its own life cycle – for instance the sun is becoming more luminous – at the rate of 10% every billion years.

As there can be innumerable representations of the same object or entity, and also each objects can have numerous forms or manifestations over the time – one could realize that God too can be visualized or represented in many forms and in many ways!, and if God could be factorized to a base – i.e., energy, then God too could manifest in multiple ways based on time!

Renunciation

A couple of months ago, I had an opportunity to meet a young Swamiji. He was wearing saffron robes, and gave a very short lecture to us, about a Kriya – an exercise that would benefit all of us. During the lecture, he also mentioned about his journey of life, and how he went on to embrace spirituality.

Actually the Swamiji was a former student at the place, where I am working now. He went out of this place in 1999, after completing an IT course (I joined here two years later – in 2001, as an employee) and after which he was working for some IT companies in Bangalore and Hyderabad, and then finally chose the spiritual path!. So, we were naturally curious to know the turn of events in his life that lead him to his current state.

One thing that was apparent from his talk was that he had been searching for ‘something’ that was not materialistic and probably would have ended up in those saffron robes. It also appeared that he had come out from most of the common worldly desires like money. However, he did not advise us to take the path of spirituality, for he knows that we are immersed and enjoy ourselves in those trapping of desires!. And I don’t believe that only food, money and sex are the powerful desire trappings – it’s even name and fame that are as powerful as the former, or perhaps even more.

Thinking about desires further, it appears to be extremely difficult for one to completely come out of all the desires – including the desire to live, which is why I think the path to spiritual elevation is supposed to be taken at an older age. According to me, one has attained the highest position – in spirituality – if he has come out of all the desires. But then, finding such a person is going to be extremely difficult for anybody, and a person inclined and committed to find such a person, would rather himself come out of all the desire trappings.

Coming out of all desires is what is called as renunciation. It is being in love and peace with everyone, but absolutely without any attachments or expectations. And I believe that even if a person has some desire it may easily lead to a trap of multiple desires, coming out of which would test even the noblest of the souls.

Some Short Philosophies in Tamil

It’s really been a long time, that I wrote something in Tamil. So, here I am going do that. But what to write ? – For me, it’s simple – philosophies as usual ( தத்துவம் in Tamil). English translations are also provided.

உயிர்- உடலையும் உள்ளத்தையும் இணைக்கிறது; இல்லாவிடில் உடலும் உள்ளமும் வேறு வேறு!

English Translation: It’s the life force that binds both our body and mind (soul). If there is no life force, then body and mind are separate entities!.

(உண்மையான) சுவாமி – ஆசை அறவே அற்றவர்; மற்றவர் – ஆசாமி!

English Translation: A REAL saintly or godly person is one who renounces ALL the desires, while others are all ordinary persons.