Observing Ramadan without fasting and prayers

It is the new year in the traditional calendar back in the old country.  This time, it coincides with Ramadan.

I suppose it can look bizarre for this atheist to post about religious observances like Ramadan.  But, I have never been one of those militant atheists making a fanatical religion out of atheism.  As long as the religious do not impose their practices on me, I seek nothing but peaceful coexistence with them.  And enjoy food and laughter and conversations with them. 

Furthermore, I am not that different from most atheists in that we reach the conclusion not with ignorance about religions, particularly the religion with which we were raised.  Even through my agnostic teenage years, I was curious about the Hindu faith and its philosophy.  Which is also why I am so familiar with ideas like dukrijnkarane that I talk about. 

Curiosity then made me find out at least a tiny bit about a few other religions.  Unlike most of the truly religious who are committed to only knowing about their own beliefs, we atheists often end up knowing a tad more about various religions.

For all the non-believer that I am, I consciously think about my existence, and worry about what it means to be human.  When bad things come my way, like when I get laid off in a Zoom meeting, I do not need a god to turn to.

"Shit happens" I tell myself.  And, for the most part, I expect shit to happen more frequently than it does.  I am acutely aware that the entire cosmos does not exist only to serve me!  The cosmos is. It doesn't have feelings towards me or you or anybody else.

In my framework, whether it is Rama Navami or Ramadan, or whatever, those religious days are designated times in order to help us mortals reflect on our fleeting existence on this "mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam," as Carl Sagan so poetically put it.  These special religious days are intentional pauses to our everyday lives.  A forced interruption that then makes us think, for at least a few minutes, about what we want to do with the little time we have on this planet.

In fact, the disconnect between such need for introspection versus the believers merely reciting the Vishnu Sahasranaamam and the Bhaja Govindam and more was the point of departure for the young me questioning the idea of god and religion and belief.  I was convinced then, and even more convinced I am now, that living a moral life has nothing to do with god and religion.

What does a true believer do during Ramadan?

By abstaining from things that people tend to take for granted (such as water), it is believed, one may be moved to reflect on the purpose of life and grow closer to the creator and sustainer of all existence. As such, engaging in wrongdoing effectively undermines the fast. Many Muslims also maintain that fasting allows them to get a feeling of poverty, and this may foster feelings of empathy.

A noble idea, right?  And this is something we ought to think about every day.  Don't we want to be empathetic every day of our lives?

Empathy is what is emphasized in Gandhi's favorites among the prayer music.  While the reference to the Hindu god, Vishnu, might distract a militant atheist or anyone committed to other religions, I ignore the Vishnu part and appreciate, and love, the ideas expressed there: 

Vaishnav people are those who:

Feel the pain of others,

Help those who are in misery 

Wouldn't you want to be friends with such people?  Wouldn't you want to be such a person?  A wonderful ideal to work towards, though a tall order for most of us mortals.

Work builds character

Perhaps you are nodding your head in agreement with the title of this post: Work builds character.

Are you sure?

Let's suppose the work is with the mafia.  Does that work build character?  How about as a butcher?  A teacher? A soldier? A ...? You get my point.

Perhaps you then argue that "work builds character" is applicable to young people. To kids. To Teenagers.

If we are what we repeatedly do, well, "to see if work really builds character, then, we need to ask: What do we repeatedly do at work?"

In the first chapter of his 1776 treatise The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith marvels at the division of labor in a pin factory. He writes that someone who had to perform every step of the pin-making process himself would struggle to make a few pins a day. Put him on a team of ten, though, and assign him only to sharpen the point of every pin that comes down the line, and he can contribute to the manufacture of thousands.⁸But who do you become if you sharpen pinpoints all day long? Do you advance in virtue? Do you attain moral excellence? 

You can now see where this discussion is headed.  Imagine the work that the "cleaners" do every single day as Facebook content moderators.  What character does that build?

So what should we do? Repair the whole rickety heap of our work ideology? Redesign work so that it delivers the dignity, character, and purpose it’s supposed to? Pass laws that limit employers’ control over workers’ bodies and public behavior? Push for transparency regarding the actions workers perform, and establish norms that they specialize less narrowly and have rotating duties? Set humane limits on service work and eliminate the pointless tasks most professionals do during the workday? It wouldn’t hurt to try. These are all worthy short-term goals that would help work in America live up to its promise. But making these changes would likely either reduce productivity or increase costs, leading companies to accelerate the rollout of machine labor in every aspect of their business. The changes would be self-defeating. Eventually, there would hardly be any jobs at all.

What exactly are we working for?

I am not sure if we ask ourselves that question even once.  We seem to have been brainwashed into believing that we have to work, and work is the answer to the question of our existence.  So much so that if we come across a person who cares not about work, but who does not depend on others either, we have only negative things to say about them.

Of course, I am channeling my life here, as I always do in my blog.  I know damn well that I could "work" a lot more than I do.  Instead of playing bridge, I could spend time writing essays. Or even books.  But why?  What for?  The typical response is about fame and fortune.  But, what is the big deal about all that fame and fortune that I might have given up, and am continuing to give up?  What does this say about my "character"?

A few weeks ago, a big-time economist, with plenty of fame and fortune, and with a lot more left in him, died. He committed suicide. I have no idea about what troubled him that severely for him to end his life.  What a tragedy!  Imagine if he had sacrificed a chunk of his fame and fortune, and had worked "only" as a high school teacher, and enjoyed his life.

We are born. We live. We die. Within this there is work. "We just need meaning, wherever we might find it."  I am confident that work does not offer any meaning to our existence.  It does not build any damn character either!

In search of happiness, fulfillment and meaning

A month short of two years ago, I blogged about the difference between a religion and a cult, in which I referred to the old joke:

Question: What's the difference between a religion and a cult?
Answer: 200 years

As I quoted there,

Cults don’t come out of nowhere; they fill a vacuum, for individuals and, as we’ve seen, for society at large. Even Christianity itself proliferated most widely as a result of a similar vacuum: the relative decline of state religious observance, and political hegemony, in the Roman Empire.

Yep, when it began, Christianity was a cult.

A middle-aged writer, who grew up in a cult when she was a kid, writes in The New Yorker about her experiences that point out how complicated it is to understand cults, and why people are drawn to them.  She writes there:

But, to be fair, the notion that U.F.O.s are going to take you to live on Venus is not obviously crazier than the Christian idea of Heaven and Hell, not to mention the unscientific beliefs put forth by other mainstream religions. Sheer popularity and longevity can do a lot to render odd convictions reassuringly familiar.

A longevity of 200 years can easily mainstream a cult into a religion.

She writes, "There will always be people in search of what cults have to offer—structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

Such a search leads people to all kinds of cults and leaders.  Like Rajneesh.

Or, like this latest one, which sounds way bizarre:

It was called “collateral” — nude photos and other embarrassing material that female members of an upstate New York self-improvement group turned over to their “masters” to ensure obedience, silence and sexual fealty to the organization’s spiritual leader, Keith Raniere.
Now some former members of the group, NXIVM, are poised to break their vow of silence for the first time by testifying against Raniere, who has been compared to a cult leader.

These included educated, professional, women.  "The women are instead described as “independent, smart, curious adults” in search of “happiness, fulfillment and meaning.”

I suspect that we will witness the rise of cults along with a diminishing status of mainstream religions.  People know well about religions for them to submit to religious leaders en masse as we humans once did.  However, as technological challenges, in particular, make us angst-filled beings who are compelled to worry about our existence, cults will step up to provide "structure, solidarity, a kind of hope."

I suppose we have a choice: Understand our mortality and deal with it in our daily lives, or follow the orders from a cult or a religious leader, who claims to know the truth but does not.  A long time ago, I decided to understand my creation and death on my own terms, however difficult the task is.  To quote the Nobelist Steven Weinberg, again:

Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God

A kumbha mela in Oregon

You recall Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh?  Yes, that fraudster who reinvented himself as Osho.

Back in the early 1980s, he and his fellow criminals bought up a ranch in Oregon and called that Rajneeshpuram.  As if people were hell-bent on confirming PT Barnum's "there's a sucker born every minute," devotees descended on the ashram.  With a matter of months, the place had the largest collection of Rolls Royce cars.

Source

But then the Bhagwan and his minions could not fool everybody.  They then engaged in bioterrorism, were prosecuted, and Rajneesh, who was kicked out of America, went back to India where he lived the rest of his life as Osho.

The police mugshot of Rajneesh.
Source

What has all that got to do with the kumbh mela?

That ranch area is prime viewing spot for the solar eclipse on August 21st!

You see the town of Madras (yes, named after the city in India--long story!)?  The ranch was close by.

Motels and campsites at those Central Oregon locations sold out months in advance.  People are renting out rooms in their homes for quite some rates.  Because, in those dog days of summer, that is a place in the mountain where the probability is very high that no clouds or weather events will spoil one's experience.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists will be flooding Oregon close to that date.  The transportation department has issued an advisory that traffic will be chaotic.  Small towns are worried that they won't have enough toilet facilities--even the portable ones.  Madness!

This is a secular kumbha mela.  People want to be awed by a celestial event over which we humans have no control.  Not even the tiniest of impacts.

When we cannot make sense of events around us, and when we have angst about our own existence, then we turn to the cosmos for answers and comfort.  Or, we turn to religions.  Or, we fall at the feet of fraudsters.  It is all the same to me.  Religions have better, and time-tested, institutional mechanisms to defraud people, unlike Rajneesh whose schemes were blown away.

We can submit to the likes of Rajneesh.  We can be devout our religions.  We can smoke weed.  We can go to religious and secular gatherings.  But, the angst about the meaning of life can be resolved only from within.

As for my own solar eclipse plans?  I live outside the belt of totality.  I don't care.  A colleague, whose home is smack in the zone of totality strongly advised me to get up to one of those places.  "It is a once in a life time event," he said.

I merely smiled.  Because I could not tell him that every breath that we take is a once in a life time event.  Every second that we are alive is a once in a life time event.  If only we cherished every second of our lives as we value the kumbha melas of many types!

I suppose it is because we refuse to understand and appreciate such a life that we seek the fraudsters of the world, who come in many shapes.  Beware!

What is freedom?

As I often note here, we struggle to make meaning of our existence from the time we realize that we are mortals.  It is a challenge to understand the fact that we arrive in this world with invisible expiration dates printed on us.  In the back of our heads, as we lay down to go to sleep, deep down we know that we do not know when it will end.

In order to make meaning, we developed various institutions.  Religions that explain where we come from and--even more important--where we go after the big sleep.  During our life on this wonderful planet, which I know I will miss, we work with interpretations of love and hate. Even as we mentally prepare for that ultimate outcome, we realize that there is a life to live out, for which we then come up with various socio-political arrangements.

Svetlana Alexievich writes about how the collapse of the Soviet system not only shattered the structure of the everyday life that people lived, but it also eviscerated the ideas about Russia and its place in the world and, along with that, their own place in this world.

The oral history that Alexievich employs is certainly different from the kinds of work that I have read.  She is not merely telling the people's stories but is helping readers like me understand the very existential crisis that people went through and go through.  I was reminded of what the New Yorker had noted about Alexievich after she was awarded the Nobel Prize:

The Swedish Academy, which announced today that Alexievich will receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, cited the writer for inventing “a new kind of literary genre.” The permanent secretary of the Academy, Sara Danius, described Alexievich’s work as “a history of emotions—a history of the soul, if you wish.” Her work might also be described as oral history by excavation.

 Even the few pages that I have read thus far make it abundantly clear that Alexievich is unpacking the lives of ordinary people who bare their souls to her.  It was so touching to read one say:

It became rude to ask, "What are you reading?"

As I have often noted here, even in the old country, the world of reading and thinking and art and culture does not seem to exist anymore.  Whether it is the old country, or Russia, or here in America, people seem to be obsessed with money and riches.  They seem to be think that they can escape the existential struggle by chasing wealth.  No wonder reading has been thrown out; after all, serious books "don't teach you how to become successful. How to get rich ..."

Most of the voices in the book are those of women.  Women authors, and women's voices in this book, will fill a huge void in my understanding of this world and my own existence.  There is a reason why Alexievich focuses on women's stories:

Focussing on women was a wise decision, Alexievich said: “Women tell things in more interesting ways. They live with more feeling. They observe themselves and their lives. Men are more impressed with action. For them, the sequence of events is more important.” 

Less than fifty pages into the book and I can already get a sense of why in his twilight years "Gorbachev has become an isolated figure".  Alexievich channels one voice:

We're rolling around in shit and eating foreign food.  Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket. If this is freedom, I don't need it. To hell with it! The people are on their knees. We're a nation of slaves. Slaves!

I am sure I will understand more about the existential crisis over the 470 pages of the book.  

On living a happy AND meaningful life

Perhaps I will continue with the theme explored in the previous post and comments--happiness.

When we discuss poverty and economic development, I can always count on a student to thoughtfully remark that people in the video and photographs of the "poor" Sub-Saharan or South Asian countries seem happy.  Genuinely happy.  Which is when I give them my usual spiel that once we go beyond the absolute poverty (those rates have been falling) we notice that getting rich is not the same the as being happy.  I discuss that without the academic language behind the Easterlin Paradox.

A psychology professor at Florida State University observes in this essay that "happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning":

To be sure, happiness and meaningfulness frequently overlap. Perhaps some degree of meaning is a prerequisite for happiness, a necessary but insufficient condition. If that were the case, people might pursue meaning for purely instrumental reasons, as a step on the road towards happiness. But then, is there any reason to want meaning for its own sake? And if there isn’t, why would people ever choose lives that are more meaningful than happy, as they sometimes do?

These days, I am suspicious about anything that psychology researchers have to offer based on the experiments that they conduct. There is a "reproducibility crisis" in psychology:

A study out last summer tried to replicate 100 psychology experiments one-for-one and found that just 40 percent of those replications were successful. A critique of that study just appeared last week, claiming that the original authors made statistical errors—but that critique has itself been attacked for misconstruing facts, ignoring evidence, and indulging in some wishful thinking.

But, we will set that aside for now and consider the essay, which argues that "happiness is not the same as a sense of meaning"--after all, this is also something that I have been talking, and blogging, about for years.  If it agrees with my view, then--of course--the research is true ;)

Kidding aside, the author writes:

If you want to maximise your happiness, it looks like good advice to focus on the present, especially if your needs are being satisfied. Meaning, on the other hand, seems to come from assembling past, present and future into some kind of coherent story.

Increasingly, it seems like people would rather focus on the present and seek a meaning of happiness that comes via instant gratification.  So much so that they even use technology that helps them assemble a past in order to tell a story that airbrushes out the misery.  Is all that really happiness, and is the meaning thus created really any meaning at all?  Ah, I digress.  Back to the essay at hand.  Why do we care about meaning anyway?

Perhaps the idea is to make happiness last. Happiness seems present-focused and fleeting, whereas meaning extends into the future and the past and looks fairly stable. For this reason, people might think that pursuing a meaningful life helps them to stay happy in the long run. They might even be right — though, in empirical fact, happiness is often fairly consistent over time. Those of us who are happy today are also likely to be happy months or even years from now, and those who are unhappy about something today commonly turn out to be unhappy about other things in the distant future. It feels as though happiness comes from outside, but the weight of evidence suggests that a big part of it comes from inside. Despite these realities, people experience happiness as something that is felt here and now, and that cannot be counted on to last. By contrast, meaning is seen as lasting, and so people might think they can establish a basis for a more lasting kind of happiness by cultivating meaning.

You are perhaps thinking, well, what is the meaning of life then?  That is for you to figure out.

People ask what is the meaning of life, as if there is a single answer. There is no one answer: there are thousands of different ones. A life will be meaningful if it finds responses to the four questions of purpose, value, efficacy, and self-worth. It is these questions, not the answers, that endure and unify.

Find your meaning. And be happy!

A man. A place. A meaning.

A few years ago, the Association of American Geographers recognized Barry Lopez as an "honorary geographer."  It is to recognize "excellence in research, teaching, or writing on geographic topics by non-geographers."  I understand that sentiment--after all, I do not have any formal education, from the undergraduate through the doctorate level, in geography and, yet, have been gainfully employed as a geography instructor for nearly a decade-and-a-half.

Lopez lives in Oregon, not far from my home.  He, too, is a transplant, from across the continent.  A writer of the highest caliber, reflecting on life by observing places, especially the natural environment.  In this recent essay, Lopez writes:

Existential loneliness and a sense that one’s life is inconsequential, both of which are hallmarks of modern civilizations, seem to me to derive in part from our abandoning a belief in the therapeutic dimensions of a relationship with place. A continually refreshed sense of the unplumbable complexity of patterns in the natural world, patterns that are ever present and discernible, and which incorporate the observer, undermine the feeling that one is alone in the world, or meaningless in it. The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere.

The themes of existence, the inconsequential lives that we lead, and attempting to create a meaning through experiencing a place, are all regular features of this blog.  Existential loneliness was also very much a part of Anomalisa that I watched last night with the friend.  Which is perhaps why that paragraph appealed to me.

I am convinced that if we paused to think about our existence we would then realize the crisis within.  I suppose we do our best to avoid thinking about it.  Or, we try to lighten that crisis by making meaning via our affiliations with everything from family and friends to football teams and faiths.  When we strip all those affiliations away, the existential loneliness is all that remains.  Of course, to some extent, these are all age-old questions that humans have been grappling with.

Lopez writes:

The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.

Indeed.  Whether it is Pattamadai and Sengottai, or Neyveli, or Calcutta, or ... the deep desire to know about them and understand them has been a wonderful blessing in terms of how much they have helped me know about myself.   I even routinely tell students that, without going into autoethnographic details--understanding the world, understanding the peoples, is a wonderful way to understand our own country and our own place in the grand scheme of things.  

Back to Lopez:

Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention. Perhaps the second is to be patient. And perhaps a third is to be attentive to what the body knows.

Yes. To pay attention. To observe the place.  To be patient. To be in the here and the now.  I suppose it is not easy to translate those ideas to everyday life!

    

The meaning of life is ...

Perhaps it is just me; I think this is truly an interesting time in human history when it comes to thinking about god, religion, and the meaning of life.  ISIS, Boko Haram, and the Taliban trigger questions about Islam.  The various fanatical Hindu groups in India raise questions about coexistence of different interpretations of life.  Buddhist monks are persecuting Muslims in Burma.  It is a global war on religions and gods, though not on any particular religion on god.

Of course, here within the United States, too.  Consider this:

A county clerk in Kentucky who objects to same-sex marriage on religious grounds denied licenses to gay couples on Tuesday, saying she was acting “under the authority of God,” just hours after the Supreme Court refused to support her position. ...
Ms. Davis stopped issuing all marriage licenses after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in June.

And this is after:

After the state’s governor told county clerks to issue marriage licenses to all eligible couples, Ms. Davis filed suit in federal court, arguing that she should be excused from the obligation, given her religious beliefs. A District Court judge ruled against her, as did the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and she appealed to the Supreme Court.

I am impressed with the fight that the county clerk is putting up, though I thoroughly disagree with her belief that she can bring her faith into political administration.  She is not merely talking her faith but is following through in her actions.

Meanwhile, Catholics, who were warned by their religious leaders that abortion is "such a grave sin that it warrants automatic excommunication" are now told this:

"I have decided, notwithstanding anything to the contrary, to allow all priests for the Jubilee Year to absolve of the sin of abortion those who procure it and who also seek forgiveness," Pope Francis said.

I find all these developments interesting because whether it is the county clerk, or Francis, or me, we are all sincerely interested in figuring out what this life is all about.  I am always amazed at how much the vast number of "religious," whatever their religion is, do not seem to inquire into the meaning of life.

This bottom-line of the meaning of life is why I don't care much for the militant intellectual atheism that portrays atheism as science triumphing over faith.  Yes, there is reason and science involved in the understanding, but those militant atheists forget that even many science-trained people follow their faiths because of the meaning it gives to their lives.  It is not "scientism":

In recent years we've come to think of atheism as an evangelical creed not unlike Christianity. An atheist, we tend to assume, is someone who thinks science should be the basis of our beliefs and tries to convert others to this view of things. In the type of atheism that's making the most noise today, religion is a primitive theory of how the world works - an intellectual error without human value, which we'd be better without.
But this isn't the only kind of atheism. History shows that atheism can have a complexity that reaches well beyond our currently dominant version. Though many today seem unaware of the fact, by no means all atheists have wanted to convert others to unbelief. Some have actually been friendly to religion. Nor have atheists in the past always turned to science for inspiration. There have been many varieties of atheism.

Source

I got to read that essay thanks to this note at the Economist; it refers to Karen Armstrong, "a former nun and best-selling writer, who became badly disillusioned with Catholicism":

She insists that the word God refers not to a true-or-false proposition but to a human quest for meaning and transcendence. 

Exactly.  Debating with believers about whether or not god exists interested me only when I was younger and way more of an idiot than I am now.  As I have gotten older, I find myself engaging in discussions with believers, who talk with me, on how they deal with the contradictions within their faith.  And, above all, to engage with them to find out whether they think about the meaning of life even within their own faith.  I am always disappointed that most believers do not seem to care much about that existential question at all and, instead, merely mouth the words in very unthinking ways.

All these, and more, will make the rest of my life on this pale blue dot exciting.  I truly "believe" in that and have "faith" that it will be a fascinating time ;)

Figure it out for yourself!

Tolstoy does not have any firm bottom-line on the meaning of life.  As I raced towards the final pagess, the nebulous ending  to the essay was just as I had always suspected; recall that I wrote this in the post where it began:

Of course I don't expect Tolstoy to give me a one sentence answer to that question. It is something for me to figure out.

So, there!

You are perhaps thinking (but are too polite to say it): "if you knew you would not find a cut and dried answer to the question, then why spend time reading it?" And why torture the few readers who are sticking with this blog, right?

I have been convinced for a long time now that it will be a lifelong quest to understand the meaning of my existence.  All I know for certain is that the scientific route keeps uncovering more questions as it tries to explain the different pieces, and the other route will force upon me questions that will be way complicated for my tiny intellect.  Yet, not to examine my life does not appeal to me.  Not to examine the meaning of my existence seems like a wasted life. Reading Tolstoy and others adds that much more to understanding my own existence.

That examination includes, of course, running into situations like what Tolstoy describes:

At that time as a consequence of my interest in faith I became close to believers of various denominations: to Catholics, Protestants, Old Believers, Molokans, etc. And among them I met many people of high morality who were truly believers.  I wanted to be a brother to these people.  And what happened?  The teaching that had promised me to unite all in a single faith and love, this very teaching in the person of its best representatives told me that these people were all dwelling in falsehood, that what gave them life was a temptation of the devil and that we alone were in possession of the one possible truth.  And I saw that the Orthodox consider all those who do not profess a faith identical to theirs to be heretics, exactly as the Catholics and others consider Orthodoxy to be heresy.

If a religion, or a denomination within one, claims it has the truth, then people who live following other religions and denominations are living in falsehood, right?

Tolstoy continues:

And I, who supposed truth lay in the unity of love, was involuntarily struck by the fact that this very Christian teaching was destroying what it should be producing.  

And:

You say to yourself, "It can't be that it is so simple and that still people do not see that if two affirmations contradict each other, then neither one nor the other can hold the unified truth that faith must be.  There is something here.  There is some explanation."

He puts it bluntly with:

Why is the truth held not by Lutheranism, not by Catholicism, but by Orthodoxy?

Of course, we can add a whole bunch to that: why is the truth held not by the Wahhabi, not by Mahayana Buddhism, not by Shaivism, ... To any believer, the other is an infidel.  We are all infidels then!

As much as an infidel, atheist, that I am, I understand that religions have comforted and assured the believers with meanings to their existence.  I am an atheist in the camp of the likes of Camille Paglia, who respect the value that religions have added to the human condition, and not in the militant camp from where the intellectual atheists wage their crusades as if atheism is a religion of its own.  I have always believed that that it is such an approach to atheism that has allowed me to be friends with believers and them with me, and to even be invited to weddings by believing students.

I am at peace with knowing that I do not know the meaning of my life, and I will continue to examine it.  It is up to me to figure out the meaning of my own life.  Merely chanting Om and "अहं ब्रह्मास्मि" (Aham Brahmasmi) won't do it!

Visit with me as I am dying and I will let you know if I figured it out by then--about twenty-four years from now ;)