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 ;)

You are the cosmos. The cosmos is you.

As I read this NY Times op-ed on "our cosmic selves," I was, yet again, reminded of the mahavakyas, especially "तत् त्वम् असि"

Ok, I am getting ahead of the story.

A question that practically everybody on this planet would like to know the answer to is this: where did we, and everything else, come from?  An awesome mystery ever, right?

If you are talented and creative enough, and have enough charisma, you can then offer your own narrative and gain a few followers.  If the numbers keep growing, then you gain notoriety as a cult leader.  If your cult manages to survive for a hundred years, which will mean you are dead by then, that cult becomes a religion based on the narrative that you offered.

I grew up with interesting narratives that had survived over the centuries.  But, after a while, the puranas, which are stories about the gods, didn't deliver any meaning whatsoever.  They just seemed like awesome soap-operas, with complex subplots.  And, yes, most stories had some element of moral instruction too.

Then there was the fascination with prophets, who turned out to be as clueless as I was--but were master manipulators.

Source

The narratives that appealed to me during the final phase of the religiously agnostic life were whatever I could understand of the vedantic approach.  There were no stories here. No prophets. Only ideas.  Thus, there was no trivial discussion like whether Sita was chaste enough after her time away from Rama, or whether Krishna's rasa lila with the gopis were metaphors to illustrate the deeper points about the soul.

The vedantic ideas were abstractions.  It was like doing math. Imaginary numbers--in this context, you, too, will find it interesting that "i" is discussed there!  Anyway, the vedantic stuff is where I came across the mahavakyas.  And I found it interesting that a commentator on these vedantic aspects was Sivananda, who was from grandmother's village, Pattamadai.  His childhood home was only a couple of doors from grandmother's.  How about that!

One of those mahavakyas is  "तत् त्वम् असि": That thou art.  You are that.  The sentence and the philosophy works well even without bringing in any creator into the discussions.

A wonderful philosophical idea that once we strip from ourselves all the identifications that we use to define who we are, well, the self is "that."  In the vedantic philosophy "that" refers to the "brahman."  (Not to be confused with the brahmin.)

In physics, "that" is cosmic dust.

The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones and the oxygen we breathe are the physical remains — ashes, if you will — of stars that lived and died long ago.

We are all stars ;)

science continues to show just how intimately connected life on Earth is to extraterrestrial processes. In particular, several recent findings have further illuminated the cosmic origins of life’s key ingredients.

You and I are all the same. Whatever our skin colors ;)

Amid the material comforts and the relentless distractions of modern life, the universe at large may appear remote, intangible and irrelevant, especially to those of us who are city dwellers. But the next time you catch a glimpse of the Milky Way in its true glory, from a dark outpost far from city lights, think of those countless stars as nuclear factories and the starless hazy patches as molecular breweries. It is not much of a stretch to imagine the inchoate seeds of life emerging in the distance.

The universe has never seemed "remote, intangible and irrelevant" to me.  Towards the last couple of years of my "Indian" existence, I felt that deep connection to the vast universe via "तत् त्वम् असि".  Now, it is via cosmic dust.  

And, dust to dust it shall be in a few more years.  Before then, there are papers to grade ;)