The Fork of Life

This has always been in the back of my mind, always picking at my brains. But I decided to blog about it when I saw this entry in my friend DDey blog.

Robert Frost is a great poet, who has given us such wonderful poems (I loved his works right from high school, my personal favorites being Birches, Mending Wall and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening).

But reading Dey's blog entry, the poem that came to my mind was Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken". Its the story of a traveler who reached a fork in his journey and decided to take the less traveled road then reflects on it later with a pleased demeanor.

As DDey says,
"I believe every moment is a forked road. You choose one path, and that determines what happens next, and at the next fork, you choose yet another path, and so on. The point is, you decide what path you take, and hence, you decide what happens to you next. Therefore whatever happens in your life is a consequence of a decision that you made at some previous instant in time."

I have faced the "Fork of Life" a lot of times. To reflect back on it makes me neither happy nor sad, just contented that I have chosen what I have (the less traveled road or not).

May be I'm too nerdish, but the fork is a place to analyze life as a tree (binary or otherwise). Trace the graph of the consequences of your selection and predict the approaching "forks" in life. It can help you make a decision in the most optimized way.

But then again, its all crap... I had a fork in life where I had to decide, where I had to do my graduation. One was a college, well known for there academic excellence (BITS Pilani) and known to groom the best engineers in the country, one was a safe option of staying on the home-turf in a college near by and then there was Manipal (the unknown, the unexplored, the lesser trodden road) about which people told me all kinds of stories.

I was "Forked" and the logical solution cried out to me saying "go to Pilani for God sake, even if it was to study something that I didn't enjoy", my mother wanted me to be at home and was keen not to spend unnecessary money on my education... But I dared to take the less traveled road and packed my bags to Manipal.

The 4 years I spent there was perhaps the happiest of my life. It taught me a lot of lessons, evolved me into a true MITan and landed me into a job that even the best dream of. But looking back, I often think how it would have turned out, if I had taken any of the other two roads. Where I would have been and how different it would be. But now,

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

-Robert Frost

There is always an amalgam inside your soul, of destiny and determination, that makes the decisions for you, for the better or for the worse...

Manusmriti and Marriages

I was at my friends Brothers marriage this weekend. He is from a caste which is known for their very ritualistic approach to life, be it worship, marriage or any other event that requires the solicitation by Gods.

The priest kept saying that this was a "Brahma Vivah" or "Brahmana Wedding", which stuck me curious. I wanted to know, in what all ways, a man could be united with a woman in holy matrimony. I was kind of taken aback by my findings...

Not only does the Vedic Religion provide 8 ways of getting marriage, it varied from marriages for learned men, kings, workers and rouges (WTF...). Also i was amazed that Vedic Religion is not at all averse to love marriages as people are led to believe. It supports it as the third most approved way of getting married...

There are eight types of marriage described in Manusmriti (Laws of Manu):

• Rite of the Brahmana (Brahma Marriage) where the father of the bride invites a man learned in the Vedas and a good conduct, and gives his daughter in marriage to him after decking her with jewels and costly garments.
• Rite of the Gods (Daiva Marriage) - where the daughter is groomed with ornaments and given to a priest who duly officiates at a sacrifice during the course of its performance of this rite.
• Rite of the Prajapati (Prajapatya Marriage) - where the father gives away his daugher after blessing the couple with the text "May both of you perform together your duties"
• Rite of the Gandharva (Gandharva Marriage) - the voluntary union of a maiden and her lover, which arises from desire and sexual intercourse for its purpose.
• Rite of the Rishis (Arsha Marriage) - when the father gives away his daughter after receiving a cow and a bull from the brightgroom.
  
• Rite of the Asuras (Demons Marriage) - when the bridegroom receives a maiden after bestowing wealth to the kinsmen and to the bride according to his own will.
• Rite of the Rakshasa (Rakshasa Marriage)- forcible abduction of a maiden from her home after her kinsmen have been slain or wounded and their houses broken open.
• Rite of the Pisaka (Pisaka Marriage) - when a man by stealth seduces a girl who is sleeping or intoxicated or is mentally disbalanced or handicapped
  

The first 3 are the most sacred, the last two are strictly forbidden and are termed as barbaric. and the others are acceptable.

Wow... I never knew my culture was so open (though it is usually termed otherwise ). Makes me wonder if we should abandon Hinduism and go into the core of Vedic Religion which is about how to live life to the fullest, rather than trying to please the so called Gods by various rituals that we ourselves do not understand, which makes us hate our own culture.

The Divine Scientists & their Research Paper...

It’s a while since I felt religious. May be the hectic work life has drained me of my inquisitiveness about my culture, one that is so vast and amazing that it spans a spectrum that no other culture, mythology or religion can boast of. No I’m not talking of Hinduism… its but a mere reflection of the great phenomenon called Vedic Religion.

VEDAs… The treasure house of knowledge, the treasure house that the scientists (rishis or sages in this case) of yore amassed from observation, analysis and a sacred bridge to the divine. The knowledge that is packed in those 4 Vedas is the pillars of this civilization (which is one of the oldest, still standing religions. It has withstood all the test of time, not withstanding its own innate and inherent flaws).

Here is an excerpt from an article that I found on Vedas (see the whole article here)

“The term Veda comes from the root 'Vid', to know. The Veda is the source of the other five sets of scriptures, why, even of the secular and the materialistic. The Vedas are the eternal truths revealed by God to the great ancient Rishis of India. The word Rishi means a Seer, from 'dris', to see.

He is the Mantra-Drashta, seer of Mantra or thought. The thought was not his own. The Rishis saw the truths or heard them. Therefore, the Vedas are what are heard ('Sruti'). The Rishi did not write. He did not create it out of his mind. He was only the spiritual discoverer of the thought. He is not the inventor of the Veda. The Rishi is only a medium or an agent to transmit to people the intuitional experiences which he received.
The truths of the Vedas are revelations. All the other religions of the world claim their authority as being delivered by special messengers of God to certain persons, but the Vedas do not owe their authority to any one. They are themselves the authority as they are eternal… and that is their beauty.”

Do I believe in it…? My conclusion is the same but my interpretation of the whole is a different perspective.

I believe that you have to view the rishis as scientists, people who were so inquisitive about finding the ultimate truth about why we are here and who are we and the other entire high sounding questions that theologists usually ask, that they dedicated their lives for it. For some, their research led them to a point of contact with that ultimate storehouse of knowledge.

Each took back something that he wanted to share with the world, a collection of which finally resulted in the Veda Samahita... their ultimate research paper and a collabarative one at that...

THE DIVINE SPARK

This is something i wrote a long time back... wanted to put it up somewhere. What better place than here...

On the debatable question of creation, the Old Testament says, “God said, Let There Be Light and there was Light”, science says that all that we see around us is the result of the biggest fireworks in the Encyclopedia Galactica. I have long longed to be in the shoes of Einstein, waiting to develop a unified theory of “The One” (not the Matrix ‘One’), a confluence of science and divinity. It is this desire that leads me to believe that it was God who gave the “Divine Spark” for the Big Bang saying, “Let There Be Light”.

Everything in nature is dual. Good and evil, birth and death, light and darkness. So why can’t God and Science be but two sides of the same coin. What or who is God? What is our purpose here? I attempted to delve into the depths of these questions knowing fully well that a great many have perished seeking this “Holy Grail” and spend a whole lifetime fruitlessly, tirelessly to find why we are here.

This dichotomous quality needs to be examined a bit more closely, first in scientific terms and then though the divine before arriving at harmony. Bible defines the body to be “from dust and unto dust”, so we are just big chunks of matter. But what separates us from the rock or the flowing water is the divine park of life. In scientific terms, the energy that runs through our arteries, pulsating through our heart. Thus we are but a confluence of matter and energy which leads us to the ultimate theory of E = mC2, thus making it a divine relation. Tracing it to its origin, life before the big bang was just one whole aggregate of energy and matter entwined in a plasma state, that wanted to be free, to dichotomize itself and turn into matter and energy, thus spawning the Big Bang, the scientific equivalent of Genesis…God.

Religions have a rather interesting way of defining creation, be it Genesis in the Old Testament or Amon Ra’s creation of the world by the Egyptians. A rather interesting perspective of this dichotomous approach is taken in the Indian Mythology in the texts called Puranas. It talks about God in a hermaphroditic from, a half-man, half-woman being as the one who initiates creation. Named Ardha-Nareeshwar in the scriptures, the being splits (much like an amoeba, the most basic form of life) into its male and female equivalents (the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine) called Shiv and Shakti, whose confluence thus spawns creation.

My unified theory thus defines God as “the ultimate sacramental form of energy”, that divine spark that exists in us. Thus God resides in each one of us providing us life and reason. We are all born with an inherent amount of this divine cosmic energy whose quantity is defined and controlled by our own karma. With every righteous deed, we escalate its amplitude and every act conceding to the seven sins diminishes its shine. It’s the expanse of this sacred spark in us that we call the soul that decides our fate after death. “From the divine we come and unto it we go”, as we die that reminiscent energy seeks its parentage, amalgamating into the One before its deeds are reckoned. If we cannot elevate our self unto the paths of nirvana, we fall into the infinite cycle of life and death, born each time with that spark that is left in us from our past life until we attain fulfillment in but a spiritual sense.

This duly explains why Jesus or Buddha is not born every now and then and why they are called "Son of God". We all are sons of God, but they are great souls who have uplifted themselves to nirvana and paved the paths for others to join them in the confluence with the dichotomous scientifically correct God….

Why this Blog....

This Blog is just because I sometimes write some crazy things that come to my mind (which i believe in). I thought i shouldnt mix those with the rational me...