Life of Gods

In my school days, I remember reading the portions of KM Munshis's novel, Krishnavatara translated in Malayalam (in Mathrubhumi weekly). [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanaiyalal_Maneklal_Munshi].  It influenced me to start believing in the capability of ordinary human beings to change the world. It also showed that how Gods are born when we fail to comprehend great personalities. 

I think "Shiva Trilogy" is another attempt in that direction. We can see many books are released nowadays with similar theme. But the authenticity of history they are developing need to take with a pinch of salt. I liked the definition of "Har Har Mahadev"; Everyone is Mahadev.

Now, I read "Scion of Ikshvaku" which is trying to portrait Rama as a human being. Again, no one is sure about the facts but It is a good read because it can ignite some thoughts. Some time back I posted a blog on the question by my son "why Seetha has not accompanied Lakshmana when searching for Rama at the forest" Ramayana and Anthropic Principle. It is interesting to realize that we never thought the abnormality of a princess childishly asking her husband to catch a deer in the dangerous forest. What about the princess of Kekaya getting influenced by a maid to make such a decision? I don't know right or wrong, but this book will at least provoke you with some questions.   

Ramayana and Anthropic Principle

It was sleep time and I was trying to make my son sleep by telling Ramayana story. The story reached Dandakaranya forest. Seetha saw the golden deer and she sent Rama to bring it to her. Finally Rama realized it was not deer but Mareecha and sent his arrow to kill Mareecha. Then Mareecha started crying in Rama's voice to misguide Lakshmana and Seetha. By listening Rama's voice Seetha got worried and argued with Lakshmana and convinced him to go for helping Rama. Lakshmana drew the famous Lakshmana-rekha and went to help Rama leaving Seetha alone...

At this point, my Son stopped me and asked. "Father, why Seetha didn't go along-with Lakshmana to help her Husband?"

I managed by telling something. But actually what is the reason? May be there were many Seethas who went along-with Lakshmana. But none of them are known to us. Only when Seetha decided to stay alone, the story became Ramayana.

My Story

I have a story to tell,
who is there to listen?
I am just a black obstacle
between you and sky
This blackness is not a protest,
it is because i gave you all my greenness

Face

every face we see,
there exist a life we don't see

An endangered species

If you search in net, a big list of endangered species can be found (Examples from Wikipedia: African penguin, giant panda, Goliath frog, tiger, ...). They are considered as facing high risk of extinction in near future. I am not sure if it is optimism or mistake to exclude one obvious species from the list. Name of that species is Homo Sapience.

If you have heard about Theory of Evolution, you will be tempted to explain anything in the world with that. Often I feels that Theory of Evolution can be simplified as "whatever can survive will survive" and is actually applied to patterns. Stars, galaxies, constellations, black-holes, or even universe are patterns of energy and matter. Every pattern struggles to survive by adapting to its environment. In fact, the environment itself is another pattern and that struggles in another environment and so on. In another words, there exists a hierarchy of patterns. In my limited knowledge, Universe is the topmost pattern in the hierarchy and Quarks are the lowest. Let us skip many levels in the hierarchy and come down to the pattern called Earth. If we consider Earth as a software, Nature is the software written on it. So I will use the terms Earth and Nature interchangeably.  Nature composed of various living and nonliving patterns. A particular type of living pattern is called a particular Species. Now, let us apply Theory of Evolution to patterns. A pattern continuously evolve by competing with its sibling patterns to become the best suited for its environment pattern. The only way for a pattern to evolve to a better pattern is by altering its component patterns. But, if a component pattern is very strong and resist to change, the entire environment pattern will perish. In most cases, even if the component pattern is strong, it cannot survive independent of its environment. In case of a Species, it will survive only if it is helping Nature to survive. In other words, nature doesn't care about our list of endangered species or even us. A species which is not suitable for the Nature will perish either by itself or along with Nature.

Brain is a component pattern in a Species. Human behaviors like Greed, Pleasure, Altruism, etc. are component patterns in Brain. They all are so strong that they became integral part of a Species. Initially Brain helped in short-term survival of a Species. It helped to overcome immediate dangers instead of evolving resistance to dangers. Because of this, further development of brain actually retarded other functionalists of a Species. To overcome this, Brain evolved the ability to think. We can now foresee the results of our actions and do (or not do) things for long term survival of us or even Nature. But some of the Human behaviors evolved to shadow this quality. Human being is the only animal who kills for pleasure. Is it because pleasure at this intensity exist only in us? Greed is the other behavior which has been evolved to destruct entire Humanity. Not just the big stories of Bribe popularize by media. Greediness in each one of us need to be analyzed. Bus conductor says "No Change" and allows you to travel by paying less amount without ticket and both are happy. In MNCs everyone is encouraged to work more than eight hours when many Jobless qualified people are starving. Many of us dislike this only if remuneration is insufficient. Think about this and you can identify many such things. Change need to come from each one of us.


Thanks to those whose behaviors are not yet evolved like ours and work for every ones well-being. Do we know how to produce something to eat provided a fertile land? Even if someone produce raw-material for food, do we know how to prepare that? After ten years, even if someone prepare the food for us we may not know how to eat. Why we are considering production of food is so low esteem profession? We consider our-self great for our capability to adapt to changes. How many of us can adapt to the living conditions of twenty five years back? Adapting to a more comfortable condition is not difficult. Have you ever thought what will happen if every farmer "adapts" to the modern conditions? There should be a healthy balance and every Job supposed to be respected. Balance is an important thing in evolution. Every behavior is needed for survival. In other words, any behavior that survives is needed for us. But cancerous growth of any behavior leads to destruction. We will not be able to evolve any new traits in our behavior to overcome current problems. Evolution for us is almost stopped because of highly developed brain. For example, we will never develop thick skin, as we learned how to use clothes. So we need to use our brain itself to find solutions for our problems.

Happy brainstorming !

Astrophysics and Ramayana

 

Two pages from two books illustrates the soul of Astrophysics and Indian philosophy. Left side is a page from "Black Holes and the Universe" by Igor Novikov and right side is a page from "Sita" by Devdutt Pattanaik. 

We can easily appreciate (not necessarily understand) the mind blowing equations in astrophysics and concepts like, non-euclidean space, closed universe, finite space with no boundaries etc. We are ready to ridicule questions like "Where this space exist?". Has anyone thought that this question is "topologically" same as "Who is the creator of God?". When we talk about "Kurma" incarnation of Vishnu, it is often considered stupid to invoke the world from ocean. But we don't have any hesitation to believe in the ocean of neutrinos existed nowhere.

When I almost finished reading the first book (Black holes ... ) and took the second (Sita), one interesting thought came to my mind. Astrophysics talks about closed universe, and Indian Philosophy talks about Cyclic Time. Are they not same concepts? As per Einstein,"Time is an illusion" and modern science consider time as another dimension of space. When we say time is cyclic, it automatically implies Space is closed. From a moving bus, we can either say trees are moving or bus is moving. Theory of relativity helps us to believe both are correct. Let me extend this to the concept of time. In one viewpoint, we can hold our consciousness still and imagine that the surroundings/universe is changing/evolving. In other viewpoint, we can imagine that the consciousness is moving while unraveling a still Universe. This is like a video player reading data from a tape. None of the data is newly created. Entire data exist always in the tape and the sensor is sensing one incident at a time. We can consider the path traced by our consciousness as time. When Astrophysics tells Space is Closed in first viewpoint, it is same as telling Time is Cyclic in second viewpoint.

It is true, that there is no experimental proof for many of these great thoughts. What about the theories in modern science? Many times the prediction by theories are proved much later. One important thing to remember is that the Universe is not following any theories. We are creating theories to explain the Universe. Imagine how funny it will be, if Universe has to do all complex calculations before moving every photon and colliding particles.

Worlds of Reality

I jumped up in the air and moved my hands to get balance. Slowly pushing the air backward I moved forward about one meter above the ground. I could guide myself in any direction with hands. I was doing it like a natural activity and I was little surprised why others were not able to levitate and fly.


Suddenly I got disturbed and woke up from the dream. Yes, I saw the same dream many times before. But I am not remembering that "remembering" this dream so vividly. As I read "Phantoms in the Brain" [V. S. Ramachandran], I want to give some brain to it. I remember one of my friend mentioned about similar dream in which he was running and suddenly he started flying and he has not realized anything special about it in the dream. Some point in life we were all kids and wanted to fly like birds. May be this why we dream about flying. But what intrigued me is the memory of dreams. This time I woke-up in the middle of dream and suddenly had a flow of memories of the same dream occurred before. It seems like a dream is happening in its own world. Until I woke-up in the middle, there was no connection between that world and the world in which I am writing this blog. At the moment of wake-up, the flying-dream-world is collapsed into blogging-real-world. Probably the so called "Final Realization" is the collapsing of this world into some new world due to some unknown wake-up call. I believe the director of the movie "Inception" had similar dreams and similar thought process.

We all know that we are physically in the bed while dreaming. Then where are these worlds exist? Obviously in the brain. This leads us to the quote by Rene Descartes, "I think, therefore I am". V. S. Ramachandran explains a thought experiment of connecting a brain with some signals produced by a computer imitating our senses. This is similar to the movie Matrix. What will happen? Will the brain create a concept of "I"  and "feel" the world as per the signals send from the computer? All this shows that many great brains agrees the world inside our brain. Now, consider each of the world we talked earlier, as individual circuits in brain, may not be physical but logical. Our senses influence only the real-world-circuitry. We often say "He is in his own world" and that may be literally true.By shaking his shoulder you just short circuited two worlds!

Stephen Hawking goes a step further and explains "the direction of time" itself is a brain activity. There is a principle in Thermodynamics which states that the Entropy, will always increase. In other words, when time goes forward, the disorder in the universe will always increase. As per Hawking, every brain activity will result in an increased disorder in our brain. This increased disorder creates the feeling of time. That means, the Entropy/Disorder is not going to increase in future but we call the state of increased Entropy/Disorder as Future. This theory can explain why the feeling of time is distorted and different in each dream. In some dream, we feel like the world is in slow-motion (Again credits to the movie Inception) and in some other we go backward in time. The disorder inside the brain, as a system, may be increasing always because of our physical and mental activities. But the individual worlds created by each circuitry can have different rate of change of disorder. Even they can share disorder and reduce the disorder in an individual circuitry  making the feeling of going back in time.

Master Zhuang: Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

Let me know if this Blogging is a dream or not from your comments.