Obituary of my dad

It has been a week since the sudden demise of my dad (at 72 years) and through our bereavement mom and I have had a lot to contemplate about his life. As a person, he was outright, outspoken and honest, a little too much for his own good. As a caring son and loving husband he was peerless and as a father he was borderline maniac. Nothing I did ever impressed him. He always believed I could do better. Grow more than his 6 foot 90 kg frame for starters. I have been literally hounded and abused for being a poor eater. Other than a chronic acid reflux issue and vitamin deficiencies, he was disease free. All organs, blood sugar, blood pressure, essential elements like sodium, potassium, magnesium were stable and in good condition. In 2021 he started going to the gym but loss of protein made him quit. This post is not to eulogize his life though.

Dad and his mom were endowed with extremely good genes. Grandma was also completely disease free. Both were addicted to sweets and drinking sugary water of Indian sweets and still their blood sugar never went up. Grandma went silently in her sleep in 2010. After a bout of acid reflux, dad developed slight respiratory problem and I took him to hospital. ECG, brain CT scan, chest x-ray all came out normal. He was given sedation to sleep and was sleeping soundly when silent cardiac arrest took him, just like his mom.

What I have learned from their lives is, as they grew older they found happiness in two things. They were able to eat and do mostly anything they wanted (dad had to take medication for acid reflux). Both dad and grandma loved animals and both kept in touch with the people they loved. Dad was a jovial man and loved cracking jokes all the time inside the house and with his friends, even the ones from his childhood days in Calcutta. Many of dad’s friends are far younger than him but all crazy like him.

People I talk to are surprised that disease free people can die. Prana or the life force that runs through our body is the cornerstone of all ancient healing methods like yoga and acupuncture. More prana means better health and less prana means weaker pulse and weaker immune system making us vulnerable to diseases. No matter how healthy we are when there is no more prana left in our body we die.

Many cultures believe in rebirth after death and rebirth depends on karma of our past lives and the state of our mind when we die. Dad had his share of regrets but I hope a good death in this life will give him a much better next life.

The incredible secrets of astrology

Astrology is an integral part of Hindu life in India and probably of Hindus all over the world. Hindu culture is steeped in numerous Gods, temples, worship and mythological stories; in fact Hindu culture is so old that it has become a way of life. It is a mighty challenge to live in a country which is the most multicultural land in the world. Most aspects of Hindu culture are not comprehensible and sometimes we end up making fun of them in certain situations. When I traveled to Netherlands and returned to India after 6 months, my mind started asking questions about my life and everything in it in India.

It was during this time that my parents were trying to get me hitched. It all starts from matching the horoscope of mine with that of a woman. I was extremely apprehensive about the entire process. Astrology is all about mathematical calculations and mistakes can happen during calculations. An astrologer had almost screwed up a marriage proposal a friend had received. I was actually putting the most important decision of my life and my future in the hands of people whom I have never known before. That was the time when I decided to understand astrology better. I didn’t start learning astrology as such but I wanted to understand the background of astrology. There was a time till not so long ago when parents used to fix up marriages and the boy and girl used to see each other only on the first night of their union. There had to be some way to match the boy’s and girl’s personalities. What I wanted to know was about the parameters that are used in astrology to check for compatibility. One specific aspect caught my eye. From the horoscopes it can be found out if the lifespans of the boy and the girl would be affected if they were brought together in marriage. It struck me immediately. Energy and vibrations. Too much attraction or repulsion of energy can be catastrophic to one person or both. Then I realized that astrology is all about energy. In astrology it can even be checked if two people are sexually compatible. This is advanced science. But how is it possible? Big Data and Predictive Analytics, the current raging storm in technology has been quietly working in astrology for thousands of years. Patterns have been established by observing people’s lives and predictions are made from these patterns. For example, Jupiter in 8th house indicates high probability of incarceration which is proving to be true for people.

To make a horoscope, the essential components are date, time and location. Based on these factors, the positions of sun, moon and other planets in the solar system are calculated and from this data, their influence on each person’s life can be inferred. This points to a specific question. Are we born randomly or are we born on a specific date at a specific time in a specific location?  Ancient texts indicate that Gods incarnated on earth under these specific parameters and the heavenly bodies were aligned in such a way as to be helpful in fulfilling their purpose of incarnation. If this is true, aren’t we also born in the same way? All of us have unique experiences in life and not all of us get Jupiter in the 8th house. What does all of this mean? Karma in our present and past lives. Lord Rama killed a monkey king by deceit and Lord Krishna gets killed by an arrow from a hunter who happened to be the monkey king in one of his past lives. This is all about some sort of celestial accountability. No karma, be it good or bad goes unnoticed. We have to fulfill our karma in present life and also account for karma in our past lives for which we have to be born under certain conditions.

But one question bothered me. Why are we born under the influence of celestial bodies? Why doesn’t their influence affect the animal world? There could be only one reason. The frequency of energy of human beings is tuned to the frequency of energy received by earth from other celestial bodies. This means we are created specifically in this way which would mean that Mother Nature did not create us. This is why we are not part of the food chain. This is why we are destroying nature, a behavior that no other animal exhibits. Add to this the concepts of karma and rebirth. It is said that our souls are cleansed before it is proceeds to afterlife. This must mean that our memories and effects of celestial bodies are erased before we are reborn. Maybe this is why we do not have memories from our past lives but we still have to deal with karma from those lives without remembering about them. The influences celestial bodies bring to each person’s life is clearly connected to their karma which is why different people encounter success and failure in their lives in unique ways. Isn’t this a system put in place to manage and monitor us? Birth, life, death, and the cycle goes on and on. Aren’t we prisoners in the system? Is this the Matrix we are all stuck in and saints like Sankaracharya supposedly escaped from? What is the purpose of the system? Is this a model that works for beings with higher intelligence all across the Universe? Or is this a model experimented on us so that it can be replicated to the worlds of other intelligent beings? Most importantly, aren’t we the aliens on our planet?

Whatever it may be, nothing happens by chance or accident in the cosmos. There is a specific reason associated with every event. Research suggests that we make friends based on how closely our DNA resembles theirs. There must be a reason why out of the billion people on earth, we know only a few hundreds and very few of those hundreds end up as our good friends. I met a girl when we were both 6 years old and as we grew up I started feeling that if I let her go away from my life I may never find anyone else again. That’s exactly what happened. Intuition? Connection from a past life? I may never know. All I have with me is a haunting feeling that there is some sort of connection with her. What’s worse, our horoscopes may have matched perfectly well.

Questions were twirling in my mind after I returned from Netherlands. No astrology exists there but life is better by a 100 times. Don’t celestial bodies affect people there? I realized later that they do. The differences I observed have been created by us only. India is bursting at her seams with population growth. It is impossible for social benefits to reach all people. Everything is controlled and managed in Netherlands so there is prosperity. But this doesn’t mean celestial bodies and karma have no bearing on their lives. They simply don’t know enough about all of it to consider their influences in their everyday life. The system works precisely everywhere. Different skin color, races, religions, castes, the system keeps us divided perpetually so that we are chasing our lives all the time and never get to even know that a system that controls us is in place. Who runs this show? Would be fun to exit the system and meet the Great Manipulator.

 

Dissecting first impressions and their consequences

I ran into the article in the below link and looks like the objective of the author is to sabotage the adage “First impression is the best impression”.

https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Why-First-Impressions-Are-Often-Wrong

First impressions do not make any significant impact about any person or situation in my mind. Forming first impressions are fine as long as we are not going to have relationships of any significance with those people. If we are going to have even a conversation with someone once, it is better not to be judgmental about that person based on first impression and look forward to the conversation with an open mind.

What we need to understand is that we are all connected at the cosmic level. Doppelganger effect is not an accidental phenomenon. There should be a reason why 9 people in the world look similar to each other. Our human forms must be getting created from a finite number of templates. There isn’t anything to be surprised at this. Tigers all look the same, so do Zebras. What differentiate them are their stripes which are unique, just like our finger prints. So there are common and differentiating factors among all species in the Universe. I had read a long time back that when a man looks at a woman, he is not simply admiring her physical appearance. He is trying to figure out how fertile she is. When a woman looks at a man, she is trying to see if he has the characteristics to become a good companion. Both are results of nature at work. What the man does ensures that procreation happens and our species survives. What the woman does ensures that her children get the attention, protection and nurturing of their father. All of this happens in the first look itself but we are unaware of it because that’s how our body is designed to function.

We do not really need to strive to create first impressions about people we come across. We have those features designed within us already. Our hormones attract or repel hormones from other people which help to set the comfort levels we have with people we see. Our eyes are said to be the mirrors to our souls. What we think and feel will reflect in our eyes. This is why poker players train to have “poker eyes” so that their eyes do not reveal what their next move would be. Research studies indicate that we tend to look towards the left side when we are recounting straight from our memory and towards the right side when we are putting together a series of events and explaining a situation. This is used to identify if someone is lying and forging facts during interrogations. The firmness of the hand’s grip is an indicator of self-confidence and the confidence one has in the other person. Drooping shoulders, bent spine, fiddling fingers all are indicators of lack of confidence. How we judge people is also based on our own personality, upbringing, the environment we grew up, the type of people we normally associate ourselves with and societal influences such as skin color, race, caste, religion and so on. There are numerous parameters we use to analyze a person in a single look. But everything in this world is situational. Any or all of the indicators could also be false flags because that person is not able to be himself due to circumstances. This is why first impressions could be misleading.

I believe there is something more innate about us which is beyond our comprehension. For those who believe in rebirths and reincarnations (of which I am a firm believer), we also have the ability to know who are the right people and who are not either from our relationships or through our experiences of dealing with people in our past lives. What we are experiencing and feeling through our lifetimes are also data in the cosmos and this data should be existing somewhere from where we can reuse it. All of these could be contributing factors when we form those impressions about someone in milliseconds. This could be what we call as gut feeling or intuition. Love at first sight is one possibility. It could also be that our body is going into self-alert mode to ward off potential threats.  I read in an article that we usually bond with people whose genetic structure resembles more closely to ours. There is simply too much that we do not understand about our anatomy and body functions. Forming first impression is not a one dimensional activity. There are too many parameters involved to draw conclusions based on just the concept of physiognomy.

Leaving our imprints in the sands of time

This is something I had read on Facebook a while back and every time I think about it, my mind gets shaken. If there was a planet somewhere in the universe that was behind time measured in number of years on Earth by 65 million years and if there were living beings on the planet who could observe Earth, they would be seeing dinosaurs and the calamitous asteroid strike that destroyed them. This can be so true because light from supernova explosions that occured deep in the Universe millions and even billions of Earth years back is reaching us only now. So if we consider a planet that is a few thousand Earth years ahead of us, then the planet’s inhabitants might be seeing our future. What this essentially means is, if we are able to traverse through the Universe, we would be able to take snapshots of our planet throughout it’s life time. Sounds crazy? Yes it does. Now what should we understand from this?

First of all, we should stop thinking in terms of time. Time is simply a measurement based on a spacial body’s rotations and revolutions and it varies from one body to another. In the dark void of the Universe, time is immeasurable and immaterial. What this translates to us is, there is no good or bad time to do anything. Since we do not know if the life force or spirit within us is confined to our planet only, we should also stop counting our age. By measuring time and everything in terms of time, we have created perpetual walls around our minds from where what comes forth is only constricted thoughts. If we learn to manage our time properly and know how to do the things in our lives effectively, we do not need to live by the needle of our watches or the clocks of our mobile phones.

There is a whole lot of hope riding on our desire to become space travellers and loads of money and effort is being spent to leave our foot prints in our solar system and beyond. But to what end? When we calculate time in millions and billions of years, it says two things. One, we are allowing the monstrosity of distance to stifle us from thinking and seeking knowledge beyond the realm of what we know now and two, the technical knowledge we have now is simply not good enough for space travel because it is doing nothing to reduce our perception of distance and time.

I happened to read recently about the ancient Egyptian belief that three things essentially constitute a human being, body, life force and a personality which is unique and created in the life time. When we die, the life force goes away but the personality remains. No wonder that in Hindu tradition, when rituals are done yearly for the deceased in the families, the crows who answer the beckoning to eat the offerings of the rituals are considered as reincarnations of the dead because no matter what life form the dead may take, the personality will remain the same and that’s why the crows respond to the calls. Mummification of ancient Egyptian Pharaohs and high priests and their eventful burials with large quantities of food and wealth along with servants was supposed to be help them in their after life. But ancient aliens theorists are claiming that the bodies were preserved that way because Egyptians believed their Gods would come back some day and they have the power to give life force to the dead, so the buried ones could be brought back to life with their same personalities.

We are all essentially trying to leave behind a legacy of our own in the world, which is why we are always striving to achieve more. But nothing stays forever in the sands of time. In our world, everything is open to interpretations and the legacy we leave behind today may not be interpreted in the same way 50 years later. The birthday of Mahatma Gandhi, who spearheaded India’s freedom struggle, is now remembered more as a “dry day”, when shops selling alcohol are all closed down.
The value of everything in the world diminshes with the passage of time. If we can see the past, present and future of our planet from other far away planets in the Universe, how do we define what is true and what is false and what would we believe in? What happened, what is happening or what might happen? So essentially, everything fades into nothing. What would remain is the personality we create for ourselves. An endearing personality would live on through the thoughts of people who knew us and if we choose to believe in rebirths, a well developed personality will help us no matter what life forms we take. There are no other signatures that will stand the test of time.

Deciphering death with a dash of science

Death, the final frontier. Something we have no answer to. The biological clock keeps ticking, no matter what. As we age, the rate of regeneration of our body cells slows down as against it’s rate of death. I read recently that scientists are working on ways to decrease the rate of death of body cells which can possibly increase our lifespan. This is science which most people do not understand or care about. We have in a way accepted that some day our bodies will return to nature. What is mysterious and what matters is our soul and what happens to it after we die.

Scriptures of ancient religions have their own definitions of death. I am clueless about where the concept of afterlife came from. Then it was quite easy to build up the afterlife worlds of heaven and hell. The question we need to ask is why was all this created? To draw the boundaries of society and to create and maintain a sense of fear. If we do not live our lives as per the norms of the society, our actions will be weighed and then it will be decided if we go to heaven or to hell after we die. Do we have any definite proof of this? No. So logic says heaven and hell was a result of an intense and sustained drive of certain concepts into our psyche.

The concept of life, death and afterlife is one of the backbones of Hinduism and rebirth or recycling of life is it’s fulcrum. Apparently life takes the human form after many cycles through animal lives and the life of a human is ordained only to the purest of souls. The natural transition from a human life to the next life is freedom from the cycle of rebirth and the merger of our souls with the Almighty. This was lost as we descended into the age of Kali when our souls were engulfed by the seven sins. Similar and elaborate accounts of life, death and afterlife abound in all other ancient cultures. Vikings believed that death while sleeping or when their eyes are closed will take them to hell. So they always looked for ways to die in battle.

Let’s put science to work here and see how it stacks up against these timeless concepts. Our soul, like everything else in this world is made up of energy. I have first hand experience of it when I did acupuncture for my troubled back. According to the chinese concepts of medicine, when flow of energy stops through a part of our body, it is when that part becomes sick. Acupuncture simply releases that energy. I was sleeping away wherever I went for the next four days. This proves energy exists and powers our body. Suppose, like a nuclear fusion reaction, the fusion of sperm and egg produces energy that envelopes the embryo. The energy grows along with us and reaches an optimum state where it can sustain our body. As long as the rate of regeneration of our cells is greater than it’s destruction, our soul keeps powering our body. As we grow older, our body cells wither and die and does not get replaced. When our body can no longer hold on to the energy, it exits our body and we die. Now to the concept of rebirth in Hinduism. Let’s say every good deed adds more energy to the soul. But there will be bad deeds as well which will diminish the energy. So the good deeds should outweigh the bad ones. Such a soul will be on the ascendancy through it’s several lives and will finally reach a human. Any more addition to this energy would mean that there is no body on earth to hold on to so much energy. If we correlate this with the age old concept that the best souls become stars in the sky, it could mean that the energy of the pure soul is massive enough to create a star. Sankaracharya, the great Indian sage and scholar disappeared from the earth. Does that mean the energy of his soul may have engulfed his body? Conversely, when a human with his measuring pan tilted towards bad deeds die, the diminished energy can only enter an animal and the whole cycle has to be repeated.

Now what is it that we are really scared about death? In the hindsight, our age old belief that our souls are monitored and regulated. Simple energy management is done and maintained in the universe by default. What intimidates us is that the impression of the physical life we lead may be passed on to our souls and carried into our next lives. This is where the concept of heaven and hell instills fear and uncertainty. This requires an elaborate energy management system in place. Should we live in the fear that someone is out there managing all this energy and weighing every action of our lives? Isn’t this the God we are actually seeking?

The key question is, do we have to worry about any of this at all? Do we know how to make our souls pure? No. Is there anything called pure black or pure white? No. Everything is in shades of grey. What is right for me may be wrong for someone else. So can we ever control how our deeds will be judged in our afterlife if at all it is happening? No. If we decode death, will the concept of God lose it’s relevance? If we want to indeed believe that there is a super power controlling our energies, why can’t we believe in it with respect rather than fear? Isn’t it easier to lead a life devoted to making the world a better place for all living beings and go? Isn’t that much easier to do than live with the seven sins and all the baggage that comes with them? The choice ultimately is between celebrating every passing birthday and as a friend says, mourning the approaching death with each passing year.