Man wants to be free. Freedom is seeking. Monks and saints renounce the world for freedom. What is freedom? Thinking about freedom, God, renunciation or meditation is like a blind man trying to see. It’s like the old parable, four blind men touching an elephant. One who touched its trunk said elephant is like a giant snake; likewise, everyone explained the elephant differently. Blind men become knowledgeable and they debate. You can win big debates without knowing about it. But when one saw the elephant, it was not like the description. Description is never the described. One can see by eyes and know the truth. That is the freedom. Buddha was once caught in this conundrum. He began by being an atheist. Non-believer of descriptions. After six years, one day he saw and was awakened by the truth.
Buddha called it “Shunyavada”. Emptiness. The earth, the stars and the cosmos are vast emptiness. Quantum mechanics describes the emptiness of particles what Buddha had discovered 2,500 years ago. Scientists hypothesise about the dark matter. They say that the universe is made of dark matter and dark energy; both make up 95% of the universe. Physicists argue the Higgs Boson God particle may bring doomsday and the planet will wipe out soon. Numbers of dark matter doomsday theories go around. How it began. Shiva calls the dark matter the form of all forms. The form from which everything comes and the form into which everything goes back. The womb of the universe. Scientists hover around theories of Big Bang, God particle, Symmetry particle, but it seems they are in a denial mode at the beginning of the story thinking about it like blind men. I suggest they should discover Shiva like Buddha did. The Rig Veda, in the Hymn of Creation, says what was there before creation, before the cosmos and existence of the universe and existence of God. It is worth reading.
The hymn was sung by sages in the Rig Veda more than 5,000 years ago. Physics may doubt the comprehension of agricultural communities. Science may think how the primitive and pristine world without a particle accelerator and space observatory could understand depths of existence with such clarity. One thing is clear even if it was poetry, the poets must have been far better endowed with scientific comprehension than the Einsteins, Hawkings, and Bohrs put together. As the hymn goes, “Then even non-existence was not there, nor existence. There was no air then, nor the space beyond it. Then there was neither death nor immortality, nor was there then the torch of night and day. There was that One then, and there was no other. At first there was only darkness wrapped in darkness. All this was only unillumined cosmic water. That One which came to be, enclosed in nothing, arose at last, born of the power of heat. In the beginning desire descended on it — that was the primal seed, born of the mind…”
Such beautiful unimaginable verse that explains to the modern world that which is. Hindus always call it that which is. Gods are the later creations after the world was created. Gods came from fear. When the light was created, the sun rose. But in the night darkness persisted. Gods were created by men. The fear of the beast created tiger Gods.
The hymn says, “The darkness wrapped with other kind of darkness.” Darkness that we know is opposite of light. That’s fearful because your mind is afraid of darkness. Sages who sung the hymn refer to another kind of darkness that which is not the absence of light but that which pervades all that which is. Modern physicists are enamoured by the word — dark matter. Hindus believe Shiva is the dark matter. He is the only non-being. Who is beyond existence. He is that which is. It is a beautiful parlance.
The hymn says, “The creation was hidden in emptiness seen when we look up at the space between the stars.” The emptiness. “In watching the emptiness a desire arose, the desire that generated the heat, that stirred the whole thing, and creation began.” The hymn says, “Before creation there were no distances, no places, no above no below, no dimensions, no measurements.” From eternal emptiness creation began. After creation, space was created, with time and space the creation was defined. Emptiness filled the space. Space between atoms becomes infinite. Science tells us that we can reduce the space between particles but their mass remains the same. This is how they perceive the world has emerged, the universe was created and the universe is moving.
What was discovered 5,000 years ago, science may dub it primitive. But who is primitive if that was the scientific comprehension 5,000 years ago. Modern science is hallucinating about dark matter and lives in denial of ancient sciences. In fact, the mind is primitive. Creation is new. Your thoughts are ghosts. Your existence is new. Existence doesn’t age. Mind ages. Scientists keep on making complex theories. Mind is lost in the trickery of the mire. Mind only wants to solve the most complex things. That’s where the ego is ballooned. It does not believe in simplicity. Existence is anew. Every moment is new. Every moment has infinite space and time in it. We live in the moment only. Beyond this moment we don’t exist. We exist right now in this moment only. The next moment is a trick. This moment can be extended till eternity. Moment is like a vertical plunge in a horizontal space and time, therefore, it is beyond space and time. It exists without the time and space. That is what Buddha calls emptiness.
Existence is your reflection. Light is a source that would be depleted. Darkness is a resource infinite. The Rig Veda says that there was no light or the opposite of light. Light is born on earth as a backlash of eyes. If eyes would not be there, light wouldn’t be born. Ears are born as backlash to sound. If there were no ears sound would not be there. Everything is relative. Material universe is the body of an absolute mind that which is. Mystic master J. Krishnamurthy says, “Universal mind and human mind will be one when there is freedom.” When the mind is empty the movement of creation happens in it.
To change the course of mind, balance of light and darkness is needed. Darkness brings a balance. All religions perceive God as light. To be absolute peace you need to tread the middle path Shunyavada. Just sit in darkness and enter darkness with open eyes. Mind will import images of beasts, ghosts. Soon they will vanish. You and darkness will remain. Let it enter your heart. Darkness will balance your life. It will bring inertia to your fleeting life. It’s a great healer.
