By: Noel H'ng
What is Life
Have you ever asked yourselves that good question?
What is the meaning of life? What defines life and death?
To some people, living means you are still breathing and your heart is still beating.
To some people, if your brain is still thinking, you are alive.
Some believed that you have never lived if you have not tried the best things in life. This includes owning and using the best things in the world, cars, properties, watches, art pieces.
Some also thinks that living means go around the world, travelling to most places in the world. If you have not been to corners of the world, you have not been to this world.
Another group would say that if no one remembers you after you die, you have never lived. You need fame, admiration, and remembrance.
Also, a fraction of people believe that living means making an impact to the world. leave a legacy to the world and the future generation. A revolution in anything will do, let it be technologies, belief, new drug formula, or philosophy.
All above are right, but something is missing. What is it?
Well, what is living?
First of all, we need to empty ourselves, and let go of all the existing paradigm and difference in cultural and religion belief. Let's explore into the root of life with an open mind.
First, start with our consciousness. This is what make us feel alive. The awareness. Some people call that our spirit, some say it is our soul, the mind, or brain activities.
We have 5 senses. everyone knows that. Lights comes through our eyes and the receptor cells convert the stimuli into brain and the information is interpreted. Sound travels through the ear and the signal is also transferred and interpreted. The sense of touch, pressure, cold, hot, pain etc, eventually traveled to the brain and interpreted. Chemicals stimulate the cells in the nostrils and in our tongues and the brain tells us smells and tastes.
Have you come across an instance that an item is in front of you, but you did not see it? When you have friend calling your name loud, but you just did not noticed? Your skin bleeding but you have not felt the pain until you noticed the would? Our brain is very interesting. The light, vibration, and pain signals are sent to our brain, but how could we not noticed them? This is where the consciousness come into place, how much awareness we have decides how much we are connected to this world.
There is a different between seeing and watching, hearing and listening, eating and tasting. The former is without consciousness, whereas the later do.
At this point of time, some people may have already gotten the idea. Whether we are alive or not, is decided by how much consciousness we have. How aware we are, or simply saying, how mindful we are.
The logical statement:
1. People connect to the world through senses.
2. Conscious awareness is the determinant of how much we are connected. Signal x awareness = connection. No matter how bright a light is, if awareness = 0, the person did not see it at all.
3. How much people connect to the world is determined by how mindful we are.
Why people do not appreciate free things? Why people are dying for one thing at one time, and bored of it after owning it for some time? Why is there a diminishing marginal utility in human behavior? The answer is direct: the conscious awareness in a thing is reducing, or there is no more conscious awareness in the thing.
Why some people owns many luxury cars in the world, stay at the most luxury mansion in the world, have many beautiful wives and kids with them, rich collections of arts and living the life of a king, and still feel emptiness in their heart, just like how King Solomon has described his life as a King to vanity? (Books of Ecclesiastes, Bible) He did not felt content and happiness even though he had the best things in the world with him. What Taoists called "Shen" (神), Buddhist called "Zen" (禪) are not mystical things. There is a reason Jesus said "Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom in heaven; and blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see god. (Matthew 5; 3 & 8).
Too much material will divert your attention and therefore your awareness and consciousness. Imagine you have 20 beautiful exotic cars. You only have 2 eyes, 2 arms, 2 ears, but one consciousness. Our brain can only focus on one thing at a time. How are you going to appreciate (build connection) with all 20 of them at the same time? Your "Shen", "Zen", awareness, or whatever you want to call it, will be diverted. When your awareness is diverted, your connection with the world turns lose, and weak. Having said that, the more you have, the weaker your connection is to the world, and you will reach a state that emptiness kick in. You have all the best things, but there is no happiness from them.
Wondered why some kids are so happy? These are kids who don't really own many things. They play with their toy, and spent plenty of time "connecting" with their toys, appreciating them. Why people would never appreciate free things?
Why the most expensive things in the world are the things you cannot get? Why Buddha said that greed is what make people suffer? This is because when we grow greedy, we put all our attention and awareness on imaginations that do not physically exist, something that we labelled as "future". When that happens, we have limited awareness available for "now", or the physical world that we are in. More scientifically, it refers to the stimulus that is coming through all our sensory organs at the very present moment. When we want a thing so badly, we are living in our imagination and disconnected from the real world. these are two different world, the "now" world is realistic, whereas the "imagination" world is abstract and non-existent.
The phrase "walking dead" describes people with heartbeats and walking around doing things, but with little to no awareness to their surroundings, the changes, the happening around them. These are people who are declared dead when their body is still living. This is what people said, "until the day I die, then only I realized I have never lived". These are the people who live in the future.
Time do not exist
Come to think of it, does future really exist? What is past, and what is time? Scientists and physicians has always tried to find a formula for time and prove its existence. I may not be a scientist, but what if I tell every one of you that Time do not exist, and it is just a mere illusion of our mind, our consciousness? To scientist who are trying to build a time machine, the biggest challenge to them is not to overcome the speed of light, it is to overcome the time paradigm in their mind that time do not exist.
The moment when we start to ask "what is time?", we have already made a mistake. We have assumed that it is something that exist, and having effect to the universe. We are thinking it as a variable, or a cause. In fact, time is a product of consciousness, a product of human mind - the effect.
Past; is memory, present, is sensing; and future, is imagination.
Things progress in the universe, and things happen relatively. For example, the earth revolved around the sun and goes back to the same position relative to the sun after making 365..25 rotations. For light to travel 299 792 458 meters, the earth would have made a 1/86,400 rotation, or 0.00898 degree turn. Things progress, and time is a result of measuring the progression of things happening relating to each other. In ancient times, people communicate time through the position of the sun. This is to form collaboration and synergy to prepare and overcome the basic living challenges such as when to hunt, when the season changes, etc.
Things progress, but the concept of time is just an illusion from how things progress, and time travelling cannot be truly achieved, even though human are able to travel faster than speed of light. Light travels in all directions. The same waves of light that hits you, your skin, your desk, and your room wall, has been reflected countless of times inside your room and probably the same strand of light has hit all things you know in your room before your conscious mind even can react. Now, let's say if you have a machine to travel at the speed of light, which direction are you supposed to travel in to observe the you 1 second ago?
Albert Einstein's law of general relativity is based on the observer's perspective, that light has traveled 299 792 458 meter in one second, and if you can travel at that speed , you will "freeze the time", by observing the "same strand of light" before things progress to another stage.
However, what will happen when time freeze? is it really that we are the only thing that moving around and everything else stop? No, when there is no time(progression), means there is no event at all, no light coming to our eye balls, no waves of sound travelling, nothing, nothing at all, and we goes into void. You will not have any conscious, your body do not exist, nothing exist in the time freeze. So, there is no such thing as freezing the time, because simple it cannot be observed, and by logic, then progression stop, it means no event, nothing happen in the universe , and nothing exist as there is no observer.
And time travelling is impossible for the fact that everything is relative. let's see you are between point A and point B, and you are travelling light speed from B to A. Everything is relative, remember? so you are relatively 0m/s faster than the light from point B, and if you turn your head around, your are observing the light from point A at doubled speed. So, the paradox is here: are you supposed to freeze in time or your are supposed to travel into the future?
Everything is connected
It seemed sidetracked a too much, but if you can see the relationship in all these, it is actually attached. I-Ching recorded that the world is created from singularity, before the modern scientist even realized it. It's said that from none there is singular extreme, and forms the two phenomena. (無極生太極，太極生兩儀，兩儀生四象.....)
To visualize, when there is no event, it is called eternity. there is no time, as there is no progression/ event. From there, there is singular extreme, for example, something called light existed. Since there is light, there is bright and dark. In this case, light is the singular, and the bright and dark are two phenomena, from which one is the present of light and another is the absent of it. It existed from observer's point of view.
Everything around us, is closely connected, there is not a singular thing that is independent. This is how the famous butterfly effect becomes valid. In Abrahamic religions (Judaisms, Christianity, Catholics, Islamics), it is also said that god is the creator of the world and there is only one god. God, is that singularity, or what you may call it, the source, Everything is created by Him and in Him, everything is connected back to him. Hinduism called this Karma, and Buddhism called this Cause and Effect. The singularity is the cause, the world we observe now is the effect.
Golden Rules
Since time do not exist, and the only thing that truly exist is the present moment. The sense of existence come from the stimulus from the sensory organs, multiplied by the conscious awareness. So, in order to truly live, we need to have all our consciousness on the very present moment. That means listen to the sounds around you, look at the things that comes into your eyes, feel the things that your skins are in contact with, taste whatever come in contact with your tongue, and detect whatever smell comes in to your nose.
"Do not have idol", as taught in the bible, is equivalent to what it's said not to be greed. when you focus on a single thing - maybe focusing all your awareness on single thing you see to the extend that you cant hear, cant smell, cant feel your skin; or thinking of a single thing in your imagination all day and night to the extend that you are totally disconnect to the stimulus at the present moment, you are as good as dead. You live where your consciousness is.
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