Disclaimer: The thoughts and ideas mentioned in this article are totally mine. These views are not against any individual or groups. Each one has their own views and opinion on the topic and I respect them as well. I would like to have a free and open mind to assimilate more ideas on the topic which is as vast and vivid as the opinion on the topic.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us most. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in all of us. And when we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. – One of the speech by Nelson Mandela
If there is one discussion that would evoke emotion from each one of us, will be the topic of God. Nothing apart from the essence of the almighty is so well ingrained within us that we sometime tend to forget or realize the source of it. It hardly matters whether an individual has grown up in developed countries like America, Britain etc or in civilization as barbaric and savage as in the jungles of Africa. Each civilization has manifested, that belief in god is something that have come up irrespective of the region, social need or any particular purpose of it. Each civilization has a different history to tell accompanied with wide variety of genetically wired humans in each of it. It is sometime difficult to compass the concept of god being so alike in each of the civilization as if the source is one. Still, people around the word over ages have believed in polytheism, concept of multiple gods. Each religion has a different god, Hinduism itself have some few million gods to worship.
As a logical thinker, I have always wondered how god can be different in each language and society given the fact that I understood the purpose of god as a father figure to combat the eternal feeling of fear. I have always believed that fear is something that is inherently human and any other form of emotion arises with manipulation of fear.
As remarked by Richard Dawkins in his much acclaimed book “The Selfish gene”, every individual or rather gene is propelled by selfishness to survive and evolve and not the altruism that was the previous popular belief. The selfish nature of the gene in my opinion is because of the inherent fear of survival. People have the liberty to choose some belief and this is the one that I decided to choose.
Having said that, I could never comprehend the meaning of god given the fact I was always confused between which god to worship or believe in. later in my school days I came across the concept of monotheism that is belief in one god. I found it much easy to convince my logical mind but along with the concept came up confusion to decide the form of god I should believe in. For years my mind wandered from one form to another trying to hold on to a state which could be permanent fixture of the form of god. I did not find any. Innumerable deities for innumerable purposes could not convince me the reality and validity of their existence, and slowly I chucked out any possibility of the existence of human god, to the extent of being an atheist.
But might be we humans are programmed in such a way that we can not escape the bond between us and the god. We all are tangled in a huge and complex thread that connects each one of us, like bubbles in an ocean. That might connect with god as well. Somewhere in my heart I felt an eternal quest for that search, search for the meaning of our existence, search I had envisioned in some wild nights staring at the stars when I was a kid. The quest was lost in the worldly battles and I convinced myself with the denial of any such existence of god firmly.
As a child I was more intrigued by the mystic philosophy of science rather than the vivid display of religious and mythological doctrines. And I soon decided that science would be the ultimate answer to the existence of life, as I had already failed in my quest to understand life reasoning it with the existence of god. Not that I made any specific effort to understand it but belief I feel is more powerful than the actual manifestation of the idea that you believed in first place.
Recently I read a book called “Code Named God” and my belief in science strengthened more. I felt science provided more logical answers and direction to the quest that I had long buried deep inside my heart.
Coming to science, we all know that each one of us is made of tiny particles called atoms which in turn made up of further small particles. Science has already shown that these particles are nothing but a form of energy. For that matter any mass is just a different way to look into energy and nothing apart from it. They are the two sides of the same coin. The energy that we perceive in different forms is nothing but different fields acting at different level. Much recently it was believed that each field is different to other in terms of its properties and the jurisdiction of area where it acts. But with recent developments, the unified field theory allows all of the fundamental forces between elementary particles to be written in terms of a single field. The same field when acting at different temperature and distance gave rise to different energy levels which became the basic premise for the formation of matter and in turn the entire universe. It has been postulated that universe started some 15 billion light years ago with a big bang. But what happened just after the big bang? The disequilibrium created the big bang and the huge energy that was created expanded. With expansion, the energy level fell to a certain extent which gave rise to the creation of the first particle of the universe and then slowly atoms, molecules of hydrogen and subsequently each element came into picture. These elements took the form of universe we know it today.
But the question remains, why did big bang happen at the first place? It has been shown that the there are enough negative energy in the universe and the total energy of the universe is 0. So can something be created from nothing? Can zero energy give rise to something as vast and vivid as this universe? Who was present before the big bang to see it happen? Are we any way connected to that single point, just before the big bang? It seems to be taxing to our human mind.
Let me illustrate a simple experiment that was done to understand the non locality of the particle behavior. It is well known factor that to observe any incident, the observer has to be present in the near vicinity (Not considering other means that could make the incident visible). A particular laser was made to strike a crystal to create 2 entangled photons. With entangle, I mean these two photons were supposed to have properties that were dependent on each other. That is the property of one proton do not exists without the existence of the property of other photon. Once these two photons were created by the laser striking the particular crystal, they were separated in two different directions. That is the two entangled photons were now separated in space by quite a distance. This experiment although easy to illustrate was no simple feat given the fact the apparatus used were not recently developed, even though the theory of the experiment was postulated by Einstein to understand the grand unified theory or the theory of everything. Coming back to the experiment, it was observed that when one of the photons’ properties was changed, it changed the property of the other photon even though the other entangled photon was not connected to the first photon by any means and was separated in space. This experiment proved that to be connected to one another do not require being in the same space or even in the same time frame.
The experiment illustrated few very important property of any particle or field. That is a particle can be entangled to some other point which might be at the other end of the universe and still can behave in similar ways. And with that another question also gets answered. An event can happen in absence of an observer. Thus the occurrence of big bang was not dependent on the availability of any observer.
Regarding the concept I was discussing, how something could be created from nothing. Is it possible for zero energy to give rise of something as vast as universe? But we should understand that the word “nothing” do not have any significance. “Nothing” can not be seen in totality of itself. Absence of “something” gives rise to “nothing”. Zero can not be attributed just as nothing. It is mid point of positive and negative numbers. It is the starting point for two sides of positive and negative increments to the extent of infinity on the both side. It is opposite of infinity as well. If we understand the existence of universe as two extremes of positive and negative energies, it is not difficult to comprehend that zero might have given rise to whatever existing as of today.
With the advances in science it has been easy to understand the existence of a particle and the formation of the universe. We have been able to justify and understand the matter as it exists today in different forms and its relation with the energy and the fields. But why we are the “thinking being”, trying to understand our own existence. Is mind and matter one and the same or they are different?
As the great mathematician and philosopher “Descartes” made clear distinction between the thinking substance that distinguishes us as a man and the matter that makes up the physical universe including our own body. Descartes defined matter in terms of two properties only – extension is space (length, breadth, depth, time) and motion. All other apparent properties depend on the perceiver and are the result of the impact of physical objects on the sense organs. Mind as he proclaimed is essentially non-physical or incorporeal. The mind that makes us understand and question the existence of life is the mind that exists in each of us. It is something like mind trying to understand itself. It is more like understanding the link between us and the single point where the origin exists. He also argued that, in contrast to the physical world, the mind is an indivisible unit. This is also the philosophy of almost all the religion. So if mind is an indivisible unit, where does the source of it exist?
Or the source is same for both mind and matter. It is very unlikely that when the universe is so much over simplified in terms of its existence to a single point that it would have different sources, one for mind and other for matter. It is just a matter of time that we realise that both mind and matter are interwoven and interlinked and the existence of one is not possible in absence of other, similar to the experiments of the entangled photons. That is the existence of the entire material universe is not possible without the existence of the mind in each particle that exists within that material universe. Everything within the universe is being entangled to that single point of zero energy which is the source of all. We are nothing but part of that source and the source exists in each of us. Although separated by couple of billion light years our mind is still entangled to that point which is the source of everything. May be that we should call as god.
God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners. –Kierkegaard
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