Musing With Thoughts
Jiten Roy
We all heard the phrase - mind is a terrible thing to waste. What is this object? It has no physical presence in our body; yet – we are so much influenced by this object. German Philosopher, Emanuel Kant, once said that – he was afraid of two things in this world: 1) the star-studded sky, and 2) the conscience. He said that whenever he looked at the sky, filled with billions of stars, at night, it reminded him of his insignificance in this world. What is this force that controls orbits of billions of stars? He said that - whenever he did something wrong, someone from inside him warned him. Even though this force resides inside him, yet it is so much bigger than him. This force knows about his limitations and inabilities. What is this force? According to him, the origin of these two forces is the same. We cannot see this force, but we can feel its presence. This force can be viewed only through imagination; spiritualists try to comprehend it through meditations and yoga.
The question is - what is our conscience? Perhaps a judgment or a decision - that emanates from within our body. It's hard to know where it comes from. Our body functions through various organs which are controlled by Brain. The brain makes most of our decisions based on the information sent to the brain by our sensory organs. The decision making process is completely automatic. If we imagine our body as a sophisticated computer system, brain will represent the processor. Then, just like computer, perhaps our brain uses logical functions to come up with various responses. Perhaps it uses some sort of Boolean operators, like IF, THEN, OR, BUT, etc. Boolean Logic works like this - IF the input information is this THEN do this (operation), OR do that (operation), etc. Computer algorithms and software are written by some people. Who writes algorithms and software for our brain? We can assume that our creator writes the software before we are born.
If our creator writes the software then why are so many lives born with faulty algorithms? According to the theory of reincarnation – whatever we are born with is as per our deeds in the previous lives. The logical meaning of this statement is that – our algorithms get refined in each life-cycle, which is nothing but the theory of evolution.
In Bhagbad Gita, our physical, mental and emotional conflicts are depicted on the backdrop of a war. In real life – the Chariot (Roth) is my Life, Arjun is my Soul, and Shree Krishna is my Conscience.
If Shree Krishna is our conscience then - why do some people commit heinous acts that others cannot even imagine? The answer to this question is that our conscience (Shree Krishna) only provides advice; our soul (Arjun) has the ultimate power whether to take or reject those advises.
Our brain computes the gain vs. the loss for accepting or rejecting our conscience. People tend to reject conscience when the gain is quite significant. Of course, there are people who normally will not reject conscience. The degree to which someone will act against his/her conscience varies from people to people. Good news is that – majority will not violate the conscience.
Most computer software is written in such a way that users have the ultimate power to make a major decision. Interactive software has 'override' function. With the help of this function, users can reject certain logical decisions made by the computer, just like we have the power to override our conscience. When one overrides computer decision, he/she takes the sole responsibility of its consequence. Similarly, when we override our conscience, we need to be ready for the consequence also. In this case, probably our burden of sin will be increased by this act.
Sometime I wonder about how God communicates and keeps track of our souls on this earth. The best explanation I could come up with, so far, is as follows. God probably assigned a unique identification (ID) number for each soul, which can be compared with an IP address of a computer. IP address is assigned by IT people to identify a particular computer in the network. As we use internet to communicate with billions of computers throughout the world, God perhaps uses those unique IDs for telepathic communication with our souls. The process is again highly automatic.
Each soul contains two 'registers' (memory location to store data) – one to keep our good credits, and the other to keep our bad credits. When we do good deed – the counter in the good register gets automatically incremented. And when we commit sin, the counter in the bad register gets incremented. No one has access to these two registers in our soul, and no one can alter the content of these two registers. Based on the cumulative counts in these registers, a program makes the logical decision about the fate of that soul. For example, if the reading in the good register is greater than that of the bad register, the soul gets promoted, otherwise it gets demoted. The process is completely automatic. That's how a soul goes through evolutionary cycles until it achieves zero reading in the bad register. At that point, the soul attains 'Nirvana' and goes to the heaven; it never comes back to this earth. I tend to think that - when a child dies for whatever reason the soul straight goes to heaven because it has zero reading in the bad register; we tend to accumulate bad credits in our later part of life.
When someone says that by doing this or that one can erase all sins, I find it laughable. It just can't be so easy. Prayer to God (in English, Sanskrit, Arabic, or Hebrew) cannot do it either - because God does not understand a word we say. But, prayer can only help us prepare our mind and body to do good deeds. Our soul can only be salvaged through good deeds.
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