The New Year  2002

The Xmas article I wrote a couple of weeks ago was on The One Consciousness, the fact that all of us are really one and the concept of duality and separateness, Blacks and Whites is just an illusion.

For the New Year, I would like to put a thought forward on how you think about Time itself.  If there is just the perennial NOW, then the separateness of time is just an illusion also.

So lets see how we can attack this conundrum to have it make sense at least sense enough that one can give it a greater amount of thought than one usually does.

I was speaking to a friend one day and the topic of conception came up. He said, there is no such thing as conception. It is a long slow process of transition from two opposing but attracting elements, which when they meet, appear to become one, by first causing, once uniting, separation of cells over and over again. But he asked, if one was to take 10,000 still, time laps photographs of the sperms journey into the egg, at what photograph can one honestly say there is such a “time” that conception takes place.

Is it when the head of the sperm touches the outside of the ovum, or at picture number 450 when the head is on the inside of the ovum, or perhaps even conception takes place when the dominant sperm has found his target at picture number 340. Could conception be when the ovum divides into two cells? Nice, but remember we have these thousands of photos, and perhaps the dna of species human does not take place until there are 4 cells. That would be at photo number 2350. Still though we cannot prove that conception has occurred yet.

This argument was put forward primarily because of the debate going on about abortion, when conception takes place, and when is a fetus a human, and also - WHEN IS A HUMAN A HUMAN?

So now we march on with our photography and wonder at what stage a human is actually and completely formed.

Surely it can’t be just because there is a leg or an arm, or the fact that we can see the womb babe sucking its thumb. After all, a human without arms or legs, is still considered human. So we know that arms or legs have nothing to do with it.

Take for instance as an extreme case, which may happen one day soon, you were to arrive home and your wife calling from the kitchen, asked you how your day went. You would reply and have a conversation with your wife who was in the kitchen. Removing your coat in the hall and still discussing the days events with your wife, you walk into the kitchen and find that your wife is nothing more than a head stuck up on top of the refrigerator. Is your wife still a human being?

Be careful, because you can’t argue that a human being has arms and legs, as we know we have many who have not, yet they are still considered human.

When then, would  one consider a human NOT human. I guess most might say, when one does not have the complex mind or consciousness that humans have. Still not really good enough, because we have many people who have virtually no mind left and we still consider them human.

Perhaps one has to be born a human with all the capabilities in tact, so that once labeled a human, no matter what dire losses they incur in the future they will always remain human. No that can’t be it either, as we have many born with few human attributes intact and we still consider them human, albeit labeled as a disenfranchised human.

Where in fact in this long transition of 10,000 photographs did conception take place, the fetus become human, and the human ceases to be a human. In other words what constitutes a human being?

In all this, was there ever a conception in the first place. If so, at what stage did it take place. Name the photograph. You can’t do it. No-one can say. We are just so used to accepting authority’s rules for certain stages of this transitional life.

The spiritualist may say that the human has always existed and each transition made is nothing more than the analogy of you changing your suit each day of the year. In that case there would definitely be no conception and no birth of a NEW human, just the transit from one overcoat to another.

No, not re-incarnation, as that implies a certain amount of carried over conscious memory. An impossibility as memory needs a brain to function in. Mind and brain is something that develops as the human develops. We know there is no brain to carry memory after death.

Now others have said to me, why this is just silly. Absolutely silly to even think about it, as we know that as soon as the one Mother, becomes two, Mother and child, you have a new life. That person is missing the point... the fine point. Does human life always exist or is there a beginning to it with each birth?

Another asked, but surely the dna from the sperm would be altered with the dna from the ovum, and if one could snap the photo at the point the dna changed, then you would have the point of conception at least, because the new life form held within that new dna would be new life.

One day we will be able to find the precise photograph that the dna was altered. We will know its mapping in each sperm and ovum. A rather difficult task as there are some 55 billion base pairs of dna in each cell.

With the new computer advancements recently, this task looks as though it could be accomplished readily.

It is not quite as easy as our religious friends would have us believe to discover conception and to pinpoint new life and equally as difficult to call abortion murder.

What for example, if the Bible is correct, when it says that God breathed life into Adam and made him a living soul. I would think then it would mean that a new born must take its first breath before it became a living soul. We surely don’t want Zombies running around, and one would think nothing of killing them FOR THEY ARE NOT HUMAN, until that first breath is taken.

So perhaps the hoopla about abortion is a misnomer. It’s just that one should question authority and not blindly accept what we have been told.

Back to Time. We can see how transition bears some evidence “in retrospect” only of a time lapse, but while one is in the moment, time ceases to exists for you. It always exists for others who are not in the moment, so they will see you existing in time.

For those of you who studied the Yantra course will have seen the evidence of a 4 year that the world has just passed through, and now we enter into the vibrational 5 year  which you can look into your notes and see what the influences of that vibration will bring.
On a personal level, you can also find your vibrational year in 2002. Executing its lessons is always a wise thing to do, because it keeps the transitional process from one vibrational transition in correct order.

Being a good gardener is rather easy providing you plant the seed in season and care for it along its transitional route to full flower and harvest of seed.

To be out of step with your relationship with the universe can bring about drastic results, whereas, barring world events, one’s life should run along quite smoothly bearing good and healthy fruits.

It seems in physics and in Yoga also, our world is a series of still pictures. What we see is one frame at a time before us and because of its speed, it appears to be a flowing movie picture. This can be easily understood when one thinks of a movie passing one frame at a time 72 frames per second through the projector, to make the movie appear in real motion.

That is exactly how our world is perceived. Due to our incapability of speeding up our mind fast enough to see these still shots one after the other we too think the world is in continual motional.

Now speed the mind up to a high vibrational level and one centers on each frame, seeing it for what it is. At this point, time stops. It ceases to exist for you, and in this quasi psycho spiritual-scientific type of intellectual samadhi, you can experience the NOW.

So it is interesting to just think about “thinking about” time, and do things really begin and end in time, or are we all just one continuum.

Think again for another moment, to uphold the argument that we are all one, just imagine again, a room filled with 1000 different races. Then imagine that you had to separate into various rooms each race belonging to itself.

Now imagine that camera again, taking 10000 pictures to discern at what point original man (we assume the African) transited into other races either by intermarriage, or geographic dispersal. At what point did the African become the Caucasian, Asian and the Mongoloid?

To find that point of separation would be impossible. We are all brothers under the skin.

It is easy to place the obvious Black man in one room and the obvious white man in another, but what do we do when the differences become so small that we do not know where the differences are, and is that white man really black, and the black man really white?

This is a trial at doing a philosophical query, and as we found with the sperm and ovum, there is not a photograph we can stop in time and say, “This is where conception took place.”

We cannot say about another, unless it is glaringly obvious, that he or she is different than me in color, or shape and or size, but we can say with this new found query, that we are underneath it all, the same and ONE.

All the rest, the cultural, the topographical differences that contribute to a persons appearance and the language differences are the real illusion.

The illusorary differences that take up so much of our perception is also scientific. The DNA of man and ape is virtually the same, except for about 10 percent that go into making up the differences in the species. The same figure goes for a tree.

The DNA of races are identical as identical as can be, with such slight variations from race to race and individuals within the so called same race, that one cannot differentiate. We are the same one to the other.

So over TIME, the illusion of differences (maya) has caused a great separation in man, but by returning to the timeless NOW in samadhi, Maya ceases.

Happy 2002 to everyone.
Swami