Who am I?

Who am I? I was born and shall die. The intermediate life is time bound. All our actions are bound to the concept of time, call it the kala-chakra if you wish. What is TIME? To me the answer lies in everything we see around the world. Take H2O for example. Water exists in liquid form. When supplied with a stimulus we call ‘heat’, it is transformed into vapour. It exists as vapour till such time as the heat is not taken away from it. What is heat we do not know…. But we only know that the state of the matter called ‘H2O’ is altered based on the temperature, which we may call the ‘heat scale’. Though it amounts to over simplification, if I draw an analogy here, human experiences are within the realm of time. The upper and lower extremities of one part of the range, are defined by birth and death. Between this period a physical human being exists in this form that we perceive. Beyond this period, the stimulus of time makes the soul change form. What form we acquire is beyond our perception when we are in the current form.

That brings me to another question. If we only change forms, then what about our existence? What are we here for and what is our goal? What is the reason for our existence? This is a matter of speculation and we have a lot of beliefs in our country. What I believe in is my interpretation which I am sharing here.

There is a scale of enlightenment, a ladder to ‘Moksha’ that exists in order to rate our performance. Our knowledge and understanding of universal truths, self evaluation, betterment, improvement and ultimate realization are the tools to climb this ‘ladder’.
The ‘good karma’ we do is the pluses we earn and the ‘bad karma’ we do is the minuses we suffer. These are determined by laws which we inherently are always aware of. Our conscience reminds us about them at every instance. The power of choice or the will given to us is what takes us one up or down in the ladder. As we make mistakes, we re-evaluate. If we rectify the error and improve ourselves we progress. If the wrong becomes a habit and then a part of our personality, we deteriorate. Escaping the ‘personality’ or ‘nature’ that we think we are born with and which we so often sight as excuses for our behaviors, is what progressing up the ladder is all about.

When born into physical existence the human being is burdened by his previous ‘karma’ which manifests itself in the present life in various forms like the situations we face, the nature or personality we are endowed with, our abilities plus there is also the strength of our inner voice- the conscience. The conscience is always talking with us. Whether we hear it or not depends on how much we have strengthened it. The more we hear its words, the stronger it becomes. The stronger it becomes, the better it guides us smoothly through the maze of life to accumulate pluses and then climb the ‘ladder’. When we attain ‘Moksha’, is defined by the moment when all we hear is the words of the conscience. This may be put as becoming one with the conscience. The conscience clearly is nothing but the universal reality. It exists within each one of us. It cannot be true that one person’s conscience contradicts another’s. It always speaks the universal language of right and truth. The personification of the conscience is God. He is said to exist within each one of us and we are said to unify with Him when we achieve enlightenment. It is said that He guides us through difficulties showing us the right path. That is what God is. Our very own conscience. Every phenomenon ranging from ESP to intuition, kaliyuga to extraordinary powers can be explained based on this. Well I shall leave them to some other time…..