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--- In tiruvengadam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, "sadagopaniyengar"
<sadagopaniyengar@xxxx> wrote:
> The Endless Entity
> 
> All things we see in this world have an end. This is a
universal law, applicable to all beings and things. What is created,
be it man or material, surely has an end too, says the
Gitacharya-"JAtasya hi dhruvO mrityu:" 
> However, there IS somebody who is not subject to these curbs and who
admits to no such fetters on His freedom. He is the Cosmic Timekeeper,
who cannot be subjected to restrictions of place or country, nor is
constricted by Visa formalities, and has no restriction regarding
inhabiting a single shareeram at a time. 

************************************

Dear SrImAn Sadagopan Iyengar,

It was very good reading your piece on the 'Endless Entity'. It
reminded me of an excellent piece of commentary that a favourite
author of mine, Sri.Eknath Eswaran, once wrote while explaining the
'nAma' "bhuta-bhAvana:" in the Sri Vishnu Sahasranama. 

Sri.Eswaran's book "The Thousand Names of Vishnu" (Jaico Publication,
Page 33) is a powerful work indeed and I am reproducing below from it
just to give you a vivid portrait of the same 'Endless Entity' of
yours which in the Sahasranamam goes by that wonderful name of
"bhuta-bhAvana:".

Regards,
dAsan,
Sudarshan

-------------------------------

Quote:

It is worth a few moments of reflection to grasp what it means to say
that God has become all things ("bhuta-bhAvana"). In an age that
tinkers with genes and specualates about the first 3 minutes of
creation, we may forget to wonder about the world we live in and how
little of it even our sciences can grasp.

We know for e.g. that light travels at about 186,000 miles per second.
We know that fact, yet it is quite another thing to understand it.
Imagine, as young Einstein did, that you had a long ray of light like
a commuter train, and that you could sit astride this ray as you sit
on the 5:15 express and travel at the speed of light. It would take
only a second and a quarter to reach the moon; one blink of an eye and
you would be there. In 8 minutes -- the time it takes to get to the
nearest supermarket -- you would reach the sun. Yet you would have to
sit there on that magical ray for 4 years to reach the nearest star,
and you could travel that way for 100,000 years and never get out of
our same old Milky Way. Imagine the expanse! Then for two million more
years it is just empty space -- no gas stations, no Holiday Inns --
until you reach the nearest neighbouring galaxy. There are believed
to be 200 billion galaxies within the observable universe, each of
them containing perhaps a 100 billion suns. It's not even the whole
picture, yet we still can't grasp it; we can't absorb what these
figures mean.

One science writer suggests, that suppose you are willing to work 8
hours a day, 7 days a week, no days off to tend to the yard -- and
begin counting at the rate of one number every second. It will take a
month to reach 1 million, a relatively small figure on our scale. If
you want to understand 1 billion, the writer says, keep counting in
the same way -- no coffee breaks, no vacations, no union slowdowns --
until the end of your life. I said to myself, "Yes, sir, I get the point".

Most intriguing, perhaps, is why astronomers are careful to say "the
observable universe". It doesn't mean only "That's all we can see for
now", as if someday, with more powerful telescopes in orbit beyond the
moon, we might be able to see it all. If Einstein was right, as a good
deal of observation still bears out, then we can never "see" the whole
universe. The speed of light itself limits us to a kind of bubble of
observation in space-time, beyond which we simply cannot perceive. No
messages can reach us beyond that bubble, and none can be sent. But
that does not mean there is nothing beyond; these are merely
restrictions on the delivery service.

Worse yet, as soon as we start looking any significant distance into
this bubble, we find we are seeing things not as they are but as they
were. Wherever we look in the starry sky, we are looking quite
literally at the past. One star appears to lie next to another, but
actually we see each of them as it was when that light set out on its
journey. One of those stars might have been destroyed centuries ago in
the explosion of a supernova; we cannot know. We devote special
attention to a star, analyse its spectrum to see what it is made up
of, guess at its past and future evolution, and while we are guessing,
that "future" has happened and the star may be gone! If it is a 1000
light years away, the news of its death would not reach us for a 1000
years. The Crab nebula represents the remains of a supernova explosion
observed by Chinese astronomers in AD 1054, but the actual explosion
took place about 3000 BC. Even the constellations whose names have
come to us down the ages may suffer from severe generations gaps: the
stars in them may be separated by thousands of years, as we measure
from here on earth. Space and time, bound together, inevitably limit
and distort the validity of what we can say about the universe.

But these dimensions do not apply to the Lord. In the Hindu scriptures
we find the provoking statement that this vast cosmos is merely one
thought of the Lord. That is as long as our universe lasts: one little
thought!

UNQUOTE

(thanks to Sri.Eknath Eswaran)
--- End forwarded message ---






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