--- 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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