It has been a long time since I wrote something random, something that has no immediate or any relevance. One writes because, well, one writes. That sort of thing.
On a walk this morning, for instance, a thought occurred to me, a short poem really, about myself. So here it is.
आप जो भी सोचते हैं मेरे बारे में
अछ्छा या बुरा
मैं उस से तो कम ही हूँ
Whatever you may think of me
Good or bad
I am invariably less than that
--Mayank Chhaya
***
I also thought about a wonderful conversation I had the other day with Dr. Tony Nader, a highly respected neuroscientist who also happens to be the successor to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and a passionate advocate of Transcendental Meditation (TM). In that I particularly enjoyed our exchange about a favorite theme of mine, the idea whether consciousness can be quantized. It is something I have ruminated and cogitated about for decades. I have always looked at human consciousness from the standpoint of quantum mechanics. It is in this context that I have been fascinated by the Buddhist idea of Kshanika or momentariness. I have written many posts about it. There was one that I wrote on February 25, 2017 that I particularly like. It bears repeating today.
The headline was : What hides between moments is our illusion of our existence
It is time to return to the “Kshanvaad” or the philosophy of momentariness. At its center is the astonishingly ingenious concept of Gautam Buddha that the universe is momentary and does not exist between moments. I have written about this frequently being quite conscious how quantum-like existence stood revealed to Buddha.
I describe this philosophy in Hindi as:
क्षणों के मध्य में जो छुपा है
वही तो हमारा भ्रम है
हमारे अस्तित्व का
(Kshanon ke madhy mein jo chhupa hai
Wahi to hamara bhram hai
Hamare astitv ka)
What hides between moments
Is our illusion
Of our existence
--Mayank Chhaya
I am as interested in the philosophy of momentariness as I am in quantum physics because both in their own way deal with an unresolved realm at the Kshan/quantum level. It is not my case that there is any intellectual affinity between the two. One was conceived of by the staggering mind of Buddha over 2500 years ago while the other a collective result of the work done by Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg in the early 20th century.
I find Kshanvaad calming in a strange way. Swinging from moment to moment like on vines in a surreal jungle of time is exhilarating. A vast majority of us negotiates swinging on vines for quite a long duration; some of us miss and fall in the void of illusion that we call death.
If the universe and the experience of the universe, including our own individual existence, is nothing but forever flowing discrete moments, then what is all this frenzy about anything? This has been my default response to everything in life so far. Of course, there have been times in recent years when familial responsibilities trigger a baser level response but as a single self, I have no particular response to anything.
‘Kshanvaad’ is part of the overarching Buddhist idea of Anitya or Impermanence. Those who believe in the traditional God-Us dynamic, as in most religions of the world, feel rather unsettled by the idea of Impermanence/Momentariness and hence perpetual fluidity of existence, its origin, its meaning and its resolution. As in quantum physics, we never really catch the essence of our existence. I have never felt unsettled by this. I ride discrete moments of existence like a highly skilled surfer or a vine leaper.
Some day I will write about the difficulty in the idea of Kshanika as to whether those moments are separable from the unfolding event, life and the universe if you will. I suppose this is enough esoterica for a Saturday morning. For me though it just moments that keep passing leaving an afterglow that too fades.