Saturday 3 November 2012

Concept of God. Let us understand scientifically…

During early childhood days my father made me worship God regularly, but gradually this strict discipline faded away in my life when I started questioning the reason for worship. I slowly became totally against idol worship.  I remember having a heated debate with my high school class teacher where he was trying to convince me to believe in such concepts. Although many tried, I never believed that some stone should be worshiped as God, but deep within I was wondering what people are doing. People say “God is all powerful, you need to surrender to him, you need to worship him daily, you need to do pooja, visit temples” etc etc, but no one were able to provide proper and logical explanation for what they are doing. The question: “What is God?”, always remained.

When I started understanding it in detail, I could make striking similarities between concept of God and the concepts had read in my physics text book during my school days. We all know the famous Newton’s law of conservation of energy which states “Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed; it simply changes from one form to another”. Wondering where is Newton talking about God here? Basically, what is called God is nothing but a generic name given to Energy and some people call it as consciousness. You are so and so but your generic name is human being, also exists animal being, plant being and so on. Similarly the highest idea of generalization is called ‘God’ or in scientific word ‘Energy’. Let me elaborate this concept little more.

Science is doing constant experiment to find the smallest particle. During my school days I was taught that it was atom and then during college I was told it was neutrons, and then it became quarks so on and so forth till it came to the recent ‘God-Particle’. From Einstein’s famous relation E=mc2 we know that for every mass there is energy. So every smallest particle has energy associated with it. Science is interested in this energy and trying to understand how to control this energy so that they can get more control on the matter. Through this control anything is possible. You can change the property of matter, make matter transform in to something totally different (what science calls ‘alchemy’), transfer matter from one place to another (what science calls ‘teleportation’) etc. This is exactly what our Vedas talk about but just that they called this energy as Prana and through realizing this Prana i.e nothing but complete understanding and controlling, we can realize God.

Because of the same concept there is nothing called non-living thing in our ancient science. Every non-living thing has energy but just that it is manifested in different ways. Just like energy comes in different forms-Kinetic, potential or electrical, chemical etc. Like every living being even non-living things die, just that its life span cannot be experienced fully in our life term. Think of all basic science lessons on erosion of stones, friction between materials leading to its destruction, rusting or oxidization of metal,  etc all these concepts give us just a glimpse of the life cycle of non living things. Ultimately even they disintegrate and go to the earth. When we say it disintegrates and goes to the earth we are saying matter is transformed or energy is transformed from one form to another.

Energy is everywhere, and similarly Prana/God is everywhere. Energy cannot be seen but just be experienced/felt, just like God. Now we know why many people say, rather very lightly “God is within you”. All that they are referring is Prana/Energy which is there in everyone. Some people know how to get good control on it where as many people doesn't  If you can completely control the energy within you, you can control any energy because eventually everything in the world is made up of tiny matter and by controlling energy you are controlling the tiny matter. People whom we call ‘Yogis’ are nothing but the Vedic name for our modern day scientists.

Day-by-day what science is explaining is the concept of Prana or God in our ancient texts. Finally science community realized it recently and aptly named the latest discovery as ‘God Particle’. Whether this is the end? Frankly even they don’t know. On a positive note, through this, people are getting some insight and understanding of our ancient texts. What Newton and Einstein explained is nothing but the age old concept recorded in Vedas around 5000+ year back. Just that they used right terms to explain modern community. Similarly this blog is my attempt to explain “What is God?” using right terms for modern community J.

I hope you enjoyed reading it. I would like to thank my good friend, my philosophy teacher, Research scholar - Swaroop Sharma, for giving me this concept of “God as Energy or consciousness”, through which I could relate back to science to understand it better.

Still, why do people go to temple? Why they do idol worship when they have God within them? This is a topic for another blog J. Again I will try to bring out scientific reasons for this to the best of my knowledge.

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Please visit Yogavijnana website to know more about us.

Related Blog post
What is Thyaga? The Concept of letting go

23 comments:

  1. for the last paragraph to be answered, the entire living existence, every human being out there must realize the "just explained god understanding" at the same time and get liberated, which is not scientifically even a probable thing, hence questioning the IDOL is fine but questioning the faith that drove people to put it in the first place will be futile.....

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    1. I will not try to be judgmental about others personal opinion, idea is to understand complete essence before doing something.

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    2. Dear Aishwarya,

      you are referring to Islam without any proper knowledge. to make things clear, let me in short explain what mecca is. Mecca is a place which Muslims use to set a reference point for direction when praying so that everyone is facing in the same direction. It has nothing to do with idol because Muslims treat it as a mere stone and it has no meaning to it except treat as a stone.

      With respect, please don't take this as an argument of religion. I just wanted to clear a concept i thought u misunderstood.

      After all we are all humans first and live as one no matter what religion we follow or whether we follow any.

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    3. @Saraf: well said last sentence.
      Idea here is just to logically understand what we are doing.

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    4. No offence Saraf. I completely and support all human sentiments.

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  3. Satish Prathaban3 November 2012 at 22:41

    Nice article Vinay. Our ancient yogic science had explored and recorded everything what still the modern science is still trying to find. Time / space issues etc. Regarding the idol worship before the bakthi yoga could start there was a good understanding of "god making". They energized the idols to enhance the qualities of human in whatever the activity they went into. Like war, prosperity or even the liberation. Idols where created for butha shuddi etc.

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    1. Thanks Satish :). "Energized the idols" is the perfect way to put it. I did not know that it was used only during the activity they went into.

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  4. You might want to read my blog where I have similar things.. For the temple thing, I used to think like you too. But I hav come to realise that its again your energy.. What do you think is an idol? A piece of stone? No. The puja procedure is a completely scientific procedure. For eg., if you see the Sree Chakra, there is a science behind how many triangles should be there, and how the chantings have to be done, etc. Its the power in the words. they are not just words- they are mantras. The energy which comes out by chanting those words is the idea. Thats how the idols are installed. They are centres of huge concentrations of power and energy, when installed in the way said in the shastras. they are worshipped in a particular way with certain mantras- again the concentration of energy.

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    1. Perfect Nanditha :) You bought out the essence of the idea I was planning to explain with more details and examples. There is nothing like "This is the only right way, your is wrong, mine is right." I don't understand why we don't get the simple fact that there can be different ways to concentrate energy. That could bring so much harmony.
      May be you can give link to the blog you mentioned. You have too many blogs to search from :). Others can refer to it as well.

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    2. http://nanditharao.blogspot.in/2006/07/two-kinds-of-beliefs-and-their-common.html

      This is an old one.. I only remember that I had written something on the same lines..

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  5. "What Newton and Einstein explained is nothing but the age old concept recorded in Vedas around 5000+ year back. Just that they used right terms to explain modern community."..can you give some specific examples?

    Also if it is true that the Vedas contain all of modern science then why is it not used to predict the next scientific breakthrough(like explaining Dark Energy, Dark Matter, etc.)? Why is it always the case that once a scientific discovery has been made people scan the religious texts and look for verses or phrases that resemble the latest discovery?

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    1. I like your argument, because I have found most of the smart believers (apologists) referring to their holly text books and justifying their faith.

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    2. Good question. This will make the discussion very lively. Anonymous below has tried to explain it but let me also try to take a shot at it.
      For your first question, I have cited some examples from science and vedas for comparison in my blog. I liked 2nd question a lot. Like I said energy was termed as prana. The terms were totally different. If I reply this in some african language you cannot understand unless you know the language. If someone tells you exactly in the way your mind is programmed to understand you will get the concept, otherwise not. For example/- The concept of "anu" similar to atom was there in vedas, but if you had read it before understanding atoms you would not have understood unless your mind was programmed for that language. Human mind is extremely structured. It cannot create links with anything random. We are trying to understand other language in relation to what we know. I stress this point...When you read a language it is not about english, sanskrit etc etc. It is the intention behind what they were trying to communicate in the words.
      Like I said, science is doing good job by giving insight to our ancient texts. Let us accept it that till Newton explained conversation of energy we did not know about it in our language.

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    3. Hi Anonymous,
      There is a wrong understanding about Vedas.. Vedas are not a religions books like other religions.. Vedas is a collections of books... for example Ayurvedha.. this is related to health science.. similarly Vedas have science, maths ect.. so there is no way you can compare with other religious texts...

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  6. Good to see your effort of understanding the absolute!
    Nothing is false. There will be some truth behind everyway. Worshiping Idol is also a technique to realise the ultimate conciousness. It is just that the concious mind of humans do not know why to do it or how to realise it. To an extent humans are brainwashed and controlled by many factors and channels.
    Even if you tell the truth there are hardly any believers.

    I go with Nandhita here for her insight is very true.

    Science has to eventually merge to spirituality. everyone will soon accept it through Quantum Physics.

    @Anonymous above, everything is explained in our ancient texts. Everything!!. Do you have time and passion to go thru or are you saying it after going thru the text(which I know you wouldnt have)??
    Do you know why Hilter became so powerful? just by commanding?? naaa
    He realised the power of our Sanskrit texts decoded and implemented just a part of it. And so goes to many many great scientists of the world. Its just that people here understand what comes from the west and our text they call it some magic and named many as 'mhooda nambike'

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  8. Good one. Glad to know we are thinkging about our primary duties! Logic cannot explain god and obviously science is yet to mature and get over the short sight - and those who think science (with a ~300 year background) can answer all questions of life are increasingly learning that they were so.. wrong!! And of course evrything is moving towars a more stable existance - both living and so called non-living bodies.. everyones duty being to realize what/who we are..

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  9. To me 'God' is the most exploited word, we created religions around it and divided people and have brought this world on the brink of destruction.

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    1. Things may be true here but let us try to first try to understand the whole idea of why this happened. There is a reason for religion and why it started which I will explain in another blog. But people reasoning,understanding and interpreting it has bought to your conclusion.

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    2. Agree Vinay, God could be nothing but energy what Vedas talked about. Adding on to it, Adi Shankaracharya and many other sages said that the world is a Maya(Illusion). We as human beings have a gross limitation to precieve the world, and we see it only as it is presented to us by our 5 senses. Sparing some time and patience you should watch the below video,
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnvM_YAwX4I

      I think, the movie "matrix" also speaks about the world being an illusion.

      "It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind."

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  10. You are right Chida. We conclude only based on perception. Good think in science is there are coming up with new ways to perceive what cannot be done through our sense.
    Matrix is completely based on ancient texts. My friend was mentioning a book which talks about the comparison between matrix and vedas dialog by dialog, but I forgot the name of it.

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