I have been away for over two months in India and have not been able to write anything for this column. Even when I had access to computer and Internet the ambient was not conducive to writing at leisure. But during this period I learned something very important – to set right my priorities. In this column I have been writing mostly about the place of philosophy and science in day-to-day life. This has been an intellectually satisfying effort, but this visit has made me realize that the real satisfaction and contentment can come only through serving poor and needy people. I also realized that one does not have to be rich (which I am not by any stretch of imagination) to do this; all that is needed is the will and resolve. So now I will be shifting the emphasis to these activities and mostly writing about them.

I come from a rural area where it is easy to find poor, needy, and suffering people. Remembering the saying – ‘Charity begins at home’, I decided to start a program in my native village. I gathered around a few sincere workers and we have founded a trust (Samvedana Trust – samvedana means empathy) for this purpose. To begin with we are trying to relieve suffering at its worst – help destitute, terminally ill persons in making the rest of their lives as comfortable as possible by providing them their basic needs. As the project grows we would try to help any poor family facing serious medical problems. We plan to start an independent website for the project where details of all the activities and plans will be published and updated regularly.

On my way back I stayed in Delhi for a week with a relative. He has an apartment in a multistory building in a newly developed area near the airport. One day on our way back from shopping he stopped at the pavement outside the building to reprimand someone who had set up a makeshift tea stall on the pavement. It is illegal and the society responsible for the building is fined for allowing it. It was a family consisting of a boy and his mother. The boy is a midget; just out of his teens, he is only about three feet tall. He was pleading for continuing his shop, promising that he would keep the place clean and also not let anyone else set up a shop there. My host asked him to find another place and move out before being forcibly driven out. Later I learned that the mother has no legs.

I thought of our project in the village. Here was a boy, himself handicapped and with the added responsibility of a disabled mother, trying to make a life independently instead of resorting to begging and being a burden on the society. I decided that our project would have no geographical limits. I talked it over with my host and we are trying to get some site officially allocated for the boy to have a regular shop and to help him build a respectable life for his family. We hope to track his progress at each stage and report it on the website.

This brings me back to philosophy in day-to-day life and to the difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is generally passive, while empathy is an active response. In empathy you feel the pain and suffering of others and take some action, not so much for the other person as for yourself. Here we are talking not of the meaning of the words but of the emotions and feelings that they invoke.

D. R. Sharma is a retired professor with physics and electrical engineering background. He maintains a website Cosmosebooks.com devoted mainly to philosophy, science, and self-development.

We live in a competitive world where everything is based on comparison. Therefore life itself becomes a process of comparison. The very basis of comparison is examining similarity and difference between different objects. If the difference is more pronounced, we use the word contrast but the process is still the same. We often come across the statement – ‘you cannot compare apples and oranges’, but when it comes to the basic nature of objects we can compare seemingly dissimilar objects. Outwardly apples and oranges may not have anything in common but they are just fruits and one can always compare their tastes, nutrition values, and other properties.

Still in life when we compare things, we tend to pay more attention to differences. This often leads to consideration of everything in terms of opposites and that, in turn, leads to unhappiness. A person is often unhappy not because his needs are not satisfied, but because someone else has better things. Unhappiness comes primarily because one is not satisfied with ‘what is’ and always desires for ‘what should be’. In itself there is nothing wrong with this attitude; it is a normal and healthy instinct to improve oneself. But it should be based on one’s inner motivation and not on comparison with someone else; it should be truly a part of self-improvement irrespective of its being materialistic or otherwise.

If we look closely, everything in life consists of opposites; in fact life itself has its opposite – death. All opposites are based on comparison and, therefore, are relative. Anything that exists only in relation to something else cannot have an intrinsic reality. The opposites are merely words or symbols and by very definition a symbol is not the real thing. Thus, whatever the concept that the opposites represent is one and the opposites are also one. This unity of opposites is not a concept confined only to metaphysics and spirituality. Modern physics has shown that the duality presented by the opposites like rest and motion, particle and wave, before and after, and so on does not really exist.

All the conflicts that arise in the world whether at personal or group level, are caused by comparison emphasizing the differences, especially one group claiming superiority over the other in terms of ideology. (This is opposite of the comparison on personal level leading to unhappiness as discussed above.) If similarities were emphasized, there would be harmony and reconciliation instead of conflict.

From the point of view of self-improvement comparison may be healthy if it involves only self and not others. One can accept ‘what is’ but try to make it better without being unhappy. If we strive to be better tomorrow than what we are today and keep that attitude going, we are on a real path of transforming our life physically, spiritually, and also materially.

More articles and ebooks on science, philosophy, and self-development
can be found on the author's website CosmosEbooks.

Another year is coming to its end and yet another will begin. What was new a year ago will become old – a relic in the past like so many billion years. People will be celebrating the New Year with joy and revelry. But the distinction between new and old is a man-made concept. People of different faiths have different ways of reckoning the year. Leaving that type of difference aside, how do we distinguish between new and old? Time is a continuous process and any demarcation is arbitrary and relative. There is nothing new or old as far as time itself is concerned. Every day, every, month, every year is the same as another. We give them different names for our own convenience and associate a beginning and an end to each.

The celebration of the new year begins hours (if not earlier) before the old one ends even if we disregard the difference in local time. In effect then we are celebrating the year-end as well. But no one thinks in those terms. Our minds are conditioned to associate new with happiness and old with sadness. This is reflected in the modern societies in the relentless pursuit of perennial youthfulness. The young will inevitably become old; anything that has a beginning will eventually have an end. There is no way to reverse time or even make it stand still (unless we are capable of traveling with the speed of light).

The beginning and end are always associated with our concept of existence of something, physical or abstract. In this phenomenal world existence is related to perception. If one can perceive something, it exists. In this sense the existence of a thing is only in the mind. This is the basis for the philosophical viewpoint – ‘everything is in the mind’. We perceive time only in relation to different events. Thus time has only a relative existence. Space, time, and matter are all inter-related in terms of existence. If there is no matter, there is no space-time and, of course, there is no universe either. But we are straying too far from the topic of new year that we started with.

Why do we celebrate the beginning and not the end even if it had been a good year? Perhaps it is because of the constant awareness of our own mortal existence and subconsciously we do not accept the inevitability of the end. For an individual space, time, and everything in the universe exists only as long as he/she exists. So the normal tendency is to seek happiness as long as one lives. It makes sense from a materialistic point of view to enjoy life as long as one can. And that is why man chooses to designate occasions for celebration in life. In a collective way we may not celebrate the end but who knows for certain that as individuals we do not celebrate the end?

The author maintains a website CosmosEbooks mainly devoted to philosophy, science, and self-development.

The relationship between cause and effect, known as the principle of causation, has been discussed extensively in both science and philosophy for a long time. Common experience in the real world always relates an effect to a cause even if the cause may not be pinpointed. This means that something cannot happen without something else causing it. This may be called a deterministic view; if the cause is known the effect can be predicted. On the other hand things can happen purely by chance – random events without any definite cause. The deterministic view prevailed in science (physics in particular) until relativity and quantum mechanics forced a readjustment. The assumptions of causation are no longer rigid; they are not valid at the most fundamental level, but remain so at the level of common experience.

In philosophy also there have been divergent views. In Eastern philosophies (Vedanta in particular) cause and effect are not separate entities. Cause is the latent form of effect, while the effect is the manifested form of the cause. In other words cause-to-effect is simply a transformation process; the underlying reality is the same, only its manifestation changes. In Western philosophy causation is treated more or less as a deterministic process; Aristotle described five different types of cause leading to a particular effect. Others (Hume, for example) give a slightly different representation of causation.

An inherent assumption in the deterministic view of causation is the flow of time – cause must precede effect. Causation is, therefore, tied to space-time, which exists only in the phenomenal world. Perhaps this is what the quantum void indicates, where space-time is approaching zero and energy and matter transform into each other spontaneously without any cause. This brings us to the question of the origin of universe, which is the end of the cause and effect chain leading to the God and science controversy.

There is another aspect of causation that needs to be emphasized. As mentioned earlier causation involves transformation in some form or other. The cause must inherently have the potential to become the effect. For example an acorn can become only an oak tree, it cannot grow into an apple tree under any condition. If we take a piece of dry wood and light fire, it would burn and become ash or coal. If we do the same to a piece of stone it would not burn in the same way because it does not have the same potential as wood.

However, this may be true only for relatively small time scales. On very large time scales, such as geological, the transformation may involve even fundamental changes in the structure of matter itself. I have here a fossilized fish that was alive and swimming around in water some million years ago. Now it is a hard stone although its outward appearance is preserved almost intact. Apparently the body of a fish has no inherent potentiality for becoming stone. So it seems reasonable to assume that given the proper set of conditions and enough time even the particle configuration of matter can change.

The author maintains a website CosmosEbooks devoted mainly to philosophy, science, and self-development.

The greatest mystery that confounds man is that of life. Whether it is our own life or of all animate objects (or even of the universe itself) the mystery is beyond comprehension. Even though science has made tremendous progress the complexity of life is such that it may be beyond the realm of rational investigation. And this may be due to the simple fact that man himself is a part of the mystery. Yet at some stage in life most people do wonder (if not worry) about what lies beyond.

Almost all religions stress the significance of life after death. In a literal sense ‘life after death’ is a contradiction in terms. Death marks the end of life, so life after the end of life has really no meaning. Yet most of the religious beliefs are based on securing a better ‘afterlife’. This is rather unfortunate because the emphasis is shifted from the present to a nebulous ‘future’, even though in this context future cannot even be defined. Time has only a mortal existence; for a person it has no existence before birth or after death.

What happens to a person (or the spirit) after death no one knows or would ever know. No one has ever come back to say he is dead and relate his experience. Our ideas on this subject are based on philosophical or fanciful speculations. In some cases these lead to dogmatic beliefs and to extreme actions. The hard fact is that nothing exists after death in the sense of existence as we know it.

In some religions there is a belief in reincarnation. The soul is believed to be immortal and eternal, being a part of the ultimate reality usually called God. The main objective of life is to achieve union with the ultimate reality. After death the soul is supposed to remain in a suspended state until it finds a suitable vehicle for rebirth. The effects of the actions performed during the lives on earth are carried by the soul. When only the effects of the good actions remain it becomes perfect and merges with its infinite and eternal source attaining nirvana. Until then it continues to go through the birth and death cycle, which is the basic concept of the karma theory.

In the context of rebirth it may be natural to wonder what happened to all the famous persons of the past. Some saints and enlightened persons would have certainly obtained nirvana not to be born again. For the majority of them, though, it is hard to believe that they never did anything bad in life (not to speak of evil ones), so they must be still going through the cycle. People do not remember anything from their past life (except for some rare cases reported sometimes). It is thus impossible to know who is reborn as who.

If we take the view of science the ultimate source of everything including the universe itself is energy. It is not possible to go into details here but this energy can be identified with a universal consciousness field. Consciousness is the all-pervading original source of everything and every life is a part of that. This is why the ancient philosophies identified God with consciousness. The individual consciousness lasts as long as the life. Its identification with the soul maintaining a separate identity after death may be a matter of philosophy. But it is a part of the universal consciousness with which it has to merge at some point. So in answer to the question what lies beyond death we may say - nothing. Like a drop from the ocean the individuality remains only while it is away from the source; once it goes back into the ocean it has no individuality, it is all ocean.

Articles and ebooks on related topics may be found on author's website CosmosEbooks.