Harmony

Nature demands harmony. Due to our individual, anthropocentric (human centered) points of view, we often have difficulty seeing this harmony.

In Hinduism, it is believed that the truth of reality underlays this which we experience. The spirit (purusa in sanskrit) is beyond human comprehension, and interacts with the material world (prakriti in sanskrit) to create what we know as the universe. This is lila, divine play. The unfolding of the universe is it’s way of experiencing itself, increasing in complexity every step of the way yet maintaining a balance which is often beyond our view.

Hindu iconography

I think of there being many different orders of magnitude of time that correspond with changes in levels of consciousness. An order of magnitude is an exponential change of plus-or-minus 1 in the value of a quantity or unit. A change in level of consciousness is scaling up or down in size to find the next level of individual entities creating harmony. For example, one human is one level of consciousness, while the human species is the next level of consciousness (this is a definition I have come to on my own). The human species can be raised to earth, earth to solar system, solar system to galaxy. As a human, we think 100 years is a long time. If you meet anyone over the age of 100, they seem ancient and them still being alive is a major accomplishment. To me, a day can feel like a long time. In the human species, 100 years is not very long, considering the species has been around thousands of years. In the scale of the earth, 100 years seems like nothing. In the milky way galaxy, every single star is over 100 years away by our fastest method of transportation. It is no surprise that a system which relates to time so much slower than we do can appear confusing and apparently without any order. It is easy to see that a human contracting a fever is just raising its body temperature to kill off the sickness, but it is difficult to see that the earth’s gradual climate change is its way of dealing with a sickness. If we were able to remove the emotional and time constraints from life and watch the earth for a billion years, we would see its gradual return to a harmonious state of being.

map of the background radiation left over from the Big Bang

The thing about harmony is that harmony is not as blissful as we think it to be. If you can be in touch with universal consciousness, then it is, just read about spirituality and Hindu saints. To the average unenlightened human harmony is constant rise and fall. Ralph Waldo Emerson talks about this in his essay “Compensation.” Everything that happens has an equal and opposite reaction. A forest fire burns down miles of forest and kills tons of animals, but it creates a fertile environment for life to flourish. Life can only continue by death, death can only continue by life, one cannot be without the other. All things are two sided, as they must be. But imagine yourself trapped in a forest fire, it would not matter to you that it will cause new life to flourish, you would only feel the panic associated with burning to death. We lack the perspective to consciously allow Nature to take its necessary course. We attempt to use our minds to rule Nature, but we cannot rule that which we are a part of. That is like fire trying to burn fire. It cannot be done. Human's picture ourselves to be these living breathing flesh and blood bodies which can feel pain and pleasure, but we are really horribly mistaken. We are the consciousness observing the happenings of this reality.

I repeat, we are not our bodies, we are not even our minds, we are the observer of all that is. There is only one observer, and it is consciousness. The reason we believe there are billions of different observers is because of our evolutionary need to survive. This need causes us to categorize between safe and unsafe, known and unknown, self and other. In my opinion, if we can transcend the body and all of its evolutionary & experiential baggage, we can experience this blissful harmony.

Tao Te Ching: Verse 12

The five colors blind the eye.

The five tones deafen the ear.

The five flavors dull the taste.

Racing and hunting madden the mind.

Precious things lead one astray.

Therefore the sage is guided by what he feels and not by what he sees.

He lets go of that and chooses this.

References

1) Free Tao Te Ching: http://www.with.org/tao_te_ching_en.pdf

2)   Yoga sutras: https://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Sutras-Patanjali-Swami-Satchidananda/dp/1938477073/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=P7PYGMVDGM9NQBYHWX2X

3)   How old is the universe? https://www.space.com/24054-how-old-is-the-universe.html