THE BIG AND THE SMALL

THE BIG AND THE SMALL

The universe is so vast and we, humans, are so tiny in comparison. Between the big and the small there is such a gulf that we set magnitudinal values to the objects and events of the universe including our own terrestrial affairs whereby we seem to be insignificant in the cosmic scheme of things.

But these are all instances of spatial conceptions, events which we cognise in our minds. Do we lend them relative proportions which may not be true in essence after all? Are these vastness and minuteness of events, from the galactic bodies, intergalactic distances to the bacteria or the quantum particle, projections of our hallucinating mind which in first inexplicable projection is caught in hallucination itself? Is there anything called magnitude after all beyond what the mind in hallucinating self-extension lends credence to? As such, are not the big and the small mere quantitative differences created by the mind where in essence, as subject, their magnitudinal differences vanish and they are reduced to their intrinsic invariance of the dimensionless Being?

Maya, Shankaracharya says, is 'anirvachaniya' or impossible of articulation, that is, inexplicable in linguistic terms. In that case all our efforts to translate the universe to linguistic terms may be flawed and as such false. How then do we assign values to things temporal, events phenomenal? For pragmatic purposes we may choose to go dimensional, as indeed we do, but that would not solve this 'riddle of existence' (quote, courtesy, Jawaharlal Nehru). There has to be a basis to resolve this empirical crisis of the confrontation of the big and the small where the big is of the overpowering insentience of the cosmos and the small of the battling sentience for survival.

The Rishis of ancient India went for this resolution. They plunged deep through misty Maya to the depths of the ocean of consciousness where they beheld the radiant source of phenomenal existence in the Absolute Being which immutable lies, dimensionless, Self-conscious and Alone. The Rishis in trumpet voice announced their findings but till such superconscious Self-realisation takes place in us, we continue to be caught in this prison house of numbers and dimensions, spatial and time conceptions with their concomitant induction of ignorance and fear.

May illumination be the lot of all!

Written by Sugata Bose