Nikolai Berdyaev, the Russian philosopher famously said, “the question of my bread is a material question, but the question of my neighbor’s bread is a spiritual question”. The purport of this is that while it is easy to be philosophical when it comes to others its very difficult when it comes to your own self.
Even though we live this adage, I had a heightened experience of this recently, when I woke up one morning with a piercing pain in my right eye. It felt like a grain of sand was stuck under my eyelid over my pupil. As I repeatedly washed my eye, it only got worse. I panicked. Visions of an one eyed me floated in my other good eye. I rushed to the Eye Clinic and waited impatiently for my turn. I looked enviously at all the two-eyed people around me. I fumed at the old man with a heavily bandaged eye who went ahead of me. These people really need to learn prioritization , I groused. Finally, after what seemed to be an eternity my turn came. The doctor spent less than 5 minutes with me. He flipped my eyelid over, shone a light at it and casually said, “it’s a mild allergic inflammation due to foreign particles. Possibly pollution”. He prescribed a generic saline eye drop and asked me to apply it locally three times a day. So much for my panic, dire visions and resentment.
As I nursed my poor little right eye back to good health (I was actually okay by the end of the day), l began to reflect on my own state of affairs. Just a few days ago I was talking to a man whose right hand shook uncontrollably. When I inquired, he shared that there was a clot in his left brain that was impacting the right side of his body. “Ah at least, one side is healthy” I consoled him. Another time, when I was gently motivating a woman devotee to cook for me on Ekadasi, she demurred, stating that after her surgery for aneurysm, she has been unable to hold things properly. “Reminders that we are not this body” I philosophized. Why was it so easy for me to be detached and philosophical about others and so difficult for me to apply it to myself? In all honesty, I genuinely believed every word I spoke to others. Yet I could not apply it to myself. Why was I unable to fully empathize with others? Apparently, I was not the only one asking this question. Five thousand years ago, in the famous yaksha-vartalap recorded in the Mahabharata, when Yudhisthira was asked the question “what is the most wonderful thing in this world?” his answer was, “everyday people see people die around them, yet they act as if they will never die”.
Recently, a group of Israeli scientists (ref below) were applying scientific rigor in an attempt to answer this question. The intrinsic nature of the human brain is that it uses past experiences to make future predictions. This is essentially the process of accumulation of learning experiences unique to the humans. By measuring the electric activity of the brain, when it was actively involved in this predictive mode, the scientists were able to identify a specific portion of the brain that supports it. They then showed their study subjects various patterns and recorded the predictive part of the brain light up as the subjects mentally extrapolated the patterns. They then showed the subjects pictures of various people followed by symbols related to death (graveyard, crematorium etc.) and recorded that the brain effortlessly went into the predictive mode; implying that the subjects had no problem grasping the fact that these people would eventually die. They then showed the subjects pictures of themselves followed by symbols of death and were surprised that the predictive portion of the brain remained quiescent. The same thing was repeated again and again, with the same results.
Simply put, our brains are not wired to acknowledge our own death. We may intellectually acknowledge it (at a thinking level) but the brain refuses to accept it (at a feeling level). The hypothesis of the scientists is that at a certain point in human evolution, when the brain reached the level of awareness for it to understand the concept of inevitable death, the process of self-preservation re-wired a portion of the brain for it to be unable to accept its own death. The survival of a species depends on the self-preservation instincts of each of its members. However, if they were sufficiently intelligent to understand and accept their ultimate inevitable demise, the drive to survive would be seriously compromised. Evolution thus made it impossible for the humans to be able to experientially acknowledge their own death.
This leaves religion, which needs death to be acknowledged so that it can talk about transcendental existence after death, in a very difficult place. Their instructions may be accepted by intelligence, but if the mind refuses to register. It is like shining a lamp on a blind person. No matter how bright the light is or how often it shines, the blind person will not register it. You can tell him there is a light, but it will remain an abstract concept. How do religions solve this vexing conundrum?
Interestingly, for the most part, religions do not bother to do so. They use morality as a substitute. Be-good; do-good, and good things will happen to you. Morality actually nourishes the notion of immortality – “live long and prosper”. And the theoretical notion of death is theoretically answered with assurances of even more happiness. In the Hindu religion, the vast majority of the Vedas propounds this notion (it is called karma-kanda and occupies 95% of the Vedas).
Carrying forward the metaphor of the blind and the light, there is a very small portion of people who try to cure their blindness. They are essentially trying to re-wire that part of the brain These are people who follow the long, arduous path of jnana and yoga. The process is long and difficult and success rate very low.
There is yet another alternative. Humans by nature are social and living in a group is based on trust. We are thus wired to trust. What if the blind person learns to trust one who can see? No need to live in darkness. No need to re-wire the brain. In fact, by using that aspect of the brain that is intrinsically strong (trust) one addresses that portion that is intrinsically weak (experientially acknowledging death). This is actually the process of bhakti. Hearing from a self-realized person, accepting their realizations as factual and then attempting to act upon them.
The process of bhakti does not rely on living with death. Krishna speaks only once (in the second chapter of the Bhagavad-gita) about the inevitability of death. The process of bhakti is to develop faith in the realizations of those are self-realized. A blind person holding tightly on to the hand of a person with vision is as good as him having a vision himself. That is the beauty of bhakti. Easy, simple and works with what you have.
That was by realization triggered by an itchy eye. At this point it is understandably difficult for me to experientially act on the “I am not this body” platform, to make the bread of another person like my bread. But I can follow the instructions of those are on that platform, with faith and conviction, and I am as good as being on that platform. Time for my eye-drops. Doctor’s orders!
Reference
Our brains are wired to prevent us thinking about our own death
