Religion and Social Values :29

3: The Reason for Birth and Death : 8



Hence, our involvement is not merely as a thread in a fabric or a piece of cloth, which is only to describe part of the mystery; we are also involved in a terrible illusion called the time process. No one can understand what time is. Time is not the movement of a watch or a clock. It is also not the recurrence of day and night. Even if the Sun were not to be there, there would be a time consciousness. Do we not feel there is time even in pitch darkness, when there is no light? So it is not wholly true that time is due to the revolution or the rotation of the Earth or the presence or the absence of light, like the light of the Sun. It is a mysterious way in which our mind itself works.


Time can ultimately be reduced to a state of consciousness of the succession of events in space. As space is involved in time and time is involved in space, we cannot know space unless we know space is now. So we have brought the time factor into our consciousness of space. “I am experiencing space now.” We are connecting the spatial extension to the time process in order to be aware that space is. And, we cannot be aware of time without space, because time is known by us as a succession of events which take place in an extension of space.


Thus, we are in a web of unintelligible relations, and being part and parcel of this network of relations, we are unable to know ourselves wholly, and are unable to know anything in this world. Outwardly we are ignorant; inwardly also we are ignoramuses. This is to say something about space and time.


But there is another difficulty of relationship, which ties us to the bondage of life. We are very happy when we see our friends and very grieved when we see our enemies. When a friend dies, we weep; and when an enemy dies, we say a good thing has happened. This is the manifestation of relationship. The whole of the life of man is nothing but an interpretation of relationship. Our possessions, our wealth, our family relations, and whatever we think is ourselves is nothing but a bundle of relations. Even that is unintelligible. We cannot know in what way a thing is connected with us. We have a piece of land and we say, “I am a landlord.” First of all, this land was there even before we were born.


This is something we should not forget. So it is difficult to believe how it has become ours. Anyhow, we say, “It has been registered in my name.” What do we mean by ‘registration’? Nobody can understand what it is that we are thinking in our head when we say it has been registered. Again, some illusion is catching hold of our mind. By registration, we secretly mean that we have the consent of other people also in our imagining that this piece of land is ours. That is all that registration is. It means nothing else. Some person who is supposed to be representing other persons says it is our land. This is called registration in the District Registrar’s Office or Sub-registrar’s Office. There is nothing else in it.

To be continued  ...