Hari om everyone,
Happy New Year to all. Hope you all enjoyed a nice winter break and rejuvenated for the upcoming year!
We started our class with meditation and chanting (geetaa dhyaanam and ch. 1.)
Today, we recorded them chanting until verse 21 and we're so proud of them. Check out the below video for yourself!
Verses 20 and 21 needed some corrections. We did that and continued to learn until verse 24. Below is the recording for the new verses -
In our discussion segment, we delved deeper into our understanding of bhagavaan/parabrahma.
There was a question a while ago regarding the time span of 'Gods' (deities). We understood that the 3 murtis we have always known as brahma (creator), viShNu (sustainer), maheshwara (dissolver) are also entities or powers of the Supreme power (if we want to say so,) called 'parabrahma'.
This parabrahma is beyond time and space, ever-existing, ever-unchanging, ever-shining! But the rest have a time span for their existence. To better understand this we saw a short video about the time span of chaturmukha brahma, the creator. The mark-ups in the pictures below give us a summary of the video we watched.
Phew! This means, approximately 311 trillion human years is the tenure for one brahma! THAT. IS. A. LOT! But then, doesn't it mean, even Gods are NOT immortal? Yes! They too, are mortal just like us, but with a mu....ch longer life span :).
So, wait... What? So..., who is going to become brahma after this brahma is gone? Well..., brahma is a designation just like the President. Once the tenure is up, another brahma takes over :).
The only immortal entity that there is, is "parabrahma". Only He is 'in and through' everything that exists, like the string that holds the pearls of a pearl necklace. No pearl of the necklace can exist without the presence of the string!
How can we become immortal then? The ONLY way for that is to attain the 'ultimate knowledge' about our true nature. Any amount of demerits or merits (paapa or puNya) will only give us tentative suffering or pleasures. Even deities enjoy merits and when those are exhausted, they drop down into the cycle of birth and rebirth again. Knowledge is the only way to break that cycle and attain ultimate peace..., AND that progress toward learning about our true Self can be done only when we have human birth! Nowhere else is there an avenue towards this goal. Hence, the main goal of human life is 'to work towards gaining this ultimate Knowledge!' We established this further with a few more examples that brought us to the end of chapter 7.
All the numbers and the concepts learnt today were so mind-boggling that we decided that they need to sink in. The last 5 minutes of class, we chatted about their winter break and all the fun things they'd done and left for aarti in the auditorium.
Until next week, happy contemplating!
Regards,
Rashmi and Kishore.
Rashmi and Kishore.
