My first post in this category: Existential Perspectives

This site will reflect on the existential perspectives that we all human beings at one time or another in our everyday conscious experience reflect on or think about. It goes to the core experience of feeling “being unique,” with the awareness of being confined to one’s own individual physical existence- seeing, sensing, and behaving from one’s own personal perspectives, and feeling in some ways of “not knowing others,” and feeling being “all alone,” “imprisoned” in our bodies, but at the same time having the thought that all human beings in their conscious experience feel the same from time to time. It is a personal search that we all perhaps engage in or reflect on as human beings, constantly reaching out to others around us, and trying to make some sense of connection to everything that we see around us.

I will be posting from time to time my personal reflections, thoughts, and ruminations about my own existential experience, mirroring perhaps experiences of others, as well as post my thoughts drawing from my interests in philosophy, clinical psychology, astronomy, as I see them relate to our existence.

“In midday, I would sit down on the picnic table with a glass of wine, and a sandwich of bagel, cream cheese, onion, and lox (smoked salmon), and read the latest article on cosmology in Scientific American – thinking about the bursts of innumerable big bangs on the space balloon instead of one Big Bang from one point of Singularity causing the bubbles of matter to congregate on space balloon surface of the universe at different points, and the expansion of our known Universe some 15 billion years ago, and how this expansion is being accelerated with a mysterious anti-gravity force, Dark Energy, which, with Dark Matter that we don’t see are supposed to make up approximately 96 percent of everything in the Universe… How the Bing Bang led to the formation of stars, galaxies, black holes, and in our own Milky Way causing our own Earth to revolve around the Sun, and the other planets around their mother stars, and all the stars around the galactic center, possibly consisting of a massive black hole formed from the ancient dead exploded stars.

And then ponder how the galaxies formed clusters, gobbling each others -the big galaxies colliding and merging with the smaller ones- the Cosmic rule that gets repeated in life cycles of our own earth, big fish eating the small ones, strong nations or tribes or people dominating the weak, a process  that pervades human history, and so on.

And then may think about my own breathing, awareness of this feeling of being alive at the moment, inhaling and exhaling, contracting and expanding, reflecting the universal principle of all life forms, and reflecting also on the repetitive process of expansion and contraction of our own Sun, which keeps a balance between its own gravity pull inward and the emission and dispersion of energy, the giving of light, the source of all life on earth, in its life cycle of converting hydrogen to helium, and the Universe itself in its own eternal cosmic life cycle of Big Bang (expansion) and Big Crunch (contraction).

And then may reflect on how the plants trees, the river, beyond, and the  blue sky, and  Sun are all related, and take this momentary living experience for what it is, not knowing where the next moment of our existence will lead to, and somehow see the connection to everything that I see around me, and then feel the presence of the Ever Present Mysterious Creative Force ( which billions of people of various religious faiths call the Almighty One) that is behind everything that I see around me, around us, within me, within us, and in all of the living and non-living things that I see and don’t see in my conscious experience.”

Please  note, this is a  series of blog postings by Mohiuddin Ahmed, existentialperspectives.wordpress.com created in 2014.  Any unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links can be used provided full and clear credit is given to Mohiuddin Ahmed and existentialperspectives.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Existential Mystery

We all live in the present momentary existence, although aware of our of our past that gives us our unique identity, helping us to remember  experiences, often selectively some and block out others,  and aware of the directions that we want to go in the future, which could be the next moment, or far off in time in an an unidirectional time dimension, where we cannot go back to past, but can only anticipate future with mixture of probability and uncertainty.   We alternate between our mental creation of events or anticipated happenings and remembrance of our past events, we keep a sense of connection to the immediate reality of our present realty of  existence, performing “duties” and our daily living activities consistent with our  our unique personal and social demands and expectations.

The forces that guide us come from different directions are our unique personal life and history, social and cultural upbringing, our genetic endowment and biological forces through the evolutionary process,  the Life and Universal Force that exists within us as human beings, as living beings- an embodiment of expression of cosmic existence. From Science-Naturalistic perspective, it is  related to  the Big Bang and perhaps to the Big Crunch process of the Eternal Ever Changing and Moving Reality. The whole picture  is mysterious and unknowable to us as human beings except in bits and pieces that one can comprehend through a given limitation of our human mind. This is analogous to   to what philosopher Kant has called the categories of mind that allows us only to know only  the world of Phenomena, but the Ultimate Reality, the Noumena is beyond our reach. Independent of our wealth, status, and beliefs, we all have in our deep down a sense of existential mystery and are bound in a cosmic journey together at this moment as we communicate with each other.

From a science based knowledge perspective, we are  further told that the Earth is not only moving around the Sun, but the Sun also moving around the Galactic Center, the Milky Way, at approximately 118 miles per second to go around in 240  million years, So we really do not know where the Sun is dragging all of us to the next second of our existence.

As human beings we have the capacity to project into the future, and we all come to accept the Reality of Unknown, as unpredictable events happen in our lives, and we are confronted with the Reality of Death– the the Ultimate Experience of the Unknown, and many have come believe in God as  entity that only knows what is there for us in the future, as we journey to the Unknown Future.

Science and Religion both in some ways affirm this Unknown Existential Mystery. It gives a sense of Unity to all US! At the same time awareness of existential uncertainty gets manifested in myriad ways in our  life.

Existence of the Immediate Present and Uncertainty of our Living Experience

Our conscious experience and thoughts often shift from past memories to present experience of our thoughts and feelings and awareness of the immediate environment. At other times, we have thoughts about future expectations, projecting what will happen to us and to the world around us, or  what we want to do or what we think  that can or cannot happen. We may have also fantasies that merge our thoughts from past, present, and the  future.  But in all these experiences, the Reality is the Experience of the Immediate Present Moment of our Life, as it is the  Only Reality  we see or experience. at the moment of our conscious existence.  In a way  past is past, they are  gone or not experienced in the present.   Memories we have or things that we see in the present are the evidence that we surmise to be from the Past,  The Future that we project is Not Real yet.  So the only  Reality that we deal with is the Present Moment of our Existence, as we Move from One Moment of experience of Reality to Another.    As human beings,  we are somewhat freed from the  instinctual inherent biological based constraints of thinking, unlike other known living creatures around us, and  we can anticipate and project into the future in a much more elaborate and complex and symbolic forms,  and,  we  have more of  a sense of Uncertainty of Living and Dying facing the Unknown Future.

For many, the  religious faiths and beliefs that God knows everything and decides our Fate  help us to deal with the Unknown Reality of the Future Moments, including the life here and whatever comes after death. This helps to deal with our Existential Anxiety in trying to cope with the Uncertainty of our Everyday Living Experience.

From a science based knowledge such as  astronomy  based knowledge perspective, one believes that  everything that we see, planets, stars, galaxies are always moving in the Universe,  presenting an Unknown experience for all of us. For example,the Sun is revolving around its own Galactic Center of Milky Way (which comprises some 200 plus billions of Suns) at an approximate speed of 118 miles per second to make one revolution in some 240 million years  This means that no human being, not even the human race, has had the experience where the Sun has been dragging the Earth and all of us with it, every next second of our existence, as we, the human beings as Homo Sapiens Sapiens  have been around only for 30,000-40,000 years or so.  This Reality of the Unknown in a way is common to both religious faiths and Science,  proclaiming the notion that  no human beings can comprehend the Uncertainty of our living experience.  Thus Science and Religious Faiths, in a symbolic manner,  point to the same direction of the Unknown Reality of the Future from the human mind perspective.

Please  note, this is one of the series of blog postings by Mohiuddin Ahmed,  under the blog tittle of Existentialperspectives .wordpress.com, created in 2014.  Any unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links can be used provided full and clear credit is given to Mohiuddin Ahmed and Existentialperspectives.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.       

One-to-Many and Many-to-One: A convergence of Science and Religious and Spiritual Faith-based practices

Astronomy tells us that the Universe we see all around us: Stars, Galaxies (seen through our telescopes), and all the living and non-living beings, were “born”(created) from a Point of Singularity (an element with no dimension but with infinite energy potential) with a Big Bang (some 13+ billions years ago), which created a  rapid expansion of force and matter resulting in the visible Universe that we see today. The Universe that we see is supposedly composed of 96% of Dark Matter (that we don’t see) and Dark Energy ( the anti-gravity force that accounts for faster acceleration of the Universe above and beyond the accelerations due of Big Bang explosion). All the visible matter comprising of all the livings and non-livings in the Universe that we now see or potentially will see constitutes only 4% of the Universe.  In this this sense, everything evolved and differentiated from the One Whole (Point of Singularity), and this process of differentiation from the One  Whole is still going on.

The concept of Mathematics, as I understand , is to capture the structure of the Universe using  a process of  infinitely possible defined formulas to divide One Whole , allowing human science to explain infinite ways to reflect the different and potential  aspects  of the manifestations of One element of the  Universe or the One Whole Universe. This is analogous to reflect the Reality of Many from One.  

Many astronomers believe that at some point of the Acceleration process of the Universe, the  expansion process  will begin to slow down and start Decelerating  leading to a  Big Crunch, whereby all the different and discrete things in the Universe will collapse again to a One Point of Singularity (becoming One Whole again). This is analogous to Many-to-One Process,  and this process may repeat itself, ad infinitum (the process of creation of recreation of many Universes that many Eastern religious faiths, such as Hinduism proposes).

Different religious faiths of human beings in some ways reflect this.   In spite of differences in practices of faiths in different cultures and societies. The concept of God reflects the Supreme One, who created everything that we see in this World, so like the science perspective, Many come from One.

Human concept of what happens to living creatures (human beings after death) also reflects a sense of “return” to the Oneness, through individuals’  special relationship to the One, the originator and creator of All as per various religious faiths that billions of human beings believe. , This  concept symbolically  may vary from culture to culture, but the essence of the belief remains the same. the “longing” for diverse elements of the Universe (e.g., human spirits) to Return to Oneness in some form and giving a sense of Eternal Reality with the spiritual connection to One God.

Please  note, this is one of the series of blog postings by Mohiuddin Ahmed,  under the blog tittle of Existentialperspectives .wordpress.com, created in 2014.  Any unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author is strictly prohibited.  Excerpts and links can be used provided full and clear credit is given to Mohiuddin Ahmed and Existentialperspectives.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.