I am actually doing it!!

Hi Folks,

It is a beautiful Monday morning here in Richmond, Virginia. I have been thinking a while about starting to write my own blog, and after some trepidition, here I am - feels awesome!!

The contents of these posts are likely to my personal musings about a variety of topics - from things as abstruse as the philosophy of life to day to day blocking and tackling. So follow along and hopefully you'll enjoy the ride.

Today I'll start with what's been on my mind most recently - the Hindu theory of Karma, the relevance of astrology and how "free will" plays in all of this.

To set the context, the basic theory of Karma posits that all human beings are part of the universal divine. They are born from the subjective realm into the objective realm, journey through various lives constantly evolving and finally merge into the universal divinity once the journey is over. The "Lords of Karma" have a well defined path for each living entity for its lifespan (actually several lifespans over) and they closely monitor and tweak the conditions around each soul so that the soul's journey towards final emanicipation can be actualized. In every event that a soul faces, conditions are created so that it can evolve towards its final destiny. Scriptures suggest that there is some element of free will in terms of how a human being responds to the conditions that are presented to her.

At this point itself I'd like to share a few observations - this construct seems profound. In some ways I believe that the best human designed constructs are "wannabe" replicas of analogous natural phenomenon e.g. the camera tries to emulate the mechanism of the human eye, the computer tries to emulate a small part of the human brain etc. So thinking on those lines, this karmic construct could be the fatherfigure to organizational constructs of people development - as a rising executive you are assigned the right "platforms" by your bosses so that you can develop on your areas of opportunity while building on your strengths. The similarities between these 2 worlds only begin here and as a person who is neck deep in professional organization life I'll leave no opportunity to surface these on a regular basis. Every human ego in the final stages of its development (close to reaching home!), starts to develop on one of the 7 distinct rays for the evolution of the soul (just like a rising executive could be seen as a finance or a marketing or an operations guy). At this point in the soul's journey the "mentorship" of the ego is usually taken over by the moon (first) and then the sun - a bit like the most promising candidates in corporate life getting the attention of the president and then the CEO (the sun is widely recognized as the king of the planetary kingdom and the moon reflecting the light of the sun is the queen).

Astrology is an attempt to understand the divine plan and prognosticate it for the benefit of the individual being so that she can understand the divine plan for her and adjust her life and thought process to be in sync with what nature purports for her. The discipline was founded and nurtured by seers with "sidhis" ages ago and their wisdom is cloaked in mysterious vague language that can only be deciphered after much perseverance. Well that all makes perfect sense but.... it does beg several questions, atleast a few of which are:

Why does the soul separate from the universal divine in the first place to start its journey with the implicit aim of becoming one with the divine as its end goal?
What are the boundaries under which free will operates ?
If the final purpose of all life forms is to become one with the divine, and we think of this as a "stream flowing" from place A to place B (divine destination), once all souls, in a very very long time, reach their destination, would life cease to exist?... Or if not, then how is "new water" being added to this stream to create a cycle. In some ways this question is realted to the first question but in other ways perhaps has other accents to it...

So what do you think?...


Feel free to respond, critique or just share your own observations...

Best,
zenith_n