Spiritual answers to burning questions

Most of us have several profound questions related to God, heaven, hell, reincarnation etc. and we hope we can get a convincing logical answer from somewhere and keep waiting for it. More often than not, we get answers from parents/elders to follow some tradition of belief and not ask such questions or we get soothsayers/astrologers who are looking to make a big buck out of our curiosity or we get pseudo-intellectuals who laugh such doubts away under the guise of dogmatic belief or so called rational thinking. I also burnt with such questions with no good answers till I was exposed to spirituality in the form of Vedanta. With the low level of intellect that I have, the answers satisfied by curiosity. I am not sure these answers wills satisfy the logical test of more intelligent people. But I will try.

1. Does God exist?

This is a question that has baffled us for many centuries. I would like to rephrase the question. Does God in the form that we have been exposed to, exist? Vedanta declares with all power, that such concepts or forms of God do not exist.  God as conceptualized in Vedanta is the consciousness principle, the life principle, the enlivening principle. As such it is the only reality and anything else is just an illusion.

Just as gasoline in a car is the enlivening principle that gives the car the ability to move without being blamed for the car going to a gambling den or being praised to go to a place of worship, God is just an enlivening principle which gives us the ability to do our action without taking blame for good or bad acts.

So, to the question whether God exists, the answer is God in the form of the enlivening principle surely exists. Without this enlivening principle, we would not even exist, let alone have the ability to debate such questions.

2. Why does God not prevent bad things from happening?

Again this is a perennial question. When we see a small helpless kid suffering, we ask the same question. When a major disaster happens and innocent people are killed, we ask the same question. But, based on my spiritual understanding, it is evident to me that such expectations are foolish. As indicated above, the only reality is consciousness and anything else is an illusion created due to the innate power of consciousness. Just as a rope has an inherent capacity to appear like a snake in the dark, due to the inherent capacity of consciousness, it appears as this world, due to our ignorance.

Imagine that I am dreaming and in my dream, I see a situation where a madman is driving at breakneck speed and hits a small child. Now, the people on the road can be wondering, why God is so cruel. Why did God not prevent this innocent child from being hurt? Now, who is God for the people in this dream? The creator of the dream characters is me. Whatever the dream characters wish, whatever they pray, there is no chance that I the dreamer sleeping in my bed could have gone into my own dream and protected that innocent child in my dream from being hit by the mad driver in my dream. So, why would I in this illusory world expect that consciousness whose dream character I am will come and protect innocent people from being harmed?

3. Is there life after death?

What happens to me after I die? The answer to this depends on who is asking the question? Let us think of a pot made of mud. It has a certainty that it will break, just as I have a certainty of my death. Now, if the pot identifies itself as a pot, there is surely rebirth after death. I mean, that once a pot is broken, the same mud will be used to make probably another pot or a mug or a cup, whatsoever. So the pot has reincarnated as a cup or mug or whatever. However if the pot does not identify itself as a pot, but just thinks of itself as mud, there is no birth or death for it. Even when the pot breaks, its essential nature of “mudness” will never break. Though the pot after its “death” becomes a mug, its essential “mudness” does not change. In exactly, the same way, if I identify myself with the body/mind/intellect complex, then when I die, I will be reborn in a different “shape”. However if I identify myself as “consciousness”, there is no birth or death for me.

4. Is there a basis for fortune telling? Can astrology be true?

The surprising answer is it could be true. It all depends on who is telling the future. As mentioned earlier, the only reality is consciousness and it is a silent witness to everything. It knows every action that has ever happened since time immemorial. Again, based on the law of Karma or the law that every action has an equal and opposite reaction, it knows the potential acts that may happen because of all the actions that have taken place or are taking place. So, if I am consciousness, then I know every action that has happened and will happen. So based on a particular entity, I know its past and current actions and can easily know what the future will be.  

But then how many are at the level where they are fully identified with consciousness? There may be a rare Buddha, a rare Shankaracharya who were people at that level. I would discard most other people who claim to be telling the future. 

However rather than summarily dismissing such people, I would like to add that there it may be possible to statistically link events happening elsewhere and predict the  future. I have heard of any number of accurate predictions about presidential elections in USA depending on which team wins the super bowl. Though these are totally unrelated, over a period of time, it may have been possible to establish some link between the two statistically resulting in an accurate prediction. In the same way, it may be possible that based on totally irrelevant planetary positions, there may be an impact on an individual and it may be possible for a super statistician who has these intricate equations worked out, to be able to predict the future.