Questioning Life

That was one beautiful evening, I was sitting with my friend Sravan, and our chit-chat shifted on life and what it is. Intricate topic, that provoked dormant thoughts and lead to exchange of ideas at different level.

Being poetic person, I feel and experience things. Sravan, being a logical person, reasons out everything. Sitting on a beach at midnight, I would just feel the magnificent mighty waves, the amazing beauty of nature - while Sravan would think about the energy of waves, the origin of sea, the chemical composition, how the sea can be purified to solve the drinking water problem of world and so on!! We had two different views on what life is, our instruments to understand it are different - his focus being on logic, my focus on experiencing the things. But basic quest was same, to make an attempt to understand life.

Life can be viewed in terms of what is it not. It is like saying - light is absence of darkness, Life is absence of death. But in simpler terms there is difference between a living body and a dead body - that difference is 'life'. In smallest measurable quantity of time, when there is transition from life to death - there is something that is no more. That something is life; call that 'life element'. What happens to that when that element is no more in body - after what is called death? . Is that element different in you and me? It that element permanent and above the relativity or is this pure biological aspect, that life element also degrades as body degrades?

There are views, philosophies, experiences and visions about that life element. That element may be energy, pure consciousness, or something that is pure biological phenomenon that is still unexplained.

Sravan, being analytic person reasons that things which are unexplained today including life element, would be common knowledge some day, may be after few hundred years down the line. In primitive times, people used to view rain, earthquake and other natural things as something super-natural and things which can only be 'experienced'. There was no explanation for them. Over hundreds of years, people having logical bend of mind discovered and explained these phenomenon. Now these are no more para-normal, we know them, we understand them - and even can create most of these natural things at will. So time would come, there would be no mystery about life element and what happens to that element after death. This ultimate research may take hundreds of years, but it is bound to happen.

I, on the other hand, believe there is something beyond science, something that can only be experienced but cannot be explained. Today medical science have advanced and reached peak point (or will reach in next few hundred years) where every part of body can be made in laboratories. But I am sure, that will never come, when life can be created in laboratories. Spirituality and yogic techniques have developed preciously for this reason - to experience because life force cannot be known, it can only be experienced.