During the course of discussion on this thread, please anyone - also try to explain the following two questions from YOUR point of view - NOT quoting scriptures even if there is anything already written about it.
People say the Universe expands - but into what?
People say God is in everything - but from where did God come from?
Dear Sridhar,
After talking to gurus and mediums, this is what i understand:
<<People say the Universe expands - but into what?>>
The soul is enclosed within 'gaseous' or 'amorphous' like stuff (for want of better words) which hindus call ether. The sun too is just hot gas.
Hindus beleived light is conducted in the medium of ether. This is what physics also says today, and we have come closer the understanding of light as ether waves.
Of the panchabhutams, the concept of ether is hindu (the chinese or dao also have the concept of panchabhutam but it is metal for them not ether, the remaining four are same).
The sun too is just hot gas. Ages later, it will cool. But the gases themselves do not cease to exist. They can still concentrate into a ball of condensed heat again.
These gases have no time or boundries. The universe just expands, not specifically into anything, it just expands. This page also has a part on what is the universe expanding into:
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#UN
Einstein (a brahman and that too a vedic one to me
) was able to prove using logic of the existentiality of other things (in his theory of relativity space), deriving at with his various calculations, that ether exists:
http://www.tu-harburg.de/rzt/rzt/it/Ether.html
<<People say God is in everything - but from where did God come from?>>
Going back to the idea that hindus beleived light as the medium of ether, it seems that the yogis saw the soul ensconced as a tiny concentrated light enclosed within amorphous gaseous stuff that diffused outwards. Meaning, they saw the soul itself as amorphous gaseous matter and light that concentrated at a point and diffused outwards. (hope am putting this into words sufficiently well since it is taking me effort to get the right words).
So the yogis explained the soul as a fragment from a "source"; and that everything came from a single point of origin. This is rather similar to the concept of big bang (nasadiya suktam ?).
The yogis say that when the soul (gaseous matter) returns to its source it is in an unconditioned state (the body is a part of the conditioned state). And since this soul matter is part of the other gaseous matter of the universe, it too can expand. In that way, they expanded their consciousness. Meaning, they dropped their senses, got to a blank state, had glimpses of their soul light, travelled into it, and found that they are in an astral plane where there was nothing but shapeless gaseous expanse of light, which they called consciousness. They figured out that the darkness occurs during transition states or transformation stages of conditioning or transformation. They merely called this light as God and darkness as a state of conditioning or transformation.
This God came from nowhere. It exists, within each one of us, it exists everwhere. There is nothing without an atom, or light or gaseous matter.
Everything we see is in a conditioned state as a stone or a plant or human. Meaning "creation" is a state of conditioning.
Various people and philosophies describe this in various ways. Some say the source (God) and the sourced (the soul) are the same. Some say the sourced is part of the source but it can never go back to the source, like the planets cannot go back into the sun. But well, they can, but only after a stage of massive transformation (some say its destruction, but its not, its just transformation, of taking on an other form, so shiva (to me) is transformation, but we are in a conditioned state so it appears as destruction).
It also seems to mediums that every soul has an inbuilt evolutionary intelligence to choose its expereinces or its conditioned state. That's a point of freewill. The freewill chooses conditioning of various kinds (even so-called wrong doing) and only after a conditioned state there is a point of understanding of something as "good" or "evil". The soul chooses both since it has to experience both, before it merges back into the source. (this obviously is moved away from making 'judgements' or morality about deciding that something is good or evil, there simply is no room for judgements in this point of freewill).
Now comes the question - what is the source? And why did the source choose to become conditioned as creation?
Currently i call the source with various 'names' like God or Allah (all sounds and syllables that come from a conditioned 'mind'), the closest of which personally to me is Narayana. But this Narayana to me is not without Shiva. The terminology may be sounding hindu, but they are just names given to attributes (of matter and all else). A rose by any other name is not going to be different, so if i call it Allah, its still gonna be the same.
Regards.
