Living life with Calculus....

Mark Twain — 'Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.'

Definitely. Real life is stranger than fiction, it’s fascinating to observe how it unfolds.

Lets try to understand this by taking help from Calculus - the mathematical study of continuous changes ! The journey of the life for any human being is shaped by two uniquely owned attributes of that person, one is Prakriti (Nature) and other is Sanskara (Values). These attributes are very customized and absolutely unique to that individual, which can’t be matched exactly with anyone else. But one of these two factors shows its dominance in shaping life by governing our world of action ( to some extend in two different circumstances) . One manifests more  while, we apply our faculty of discrimination in our action and other when we allow action to flow as it spawns, which normally sparked from our desire, wish or by our very personality ( Prabritti ). At the same time from the experience which we earn through our action only, these characteristic influence and shape each the other - Value System and Nature.

Why we’ll limit this phenomenon to explain the action of human beings only? this can be extended to any living being from any species. And also, the qualitative position of a species in the spectrum of the living beings, or a single individual from any species is determined by, how much it’s action is driven by its nature and how far it’s capable of choosing its action applying the faculty of discrimination. If we consider any supremacy of the human species ( which has enough good reason to be skeptical ), is because of our faculty of discrimination or the ability to judge our action. When we try to exercise this faculty, the reference, we use,  to classify good or bad is named as our personal value or Sanskara.

When our action is driven more by our power of discrimination, or our tendency is to become more cerebral, then in the manifestation our of life’s journey, the influence of Sanskar is very prominent. Let’s take a Mathematical approach to analyze our very own Sanskara and where it leads us through the journey of life.

·        Sanskar is our very personal judgmental reference to consider what is right and what is wrong. This is my very own individual reference to choose the right path of action in the journey of life . This reference can have a lot of similarities within a group or some person but can never be exactly same with any other individual. Now if we want to be little economical with our script and drop one ‘o’ from what we consider good as god, it won’t alter the relevance of the word much in this context. In this light our individual good or god represent the same, lets assign a variable g ( small g ) to represent this.

·        Anyone who is little watchful and be honest with his/her life review, will agree in our life’s journey our Sanskar or what we consider good keep on upgrading, so it won’t be wrong to say, our Sanskar alters by the experiences we earn from our life, that’s why this g cannot be a constant, that’s why we have assigned a variable over here. But a deep instinct always bothers us to seek for that good what is universal, what is eternal, with lack of terminology in English, using a word eternal, or what is Sanatana. In our algebraic way of expressing let’s put a symbol ‘G’ ( Capital G) to represent this. And it is a constant and not like variable g, why is constant ? as it’s universally true in time and place. And we all have a very powerful instinct, especially when we are more in cerebral, is to elevate our individual standard (g) for to the universal standard ( G). But when we misuse this tendency or forcibly try to express or claim g to G to the world, we display our egocentric personality and create conflicts around us. As long as we have that awareness that my personal g is not G, in Mathematical language the g != G and we recognize our inner seeking to expand our personal g to G though our thoughts and actions, our life becomes meaningful and purposeful. So to live a meaningful life the mathematical formula should be, our life’s action ( karma) should be guided by the mathematical expression  g -> G.

·        So borrowing concept from calculus, mathematically a life’s journey can be represented like this :

Where t = Time and L is a full life journey.

·        Here an obvious question will arises, does every single life journey conclude at G ? It won’t be difficult to convince us from our observations that every single life may not reach g - > G in its journey of this lifetime. It’s more often confirming improvement of a personality in various aspects, that also factored by how that individual live a thoughtful life taking lessons from the journey, this attributed to the improvement of Sanskar in his life. Now in some eastern philosophy this lesson gets carryforward to the next life. So if we try to capture the journey of a single soul in eternity this can be expressed like this.

Or we can put like this :

n is the iteration of life

·        Or we can tell in cosmic scale the journey of an individual soul ends when g becomes G or we reach God, or in non-mathematical term elevate our samskara to sync up with God or reach to God.

Now let’s try to understand how a life journey evolve our g. It’s more often we observe the dynamism of the external world is guided by the Prakriti. In this dynamics of interacting with the outer world, understanding this Prakriti ( nature) is a very important, which we have totally ignores in our development process. So let us try to take an analytical approach to understand this aspect of us.

Nature ( Prakriti ) is those predictable response from an individual, even it can be any living organism, in a given situation. In the dynamics of interacting with others understanding Prakriti ( nature) plays a very important role. Interestingly if we try to go deep enough, we can clearly observe this nature is again shaped by our Sanskar. Which is more prominent in human species as they attempt to use this faculty of discrimination more often than any other species if not all.

Human life is the expression of some behaviors sparked from our very own unique believe system ( sanskar). At first some elements of this believe system we get from parents and relatives, then comes contribution from friends and our educational systems, thirdly all the pleasant and painful experiences we go through in our life and some parts of it, nobody knows from where it comes, this is what some of eastern philosophies say, we inherit from our previous life. Characterizing of this believe-system into a person or in a living being, is called as its Prakriti (nature).

All of us have our unique nature(prakriti)  and which not only other considers as us but also more often we ourselves consider as ourselves. So it is very loving to us. And all living beings has a tendency to confirm ( to prove it is the only truth ) its nature in outside world. And this is very very powerful in the world of action, this phenomenon  is named as Maya ( illusion) . All living beings [ including us :) !! ] interact with world through that Maya (an unrealistic view of existence). The strange thing is, it is so correct to us at this very moment  that we can’t think of any other idea to be correct but in a short while our  view itself get changed and another view appears as perfect truth. So in reality, we all are perceiving the world through an unique glass of maya of this very moment but strange thing is we are not ready to accept it. That gives all the diversities in the world.

I’ll end this article with a personal note, long before ‘Positive Living’ and ‘Art of Living’ is a common topic of discussion in households of urban society in India and abroad, back in early 90s, I got a flyer from somewhere. I can’t remember exactly where, most likely from Chinmayananda Mission. That little piece of paper has become a very important part of my life for last few decades. There was nothing much in that paper, a bold heading ‘Positive Living’ and some bullet points under that. This talk about the continuous personal development from living a meaningful life.

POSITIVE LIVING

• Live Dynamically

• Think Positively

• Plan out Deliberately

• Work Productively

• Exchange Meticulously

• Approach Smartly

• Behave Friendly

• Read  Daily

• Pray Ardently

• Meditate Regularly

• Grow Divinely

I am getting courage to write on this topic of self development, which I am sure I am not qualified to talk. And also I am not such a great soul with exceptional human quality who deserves to talk on this subject. Still I am making a humble attempt to write something on it. Though in the process of self development, apparently sometime, it seems, today’s thought is quite in contradiction with the thoughts I had yesterday, but in reality it is just outcome of more opened up more complete form of yesterday’s thought. In this aspect, I think, I can relate with, what Swami  Vivekananda wanted to tell by “from truth to better truth” . Your thoughts which are very close to your heart always accommodate your previous thoughts in that direction, though sometime apparently it seems contradicting but you know deep in your heart your new thoughts are expansion of the previous one. So if I can express from my heart here, whatever I’ll write, won’t make me to repent for talking nonsense after.