Kannadasan – A Realized Master (Part 4)

  

Coming back to Kannadasan's 'Who am I?" (Nee/Naan Enbathenna?) song, “after all, over a trillion life forms have come and gone in this planet and we don't have to believe 'ourselves' and our imagined story to be something 'special' and ’individual/unique to ourselves’”, says Eckhart Tolle in his books and YouTube Lectures. After all, we are just living organisms like our other senior brothers and sisters viz., reptiles, amphibians, avians and mammals. Difficult to accept?

Let us continue our journey inwards to know how ‘our fictional inner world’ is created.

Indranil Chakraborty in his book "Stories at Work" confirms, "the brain converts raw experience into a story and then considers, ponders, remembers and acts on the self-created story, not on the actual input experience!" It only goes to prove that our brain generates ‘its own stories’ to help us ‘understand the real world’. Boom! And hence ‘our’ reality is generated by the gray stuff inside the skull, we ALL live in our own unique Maya! NOT in the ‘real’ world at all/anytime. And I have read elsewhere that every time we recall a past incident from our internal memory, the brain adds/alters some portion of it based on the overall ‘updation’ of its software and hence we DON’T have ANY originally happened story that we are reproducing/depending upon. On this, Eckhart points out that “the past comes as a REMEMBERED NOW and the future is nothing but an IMAGINED NOW”.

This is also confirmed by various Neuroscientists and philosophers coming in 'World Science Festival' channel saying, we humans, unless 'wake up' (in the sense of the Spiritual Masters’ words), will never be able to see the 'reality' as it is, since our brain is playing continuously the interpreter/narrator's role on ALL inputs from the five senses as well as our own memories! If you keenly watch the gap between your own thoughts and what you speak/write about ‘your experience/opinion’, you will notice that every time there is an updated version coming out.

What you call yourself as a personality is only a story in your head says Neuroscientist Dr V S Ramachandran’. (Books: “Phantoms in the Brain”, “Tell-Tale Brain”. In his own words, "The autobiography we each carry around in our minds based on a lifetime of episodic memories is intimately linked to our sense of self. A monkey can learn new things, of course, and retain memory. But a monkey cannot engage in conscious recollection of specific events from its past in order to construct an autobiography, imparting a sense of narrative and meaning to its life."

Today Neuroscience says that your sense of being 'yourself' is a controlled hallucination generated by your back-office brain, sitting inside the bone box between your ears. So, what you call 'I' is ONLY a mere collection of ideas in the gray matter, created and updated on a sustained basis, running a movie of sorts, on 'your' mental screen. And people around you have similar movies of yourself (even as they are continuously manufacturing their own personhoods) as you appear in their screens, when one of their five antennas (visual-auditory-olfactory-taste-kinesthetic or thought-factory inputs), gives as an information, to their processors! 

In conclusion, funnily, not only we humans ourselves suffer our own creative burden of our personalities, but also project it on to our Gods! Just check these famous songs of Kannadasan...

Film: Thiruvilaiyadal (Year: 1965)

“Paatum Naane Bhavamum Naane
Padum Unai Naan Paada Vaithene”

“I am the song, and I am the melody;

I shall make you—the singer—sing.”

The Bhagavad Gita Song in the movie *Karnan*:

“Maranathhai Ennik Kalangidum Vijaya!...

Maranathhin Thanmai Sonven!..."

“Vijaya, who trembles at the thought of death!...

I shall reveal to you the true nature of death!”

In both verses, the word "I Myself"—spoken by God—refers not to *Him* (as a person), but to the very sense of "I Am"!

In these two exquisite philosophical songs, God Himself declares—that if human beings focus their attention upon the sense of "I Am"—the feeling of "I Am-ness"—they will be able to realize the Divine nature. In fact, in his own life experience, Nisarga Dutta Maharaj, who was just ‘Maruti’ a small-shop illiterate owner and simpleton, knowing ONLY Marathi language, realized in three years’ time, just by following his Guru’s advice of focusing on the ‘I Am’ness feeling consistently. (Book: World famous Spiritual Classic “I Am That”). No Mantras, No rituals. In fact, he was smoking the humble beedi!

Coming back to Kannadasan’s songs, we are so enamored by the magnetic acting of extraordinary actors like Sivaji Ganesan and NTR are that we unconsciously fall in to the trap of considering the God in the 'human format'. To shake out our mindset may be that Monkey God, Elephant God, Fish God, Pig God were created deliberately by Indian Spirituality, to make human species realize the evolution of life forms in this planet.

Also included were the Reptilian, Avian and Mammalian animals as consorts to Gods to point to the multitude of living entities into human consciousness. In fact, Neuroscience confirms that we humans still have in our upper story, Reptilian brain and Mammalian brain modules. But seeing the God with a head, two/many hands and legs with one/many spouses and children, we slip in to believing God to be ONLY in the anthropocentric format! Why couldn't God exist in the form of an ant or a dolphin? Since we cannot fathom using the little logical mind as to ‘how’ the Supreme ‘looks like’, we have created a convenient human form!

Then what is God(-liness)? May be, Supreme Consciousness, Stillness, Darkness, Silence, Infiniteness, Shoonyata, Space, Nothingness, Unmanifested. But I won't call it 'Shiva' and rake up the Chola-period 'Shiva-Vishnu' controversy, for we will fall again into the personalities trap.

I was simply lying dormant ‘Shiva like’—peacefully and inert—much like a neutron within an atom or its nucleus. However, since Ramesh Thiagarajan—acting like the electron Parvathi—gave me a vigorous shake, I stirred into motion; and as I moved—muttering "Ganesha, Muruga" with a monumental effort—the creative offering shall continue for as long as this "movement" persists, just as the poet Kannadasan declared in *Paattum Naane*. Shiva Shambho!