new hope and happiness Good Question!
In Sanskrit, truth is that which is always true (like whole is greater than its part or that which is always there, hence is the substratum on which things come, remain, and disappear after a while.. Fan revolves, yet for this to happen something that is not revolving is required as a platform-hence that platform is more important than the fan leaves.
Similarly, we have accumulated vast amount of knowledge, received through perception. However there is no perception without the (spirit) perceiver who is independent of the things perceived, hence exists before and after embodiment. Your tools of knowledge is your senses and act of perception! Through senses or even through thoughts, you cannot know this perceiver. Because thought is actually, like memory, the representation of some experience or notion. Representation is like your photo which is statistic, but photo is not you which is dynamic—hence how can you know the dynamic through something static?
We watch our loved ones age and die, and we assume that an external entity called time is responsible for the crime. But experiments increasingly cast doubt on the existence of time as we know it. In fact, the reality of time has long been questioned by philosophers and physicists. Actually,
space and time are tools of the mind and thus don’t exist as external objects independent of life. When we feel poignantly that time has elapsed, as when loved ones die, it constitutes the human perceptions of the passage and existence of time. Our babies turn into adults. We age. That, to us, is time. It belongs with us.
In 2002, scientists carried out an amazing experiment that showed that within pairs of particles, each particle anticipated what its twin would do in the future . Somehow, the particles “knew” what the researcher would do before it happened, as if there were no space or time between them. In a 2007 study published in Science, scientists shot particles into an apparatus and showed that they could retroactively change whether the particles behaved as photons or waves. The particles had to “decide” what to do when they passed a fork in the apparatus. Later on, the experimenter could flip a switch. It turns out what the observer decided at that point determined how the particle had behaved at the fork in the past. Thus the knowledge in our mind can determine how particles behave.
In the Oct. 2010 issue of Discover, theoretical physicists Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow state, “There is no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world … In classical physics, the past is assumed to exist as a definite series of events, but according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities”.
Thus it follows: perceiver is independent of the things perceived, hence immortal. Immortality doesn’t mean perpetual (linear) existence in time but resides outside of time altogether. Life is a journey that transcends our classical way of thinking. Experiment after experiment continues to suggest that we create time, not the other way around . Without consciousness, space and time are nothing. At death, there’s a break in the continuity of space and time; you can take any time – past or future – as your new frame of reference and estimate all potentialities relative to it. In the end, even Einstein acknowledged that “the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Life is just one fragment of time, one brushstroke in a picture larger than ourselves, eternal even when we die. This is the indispensable prelude to immortality.
“Time and space are but the physiological colors which the eye maketh,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay “Self-Reliance.” “But the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night.” This perceiver as the substratum has been accepted as THE truth by philosophers like Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, Lessing, Hume, Spencer, Marx Mueller …… Among the poets of the West, we find many burnished intellects soaring into the cloudless sky of imagination and within their poetic flights they too have intuitively felt the sanction behind this immortal perceiver---Browning, Rossetti, Tennyson and Wordsworth .......... Hence truth is not subjective, and it’s never changing!
