There are some scientific discoveries that changed the face of the world. Once such discovery was the invention of electric motor, which converts the mechanical energy into the electricity. Imagine a world without electricity. Yet few of us know how the principle of electromagnetism behind the electric motor was discovered by Michael Faraday.
In 1820, Hans Christian Oersted and Andre Marie Ampere discovered that an electric current produces a magnetic field. Faraday thought that since an electric current could cause a magnetic field, a magnetic field should also be able to produce an electric current. He worked on this idea for a long time for converting magnetic field to electricity. Nothing was forthcoming. One day in 1831, he got frustrated and threw the magnet to the electric circuit. To his amazement, he noticed that the Ammeter (Instrument for measuring electricity) showed movement indicating the flow of electricity. He repeated this experiment again and again and found that every time when the magnet is brought near or taken away from the circuit (loop), electricity is produced. Thus he invented the electromagnetic induction which means that whenever the magnetic field is changed in a loop, a current is produced. From his experiments came devices that led to the modern electric motor, generator and transformer, which changed the world forever.
Little did he know that he has embarked upon a great mystery of life. Just like the changes of magnetic field produces electricity, the change of the condition of the man does produce happiness or pain. If you understand this principle and use in your life, you can control and manage happiness and pain in your life.
Discoveries of the Dualities in Science
The modern physics is nothing but the discovery of the duality that existed in nature. From time immemorial people knew about magnets. Even our earth behaves like magnet and people used magnetic needle to find direction from ages. Electricity too was always known to people as manifested during the rain. Yet what was missing was the link between the two. Yet electricity-magnetism was not the only duality that was discovered by scientists.
The wave particle duality helped Einstein to explain the concept of photoelectric effect and fetched him the Noble Prize. The mass-energy equivalence principle derived from the special theory of relativity made him the greatest scientist ever that explained many mysteries of the nature like creation of energy by sun and helped the scientists to produce nuclear energy and also nuclear bomb.
Yet duality is beyond the comprehension of our commonsense. How can a magnet create electricity? How can a wave become a particle? How can energy be converted to mass? Yet one has no option but to accept these dualities since they were true. Yet when Heisenberg gave the "uncertainty principle" which implied that locating a particle in a small region of space makes the momentum of the particle uncertain; and conversely, Einstein found it absurd and passed a famous comment, "God does not play dice with the world." Yet the world listens to the truth of the uncertainty principle and Heisenberg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1932.
Body-Soul Duality
However, there is one type of duality which has never been resolved and that duality is called body-soul duality. No one deny the existence of body, which is seen, felt and measured. No one can also deny soul, which is the essence of every life but can not be seen, felt or measured by any instrument. Once soul departs, body become nothing but dead matter.
From eternity, philosophers and scientists have been fighting with each others on deciding which of the two is real. In the eyes of scientists, body is the sole reality which is the source of mind and life. While philosophers believe that only soul is real and it is the source of body and mind. However, every person knows that both body and soul are the reality. One can not exist without other. There is no evidence of soul without body, or body without soul.
The Mystery of Happiness
The mystery of happiness is hidden in resolving the duality between the body and the soul. Spiritual leaders from Buddha to Jesus to Mohammad to Gandhi advocated denial of sensual pleasure and material comforts in life to attain happiness and peace by invoking the spiritual self. Poverty and abstinence were considered to be the surest path of the kingdom of God. Jesus Christ said to his disciple (Mathew 5:3), "Blessed are poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." He also stated, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God! In fact, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God" (Luke 18:18-27)
Yet the fact is that there are few people who really believe that the source of happiness lies in being poor, discarding of bodily comfort and sensual pleasure. Most religions ask their follower to follow abstinence and avoid sexual indulgence. Nothing can be more absurd, when everyone agree that sex is the source of all lives. Even saints feel hunger and need food, shelter and clothing. How can one get all these material requirements fulfilled unless he is attached to the world and earn his livelihood.
The fact is that God has designed the universe in such a way that one has to have body and also have soul. While the body is created from the flesh and blood of the parents, soul is part of God. In the interplay of body and soul lies the mystery of happiness and pain.
Only Change is Eternal
No person can live wither a material life or purely a spiritual life permanently. You may love music but imagine that you have listen to the same music for days. You are sure to get mad and hate music. Similarly, even the greatest believer in God can not retain their faith when they see extreme poverty and misery in this world and the crime perpetrated against kids and woman.
Nothing in this world can remain stationery even for a nanosecond. Even the solid object consists of trillions of atoms which all are vibrating with respect to each other and each atom consists of electrons that are moving close to the speed of light.
Our day itself is filled with the interplay of material and non-material life. When you get up in the morning, you may pray or go for a walk. These are not the activities that are pleasant to the body and senses and therefore non-material or spiritual. When you eat your breakfast, you perform a material function. When you go to office, you perform both. Any action that is done with the spirit of selflessness, kindness, compassion, justice and love is spiritual, while the opposite actions are selfish hence material. When you lay with your children and spend time with your spouse, you are essentially doing an spiritual function since it is done selflessly and you are deriving any physical pleasure from it. Finally when you sleep in the night, you are in the deepest stage of spiritual conscious as Indian philosophies believe that during the sleep your soul get connected with the soul of Universe of God.
Thus even your daily routine and indeed whole life is nothing but the interplay of material and spiritual nature of man. While every happiness is associated with spirit, every pleasure is related to body. The change in the spirituality produces the physical pleasure while the change in physical pleasure produces spiritual pleasure. Yoga is the best example. You control your body and suffer physical discomfort, and you receive spiritual energy. Conversely sex gives physical pleasure at the cost of spiritual energy.
Let us try to understand this mystery with another example. Charity is the considered to be the most holy and spiritual activity in every religion. But in order to give something, you have to have that thing. You can not have it unless you earn it. But earning anything requires engagement in the worldly affair. So the happiness lies in fist earning it and then giving it. When you earn you evolved from poor to rich, hence become less spiritual. Yet when you give, you become poorer and become more spiritual and get happiness.
It is like conversion of one type of energy to another. When you throw a ball upward, you give it kinetic energy. However, on the top of its position, the energy get converted to potential energy. When the ball comes down the same potential energy get converted to kinetic energy again. Thus by suffering the physical pain you earn pleasure of happiness which is associated from spirit.
Thus spirituality is like the potential energy that is earned by investing in pain of material life. Yet if you don't spend it, it is of no use. It is like a ball thrown in air which got stuck in the tree. If you want happiness, you have to let it fall below the tree to realize its energy. In the same way, if you have high materialistic possessions, you have the hidden source of great spirituality and pleasure when you decide to give it away and become less materialistic.
Buddha was not born of poor parents but in the family of a king. He had all the pleasure of life. However, instead of accumulating the pleasure, he decided to spent it and discovered spirituality. Gandhi too lived the life of poor yet his organization Congress survived only on the donation of the rich industrialists. He would not have run the organization without these materialistic people.
The Harmony of Life
The secret of happiness, therefore, lies neither in materialism nor in spiritualism but in the interplay of both. The truth is that life is like a symphony which requires constant change of nodes. If you have listened to music and found pleasing to your senses and appealing to your soul, it is because the nodes are changing constantly with time with such a frequency that they creating symphony. If the nodes do not change with time, there can't be any music.
Same is true with life. One has to constantly move from materialistic to spiritual planes at regular intervals to create the symphony called happiness. Only by practice and experience, you can understand the true symphony of life. In the change lies your source of all happiness. A harmonious change always please you while a inharmonious change can become cacophonous and become pain. Learn this secret of nature and God and you can discover the pleasure and happiness in your life.
Mr. Awdhesh K Singh is an Engineer by education and philosopher by passion. He has published several papers in International Journals and Conferences on the subject of E-governance, Artificial Intelligence , Fuzzy Logic and Expert Systems.
He is the founding member of The Aatmic Science Foundation, (The Science of Soul Foundation). His interest is in creating synthesis between all religions and sciences for the benefit of the mankind.
He can be contacted at his email address aksinghirs [a] yahoo.com
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