Brahmin does not mean a worshipper

 

Brahmin does not mean a priest, Brahmin means one who knows about Brahman, miserly does not mean stingy in meaning, miserly means one who is stingy in acquiring knowledge.

----------

If you avoid all jealousy, greed, anger and competition and follow only the path of mental pleasure (not the pleasure of keeping the mind forgetful). Then your mind will tell you which path to take, which will open the door to inner peace in front of you.

A university teacher friend openly said that if I had invested the talent I had in one subject, I could have become something great in life. It is not just him, my mother's whole life's regret was the same, that I did not become anything (this doctor, engineer, what else).

Let alone lovers and girls of choice, they don't trust their life partners unless they have a solid, cool name on the docket because they think that people will think that they themselves have not been able to do anything great. The intelligent ones among those who know me closely know that I think differently. From my various writings, many have noticed that my perspective is different from the general public. Many people message me to know how they can be like this (or teach their children like this). Today I will try to tell you a little about why I am different.

When the eminent writer Syed Mujtaba Ali went to study at Santiniketan, Rabindranath himself was physically resident there. At the first meeting, Rabindranath asked the seventeen-year-old Syed Mujtaba Ali, "What do you want to study?" Mujtaba Ali said, "I don't know exactly, but I want to learn one thing very well." Rabindranath then said, "What's wrong with learning different things?" Mujtaba Ali then said, “If you spread your mind all over the place, you don’t seem to learn anything well.” Rabindranath looked at him for a long time and said, “Who said that?” Mujtaba Ali was seventeen at the time, and after a while he said, “Arthur Conan Doyle.” Rabindranath then said, “Oh, it’s not surprising for an Englishman to say that.”

From a very young age, I understood that knowing something about life and being skilled in something and making a living are two completely different things. I never wanted to mix the two. When Einstein did his best research, he was a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office. If he had been a good student, his thinking would have been influenced by some distinguished professor who would have assigned him to solve classical problems, and we might not have gotten the theory of relativity from him. The brain of every successful scientist is prepared at school – not after getting a PhD. I have seen this everywhere, how people mix the two and then they can't save the two.

For example, let's take photography. I knew from the very beginning that if I don't have photography as an art, then I can't rely on it to make money or live. And if I don't have it as a profession, then I won't be able to keep the art in it. Because as an artist, my mind will want one thing and the market will want another - then which path will I take? The path of knowledge and art and the path of the market or making money are different - this has to be learned at a very young age.

Now the question may arise, how did I understand these at such a young age?

From a young age, I wanted to understand systems. How does a clock work, how does a calculator work, how does the human body work, how does a one-dimensional wave travel far and a two-dimensional image appear on a television screen, how can a color image be sent back with it, I wanted to understand all these. It is not just about machinery, there are two ways to understand social events, family events, and political events - one is systemic understanding and the other is political understanding. Why do people in our country not want to move towards systemic understanding? Almost everyone takes a side in advance and then looks at the issue politically. An accident happens, people do not want to understand why the accident happened, they assume in advance who is responsible, they get angry against it.

Before the injured can be rescued and sent to the hospital, the car gets wrecked. This is everywhere in our society. One thing I noticed at that age is that as a result of such pre-emptive political understanding, our fathers, mothers, teachers, famous people, state leaders, scientists, writers - almost everyone talks a lot without knowing and understanding. All of them talk confusing, false, and meaningless things without any specific topic - which is their profession - or even beyond a certain limit.

I used to think that everyone in our country is afraid, traumatized, and feels like a failure and defeat in their own lives, so they cannot accept the truth with courage. They are in a false dream, a false dream, and they think that if the truth is revealed, their existence will be in danger. The dominant culture – namely the economy, the state, politics, radio, TV, newspapers – regularly supplies the dream or addiction that they are brainwashed every day. The brainwashing is such that if you do what you can do better, all the problems in the world will be solved, and whatever you think without knowing anything about the rest of the world is right – there is no need to know anything more.

American anthropologist Edward Hall, who is the world's leading scholar on cross-cultural differences and communication, says that when frogs grow up in different dirty ponds, they never realize how dirty the water in their own ponds is. Every frog thinks that the water in their own pond is perfectly clean and that is the ideal. Every frog spends their entire life with this delusion. The same happens to every one of us in modern society. We all grow up with the family, social or personal dirt, corruption, illiteracy or pollution that we consider clean and ideal.

Now if a frog for some reason gets out of its pond and falls into a cleaner pond and then returns to its own pond, only then does it realize how dirty the environment it is living in is. Only then does it try to convince everyone that this pond is not the best. Dominant economy, dominant society – namely the state, politics, radio, TV, newspapers, etc., constantly tell the opposite: your pond is wonderful, the best in the world, it is clean and spotless. Don't listen to the dissenting opinions of evil people, just increase your delivery, give more labor for the owner, for the government. This is the mantra of brainwashing that creates that darkness in the minds of people who are afraid and traumatized.

In the case of knowledge, similarly, to get out of this own pond, break this darkness of brainwashing, make a paradigm shift and go to a completely different relativity and from there, when we return to our own world, we understand where our ignorance is, how dirty our thoughts are. Universities all over the world are the ponds where there is clean water and all the student frogs once they get there, they understand how dirty their own ponds are. There is no university in our country, there are training institutes in the name of university, so our idea of ​​education or knowledge is actually education for selling labor, just like our idea of ​​marriage is actually selling body, our idea of ​​state governance is actually exploiting people and stealing wealth from them and distributing it to officials. Einstein called this wrong idea about everything from birth prejudice. Which in Bengali is prejudice, bias, one-sidedness or blind faith. This blind faith is not only in religious matters, it is in all matters, which Einstein called seventeen years of accumulated prejudice. And to break it, the student needs resurrection or rebirth. Those who do not live in the world of knowledge and science live in a world of certainty. A degree or PhD in science or even receiving a Nobel Prize may not give that rebirth. Nazi scientists or Pakistani Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam are examples. This false idea of ​​certainty is contrary to real knowledge.

As a child, I understood that knowing something and being skilled in something are two different things. In adulthood, another understanding has been added to it. Since then, I have understood that most of the ideas and directions of life given by the contemporary adults of the dominant society are wrong and suicidal because they are in that false delusion. My young and pure mind then started to notice another thing that everything that society, religion, science and all such knowledge tells us is true subject to conditions. Much of what we are told as reality is only our perception. However, they themselves do not know that the truths taught by our teachers themselves are bracketed (conditionally true). This used to hurt me a lot.

I felt pity for those teachers who have known this old man all his life that he is wise, everyone in the society has respected him as wise, society has given him the most honorable job, but he himself does not know where the limits of his knowledge are. At some point, he no longer dares to seek the truth, otherwise the house of cards he has built his whole life will collapse.

The famous physicist Richard Feynman has told the story of the limitations of knowledge in the form of a story from his life. One day, he was sunbathing by the edge of a swimming pool. At that time, a girl wearing a bikini came and jumped into the water of that pool. He was saying that the girl was not attractive enough, so she could not interrupt his thoughts.

Feynman was saying that the girl jumped into the water, as a result of which many waves were created on the surface of the water. How many more people are swimming in the water of the swimming pool, hundreds of waves are forming all the complex waves. Several small children are jumping there, they are creating countless more waves. On the surface of the water, which is shaken by thousands of waves coming from all around, there is a water insect floating with six legs that does not see, is blind.

The insect can only sense the vibrations of the waves with its six legs. By feeling the vibrations of its six legs, it is trying to understand what is actually happening in the swimming pool. That is the physical reality for it. Those six legs are our six senses. Everything that happens in the universe and on this earth is created by various types of waves, which are sound, light or electromagnetic waves. By analyzing those waves, we are trying to understand what is happening around us.

We get very little idea of ​​what is actually happening and why it is happening. We just make up a story of our own that lasts for a couple of hundred years – and then something new again. These truths were known to me when I was a teenager, so I did not move forward on the path of futile learning. The knowledge of our current era is like adding intelligent organs to the body of an ignorant animal – who will participate in it fully, and how?

Since childhood, I have felt that I have to do two things:

One - In this competitive society, I have to learn something so that I do not have to be at the mercy of other people for food and clothing, and so that I do not have to work hard for food and clothing and do not become a slave to the uneducated.

As it is said in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (1/3/28):

“Aso ma sadgamoy, tamso ma jyotirgamoy”

Which means “Do not remain in untruth, go to the world of truth. Do not remain in darkness, go to the world of light”.

And two - After taking birth, I have to know the truth as much as possible about what I have come into, what is happening around me, what is the meaning of all this, what is the consequence of all this. Even if it is not possible to know that, at least we have to know what we do not know. It is humiliating to die with a head full of misconceptions and blind faith without knowing this, whereas as a human being I have that power.

As stated in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (3/8/10):

“Yo ba etadaksharam gargi viditavasmallokat praiti sa brahmanah”

Which means “He who leaves the body knowing the solution to the main problems of life (birth, death, old age and disease), that is a brahmana”.

Here, brahmana is not a worshipping brahmana - it is a wise man, a teacher, i.e. a person with the knowledge of Brahman who knows about Brahman. Brahman refers to the concept of the ultimate and undivided truth existing in the universe.

The same verse also says:

“Yo ba etadaksharam gargyaviditvasmallokat praiti sa kripanah”

Which means “A person who does not understand the science of self, leaves this world like a dog and a cat and does not solve the problems of life even after acquiring a human body, is a miser”.

Here the Sanskrit word ‘kripan’ is the opposite of ‘brahman’, i.e. miser in knowledge of Brahman, not miser in meaning.

So I did not want to die miserly, although I read all this in the Upanishads and decided on these matters many, many years later.

©Sirajul Hossain