The Eternal Knowledge....

Last week an article in the newspaper said that our lives in reality could be like lives of people in the movie Matrix. The hero of the movie, Thomas Anderson, apparantly realises that the Earth has been... uhm... conquered (?) by a crazy computer and that the world is a virtual reality..

Ok.. I have not seen the movie (yeah yeah.. i owe an L to my forehead)

But sh*t!... imagine... what if this was the truth?... that means my brother is my brother just because he is being portayed like that?.. my car is red because Mr. Comp wants it to look red? I started blogging all because the silly computer wanted me to?... this is NOT happening to me!

As a result of curiousity (and as a result of my last project getting over, and my not having to do anything for two long days), i did some research on this topic. (Basically i just wanted to check if there was some way to coax the Mr. Comp into getting my brother to shed some weight)...

And what i found was quite interesting...

I happened to come across a link describing Gnosticism (gnosis, in Greek meaning knowledge)- apparantly a Greek religious belief system according to which human beings are supposed to be divine souls 'trapped in a material world created by an imperfect spirit'. The imperfect spirit here refers to a evil embodiment-a.k.a Demiurge (not exaclty the Devil because Demiurge could simply be imperfect and not absoutely evil). Then there is this unknown supreme being (The Providence) that embodies the good (obviously). It further says that only 'learned elites' can free themselves from the world ala imperfect. Gnosticism even recognises Jesus as the divine incarnation of the supreme being who tried to help the mankind break from the shakles of darkness.

The philosophy is repeated in the Bhagwat Gita- the hindu religious text, which talks about the eternal knowledge of life and death, though in another form and a different context. It mentions at length, the knowledge (about 'Atman') that Lord Krishna passes over to Arjuna in the battlefield of Kurukshetra.

The Bible also says "Seek and ye shall find."

Funny.. All these belief systems, books and stories pointing out the same thing- the illusionary world and all of us being puppetted by some unknown power whose existence no one realises or give much relevance to. And the one who does realise, thereafter fears nothing. For, he knows the truth, the eternal truth (or the virtual truth?). Death then becomes a part of life.

The eternal light of knowledge... gnosis... virtual reality.... Atman...

Ahem.. do we have any freaking idea where we all are heading to?