Saturday, May 28, 2011

Imagine There’s No Heaven, It’s Easy IF You Try


Why does it take a blind man to see what others with vision fail to see?

Well, Stephen Hawking is not really blind, and what he said cannot really be seen—but you get the hint!

Hawking said in an interview published on Monday in The Guardian: There is nothing out there; heaven is a fairy tale.

Who is Hawking?

At the age of 46, Hawking became world’s most famous scientists, with the publication of his book A Brief History of Time in 1988. This was 23 years after he was diagnosed with ALS disease that affects motor neuron, and was given to live only a few years.

The degenerative disease paralyzed him and took his voice, however, it could not prevent him from becoming the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton.

Hawking said, “I have lived with the prospect of an early death for the last 49 years. I'm not afraid of death, but I'm in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.” What keeps Hawking going? How did he achieve so much that people with healthy bodies cannot emulate? The burning ‘fire in the belly’ that keeps Hawking going is found in his answer: “We should seek the greatest value of our action.”

Hawking elaborated, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.” He explained life emanating out of quantum fluctuations that occurred in the early universe.

This indeed is a phenomenal assertion from a person who has no voice and has to speak with the help of a computer, regardless, he speaks in the voice of the early sages such as Lau Tzu who maintained, “Tao is the way to Tao.” In a further esoteric expression Lau Tzu articulated:

He who knows, speaks not;
He who speaks, knows not.
He closes the mouth,
He shuts the doors of the senses.
He subdues activities,
He is freed from bonds.
He diffuses light,
He gathers men into unity.
This is called wonderful unity.

What an irony, the life-long seeker of truth, Stephen Hawking does not have a voice where as third grade preachers spewing out second hand knowledge have megawatt sound waves!

First Published on Technorati.

1 comment:

  1. Mohit,

    After reading the article about Stephen Hawking, I was reminded of Pascal’s Wager. A French philosopher, mathematician, and physicist Pascal put forth a very interesting wager for those sitting on the fence of belief in a god. His wager does not force one to conclude that Christianity is the only path to heaven, but gives incentive through logic that it is better to find God and follow him than not to. As long as you are seeking the truth and the God that exists is truly concerned about you, he will call you and give you direction along the way. If not, it doesn’t matter anyway because you no longer exist. Hopefully you would have only wasted a little bit of your time serving others and not destroying them because of this faith.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

    Laurance Draves

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