jātasya—for one who has been born; hi—for; dhruvaḥ—certain; mṛityuḥ—death;

dhruvam—certain; janma—birth; mṛitasya—for the dead; cha—and;

Krishna said in verse 27 of chapter 2 that all things born in truth must die and out of the death in truth comes life. This kinda hints at the cyclic reality of our being. In previous article, where we hypothesised the postulates of Gita , we went through a numbered list that we are all endowed with a protected, immutable but encrypted copy of knowledge. We also dwelled on the idea that Bramh - an overarching system, provisions everything - our “tiny box”. In addition, it also implements a superior garbage collection system. But we left an important point open that the underlying reality is a continuum. There is no beginning or an end. It’s an everlasting cycle of knowledge to manifestation and vice-versa.

This cycle is also called Kaal Chakra - the cycle of “Time”. Each cycle expresses a specific aspect of “Knowledge”. These cycles of Time are scale invariant - i.e they may express an entire Universe or a single atom or even a quark inside an atom. The journey of human life or for that matter any other manifestation is thus too a cycle of Time.

Time

One of the reason it is so hard to understand time is we treat time as a measure. For example an year is a duration it takes earth to go around the sun. A day is earth’s spin around its own axis. The problem is such measures work for spatial dimensions such as length , width or depth because when I am using a meter scale , I can tell that a tree is ten meter tall as a whole. I can see the starting point of the measure and the end. But if I use a day as a measure of time , I have no way to tell if a particular thing is 200 days. I can’t see the starting point when I am taking the measure on say 200th day. In other words we can say that a building is ten meters high. I can prove it you by taking a meter rod and measuring it right there , but there is no easy way to tell if the building is exactly ten years old. And even if we have a way to tell that building is actually ten years old , we don’t know for sure how long this building is going to last. A ten meter high building is supposed to stay ten meter high but it is not guaranteed that building is going to be ten years old or going to last for 100 years. In other words - Time is not a spatial measure.

A spatial measure is where both start and end of the measurement are in the same moment whereas time is something across many moments. In a way time is orthogonal to space. So hereon , we shall represent Time as perpendicular to space.

You may say - if a road is 1000 miles long , we can’t see the starting point. I agree but we can have someone stand there and claim that the start of road still exist when we measure 1000th mile. Can we do this with time ? The start and the end of the road exist at the same moment of the measurement but time in itself is a measure of moments. The fact that start and end of time are NOT in the same moment, makes it almost impossible to visualize even with our most advanced instruments. If a say a building is 100 years old , I just can’t have someone sitting in 1922 telling me that yes the building actually came up there in 1922. I need to depend on the history. And assuming building records were maintained correctly , I may conclude building is 100 years old.

So we can say that the first law of Time is :-) Time is the historical data of events. Time only makes sense if we have a history.

Information

The good news is nature provides a mechanism to maintain history for everything. This mechanism is a fool proof ledger that can’t be tempered by anyone. No it is not a Block Chain :-) It is called “light”. We may also cal it “information”.

Everything that exists or ever existed, emits electromagnetic radiations (with exception of Black holes- they swoop in their own radiations too - they are both hungry and greedy). These radiations can be in different levels of energy (or frequency). For example Gamma rays have very high energy even more than X rays. On the other side of spectrum we have radio waves that have a longer wave-length and thus very low energy. Our visible light falls somewhere in the middle. There is however one thing in common for all the electro-magnetic waves - they all travel at the same speed in our space - roughly at around 300,000 km per sec. I can go “on and on” on electro-magnetic waves but I had rather give you this xkcd - it says it all.

Scientists use these waves to measure all sorts of things from the far flung places to the origin of our universe. For example , our Universe is 13.8 billion years old. Obviously there was no recorded history at that time. Then how can we be so sure of the phenomenon? That is where electromagnetic waves come into play - We know that we can still observe the light created say around 380,000 years after the big bang. The photons from that event are still accessible to our instruments. This back ground light is distinctly available in the shape of microwave radiations commonly called “cosmic microwave radiations -CMB” . We can figure out with high confidence that the pattern of CMB is around 380,000 years after the big bang.

The first question is how come these photons still around?

The answer is in Theory of Relativity. We know that everything moves at ~300K km per sec in our space-time. And that includes you , me and the computer you are reading this text on. If something moves spatially at the speed of light ~300K Km per sec, then it doesn’t move at all in time and -vice versa. In other words ~300K Km per sec in not a special thing for “light”. The only thing that is special about light is it puts all its eggs into the spatial basket whereas we the “chair-seekers” move mostly in time :-)

Thus photons never move in time. They are ever young. Or in other words - nothing ever dies in the realm of information.

Health Tip - If you wanna stay young , kick the chair and start running around. Faster you move in space, younger you are going to be :-) You may not save much in terms of your motion in time but running around anyways keeps the muscles strong !

The figure above ignores the gravity to simplify the things . We know gravity bends the space-time and thus the diagram becomes bit convoluted instead of a nice looking circle if we consider the effects of gravity

Since Photons move at the speed of light (C) in space, they don’t move at all in time. In other words the photons created 380,000 years after the big bang are still available to our instruments. These photons are exactly in the same conditions as they were at the time of their birth and they are traveling in space at ~300K Km per second and are reaching us from all the directions. We can go in details as to why is the CMB visible in all the directions but that is not the point. The point is - it is generally understood that light emitted from the past events can reach us now . For example the light that is coming to us from sun left sun around 8 minutes back but it didn’t change at all in these last 8 minutes. In essence photons don’t age at all. The one that left billions of years ago from the face of some star is still the same. Or we can say information moves at the speed of light in space. It doesn’t contribute at all any of its motion towards time.

This brings us to our second law of Time - Only manifested things experience time. Information, on the other hand,is timeless because photons are massless.

This kinda makes sense and plays well with our first law because you can record history of only those things that exist or existed in the past. If something never existed, there is no history for it. We sure can wait for it to happen but its history will start only after it happened. Well, there can be “conspiracy” histories of anything (that never existed) on youtube and twitter :-) but we are talking about real histories in terms of electromagnetic waves.

And in line with Youtube tradition, here goes our first paradox of Time. You see , there is no fun in science if there are no paradoxes :-)

Wave Particle Duality

The question is - if Photons don’t move at all in time, then how do we get the light from our extreme past ? Even from near past? Things don’t add up here ! If something doesn’t move at all in time , then it should be stuck in the same moment. It should never reach future !

This is where the Nobel prize winning idea of Einstein comes up. Einstein showed that even information must manifest in order to pass through time. Okay , he didn’t put it like this but he did prove the wave-particle duality of light. Just as a side note - Einstein won Nobel prize for describing the wave particle nature of light (photo-electric effect) NOT for theory of relativity. At the first look it appears gross negligence on the part of Nobel jury but if you dig deeper, the idea of wave particle duality is core to understanding “time” - which is a big deal. Let us see how ?

The graphic above explains the iterations of a Photon through space and time . Through space as information and through time as a particle. The horizontal lines represent say a moment in time. To move through time - photons must manifest themselves as a particle and then again into massless information. This life-cycle is ephemeral. Photons transform into a particle and then back to wave at incredibly fast rate. The cool thing is even this particle is kinda massless because all it has is kinetic energy - no internal energy that should technically qualify it to be a particle. Since it is massless - it has no information of its own and since it is a particle , it can pass trough time. In essence - photons are a unique case of nature that can carry information of the massive things they are generated from. To be scientifically correct, Photons don’t move at all , they simply pass the information to their next kin in the next moment of time - radially outwards - something similar to the waves we see in a water pond. A little straw jiggles up and down in the pond while the wave passes. Photons are that little jiggle in space-time. Instead of water, we have something called electro-magnetic field that fills up our entire space.

Despite the extra ordinary speed of their transitions - there is still a finite speed limit to the transition of information through photons . And that speed translates into a “space-time” velocity of ~300 K Km per sec. If you notice, I am saying space-time , Not space - why ? Because the notion is velocity itself brings in the time - velocity is expressed in terms of “per second” or “per hour” - an arbitrary unit of time - which means any statement of velocity is essentially a statement pertaining to space time. Or in other words - we can’t measure velocity in absolute space without throwing in a “time” aspect.

In the light of this discussion, you may want to take another look at the circular graph now. It is a graph of velocity “C”. The idea that we may split the motion in absolute space or absolute time breaks down the very notion of “velocity”. In other words, the moment something manifests (including photons) the time starts ticking. In a way, time and space are inseparable. Even if we hypothetically assume something at absolute rest, it is still moving in time. Thus motion is the fundamental aspect of all manifested objects. In a way , motion itself is the history.

The key point is this duality of wave to particle and back to wave may also be called mass-information duality. In essence every manifested thing is a representation of information. And information can also be expressed as mass.

We got some idea that manifested things pass on information through electromagnetic waves. How and why they do it is something we can park for now because the bigger question is how does information turns into mass ?

Mass

It was Maxwell who postulated that in order for electro magnetic waves to pass, there must be a field. This field is called electro magnetic field. We will go into details of electro-magnetic fields, when we discuss about the “consciousness” later in this book. Suffice to say here, that electro-magnetic field is kind of a template that allow the passage of a photon in space-time. It allows photon to act like a wave and also act like a particle. It must do both cuz we don’t want information stuck in a moment for ever. Einstein built heavily on Maxwell’s ideas to derive wave-particle duality and later these ideas paved the way for Special as well General Theory of Relativity. All good except that GR has crazy math. Life loving humans are NOT supposed to understand these equations. That exactly is the reason that even after more than 100 years of GR , the theory is well understood by only a special breed of humans who actually believe that space-time is curved :-) Last I checked , it was still flat :-)

Anyways - jokes apart GR still remains a wonder of creative thinking and hardcore math and I am okay to think that there is an actual electro-magnetic field out there wherever the light goes - which is literally our entire observable universe and we can easily speculate that unobservable universe too has light and thus elecro-magnetic field. In a way entire space - even the so called empty space - has “intelligence” built into it to enable traversal of information through time through cycles of manifestation and information.

Now this is a big ask. We are asking every one to assume that there is this electro-magnetic field that underlies our entire universe. This electromagnetic field holds the keys for light to behave as a wave and as a particle in quick successions. If you don’t want to consider this property of space as some sort of divine “intelligence” , I fully agree with you. This can be an accident. Just a random property of space. It can just be a chance.

However things didn’t stop here. After General Theory of Relativity, our best theory is “Quantum Field Theory - QFT” . I say “best” because both GR and QFT are testable by experiments. Many more theories are beautiful from mathematics standpoint but they are beyond our current state of observation (for example String Theory).

With QFT, we now have testable proof that every basic sub-atomic particle has their own fields. Depending on who you ask this question , quantum nerds will tell you there are anywhere between 19 to 268 such fields that give rise to electrons, quarks and a truck load of other basic sub atomic particles. And all these fields are stacked together, many of them non interfering with each other , all across the universe. Holy cow - that means there is a lot going on even in empty space.

At the risk of totally alienating you , I am quoting here-below this answer from Physics stack exchange. You can totally skip over it but you will see after this quote as to why it was important to put it here ..

The Standard Model of particle physics is the current well established theory for elementary particles. In it, fields are grouped together using symmetries (Lorentz and gauge) in what are called multiplets. Because of it, it is not clear how to count the number of quantum fields there are in it.

For example, we can count for each multiplet how many real degrees of freedom it has. The counting goes as follows (don’t worry if you don’t understand some of the words, they’re just ways of stating how the symmetries act on the multiplet; d.o.f means “degrees of freedom”):

• Complex scalars:

  • Higgs doublet: SU(2) doublet, 4 d.o.f.

• Two-component spinors:

  • Right-handed electron (3 flavors): singlet, 4 d.o.f.
  • Right-handed up quarks (3 flavors): color-triplet, 12 d.o.f.
  • Right-handed down quarks (3 flavors): color-triplet, 12 d.o.f.
  • Left-handed lepton doublet (3 flavors): SU(2)-doublet, 8 d.o.f.
  • Left-handed quark doublet (3 flavors): color-triplet SU(2)-doublet, 36 d.o.f.

• Massless complex vectors:

  • U(1)Y gauge boson: singlet, 4 d.o.f.
  • SU(2) gauge boson: SU(2)-triplet, 12 d.o.f.
  • Gluon: color-octet, 32 d.o.f.

So there are 19 multiplets and if we decompose them we get 268 real fields.

Now, in the Standard Model there is something called spontaneous symmetry breaking. It makes massive the massless fields it contained in principle. This changes the counting and gives us the fields associated with the particles we are more familiar with:

• The Higgs boson
• 3 charged leptons: electron, muon and tau.
• 3 neutral leptons: the neutrinos corresponding to electron, muon and tau.
• 6 quarks (3 colors each): up, down, charm, strange, bottom and top.
• The photon
• 3 electroweak massive bosons: Z and W±
• 8 gluons

Counting this way gives us 37 fields. As you can see, field counting can be very arbitrary as it depends on what you understand by a single quantum field

So , if you survived above quote, what we are saying is , electromagnetic field is just one aspect of space. It enables Photons. Since we have so many fields, it is really hard to imagine every tiniest possible area in space has these fields aligned on top of each other. It had rather be more intuitive to call these fields as “templates”. Notion of a template allows a tiny spec of energy to transform into a Photon or an electron or a Quark based on what is expected at that point in space. We can have many many more templates. Each template has its own rules to give rise to massive and massless particles. I must add that the standard model still can’t explain many things - for example it is somewhat limited in describing the “gravity”. It has no clue what is “dark energy” or dark matter“. Which means we need many more templates to define the very basics. Despite its limitations, the model is tested day in and day out in particle accelerators and it represents the best of our testable understanding of the universe.

The point that I want to make is , every tiny piece of space - even the empty space - has the intelligence built into it to convert waves of possibilities into something perceivable. The mathematics of these fields might seem like a crazy imagination but the model predicts formation of real particles such as electron and quarks. We know quarks make up the protons and neutrons and together with electrons they form the classical atoms. We can debate if atoms or molecules are real or a wave but the thing is - we can see them under a microscope. They persist. They experience “Time”. They rise and decay in time. And they form the beautiful reality that we experience as conscious beings.

And now the more important point- We could have imagined that one such field (our old electromagnetic field) was an accident. A random property of universe. But all the above described fields can’t just be an accident. These mathematical models exist in space as much as the particles that they give rise to. In other words - space holds the skills or intelligence to manifest things. In a way, it is something like a computer application - for example when you launch say Microsoft Word - you have the templates to make a Resume, or a Brochure or an Essay .. These templates in themselves are NOT a final product but they exist to make it easy to manifest a desired document. In a way, our space is a quantum computer that provides ready templates for manifesting real objects. In that the space could also be a manifested object.

It is important to mention here that even information is a real object as we saw in wave-particle duality. Similarly particles too have wave like duality.

Particle wave duality

Back in the day, Einstein had proved that the light actually behaves like a particle. And that gave rise to the idea that has mesmerized the scientists as well as philosophers - what we call wave-particle nature of electromagnetic waves. But the idea of Einstein that a wave may behave like a particle, led De Brogli (Pronounced Broy) to think the opposite. If wave can act like a particle, is it possible that all the matter - the solids that we touch and feel may also act like waves. He submitted his PhD thesis in 1923 that was summarily rejected by his PI as stupid mental math. To his good luck, somehow his paper made it to Einstein. You see Einstein is everywhere - like God! Einstein saw his paper and not only agreed to the math but he gave him a Thumbs Up. BTW this was the first time that a PhD thesis won the Nobel prize. Now that is called a real brilliant science!.

It took the world six long years to digest what De Brogli proved so his prize came in 1929 . I guess it was totally worth the wait because the idea laid the foundation of Quantum Mechanics. What De Brogli showed us is known as “Matter waves”. He showed that the tiny electrons are actually a manifestation of waves. And these waves are very different from the Electromagnetic waves. So between Einstein and De Brogli - It got proved that everything is dualistic - waves have particle nature when they manifest and particles have a wave nature when they turn into information. And almost 100 hears later , I am still scratching my bald head !

You might feel that electrons are moving in a wave - like up and down of Mechanical waves. Nope - that is NOT a matter wave. Well, it is easy to say what is “NOT” a matter wave but it is difficult to comprehend a matter wave. The easiest analogy is when matter waves come together such that their amplitude peaks up like a tsunami - that is where the particle shows up. In other words, particle can be anywhere in the entire universe but it shows up only where the matter waves come together to peak up the crest. These waves are also called probability waves and are put into equation as Schrodinger’s wave function. And obviously, if matter waves are opposing such that they cancel each other than we feel nothing there. And here is the worst part, these matter waves are so small that we have no instrument to measure them (unless particle is tiny like an electron. We do have indirect ways to check the existence of matter waves. And one such intelligent test shows that a sodium atom does act like a wave) .

Since the waves are so small, we feel the solids as persistent pieces of matter. Why ? Because we need infinitely many waves to come together at the same point in “Time”. This means a three dimensional interference pattern is almost unique in a very large universe. Or in other words - the perceptible bands of this 3D spectrum are universe apart, may be in other dimensions. That is the reason the baseball that you are holding in your hand is blinking in and out of existence. It is vanishing and showing up but it does it so fast that we feel it is always there in our hands and never there anywhere else in our universe.

What if the pattern shows up somewhere and we see two tsunami peaks?

At our scale, it only happens in Hollywood but technically, that is possible and has been observed at sub atomic scales. Physics has a very romantic name for such particles - they are called “Entangled” !

We may mistake such particles as two different particles. They are actually the same particle manifested at two places in space.

Coming back to our discussion on mass and information. We noticed above that both information and mass are manifestations. At least for the tiny subatomic particles that we are talking about. And space has mathematical models - that we may call templates to bring these manifestations to existence. In pure information form, these manifestations are entities without any motion or velocity - they are simply probability waves. They experience space and time (space-time) as they manifest. But the question is what exactly is it that is manifesting ?

And that brings us to our last point of this chapter ..

Energy

The key point is one template can lead to infinite manifestations. For example the pattern of electromagnetic field may repeat to manifest infinite number of photons. Just like all your friends may use same template for their resume. But each of the resume becomes a different entity. It is as if templates manifest themselves to find out what is the best possible use of them.

Some of these manifestations may become new templates. In a way , the process of manifestation is a continuous refinement to arrive at the best way to hold content. The question is what is the nature of the content that these templates and their subsequent manifestations are trying to express?

This content is very different from the nature of the template or that of the manifestation. For example your resume is not just a resume template or the document that you made out of this template. Your resume represents who you are. You are trying to fit in a description of “you” in an electronic document using a pre existing template. The question really is not the format of the template or the electronic document. Question really is what this document represent - your education , your experience and who you are. Without this content , template or the resume document has no meaning. In a way, reflection of your personality is the soul of the document. You can improve the template or the document but that improvement is meaningful if it exactly represents you. This “you” aspect or the “content” aspect is what we call “knowledge”. In science, this is what we know as “Energy”.

• Energy is protected - means it can not be created or destroyed
• Energy is immutable - means it can’t be changed. We can sure pack it in different forms through different templates into different manifestations but energy itself never changes.
• Energy is encrypted - We can’t perceive it with our senses. We only perceive it through its manifestations.

And we know from science that Energy is symmetric trough time and it is conserved. There exists a continuum from energy to manifestations and vice versa. However, trying to understand energy is an uphill battle. Our most accurate scientific observations using the type 1A supernovae indicate that the energy density of our universe is of the order of 10^-9 joules per cubic meter of volume. Which seems reasonable because most of the space is empty. Roughly 4% of this energy is matter from our stars, planets and me and you. 26% is dark matter that is invisible because it doesn’t interact with our Photons and hence no information. Whopping 70 % is dark energy which we don’t yet understand at all. These observations are remarkably close to predictions based on Friedman equations (derived from general relativity) assuming a flat universe and Hubble expansion. In essence science is pretty clear that we can account for only 4% of energy in our universe with current state of science. Which is not a bad thing because knowing how much we don’t know (and accepting) is the way science moves forward. But here is a bigger problem. The energy density of our universe based on calculation of QFT is of the order of 10^114 Joules per cubic meter (~ 10^97 kg per cubic matter using energy mass equivalence). To put it in perspective - QFT is suggesting that one cubic meter of quantum space has the mass of a billion trillion trillion trillion Andromeda galaxies packed into it. Which obviously seems a lot :-)

To solve this problem String theory suggest “Anthropic Principle”. As per Anthropic principle, we observe a universe that is right for humans to evolve. As per string theory the strings can exist in at least six dimensions and can be compactifed into numerous possible vacuum states. A conservative estimate is , the number of possible vacuum states are of the order 10^500. Which means in one of these universes, conditions could be right for us to exist. Now this is not a bad idea but only problem is string theory is almost impossible to test because the size of strings is of the order 10^-35 meters. Which is impossible to measure. And these strings , with their different vibrations provide templates to manifest different types of matter e.g. electrons , photons and quarks etc. What causes these strings to vibrate is “energy”. In essence , String Theory suggests that our universe is just one expression among infinitely many possible universes and Energy must be conserved not only around time but all the universes.

At this point, you may be inclined to conclude that we should focus solely on understanding what “energy” or the “Knowledge” is. Fair point. But the thing is “energy” can’t be experienced. We can perceive it only through its manifestations. Or we can try to figure it out through better appreciation of templates. The later is what we call Nyaan Yoga. Nyaan Yoga is a great path but it is hard. You got be an Einstein to successfully discover the underlying templates. And there is no warranty on this path. You are kinda on your own.

The other path is to feel the presence of “knowledge” in manifestations. You can feel this knowledge expressed in the violin of an expert player. You feel this truth in the paintings of a dedicated artist. Every skill irrespective of the nature of work can get an expression of “knowledge”. Be it cooking, running , speaking - even sleeping can expose us to the knowledge. This path is Karm Yoga. He also adds that even Nyaan Yoga leads us to Karm Yoga for the goal is only to understand and appreciate the “knowledge”. A Karm Yogi experiences knowledge riding above the cycles of elation and pain. The other paths are often full of miseries.

Krishna says that this cycle of knowledge to manifestations and vice versa is a cycle for us to experience the knowledge. He calls upon us not to be lazy. He implores us not to waste this opportunity. He says …

Evam [thus] Pravartitam [ transformed ] Chakram [ cycle] Na [ no] Anuvartayti [ follows] Iha [ in this life] Yah [ one who];

Agha-Aayuh [ lazy, sinful life] Indriya-aaramo [ seeker of sensory gratifications] Mogham [ uselessly] Parth [ Arjuna] Sah [ that person] Jeevati [ lives].

One who doesn’t adapts and practices this transformed cycle ; transformed cycle as in knowledge to manifestation and vice versa - such a lazy sinful person , seeker of sensory gratifications, lives uselessly.