Aggregates of Life

A discourse by Guruji Sri Amritananda Natha
May 2006, at Devipuram

That’s where selflessness comes into the picture. In order to lose yourself and merge into your environment, you’ve got to understand the impulses that drive that environment. That is what all of our laws and constitutions and so on are trying to do – to abstract the principles that govern a society and define a life system or value system that extends beyond the personal.

So I’ve got my life, and my family has its own “family life.” And every village and town likewise has a life of its own. Every nation has a life. The international regime has a life. And each of these lives contains separate lives within it. Each constitutes a sub-life of all these units. So there’s nothing wrong in assuming that a nation or even a corporation has a life. A corporation is a living entity bound by certain rules and regulations which govern the flow of information in and around it. These flows are like the nervous currents that flow in our own bodies.

You see, a human being is not a single entity. It’s a conglomerate. Every second there are about 1.2 million cells coming into your blood stream and another 1.2 million cells dying. It’s a stream of life, which we simply consider – for convenience – to be a single person, a single entity. But this person does not die with each blood cell that dies and is not reborn with every new cell. So many lives are flowing through us. With such a complicated system in place, it really can’t be said that such-and-such a person is always there – because he or she is becoming a different person with every second, every millisecond, and every nanosecond.

Each day you can put your feet in the river; but it’s not the same river. It’s a different river – different water, different fish, different silt and debris, different microbes with every passing moment – but you still call it by the same name. Likewise with the human entity: I call myself Sastry; but I’m not the same Sastry I was even one second ago.

So these names are confusing. The concept of the “individual self” is actually the concept of an aggregate. And once you accept that an aggregate can have a life – independent of any understanding that a family has a life, a company has a life, a village has a life, a city has a life, Earth has a life, every planet has a life, the solar system has a life, Space has life. All of these are aggregate concepts; they simply represent different levels of the organization of intelligence.