Me, mine and mind

“ Imagine a raindrop,” wrote Yoko Ono in Grapefruit. “Imagine the clouds dripping.” Her refrain sparked John Lennon’s immortal song where he asked us to imagine a world without countries and religions.
    
Imagine grew out of Lennon’s sublime belief that we are all one country, one world, one people. The same idea that inspired Yoko Ono’s angst-filled poetry can be extended to the realm of slapstick and burlesque, as the Marathi comedian Dada Kondke did in his mega-hit number Dhagala lagli kala.
    
Kondke, who was greatly influenced by Chaplin, asks us to imagine a cloud in pain, dripping rain! When Kondke’s fans substituted the cloud with a leaking tap or its cousins they had a double entendre that enraged the moral police.
    
But the second line of the lyric startles us with the metaphor of love growing as the spirit entangles with spirit! In the Indian spiritual tradition Siva is the larger counterpart of the individual.
    
So what happens when the individual loses his identity in the universal, oceanic soup of identities? In the great axiom of Vedanta that’s exactly what transpires during self-realisation — when your self is shot through and through with the universal soul.
    
That is why the great sentence proudly proclaims: Aham Brahmasmi; I am the Brahman. The second great sentence goes on to declare that this identity alone is the valid One (Brahmasatyam). Accordingly, the world as perceived by our limited self-senses is said to be false or invalid (Jagatmithya)!
    
In a famous interview, Lennon also alluded to a similar sentiment: Imagining yourself as a citizen of a country without boundaries leads you to an anti-religious, anti-nationalistic, anti-conventional and anticapitalistic view, he said. This became acceptable only because it was ‘sugarcoated’.
    
An extension of this philosophy animates the universe whimsically. According to The Discovery Institute’s blog, when reached for comment about Stephen Hawking's forthcoming book, the Universe said that Professor Hawking should receive no credit for the ideas.
    
“(For) he is merely an epiphenomenon of the laws of nature, otherwise known as Me, the Universe itself. Mindless physical stuff, the only thing that ever really existed, or ever will exist.
    
“Hawking, and that other guy — what's his face, Dawkins — have been stealing my royalties for years. I've got some lawyers working on that.”