Expert: Harbhajan Singh - 4/22/2004

Question
Hi:
I have a problem ,I mean I keep on asking my self why are we here? ,where do we go when we die
?do u think there's  heaven and hell ? what about religions ? and what about GOD?I'm soo confused and I can't find an answer for any of those questions .
and what is worth is that I'm living in a religious community .so I can't say I haveadoubt in GOD or I don't believe in religions.
so please help with this and hope u can send me some titels of books which can answer my questions.
note: sorry for my bad language  

Answer
People far advanced on the evolutionary ladder ask such questions. But they now can not be satisfied by others answers. Indeed they cannot find 'answers' to them. Such questions arise because of man's state of isolation from nature, state of "I" and "Thou" and now such people are ripe enough to experience once again man's original oneness with nature. It is an other matter that religious people call it the experience of God. Given below is my own experience on asking questions like you. It is the only experience man has, some call it the experience of God, some of One, some of mind-opening and so on. All I can say is that it satisfies one as to the asking of questions. You please first go through it and if you find it interesting contact me further at my email: harb_singh@yahoo.com. I have lot of other answers given at other similar questions  which I will then send to you, you may not need any other book.

My First Experience of Oneness

By 22 I had completed my degree in Civil Engineering and joined govt service. For the next about five years, while my friends and colleagues were busy building up their careers I found myself lost in what one may say are the eternal questions of mankind: Who am I? Where have I come from? Where am I supposed to go after my so-called death? Has my being, my "I" some permanent point of reference or is it merely a chance bubble floating meaninglessly in the wilderness of space? What is space? Where this world ends? What is beyond that? What is God? What is good and bad? What is the best way to live this unimaginably short life?  Could it be that all this (alluding mentally to the world around) never have been? Were there then to be no.. nothing …forever….f  o r e v e r….. N  E  V  E  R…?
  Then one day as I was sitting all alone in my brother's rented flat in a big city, suspended from my govt service, separated from my wife and two children, diseased of unattended body and dejected of unanchored mind, something entirely unexpected happened.  Something like lightening but unaccompanied by usual light and thunder seemed to flux out of my head upwards, encompassing simultaneously somehow the whole of the universe into its fold…
  Actually it is not easy to describe such an experience…For, initially it so overwhelms your being that you lose all your sense of separateness, of individuality. And at long last when you regain some semblance of your sense of separateness, of individuality even then something like what the scientists call Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - simply put which states that at deeper levels you can know one aspect of reality only at the cost of the other - inhibits its truest recollection much less description: In clothing it with words you tend to lose its essential stuff, its essential beauty, in trying to capture its essential stuff, its essential beauty you increasingly get lost to the world of words…Something like St. Augustine's predicament in describing time when somebody asked him about it: "What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I want to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
  It was not something which had happened to me as say an ordinary incident or even accident would happen to me: a happening happening to me as something separate from "me," so that I could simultaneously act as an observer and a participator, so that I could 'note it down' as it happened. It had somehow involved me totally: it had somehow involved even that part of me which was supposed to 'note it down,' was supposed to act as the base on which the mechanism of my memory was to function.
  Anyway, what a way of finding the answers! Off go rather the questions themselves. Off goes rather the impregnable wall itself, dividing the Whole into "I" and "Thou", "I" and "The Rest" which had actually been the cause of all those questions. The questioner, the questioning and the things questioned had somehow got dissolved into one single whole, into one single woolly unity!
 Ahh, what a relaxed life which followed...