181. Mṛtyumathanī
Mṛtyu means death. Mathani has two meanings. The first meaning is vitiation. The second meaning is derived from the word Mithuna, this means “unites with”. As Kālī, She kills. Even while killing, She wears the memories of Her devotees on Her neck as a garland of skulls. Life is a memory. It is an experience when it is brought to the surface and is made conscious. When it is a memory inactively stored or tucked away in some neat pigeon hole, then it is an Āvaykta an unconscious life.
Memory can be compared to a dead being. It is a storehouse of images and processes. A currently active process may retrieve a certain memory record or set up records which become active. Consciousness is an active process. The function of consciousness is to retrieve and act upon the storehouse of information and fresh process. Process after process may come to exist, to live for a time to do its functions, and may either be returned back into the memory or be deleted by itself or by another process.
Sleep is like an interrupted process. After the routine, corresponding to the interrupted process to be executed, the original process continues from where it left off. The sense of continuity of the process or that of a particular life form is not disturbed by the sleep.
Time, space and matter are all notions, thoughts, processes invented by a particular process in memory. They do not exist by themselves. They exist because they are interpreted as such by a process.
During sleep the flow of time is not experienced. Time is steady both for a sleeping person and a dead person. Time ceases to be for a sleeping process or a deleted process.
The organization called life bears remarkable similarities to the organizations of software in modern computers. Many of the mysteries of the human mind and minds beyond, may be unraveled by programs which are built in such a way as to learn from interaction with an environment and to modify its process itself. For example, a program that can read and understand English may, if set upon a gobbling up of all the English literature available, may start behaving like a poet or an artist of words. An image processing program, learning to interact with images may, for example, become an architect, an engineer, etc. Such programs will be known to the author of these programs at the time they are written.
Subsequently, after they start modifying themselves in their interaction in the environment, they may surpass the creative abilities of the inventor. Thus, it is no longer true to say that we know exactly what the computer is doing, because we have written the program. The program that the human beings follow to create a new life form similar to his own is very simple indeed. It is a simple clock which interprets itself and emits a program. When that program survives, it becomes another life form. The creator of the life form knows very little about either the program which has been emitted or about what the program is going to be a few decades later. The notion of death is very important for any limited form of existence. It is important to recognize that there may be far higher evolutions than the human consciousness.
The Ṛṣis speculated that there exists a great life form in the sun which they worshipped as the Goddess Sāvitrī in the meter Gāyatrī. When they looked at the early morning Sun for a few minutes and then went into meditation of the great life form in the Sun, they were blessed with a great variety of images from other life forms. There is indeed a great flow of information coming from the Sun towards us, other than what is contained in the light.
It may be worthwhile to tap this source of information. The Sun survives for a much longer period than a human being or a comparable life form. In a sense the life form of the Sun has learned to transcend time and gain immortality.
Source: Śrī Amṛtānandanātha Sarasvatī "Sudhā Syandinī Bhāṣyaṃ" Typed Manuscript
(an incomplete commentary on Lalitā Sahasranāma)
