Eternity (A Post-Modern Reappraisal of the Upaniṣads)

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About the Book Knowledge will never meander into your lap by chance as you sit around, eat, sleep, and make merry. It has to be sought.

The search for the answer to the question, "Who am I?" is the worthiest of all searches ever undertaken by man. The search is beautiful despite its immense difficulties, and the answer to the question, if ever found, justifies the concentrated effort required to unravel the truth of one's identity. A life spent in that search is not a life lost. Rather, it is a glorious journey that, in the end, reveals to the seeker the truth about himself. When that revelation comes, the seeker will realize that the question he pursued also answers two other seminal questions: Where have I come from? And where do I go after death? The secret behind the Unsolvable Trinity lies in the study of the static and dynamic aspects of a very specific field-a field that creates the illusion of the self, much as a pond reflects the image of the enchantingly beautiful woman peering into it. Paradoxically, the image of the self is not unreal, despite the illusion.

What about the enchantingly beautiful woman peering into the pond? When you truly know her, your self must cease to exist. For, in her lap, the illusion ceases, and with it ends the miseries of the self.

About the Author AVIK ISHANI MUKHERJEE was born in Calcutta and brought up in Bombay before graduating from Presidency College, Calcutta. A practicing advocate in the law courts of Delhi, he holds a law degree from CLC, Delhi University, and a second degree in IPR from ILI. He began writing in 2004 and has authored twelve books of fiction and non-fiction. He has presented academic papers on various branches of philosophy at conferences in India and abroad. 'Eternity' is one of two manuscripts on India's timeless theories of eternity that evolved over many years of search.

Preface In metaphysics one year of intense contemplation, reflection and meditation is a long time; twenty years of hard study of primary and secondary materials may be too short. Such are the paradoxes that riddle the subject.

I have given my best years to reflection, contemplation and meditation; and done little else besides. I am an old man now. This work, which I am aware many will toss aside as that of an obscure man whose name was never heard in his lifetime and so does not deserve to be read, has passed through a staggering seven recensions as I tirelessly attempted to express the inexpressible. It is now ready.

Foreword Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."

As a schoolboy in India with a love for reading, I read almost everything that came my way in English starting with the daily newspaper, The Statesman. Somewhere I had read Addison, 'Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. Little did I know that decades later, I would be reading Eternity and writing the Foreword for Eternity by Avik Mukherjee.

Introduction This work is an attempt to deconstruct Reality.

The Reality that it seeks to deconstruct is not the reality of space, time, matter and causality: these are, by and large, objects of knowledge in the realm of the physical sciences; and the physical sciences are, therefore, best suited to investigate, study and explain them. The Reality that this work is concerned with is the reality of, if I may say so, a state that is dimensionally beyond our three dimensional space and the fourth dimension of time, which, as we all know, are not independent of each other but are rather connected as a single space- time entity by equations given in Einstein's special and general theories of relativity.