In contrast, Some of eastern religions such as Buddhism or Hinduism, and others originated in or around India have produced some truly interesting and thought provoking concepts about the ultimate "Why". And if you get your hands on one of these "Stories" with a relatively open mind, You'll find that the hardest thing to do with these, is to peal out years of oversaturated literature and folklore to get to the basic idea. But once you get there, It's an amazing feeling of having a different kind of concepts, that are unfamiliar and yet so intriguing. It's like meeting someone new from another part of the world that you don't even heard of before. The tricky thing to do here is not to let incompatibility of concepts bother you and kill the train of thoughts. See the west side of the world has more influence over our minds that we care to admit. Their science is build upon facts and reproducible evidence and theres no room for a middle ground or compromises. Which is why we easterners are also becoming more "closed-minded" to our own ideas.
Not qualified by any means to criticizes western science, but the missing "Why" part has really bothered me. Because the 'Why' for me represents spirituality. When I can't sleep and fail stop the wondering mind, I try to slow it down with deeply spiritual questions that science doesn't even acknowledge. So I read few books, Watch youtube videos that amazingly simplifies really complicated core teachings of other religions and try to put something inside my brain that my mind would accept as a good answer. Yes, I know ridiculousness of my effort but hey! it's my mind and I can do what every I want there. So here goes what I came up with using my intuition and philosophical concepts I ripped off of other people and religions.
I believe in a subjective universe. One where the big bang is replaced by an observer. Things exists because of us observing them and we exists because of the concept of "Self" which we made ourselves. Right!. Thats the big "Why" dealt within couple of sentences. But really was that satisfying?. No. So let me start at the beginning. I believe this thing we are experiencing is to be a continues process. And in this process, essences or athmas are popping into existence where some of these things starts to observe and experience other things around while creating the concept of "Self". Hence recognizing their own existence. With the "Self" comes the idea of possessions and therefore greed. So the circle grows and becomes a subjective reality. And to explain the inevitable change of conceptual objects in that reality, other concepts like Time and Space are created. These essences get trapped in their own reality while going through the process, forming more and more bonds, just pointlessly existing because of the concepts of self and possession.
OK. It got away from me a little. Let's bring it down to Earth. Have you ever wondered if you and your friend see the same color in an Apple?. Have you ever wondered if your friend exists at all. Sure, he or she looks quite real but so does things in your dreams. Only difference is that reality is "more real" than dreams. Do you know that Schizophrenic people experience "abnormal" realities all the time and to them things they see or here are pretty real?. So the fact is there's no way of proving that anything other than our own self exists. "The Matrix Theory" or "The Simulation Theory" could easily be true and we'd be hopelessly clueless about it. The point I'm trying to nail down here is each of us are living in our own reality. That's why we each have our own favorites or preferences. When we say we know someone or something, What we truly mean is, we have a concept of that particular person or thing in our mind. Think about it. Your concept of your friend can't be the entireness of your friend. It was created by your mind with parts you observed about your friend along with your own memories and emotions. So it cannot be an exact match to someone else's concept of your friend. This proves that we cannot experience things without creating subjective concepts. And our behavior of interactions will clearly get molded by those concepts. In short we really are living inside our own heads with our own perceptions of things that we created by ourselves.
Now this goes to somewhere interesting.When you die, your friend (the concept) dies with you. And so does everything you've ever known. The Universe, relative to you, will cease to exist because no you means no concepts of yours and without your concepts what really is there?. So if every observer, like you died, there shouldn't be anything to observer at all. Nice little paradox isn't it?.
We are bound to this concept of linear time. That's just how our brains figured out things and there's no reason to for an alternative. But time, conceptually relative to some other being, could be a cycle and have no beginning or an end. Some of the eastern religions embraces this idea and promotes the circle of life where you live and die over and over again. Factors like greed and ego keeps you trapped in this endless suffering and only way to escape is to recognize all of this is an illusion. When you truly nullify your own self, You cease to exist and either be part of the universe again or be completely neutralized. I find that extremely satisfying and believe it or not, somewhat logical too.
End of this train of incoherent thoughts would be the fact that, we are so far off understanding our own existence. Specially when western science looks at the problem like an infant with building blocks does. Further we go breaking things apart to look for the ingredients or try to reach the farthest depth of the universe, all we are doing is creating more and more concepts. And non of those will help us to give us freedom of choice over our own existence.
Dust off your grandma's book shelf!