Religion is as basic as maths. It's as universal as Maths.

The first concept of God propounded is his infinetness, in different ways, in different styles.

A child just learning to count progress to learn counting in various stages and phases.

Initially 1-5 or 1-10 is the max number the child knows and realizes as huge.

As he is introduced to more numbers ... the child's horizon expands to 20. Next the child ramps up from 20 to 100.

100 is a huge number is a realization that lingers on for some time.

Next the thousands, ten thousands, they keep pushing their envelope until they finally arrive at infinity !!!

They are introduced to the concept of infinity and take their time for the concept of infinity to seep in.

The intresting point to note here is that, until they understand infinity, they can have the concept that they know all the numbers.

Infinity is representative of God. One can never attempt to estimate infinity, one can just simply sink in the realization of infinity.

Every religion, every scripture, every doctrine and every philosophy ever followed will agree that, the last point is when you've reached your limit of understanding and realize that you can never ever full understand the infinite nature of GOD.

How does religion then, attempt to make us reach out to the infinte? Well let's assume that we are a number say 100, one way to reach infinity, is to keep adding, mulitplying or whatever until you're up at infinity.

Mathematically, without the help of infinity itself this is not possible.

The other way, is to count down to zero!!! Only zero can truly appreciate the infinite nature of infinity. (1/0 = infinity). The entity being counted is Ego.

So the way to reach GOD is to count Ego down to zero, Only if you're Ego is a Zero are you a hero.

Only if you're Ego is at 0, you completely realize GOD to the best of your capacity.

You have the capacity to mulitply 0's ( anything multiplied by 0 is 0 ). You don't add to anything, you don't count. But we can't proceed beyond 9 with 0 can we?

It's this quality of 0, that's important. The fact that you can't proceed without 0, but 0 in itself has no value.

Also intresting is the proximity of 0 and 1, if you're at 0, then GOD will push you just one step ahead which happens to be the No.1 position.

One basic concept of uniqueness of identity can be propounded by the number theory, if each one of us is a number, No matter how close we are to some other number, we are never quiet the same. (Concept of Shri Madhvacharya)

Various religions can intrepret the infinite GOD in different ways, as different equations, same equations but different variable names.

But the inherent "mathematical truth" of all those equations is as ubiquitous as Maths itself.

Conversly, since religion is as universal as maths, we should be able to understand scriptures, follow beliefs and verify doubts with the same universality as mathematics.

By Hrish Sri Vatsa

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