I was travelling from Satara to Pune by ST bus. The bus was going through ghat section. Resting my head against window pane, I was looking outside aimlessly. With every turn of bus, the outside scene was changing bringing into focus new hillside with small shrubs, trees and exposed rocks without giving any time to capture the details. Thoughts came to my mind about my home from where I started and imaginary pictures started getting formed about the destination where I would reach. The mind was in a fluid state where past and future events were getting mixed with the changing scene I was observing.
Bus was carrying me bodily but my mind was wandering here and there without any hindrance giving a sense of my being at every moment. I remembered having read that Maxim Gorky used to sit on the bank of Volga at night and see the moving water which was giving solace to him of laborious life in daytime. What he might be thinking at that time ? Was it similar to my thoughts. He was stationary, water was moving, whereas I was moving and outside nature was stationary but the state of mind in both cases was similar.
I just glanced around me. Most of the passengers were staring somewhere without any particular attention. They might be thinking about variety of places and events with their minds traveling in different directions. Bus was carrying all of us bodily from Satara to Pune but the everybody’s mind was traversing different terrains in the same time frame.
Just think of body and mind locations on time scale. In the universe, earth is a small negligible lump of matter. Our bus and we are still small specs of dust in that lump. When we are moving from Satara to Pune there is change in our location but we are also moving on timeline of our lifespan becoming older every moment.
If somebody tries to log this movement of body on physical and time scale, he can draw a graph of human being in terms of location and time in the entire life span and link it to global coordinates and timescale. One could document a person's occupation of space and time from birth to death. This will be unique for every person. My travel from Satara to Pune also will be part of my life span and can be marked on such a graph. Suppose we attempt to record each and every instance in life and location of the body, this could become complete description of that person. However, how one can draw a graph of thought process from birth to death.
Writing an autobiography is a crude attempt of highlighting some parts of life.
If we presume that all men are alike, it is possible that people at different times and locations might be thinking exactly same things or more precisely in similar state of mind. Hence we experience many times that our thoughts match with our own thoughts at some other time or many thought expressions others have described in their writings.
How a human brain remembers and records all the events in life and still keeps ample free space to acquire new information and store mind impressions about events. After a lapse of long time since that bus journey, I can still recall the same experience with visuals. May be my mind is composing the pictures with similar scenes which I had obseved some other time.
A single molecule of DNA does record and retain the historical development of species. Change in memory storage of DNA in one’s lifespan might be insignificantly small but does make a change in DNA. Thus the nature has evolved a miraculous method of storing large amount of data chronologically in a very small spec of matter. We know that scientists are finding historical evidences and knowledge about extinguished species from their DNA.
Who knows, it may be possible to unearth the information about my journey from Satara to Pune and changes in my body and mind during that period from my DNA in future time, if, of course, it is preserved up to distant future.
