Hinduism and Making Some Sense of Lost… Maybe by Cadence1

Wow. Tonight’s episode of Lost was a LOT to take in. It was by far the single most complicated hour of the show that we have ever seen. Lots of us are making snap judgements without really thinking. I, for one, hated the episode at first. I then thought about it for an hour and am finding myself liking it more and more. At the very least, it’s making me think more and more. Maybe I just don’t like child actors. Anyway, for anyone out there a little bit lost (ha), you aren’t alone. This episode was MAD confusing.

Whether or not we liked the answers we were given, the writers didn’t go out of their way to force feed them to us. A lot of good literature is full of metaphors and allegories and television often avoids anything like that. Television audiences don’t like to think, we like to have people tell us what to think. Lost has never been a show like that, which is awesome because we can continue to have many more discussions in an attempt to gain some semblance of insight into whatever the frak might be going on.

I’m going to try and combine some introductory courses about religion and philosophy that I took with some of what we saw here tonight in the hopes that I can make sense of something.

Hinduism has at its core the idea that everything in this universe is made up of one eternal substance known as Bhraman. We all have what Westerners would call a “soul”, called the “Atman”, which is part of Bhraman. The Atman is eternal and the goal of life is to achieve enlightenment and find one’s Atman, which is our “true self”. This can be achieved in many ways, but the point of enlightenment is that it allows us to escape from an eternal cycle known as “Samsara.” Samsara is the cycle of reincarnation. If you don’t discover yourself and find your Atman in this life, no problem, you get to do it again in the next life. Depending on how closely you followed your life’s duty (your Dharma) you are reincarnated as something more or less awesome.

Escaping Samsara allows your Atman to return to Bhraman, which means no more reincarnating. The definition of Bhraman according to wikipedia is “the eternal, unchanging, infinite, immanent, and transcendent reality which is the Divine Ground of all matter, energy, time, space, being, and everything beyond in this Universe.”

The large tunnel of light that we were shown was called “life, death, rebirth, etc” Life, death, and rebirth are the key components of Samsara. We were told that if the light went out, then so would EVERYTHING. If the infinite and the eternal went out, then there would be no more universe.

Every person has a little bit of it inside them, which is consistent with the notion of the Atman.

Here’s where I get a bit lost.

What exactly happened at the end of the episode with the creation of the smoke monster?

We were told that the light is the heart of the island. If the light is the heart of the island, then maybe the island is the heart of the universe. Jacob has been tasked with protecting it because it is essentially the embodiment of everything.

Perhaps MIB absorbed all of the “light” when he entered the cave. Maybe he absorbed the heart of everything. MIB became everything. If MIB IS Bhraman, then maybe MIB’s fate, which was called “worse than death,” is to never live, die, be reborn, or achieve enlightenment. His Atman is part of Bhraman and yet he is still aware. He hasn’t escaped. He can never truly escape as long as the universe exists and he is trapped in its heart.

If he is now the light that Jacob was tasked with protecting, then it makes sense that Jacob’s primary mission would be to keep MIB from escaping the island. It also explains why Jacob calls it the embodiment of evil. Never mind MIB and his motives, this “everything” is what Jacob lost his mother and “killed” his brother for. The fact that it is his brother who longs to leave the island while doing really awful things helps with the use of the word evil a bit too lol.

If the heart of the island and thus the universe leaves the island, then, in the words of Charles Widmore, “Everything will cease to exist.”

Man, this is some dense &!@%!

Feel free to ignore my blathering. It was more of an interpretation than a “theory.” I haven’t even touched on the significance of their mother, her death, Adam and Eve, how the light can be harnessed to power things like the wheel (does this mean that Smokey is where the wheel’s power comes from?), ETC.

Thanks for reading if you got this far. Rambling over. I’m sure I’ll regret posting this in the morning :P.

Also, check out the story of the foundation of Ancient Rome (search Romulus and Remus). Very interesting stuff pertinent to Lost.