the purpose of this time's textual struggle is another attempt to kill time while I travel.
the last time i posted, Mayur raised a very good point, a point of view, actually, that of a skeptic.
He might have not intended it that way, but that did trigger a chain of thoughts, a debate/bout if you will,
on one side lies the faith of men, faith in destiny, faith in faith itself.On the other is the juncture of acitons governing events and the doer being responsible rather than "the divnie", which in a more concentrated form evolves into atheism,
Its an interesting comncept, this. humanity has been struggling with it right since the day it was born. What man did not understand, he called divine and revered it.
We still continue to do the same, and there will always be some trace of humanity that will cling on to it till the very end. And there will always be the antagpnists, so to speak who will question this divinity and seek to enlighten themselves. some wll go to the extreme, and denounce all divinity, proclaiming humanity an in turn, themselves to be the ones in control.
"Science" as we know it has evolved through this stuggle itself.Its basic motive is to explain what is hiterto inexplicable. Technology is its offshoot, its the dreamweaver and the tool to fulfill dreams.
But since the inception of all rational thought, there is one question our race has repeatedly asked of whatever we imagined could answer us: "How did it all start?"
How did it all start?
The big bang? was it the beginning of all? but to bang together, there must have been something that could bang! how did that come into being?
Even if there was something, what made it bang together? what force caused it? why did it happen at the exact time it happened? why not earlier? why not later?
Why do we assume there was only one such bang? what if there were many? what is the eact nature of this universe?
you start asking yourself thes questoins, and you rea;llse, the list of possibilities, and the subsequent questions they raise jsut goes on getting more and more enormos and complex.the best supercomouter, the mind itself, in its untrained form cannot comprehend the immsense flows of information required to be gathered, analysed, generated while trying to solve even one of these questions.and we in this age do not really know what the limits of the mind are when trained to realise its potential.
people of yesteryear did that.the very quest for enlightement formed the base of the ancient religion. ancient deities were often symbolic representations of the elements. then the forces of creation and destruction, then as civilisation evolved, and the range of tasks possible to be performed evolved, the kind of obstacles faced grew, and with them, grew the number and nature of deities
one way to look at this is, man , given a task needs an incentive to want to do the task. What better incentive than the Blessings of an all-powerful entity, maybe even some of the power itself!
this gave rise to the system of the common man's deities, and the rituals associated with each social task. What a masterstroke!
what a way to keep a full social order busy! give everyone things to do, give them methods, and give them incentives to follow those methods, and exploit the fear of failure to make sure they do not deviate from teh said methods.
But, its impossible to progress without improvisations, and improvisation requries the freedom to think out of hte box.if fea of one power prohibits this, instate a higher power that endorses improvisation.Instate a "scientist's God". Another masterstroke! The religious order retains control and maintains structure, at teh same time ensuring progress and evolution!
But there will always be those who would see past this system.those who would again ask the Original questions, for that is the insatiable nature of the mind's thirst.They would need to sharpen their minds in order to start looking for the answers, and in doing som they will invariably unciver more and more truths, facts that might dethrone some of the earlier instated deities.
How these people should be dealt with brings us to a forking point.
different societies dealt with this situation differently.thise smart enough to perceive the benefits of acknowledging and using the works of such "ahead of their time" people gave them a degree of freedom, encouraged people to adopt that approach, knowing fully well that very few will actually do it, Christianity abhorred them to begin with, as the dark ages and the middle ages, inquisitons and abolishments of great minds of those ears would testify. Hinduism assimilated these people and revered them in almost an equal pedestal as their Gods. the Greeks had great respect for their philosophers and thinkers.
i'll talk particularly of the aryan hindu society, as thats the one i believe to know a little about.
they realised the importance of each cog fitting well and doing its job perfectly in a machine to attain optimum output.Thus, the values of equating work to worship, projecting the end objective of every endeavour as attainment of salvation, and recognising breakthroughs took deep roots in the flourishing agrarian order of the aryans.
the thinkers, scientists and researchers of those days were called sages.anyone could attain the status of a sage by accomplishing something extraordinary in their field of work.
Thats why "rishi"s wer of some many "types", rajarshis, maharshis, brahmarshis, karmayogis, these were people who acheived greatness on their spheres, and in doing so ascended from a mere mortal to an enlightened soul. It was through the work of these poeple that mathematics, astrology, geography, art, surgery, medicine, study of social orders, advancements in technologies, came about.
I personally beleive the stories narrated in the vedas and puranas and upanishadas are not mere fantasies.they arent even verbatim accounts, but poetic accounts of real events. their true meaning lost in translation.they are all scientific journals,encoded and composed in a supposedly easier form to memorise and store, since back then, the mind was traiend as a part of education, and it was neither necessary nor possible to represent all the acquired knowledge in literal form.language always tends to add distortion to information. These journals and the events that seem magical to the reader now, actually allude to some phenomenon too well known to the contemporaries, so much so that they just thought it worthless to state it, and assumed that knowledge implicit.
The base of this system was the quest for knowledge, and salvation was supposed to be the state of complete enlightenment.
But the way it was implemented, though genius, was flawed.It assumed all participating in the control system would be strong, resistant to corruption, and resistant to the temptation of the illusion of power.
It made attemtpts to work around this, once the condition was hit by referring to the balance of good and evil, and that in the end, evil cannot be sustained.
What it did not bargain for was the time that evil did sustain.
Men gave in to temptaion, power and lost the vision which had bound people to their "work" as worship, and the system degenerated into a caste divided society, where work was bno longer worship, no longer the path to salvation, but an imposed task, and one that brought, or took away rights and priviledges. the first order had used incentives to get the society to function, the degenerated order used fear and oppression.
The illusion of power boosted egos, and where there used to be symbiotic fubctioningm there came to be friction.the social order degenerated into a caste system, and the populace forgot the true purpose of the religion, the quest for enlightenment was forgotten.and the quest for power replaced it. with it, went the realisation of the importance of training the mind. advances of old technologies were forgotten, and came to be either tabooed or used asblack-boxes, the true work of the great minds of yesteryear lost in the sea of time. methods with scientific backing degenerated into rituals, advancement of science and philosophy came to a grinding halt as the main objective of the common man's life shifted from supporting a flourishing, evolving social order, to that of survival and guarding himself and his own.
The timespan was too ling to be recoverable, and the aryan civilisation fell into gradual decay, the glory days forgotten, rememberd only in song, we, the desendants of this civilsation are relearning the secrets our abcestors had explored, from the western civilisatiob, and the saddest thing is that we now look to the west for approval of the brilliance and soundness of our heritage.
word limit.
