This tale comes from the hoary past of this land.
Once a sage sent his son to study under the famous scholars of the time, the son returned home after twelve years of intense study.
The sage asked him kindly.
“Well, did you learn all?”
The son was a good scholar:
“Yes my lord, I learned everything they taught me”
The sage was not satisfied:
“But child, did they teach you of that, by knowing which everything else becomes known?”
The son mused. “I don’t think so father!”
“Then you have not learned all.”
The sage then went on to instruct his son about that part of knowledge which he had not learned.
In the next few unforgettable verses the Vedic text does the impossible- makes it possible for anyone to be God. We will not go on to them at present.
This was what Thales and Democritus of Greece were after too, that very thing from which everything else can be derived. Thales decided upon water as the substance, while Democritus found two such substances which were behind the scenes. These are not the only definitions of the primary matter in philosophy.
Both Thales and Democritus were pleasantly materialistic in their approaches. They were not interested in finding some supreme being behind everything.
Yet all through the human history, there has always been a lingering suspicion about someone who is said to have gone and created the world all by himself or by herself if you are an incorrigible feminist.
Some call it God. Why I can’t say! Why not call it the devil instead? From what we see around us now he would have been a more suitable candidate for the deed. Nonetheless as the God is credited with the feat let us trace the conception of God and try to learn something from it.
Anthropologists (or is it some other apologists?) believe that we invented God in the pre historical times because of our fear of nature’s forces; this belief is only possible if we believe in the theory of evolution of Darwin. There are other theories of the inception of the world as well. For instance Arch Bishop Usher was confident that the world was created sometime in 6004 BC. Well, God being all powerful may have made provisions to derive Darwin’s theory from his world too!
Darwin’s theory is linked to the modern cosmological concepts and is taught in schools.
So it follows that the world was formed on the day of the big bang bringing forth several bodies like our Sun, and eons later the Sun blasted and scattered its fragments around it. These fragments began to cool, the farthest cooling the most. Because of the cooling the air around globe condensed and water was formed. It poured down on earth for millions of years till the surface of the globe were filled with oceans and other water bodies.
Life was formed in those water bodies, or particularly in the ocean. Evolution took place. Simple life forms evolved into complex life structures. Amphibians evolved, then those who lived entirely of the earth. Dinosaurs came and went. Birds finally evolved into monkeys and primates developed into us
(Birds! Indeed! He places birds just before primates, can you believe it!
Well in that case let me humbly admit that,
I am not an authority on Darwin as some of my young detractors are, so I can’t tell whether birds are the real ancestors of the primates, I still feel for Lamarck and for that matter Laplace and wonder if they have consulted their visual thesaurus on it. Laplace could be some kind of place like NASA for example. Or could it be NSA? Some of my sweet mutants are so full of themselves that they often take lesser mortals like us to be non existent.)
We descended on the surface of the earth from trees and began to walk entirely on our hind legs.
The world was still very wild while all this was happening. The first men/women who looked around could not have been happy. The earth constantly shook under their timorous feet with giant and unseen seismic activity. Rain was incessant, every now and then the skies lighted up with a blinding glare, thunder brutally ripped open the sky and mammoth trees were reduced into glowing embers by the unimaginable force of lightening, whole forests got on fire driving them out into barren segments of land infested with lethal animals. It was an inhospitable world and they were mortally afraid. They were also learning all the time for they were observant (the audacity of the guy! Observant my foot!). They had an inkling what would happen if they did certain things. When they threw the first stone it produced an effect. They were learning very fast that every cause has an effect.
But who is wielding these giant forces of nature? Something, some one has to be behind it. This thing was so powerful and they were living in mortal terror; they were totally helpless and were at its mercy, better have this thing on their side than against them. What could they do to placate this thing so that it won’t destroy them? In the absence of any information on what would please it they tried to offer those that are dear to them to the thing. Some times it relented at other times it ignored their offerings.
They developed whole systems of thought on this subject of grace of god; it gave birth to Science, Theology and Philosophy.
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