Launching Thousands Of Floating Lamps
Monday, March 28, 2005 Labels: My Travels, Philosphy Of Life 1 commentsEven to persons averse to rituals, like me, the scene of the evening worship at the city of Haridwar (= The gateway to God) on the Ganges, is a poignant moment. It sends a gooseflesh shiver down my spine.
Every evening, the goddess of Ganges is worshiped, at the banks of this river in Haridwar . During the worship, thousands of floating lamps in leaf boats are launched into the night, on the Ganges. Your heart starts thumping with excitement, to the rising crescendo of chants and cacophonic sounds of gongs. Thousands of floating, flickering lights hold you hypnotised. The mixture of serenity and heightened emotional tension leaves you shivering.
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I would avoid, going out on a limb. I would not explain, why I think that main reason of "What are we here for?" is as follows:-
Imagine the knowledge accumulated by Human race over past 3000 years. The knowledge is so vast and diverse - that no human generation could have gathered it in its lifetime.
More than passing down of genes, its this passing down and further accumulation of knowledge - generation after generation - that is the essence of "What are we here for?".
We are like the thousands of floating lamps launched on the Ganges, to explore that vast river. We are part of that millenniums long project, to gather knowledge and understand the universe.
The urges to survive and mate, merely, are a mechanism of ensuring continuity of this knowledge gathering, accumulation and passing down. Selection of best genes to pass on, is meant to refine, the knowledge gathering capabilities of future generations. It would make Humans morons and humourless, if this mission was known to them, ab-initio, through an operations manual for Humans.
It is not that the lives of those, who do not help to take further, the sum total of universal knowledge, are of no avail. Like in a corporate mission, all persons in different roles in the organisation are equally important - as much as direct production or the marketing people.
Who created this grandiose scheme of Human continuity to understand an infinite world? Who seeded our brains with the Trojan viruses of survival and gene-passing? I would not like to go into that mine-field!
But I am ready to do an iteration. Having failed in understanding "Who Am I?", we turned to "What are we here for?" and succeeded. Lets go back to "Who am I?", with this knowledge. Can we now tackle it successfully?
I have a different view. I don't think we are here just to determine what we or space-time around us is, or why we are created. I also don't believe that we are here, as some religions say, to remember our creator. We are here for a specific task.
As most of us will agree there is some invisible power present around us. We notice, for example, by interval photography, how a flower blooms with every thing happening exactly the way it should with predetermined shapes, colors, etc. All livings things are also created with high precision. A lot of power and intelligence will be required to designs our bodies, though not yet perfect.
Quite obviously this power knows what is needed. Earth is an organic and changing object. I think, We the living things including humans, have been designed and created to help in this process. Our lives at cosmic scales are just blips, but billions and trillions of such blips have helped in changing surface of our planet. We are also programed to generate and leave replacements so that the process continues.
At a smaller scale we can compares ourselves with germs in yogurt, who are born just to transform the milk and then die.