The process
through which monkeys evolved into humans is called "speciation".
With the lapse of time one or
more
species had originated from one species. Speciation occurs in various ways. Several
factors like mutation,
recombination
of genes, natural selection, genetic drift, hybridization, polyploidy and
isolation play important
roles in the
formation of a new species. According to Charles Darwin, humans and monkeys
evolved (only
human species
is 40,000/35000 years old) from common stock called anthropoid mammals.
According to
Hindus Sanatan
Dharma, father of great sage Vyasa by name Parashara, had
cosmic connection, it
was rather
revealed to him
thought his eyes of the soul. He traversed the space which was into
existence from 5 billion years.
Ever since
historian Anand Kumaraswamy extolled the Nataraja bronze (dancing Shiva) as
"poetry but
nonetheless
science", interpreting the Nataraja as the "cosmic dance" of
Siva has been widely accepted. Fritj of
Capra
Catapulted Nataraja into a modem day scientific icon when he euphorically
stated in his cult book of 1974
"The Tao
of Physics" that "the dancing Siva is the dancing universe, the
ceaseless flow of energy going through
an infinite
variety of patterns that melt into one another. Scientific comprehension may be
difficult for us until we
elevate our
level of understanding. If we review the history of thought we find that the
philosophers were mainly interested in the laws of nature and their possible
co-relation with the human mind." How to achieve and maintain the inner
harmony was the aim of all the Perennial thinkers. It started well before 15000
years B.C. among the ancient Aryan
Sages. Amongst these, Socrates "know
the self'' was perhaps the last attempt of a free mind to gauge its own depth
and to attain inner harmony. In the West, the history of thought took a new
turn through the introduction for reason by Plato who insisted that everything
including man was created for the best. Descartes, the father of western
philosophy, gave it a new dimension. He doubted the existence of God as well as
existence of one''s own
body. By the end of the 19th Century the circle was
completed when the "man" Nietzsche talked of "God''s suicide.
Freud said, "Happiness is no cultural value of human beings." Man
instead of becoming rational resorts to the use of force when conflict of
interests is to be handled among mankind. Dynamic philosophy deals with this
problem from the point of view of the individual.
Recent
researches in behavioral sciences reveal that "evil" is that grand
principle that makes us social creatures.
That is
accepting Vedic concept of Surasura" war which was fought externally as
well as internally; and it will go
on as long as
humanity continues to exist on earth planet. It is only the understandings of cosmic
link that may
make man think
of the life after death, which appears to be of long duration comparing to life
on earth. Because
human culture
has lost its meaning either as static or dynamic, culture is now viewed as
"a mass of interplaying
stimuli." There
is no standard yardstick. What is one sees is the same human aspirations in
different background
and different
environment. In Sanskrit it is said: "Pinde piμ·e matirbhinna kunde kunde
navam paya | jatau jatau
navachara nava vani mukhe
mukhe ||"Ancient sages had strong imagination and cosmic link hurried them
into
vision of space
oddity; that made them unwishful (to wish away from regular worldly things).
They started
seeing reason
in improbabilities as eruption of Volcanoes. When ethnicity tends to be
unreasonable and deviates
from the
analytical reasoning world order is disturbed, cosmic link sounds imaginary, or
chimerical, even
dreamy.
Anthropologists are divided on this issue; and they become discursive mission
the vital points. Theirviews are materialistic
and those who have made progress in the materialistic aspects stand on the
highest rungs
of humanity
overhaul and look down upon others.
Democracy at
any point in time and location can never be in compatible with so called
different cultures.
Cultures are
made of cloth, but the fabric drapes differently in the hands of different
tailors, opined one western
anthropologist.
Creativity aspect of human mind is marred by cultural draping. They realized
that God made the
universe and
man has a chance to occupy that universe. What we observe is: God made the
universe and man
made the
country! Even in India exigency of living ordinary life added
vicissitudes and moved common man
away from the
great truth of existence and its deeper application as understood by those
meditating sages. There
was confusion
even among the thinkers. It was beyond them to comprehend the "Supreme
Self" as entirely
distinct from
all these vehicles of materialistic life or products of illusion. So the
popular religion in India settled
down with the
palatable philosophy.
The faithful
are seized by the desire to have their gods at hand as healing presences,
sources of hope and consolation; and this small scale spiritual economy tends
to grow up around the icon. Worship is a transaction by which the Divine may be
persuaded into exchanging favor for devotion, though Upanishads invite all of
us to participate in a very different experience of vision. No one is prepared
to be enlightened and search for the Atma, which is to be found at the core of
one''s existential texture. It was an oral tradition and literature remained in
the form of "Guru Shishya parampara" until may be 7500 B.C. when this
literature first appeared in written form, this was may be 3500 years B.C., it
contained the suggestion that the highest-source of power in the body lay in
the space between the eyebrows. The ancient Hindus based this belief on a fact
which Western anatomists only discovered for themselves in 1886. in that year
two independent monographs appeared, one in German and the other in English,
each pointing out that the pineal body, a small usually conical appendage of
the brain of all craniates vertebrates that in a few reptiles has the essential
structure of an eye, that functions in some birds as part of a time measuring
system and that is variously postulated to be a vestigial third eye, and
endocrine organ; (some believe it is the seat of the soul) it was in reality a
third eye, and had evolved from the central light-sensitive spot that can still
be seen in primitive reptiles such as the famous "tuatara'' and many fish,
birds and small mammals, the pineal sits on top of the head; but in higher
primates the cerebrum has grown over the brain and the pineal body now lies
half-concealed in the center of the skull. Had we still retained the layer of
translucent skin, it would appear a little above and between our eyes, right
where the Eye of Enlightenment is shown in Hindu art.
The biosphere
that gives us life is wondrously rich. The number of organisms composing it is
astronomical: One
million
trillion (1000000, 000000000) million insects are believed to be alive on the
planet at anyone time; they
in turn are
beggared by the bacteria, ten billion of which may reside in single pinch of
soil. And so great is the
diversity of
life-forms that we still not have taken its measure. During the past two
centuries biologists have
discovered and
given formal names to somewhat more than 1.5 million species of plants,
animals, and
microorganisms,
yet various methods of estimation, place the number of all species on Earth,
known and still
unknown,
between 3 million and 100 million.
Vedic sages had
a dip deep into 15 millennia B.C. thought of the tree they called it "Ashvattha".
Banyan Tree is the
poor
r
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