The fresh breeze of a beautiful spring day never felt any better. Lying on the warm, relaxing beach, Tilak wondered if life had been any better. Although it was a school day like any other, he was sure that the Teacher mode of his info-link, HAL, would make learning fun as it always was nowadays. Info-link devices were now carried by almost every man, woman and child on the planet. They provided instant communication to anyone on the planet as well as instant access to information.
He leaned back and thought about all the conveniences that were available to him to learn, to communicate, to satisfy his curiosity. "Technology," he thought, "sure has made life easier and more productive. All the information I need about anything that has happened or is happening in the world is readily available with a spoken command." Of course, he knew that even that would be improved in the coming years. Why speak? Why not just think? Even though man was only a century into the third millennium, he knew that 2101 CE would provide even more progress. That is why he eagerly awaited next year's release of the first thought-fax. His mind wandered off in contemplation.
Having gone through extremely rough terrain, even risking self-annihilation at one point, man had come to terms with himself. He had learned the art of balance. 'Samatvam' - equilibrium - was now the theme of life. In education, in commerce, in health, in research, in daily life, in everything in fact - people strived for equilibrium. Even Science and Religion, two formerly bitter enemies, lived in harmony.
Of course it hadn't always been like that. From creation, the world had always been in harmony, which was the natural way of things. Working according to their own natural order - according to their 'Dharma' as it is now called - the planets, the sun, the trees, the moon, the animals, the seasons, the elements and man himself worked in unison to create a picture-perfect world, a world full of stability.
Unfortunately, though, man rapidly became dissatisfied with the gifts of nature. Driven by selfish desires and a passion for change, man began to wipe out forests, kill animals for profit, waste resources and disturb the delicate balance of the environment. Even his views of himself began to change. Trenching himself in a 'Seeing-is-Believing' mentality, he began to trust only his senses, ignoring the vast intuitive universe around him. Science taught him to do so. Although nature often retaliated harshly, he raised his fist in defiance. "We shall overcome," he bickered arrogantly. Owing to the vast differences in mentality, a gaping rift developed between Science and Religion. Religion attempted to tame the outward frenzy of Science but to no avail.
The situation eventually got out of hand. It had to; it wasn't natural; it wasn't in consonance with 'Dharma'. Tired of treating human beings in a 'scientific manner', managing companies on a 'scientific basis', operating a government in a 'scientific fashion', and organising lives through a 'scientific approach', Science examined its own scaffolding and restructured itself with more 'organic' scaffolding. Using the universal and eternal principles of Religion, it began to untangle the mass of webs it had created of its own accord. It realised that the main objective in all of man's endeavours was not just living, but good living. And Dharma taught what was good.
Physicists no longer thought of man merely as a mass of whirling protons, electrons and other nuclear particles. Biologists no longer viewed man as a succession of biochemical transformations and physiological processes. Eventually, man realised himself to be much more than a mere carbon-based automaton. Science's black and white world slowly accommodated the wooly grey shades of man's intuitive and emotional world. It also began to realise that man's role in the world was not that of a callous bully, intimidating anything that came his way.
More abstracts about the Then and Now - 1