Respectable members,
'Why are we here?' is a common question raised by almost all the persons who has the capacity to think. We have seen some attempts to answer this question in philosophy and in religion. I bring forward an explanation provided by Mr. Richard Dawkins based on the study by Mr. Charles Darwin.
( I would explain why I chose to post this serial later on in this thread..).
YouTube - dawkinschannel's Channel
(Kindly find part 2 and 3 from the right side list, please. Thank you).
Dear Sir,
I would like to present my views as under. Sorry for the length of the post.
Your innocuous-looking query, "Why we are here" is a seminal one in human history.
IMHO, this question arises because we unknowingly tend to assume a superiority for Man over all other living things. Otherwise we should have thoght why all these living beings are there? But we know that almost all the other living beings serve a purpose by their presence, either favourable or harmful for Man. It is the purpose of Man being here, which alone is not clear. Does he play any role in relation to all the other living things? If so what exactly is it? We don't know. Religions tend to talk mostly about Man and God, not about Man and this world.
The word usually used in this context is 'creation' becasue it serves an agenda; if it is creation, there is a creator and since we have an a priori assumption that Man is the unique, acme of creation, he must be having a special position and relation vis-a vis the creator, who is, by general consensus, God. It is from such thinking that the various advanced religions of the world put forward their ontologies and then proceed to prescribe ways and means of achieving the purpose of existence.
In my view, we have no conclusive evidence to show that the assumption about the uniqueness of Man in the general structure of living beings known to us till now, is true. People tend to cite man's ability to laugh, to talk, and to control nature, as proofs for this. But we have birds which possess the unique ability to fly, fish which spend their lives completely in water, amphibians with ability to take to land as well as water with equal ease, many animals which can hibernate, snakes which can survive without food for very long time (which man would not be able to do) and so on.
As regards controlling or manipulating nature, it is of course true that Man has been able to tamper with nature to an astounding degree as compared to other living beings. But it is a moot point whether all this achievement was like one cutting the very branch of the tree on which he sits! Other living beings are not bereft of ability to do anything to modify nature. Starting from the lowly lacto-bacillus which curdles milk,
the earth worm which rejuvenates the earth and helps in maintaining its fertility, the honey-bee which turns nectar into honey by
regurgitation, to the Baya-weaver ("thookkanaam kuruvi") which builds very delghtful nests with great skill and structural strength to
withstand the wind force, we can find so many examples of other creatures with ability to modify and make use of nature.
In regard to communication, it is true that Man has the ability to talk, write and do many things arising from what we term as language skill. But we have knowledge now of the communication systems of whales, dolfins, etc., besides that of honey bees. What is stranger is that even trees communicate. I remember having read (long ago, so don't remember the source now) that an experiment was conducted in a large plantation in, France, I think. The trees at one end of the plantation were sprayed with pesticides which alter the chemical combination within the bark cells of the trees for a long time, and the trees up to a far off point (about a mile away from the original) were kept under study. It was found that the change in the bark cell structure spread from the trees at the spray-point to the other end gradually. While we may say that some of that pestcide would have got splashed to nearby trees, we cannot explain the changes in trees far away on this basis. In another experiment, some trees were cut at one place and the other trees studied and it was found that there was some immediate changes in the chemical composition of the leaf cells of the trees around it. A tree may be weeping or crying when it is cut! In short, in my view, all these
show that Man is just one of the living things or, creation, that is all. His special position, as is generally imagined, is due to his undue
exploitation of nature and the resultant hauteur.
So, the question why Man is here will have to be enlarged and modified as "why are all these living things here?" Well, that no one can answer with authority. The simplest answer will be " That is what nature is." Truly speaking we will be compelled to admit that we do not know. On that base of absolute ignorance Man has, however, built several grandiose religious mansions. And humanity (that includes me too) has been so captivated by or rather, addicted to religion, that it will not be able to live without religion of one kind or another.
Almost all other things on this earth and in the atmosphere function like some individual parts in a gigantic machinery and all of them
function in harmony and sustain what we find as the field for our existence, but Man alone has forgotten (or, he has not yet learnt) how to live in harmony with nature!
The ancient oriental philosophies like Confucianism exemplified such harmony whereas the Old Testament made God say to Adam that this earth and all that it contained was for his enjoyment. [Gen 2:16-17, And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; "but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."] This advice got transformed over the millennia into a mindset of endless exploitation of nature to satisfy the unlimited avarice of Man for possessions and enjoyment. Slowly this tendency spread all over the world through colonisation in the last few centuries and now we are on a par with the westerner in this respect; we are a global village!
Our ancients told us to live in tune with nature, live a contented life and after living a fruitful, long life, to accept death as it is the inevitable end. We have the very famous prayer,
bhadram kaRNEbhiH SR^nuyAma dEvAH bhadram paSyEmAkshabhiR yajatRAH |
stHirairangaistushTuvAg^m sastanUbhiH vyaSEma dEvahitam yadAyuH ||
"Satam jeevEma SaradssuveerAH" is also another prayer. Thus our vEdic ancestors valued this life and accepted that it would come to an end one day. They were less preoccupied with life after death, rebirth, salvation, etc.
"...A permanent factor in man's life which can be designated the Atman, its continuity when the body perishes at the time of death, its experiences after death, some essential unity among these Atmans through some Supreme Being, the existence of some beings who are not conditioned by the limitations of a body and of worldly existence, their guidance in the life of pious men, these aspects of philosophy are quite plain in the texts of the Rgveda. But there is considerable difficulty on one point, namely, the problem of Transmigration. There is no definite statement or hint about the Rgvedic Rsis being aware of such a phenomenon in man's life in the whole field of the Rgvedic texts...."
---C. Kunhan Raja, Head of the Department of Sanskrit, University of Madras, in his Foreward to the book titled "Atman in pre-Upanishadic Vedic Literature", by H.G. Narahari, M.A., M.Litt., Research Fellow.
It, therefore, appears that the idea of an eternal soul (in which the RigvEdic Rishis also believed)
coming back to the earth, instead of
remaining for eternity in some different world along with all those others who went from here before, was a later product of the human mind.
The Greek philosophers like Pherecydes of Syros (lived in the 6th. century B.C.E.) and Pythagoras of Samos (570-495 B.C.E.) are believed to have preached transmigration of the soul. So, it is quite likely that this was a universal phenomenon in Man's thinking in that era.
The vEdic way of life started getting opposition which culminated in such views as lOkAyata of chARvAka completely rubbishing the vEdas, and the Ajivikas (who believed, in a primitive way, in reanimation of the soul), from which buddhism and jainism seem to have originated. It was probably at this juncture that the Upanishads with their emphasis on the soul and transmigration were formulated to counter the probable mass appeal of the rival trends. The karma theory was sort of a twin brother of the transmigration hypothesis which served two purposes at the same time as well; one, it provided a reason for the great inequalities among human beings in this world (and, incidentally, this proved highly useful in justifying the treatment meted out to the SUdras) and at the same time bolstered the transmigration hypothesis.
But then, the haunting questions arose like, was it to be an endless cycle of births and deaths, characterised by equally endless suffering for human beings? Is there no hope of escape? Here comes the role of the concept of salvation or mukti, a goal which is very difficult to achieve except by meticulously following the prescriptions laid down by the respective preceptor, and one that is not at all near in sight for the ordinary populace except to those privileged few who have been certified as having attained 'mukti' by the people living here who have no proof, direct or indirect, bar their own belief, to support it.
The post-Upanishadic growth of philosophy, vEdAnta, with its many rival or competing points of view and a central preoccupation with the issue of salvation (according to me) has made a complete mess (sorry, if somebody feels that this is a strong word) of the situation and so we today find that our learned preceptors were preoccupied with issues like, is everything real or unreal? if everything is unreal, how and who/what makes it appear as real? where does this entity reside which causes such a "mirage" effect?, whether God will care for his devotee even if the latter does not make any effort to attain Him?, whether making of any such effort by man will be deemed as an egotistic act?, and so on and so forth. Such highfaluting philosophies somehow always remind me of a story in the Hitopadesa about two people fighting over one's imaginary cow having been eaten by the other's equally imaginary tiger! We have our populace blissfully oblivious to all these arguments and still steeped in superstitions.
It might have been a good thing if our learned vEdAntic preceptors had followed the moral of the poem 'Abou Ben Adhem' by James Henry Leigh Hunt. For the convenience of those members who might not know this poem, I wish to reproduce it:
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
And saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold:—
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the Presence in the room he said
"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answered "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerly still, and said "I pray thee, then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And showed the names whom love of God had blessed,
And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.
To me it appears as though GOD, the mysterious entity behind (or above) this universe and all that it contains, has not been understood by Man so far and, perhaps, he may never be able to do that. What Man can do, with quite a bit of strenuous effort, is to live in harmony with nature, but what he is more likely to do, and that too with ease, is to fight over God and kill each other, overexploit nature and thus bring history to an end.
