History or no history, life is an unmapped atlas which gets its maps based
on our innate attributes, choices, beliefs, actions, reactions, thoughts,
attitudes etc either as individuals or as a collective group with some identity,
and it is in our hands to make each one of these continents as great and as good
as possible.
" God is UNITY but always works in VARIETY" RALPH
W.EMERSON
Greatest
contribution that one can make to the pride of ancestry is to not merely give
hope for future but bequeath values, comforts, wisdom, wealth, happiness, great
wisdom etc to posterity and be clear in mind that there is no use merely
parading our past glory [though there are many documented, undocumented,
purposely suppressed etc] while letting the present in constant worry. [1-read
it last as foot note]
This is as bad as reacting to historic blunders with histrionic reactions.
“Saffronization” of history.
Let us first move away from these media appropriated and
projected labels like ‘saffronization’ [O-orange] ejected very often by the
greenhorns of red brigade [ R-red]. It is an intentional tool to divide with
ideological label and paid media are master at that, perhaps only at that as if
there are two contrasting groups like saffron versus secular, previously they
were using communal versus secular and in the process they have distorted the
meaning of all these words beyond any sane recognition by their meaningless
usage. No one minds about main stream media’s Yellow Journalism [Y-yellow]
but bringing to light what pure white hearted souls from all places and spheres
have created the purple pages [V & I - Purple representing Violet and
Indigo] of past glory through their contributions from dark ages agitates certain minds and they
are green [G-green] with jealousy how come those whom they have labeled
repeatedly as belonging to dark ages can become the blue-eyed [B-Blue] boys
of rational perception across the globe
and what has happened to the white wash done by centuries of political and academic
hegemony? How come that white wash is revealing the hidden colors of VIBGYOR beneath that white ? We must break
those prisms?
Coming to the main topic about history, there are, of course only limited ways of
knowing truth of what happened or supposedly happened in the remote past like
DNA studies, archeological samples, fossil genetic samples, architectural,
cultural, literary works etc.
I
still cannot understand terms like prehistoric times. What is meant by that?
Chronology,
especially as used today was something which by itself is a comparatively
recent discovery and adopted as a measuring tool of time for whatever it is worth, along with all the controversies
involved in various methods of calculating time as such.
Is study
of history or mythology important or relevant? Undoubtedly a big yes because at
least we can learn to follow useful things and avoid great mistakes which have
caused damage in various dimensions to everyone,
everything and environment.
Are we
as human beings doing that?
Often yes,
and sometimes not doing that for some reasons which are either justifiable or
justified or unjustifiable.
When all
or some of these factors fall in line with or suit our confirmation bias we lap
it up , wrap it up and write paeans and provide more versions or perversions
but when it is otherwise we tend to portray ourselves as too wise and pillory
the versions.
History
is after all a string of facts of purported events, happening etc, and not
hypothesis for us to keep churning till we come to a conclusive discovery or
proof, that are joined together like beads of a chain.
Facts are
extremely vital but they not reveal the truth.
Ayn Rand seems to view it when she says "We can evade
reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality." Even as
facts Reality has immense value as John Adams says, “Facts are stubborn
things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of
our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
Jessamyn West said, “We want the facts to
fit the preconceptions. When they don't it is easier to ignore the facts than
to change the preconceptions”. They have this tendency to presume some mal
intention in everything because of their perversion and they should always be
told what Milton Friedman said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs
by their [ presumed-italics
mine] intentions rather than their results”
Contradictions are also because
of human psyche’s penchant for generalizing variety, oversimplifying the
complex, sometimes confusing the motives to be either the means or meaning of
the quest, justifying all means, fear of various kinds, predominance of certain
types of thinking, passing everything through a prism of some popular or
prevailing liking, seeing things with jaundiced vision and prejudiced views,
presuming that we need to judge everything and everyone, applying irrelevant
metrics to evaluate everything rather than evaluating anything through its
inherent merits and so on.
Contradictions are very often camouflaged as
dichotomies and dichotomies are the indoctrinated and engraved part of many
domains of life as Dudley Lynch puts forth
very nicely, “The brain forever has dichotomies on its mind-The
ancient Taoists did it with yin/yang. Religious types with good/evil.
Philosophers with mind/matter. Particle scientists with wave/particle.
Psychologists with nature/nurture. Law officers with good cop/bad cop. On and
on and on. You just had to know that it was only a matter of time before
“dualism”—or … harrumph! … co-eternal binary
opposition—infested neuro discussions like kudzu” and continues “Maybe, as one
thoughtful observer has suggested, even as old dualisms get knocked
down, “it seems that there is something about the wiring of the brain that
leads to new dualisms springing up.” Talk about Whack-a-Mole! That was
certainly what the late George Kelly, the father of personal
construct psychology, thought. “Our psychological geometry is a geometry of
dichotomies[italics mine] rather than the geometry of areas envisioned by
the classical logic of concepts, or the geometry of lines envisioned by
classical mathematical geometries.” (Double harrumph!) in his blog {do
not miss to read the comments about George Kelly in the link as well } [ http://www.braintechnologies.com/blog/2010/02/history%E2%80%99s-longest-running-whack-a-mole-game-%E2%80%9Cdualism%E2%80%9D-continues-as-usual-friends-of-the-right-brain-are-kicking-left-brain-posteriors-and-taking-names/]
“Across planes of consciousness, we have to live with the
paradox that opposite things can be simultaneously true.”
― Ram Dass.
“All of us have our own inner fears, beliefs, opinions. These
inner assumptions rule and govern our lives. A suggestion has no power in and
of itself. Its power arises from the fact that you accept it mentally.”
― Joseph Murphy, The Power of Your Subconscious Mind
Every region,
civilization has certain weaknesses and if that weakness happens to be
something that is used as a bench mark or a measuring yard to evaluate
everything then that weakness really pinches hard on that region or
civilization.
Indian civilization’s greatest weakness was
lack of documentation of many great things and coupled with its weakness to
accept documentations provided by others besides its lack of synchronization with
the concomitant trend or thing of greater importance from the late 18th
century till a year ago i.e. total indifference to material/financial/economic/commercial
empowerment of the nation as a whole. As a result, inevitably, we allowed ourselves
to be at the mercy of others. So, most of our claims of great discovery and
counter claims and attacks are inevitable. Obviously because hungry stomach
creates a biological set up that does not allow the chemistry of mind to bother
about any history or philosophy or geography as its priority is purely
biological.
A great
work of history, though too idealistic, almost very difficult , would be to
create a synthesis of various factors and contextually find a relevance from a huge cauldron consisting of a mixture many
of the following- various events, impacts of some great individual souls, evolutionary
biology, evolutionary sociology, evolutionary changes in the march of
civilization, evolutionary political trends, ideas, philosophical inquiries,
psychological perception, emotional reactions, discoveries and inventions that
have contributed to life enormously and the selective static or stiffness or
suppleness of various religious edicts etc- and weave a very meaningful
relationship among these or decipher a pattern of occurrence or recurrence of
certain events or evolution of certain factors or emanation of certain ideas or
the emergence of certain individuals etc
Though
there cannot be any single great work manifesting this amount idealistic expectations,
still, there have been some extraordinary souls like Guy Murchie
who have made a modest but great attempt to chronicle history in this way.
Jacob Bronowski says, “Every animal leaves traces
of what it was; man alone leaves traces of what he created” and not only this
human beings are much more wise as William Gladstone observes, “To comprehend a
man's life, it is necessary to know not merely what he does but also what he
purposely leaves undone. There is a limit to the work that can be got out of a
human body or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on
pursuits for which he is not fitted; and he is still wiser who, among the
things that he can do well, chooses and resolutely follows the best.”
This is inevitable as Maria
Mitchell says, “The world of learning is
so broad, and the human soul is so limited in power! We reach forth and strain
every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite
from us.”
"By contemplating the relationship
between the objects in our lives and the forces that created them, we can
arrive at the 'thing itself' and know its inherent identity." ~ Dennis William Hauck [here the word inherent identity must be taken as
meaning ‘attribute of’]
As Sherlock Holmes declares, “From a drop of water a logician
could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagra without having seen or
heard of one or the other. So, all life is a great chain, the nature of which
is known whenever we are shown a link of it.”
Very few
have documented history without their view or observations, if they had done so
no one would have bothered to read history.
Even the
most extraordinary historians like Will Durant
couples Will and Ariel [in my opinion they deserve Nobel Prize for
literature] have expressed their excellent and fairly unbiased observations on
facts and have ensured that they have never distorted facts to suit their
opinions.
For that
matter the great Arnold J. Toynbee’s history books in several
volumes also is spiced with his observations and commentaries.
History for a united world-by
Edward Herbert Dance
Our Fragmented World-by
Ronald Harvey
Here I would like to quote Simone Weil, French social
philosopher, mystic and activist in her work ‘Gravity and Grace’
“The world is the
closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.
Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the
wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of
communication. … Every separation is a link.”
When talking about
boundaries , barriers etc we cannot avoid these very meaningful messages
reiterating the vagueness of boundaries from Ken Wilber in his work ‘ No
Boundary: Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth’ like these
two small pieces, “ Even to say ‘reality is no-boundary awareness’ is
still to create a distinction between boundaries and no-boundary! So we have to
keep in mind the great difficulty involved with dualistic language. That
"reality is no-boundary" is true enough, provided we remember that
no-boundary awareness is a direct, immediate, and nonverbal awareness, and not
a mere philosophical theory. It is for these reasons that the mystic-sages
stress that reality lies beyond names and forms, words and thoughts, divisions
and boundaries. Beyond all boundaries lies the real world of Suchness, the
Void, the Dharmakaya, Tao, Brahman, the Godhead. And in the world of suchness,
there is neither good nor bad, saint nor sinner, birth nor death, for in the
world of suchness there are no boundaries.” And "The
ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare to state it so simply, is that there
are no boundaries in the Universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of
Reality, but of the way we map and edit Reality. And while it is fine to map
out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two."
“Everything changes as you move through three stages of
awareness:
first, that beliefs are the result of conditions;
second, that beliefs are the cause of conditions;
and third, that beliefs are themselves conditions.”
― Eric Micha'el Leventhal
What can we do about things
like these?
“For example as early as 601 AD
in the Vaghbata complied by Indian physicians there is mention about the
medicinal herb ‘RAUWOLFIA SERPENTINA’ and only in 1949 in the prestigious
British Heart Journal an Indian physician Rustom Jal Vakil published that
powdered root of ‘RAUWOLFIA SERPENTINA is very effective in lowering
blood pressure. Then in 1952 Reserpine was isolated by Swiss chemist employed
by CIBA under the direction of Emil Schlitter who produced pure crystals of
active ingredient in ‘RAUWOLFIA SERPENTINA and Boston heart specialist Robert
Wallace Wilkins observed that Reserpine not only reduced blood pressure but
also reduced anxiety. Now to whom will you give the Patents’? Leave alone all
the controversies surrounding the product itself.
Unfortunately the things are
further complicated, especially in the field of science, by the nexus and
fights between industry and academia. While one of it has credibility the other
has incredible influence. They generate with the help of media and publicity wings
many questions of morality versus utility etc and the ultimate causality is
truth.
Justin Pollard’s book titled BOFINOLOGY
which reveals the ugly ‘the real stories behind our greatest scientific
discoveries’ like for example ‘”Archimedes never said ‘Eureka’ and hated baths
anyway”, Thales “credited as ‘the father of science’, whose only real claim to
fame is that he often fell into ditches” and this book reveals how eleven
people have claimed to have invented the stream engine etc
However, beyond all these dirty politics and
polluting trends and catastrophic cultures ,still , if there is any field of
activity that has helped humanity’s advance more tangibly meaningful and life
in general more comfortable and brought people out of their caves of blind beliefs
and trite traditions and helped them to see and savor the world with ease and
in better ways than all the rest the credit must go and still goes to
scientific inventions, discoveries and the multiple technologies that they have
given to the world. In short it is a supra religion, along with bold
philosophical inquiries, which has pushed aside the many useless diatribes of
centuries of religious edicts, narrow ethnocentric pronouncements and bluffs of
history which were irrelevant to life.
And we
would all do well to remember at the basic level we are, as we mostly identify ourselves
with our physical self, are after all biochemical organism which has to decay
or die or disappear i.e. it is mortal.
For further
reading visit
http://www.scribd.com/doc/189819608/New-Year-With-a-New-Realization-of-Reality1011
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-brain-perceives-time
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/arrow-time
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/special-report-dimensions-time
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/brief-history-timekeeping
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24473-entangled-toy-universe-shows-time-may-be-an-illusion
http://www.wired.com/2014/04/quantum-theory-flow-time/
