Monday, November 02, 2009

Mythos Vs Logos

When you love mathematics, your fascination with ancient Greeks never ends. When you start exploring Greece, what surprises you is India. She has always been a land of mysteries. Perhaps mystery is a part of life here, interwoven with facts and reason, so much so that it seems that zero could have never been invented elsewhere. It just belongs here.

On the surface everything here seems so similar to Greece; the religion, mathematics, astronomy... But no. On a deeper look you start feeling the difference. It's so fine that it misses your attention on first look: the difference between what you think and what you feel.

While myth of present times definitely has its roots somewhere in the knowledge in past, what creates the trouble is the separation. A separation of flow of human quest into parallel streams, completely disjoint. One stream lead by pure reason, flexible and creative. This stream keeps the flow going although there is something missing. Something that is above reason.
The other stream comes to the dead end of belief and completeness. This is where the flow slows down and starts to rot.

When man created the first god, it was very reasonable. The form he gave to the gods then came from his perception of world (mythos following logos). Then he created another god and kept creating more and more, upgrading from the present form. God 8.0, God 9.0, God 9.1,9.12.... and so on. While some gods were open source (Christianity), some were strictly proprietary (Hinduism). The problem really lies in the complacency created by aggressive marketing by the different sources selling the ultimate truth. Rigidity replaced flexibility and the flow was gone.

This created two parallel streams with people trapped in between. Largely responsible for the division of science and arts. This rot created the para-sciences like astrology (see the logos still sticks!!! ). There are believers, non believers and agnostics but no developers, no seekers.

The life today is split, influenced by these two worlds. You believe in Darvin and you believe in Genesis. You believe in black holes and you believe in rahu-kalam. I do not have a problem with Christ or Rahu till they don't interfere with what I do (I agree it's a Newtonian approach but we are still in dark age! ) . The problem really starts when the stagnancy tries to take over the flow and restricts the ETERNAL TRAVELLER.


PS: mythos and logos are Greek words from which the English words myth (story) and logic or logy (study as in biology) are derived.

1 comment:

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.