Symbols

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Symbols, how do they serve us? What are their purposes and parts in our life?
Airports, railways, roads, hospitals, schools and shops where ever you go there are symbols. Symbols are not bound by languages and they convey the same to people from different cultures easing out the communication gap.
Hinduism is replete with symbols: physical and metaphysical. They mean a lot of things very valuable. They help to keep us in close proximity to the most profound truth. These symbols are our only existing link with the ancient world.
Like the symbol “Om”, which forms the crux of every prayer and invocation - a sacred mantra referring to the all absolute, like the swastika (that lingers in our tradition even today), which denotes the omnipresence of the absolute on one hand but is same as the protective shape of fortresses on the other hand, like the ringing of the bell and blowing of the conch at the temples is to simulate the reverberance of the syllable Om, like the marks on the forehead to cool down the hot spot, like the worship of the medicinal tulasi and so on.
Had our ancestors known the things or had mastered those things which we treasure today as the lost arts, there is every chance that they had a psychological frame of mind rivaling ours or perhaps superior to us.
The divination of the forces of nature and the prayer towards them was like empowering the nature. How does it relate to today’s mundaneness? To answer near exactly, it is eco-friendliness. Eco friendliness means not polluting the air, water, earth, etc., It is essentially maintaining the balance of the eco system and the chains. Opening one’s mind and looking in to the life and the practices of our ancestors, we find a lot of logic and sense. Ancient people were masters in maintaining the serenity or perhaps they were trying to increase the same. It could not have been a fable, keeping in mind their other extraordinary achievements. The trinity, gods, goddesses, they all formed the different aspects on the circumference of the same circle. Some may find the different stories within Hinduism contradicting with each other. Of course the puranas themselves seem to contradict each other. Each story, each purana was meant to teach or imbibe something different to its reader.
It needs a little imagination and a lot of patience to understand the facts. It is just the change in perspectives of the different types of people that lived on earth either at the same time or at a different time.
For the antagonists and the skeptics: this is nothing different from our everyday scenario.
When asked to identify the entities X and Y the best things that have ever happened under the premise that X and Y must be the most important for them and the world, a biologist, a chemist, a physicist, a geologist, a politician, an engineer, a doctor and a lawyer won’t give the same answer or at least the same reasoning.
X and Y could be the Newton and Einstein for a physicist, a DNA and a cyanobacteria for a biologist, could be water and oxygen for a chemist, plates and minerals for geologists, money to pay fees and good GPA for engineers, patients and medicines for doctors, law makers and law breakers for a lawyer, people to vote and problems for people would be the choices of a politician, Hanna and Barbara for a kid.
The famous Apple could have had taken Newton’s place. A physicist before 1900’s would opt for Galileo instead of Einstein alongside Newton and that is “relativity”. Any new habitable planet, cure for cancer, aids, more efficient energy source and other new findings are going to affect these choices.
However, no one can dispute that these choices are bad or wrong. We cannot disown a single person out the lot because of the choices made, the reason is we need all of it today for a successful survival.
Just like this, the different puranas try to answer through different perspectives the same question.
Also, I feel that the perception towards religion was totally different in the ancient days from how we look at it today. And the result is reciprocation. As you sow so shall you reap?
Creation and evolution are the poles that are still to be bridged if science and religion need to be consistent with each other.
So, how did evolution occur? The answer is known to us through the immense research and intelligence. Charles Darwin was instrumental in this mammoth task of rooting backwards. The famous Theory of Evolution and Survival of the fittest are the slogans that form the crux of the high school science. Most scientists agree with that. But this had been told epochs ago and ever since then it was just absorbed to the extent that today it stands as the basic premise of the oldest way of living still prevailing on earth. There is no clear line of distinction between the Hindu way of life and their religious faith. So religion was the way our ancestors had accounted on to teach us the truth about life, the truth about the world, the universe and the ultimately the truth about our way of living. The Hindu way of life and their religion are intertwined but caution, they are not the same. The dress we wear today is the Hinduism we know today. There is no dress without the threads of Hindu way of life and the colors of religion. From the raw material to the final dress we do not know who the makers are and who are all involved in shaping it into the final product. Imagine an all compatible dress or a dress that can be changed to anything that you want (not an exchange at wal-mart!). That is what this is.
Starting from the fish, tortoise, boar, lion-man, dwarf, anger incarnate, man, super man the hierarchy teaches everything.
I perceive a few things from the incarnations and these are only my perceptions.
Life sprouted at sea. There are lots of scientific evidences pointing towards this “Myth”! When sea was home, probably land looked hostile for our ancestors. But once the plethora of food was threatened by fierce competitors juxtaposed with the life threat from the stronger predators, home sweet home became hostile and so some of our ancestors shifted to the new home, the land. Then onwards the land has been very patient to the onslaught, it has been the same to our ancestors and to us.
Slowly the evolutionary arrow guided through herbivores to the king of the jungle. The first sign of human form is a dwarf. This need not necessarily mean a dwarf but just a form close to human form but not completely human. Then this leads to the perfection in physical form but still agitated mind, not essentially violent but trapped in emotions, still away from perfection. After all, this struggle and strife must lead to perfection and there was perfection personified. Perfect in every sense: physically and mentally.
Have all of us evolved this far? No.
Evolution is not uniform and does not occur at same pace throughout the world. There were monkey kings and warriors and bears warriors in this story of the perfect human. Evolution is not something which occurs overnight.
Have we come this far? I doubt it. Most of us are given to emotions. We are yet to reach the perfection.
What comes above man? Superman. Superman has all the divine powers and can make fate work for him and decides the course of events affecting the people.
And the mistakes in gene coding and decoding every now and then results in the filling of the orbitals at the other end of spectrum and thereby need a cleansing act which is the cause of the last tithe of the incarnation to explain the evolution.
All this is symbolically, a part of the Hindu tradition.
All the protagonists of atheism and agnosticism fail to see this; rather they delibrately deny these facts.
What do you see from the incarnations? One god created all the beings and the same god comes as fish, as lion and as a superman. How are Hindus polytheists?
Apart from these, what else do we learn from the Ten? It shows the route in general taken by the nomad man to civilize in to cities. Dwarf was more of a wanderer and it took some time to settle down and lead an easy life. The nomad goes in search of food and shelter and has no constant place of residence, while the perfect man knew how to rule people, organize and manage the people at one place. Then man took to agriculture and this might even be symbolized by the plough in the hand. It shows how to socialize and live harmoniously as a peaceful society and also at every step along with all these symbols, there are stories show how not to also. And when man becomes too possessed with the land which has given him refuge from the hostile, it ultimately leads to war. All these are symbolically implicit in the most revered form. Many antagonists fail to accept the fact that there were people before us who were more intelligent than us. There could have been people who predicted the evolution thousands of years before Darwin can actually think about this.
There are many more symbols to be understood carefully and enjoyed . May be some one already did or will. I haven’t got the wisdom and patience yet to look at them in the right perspective.