The Macrocosm

[Guest guest]

The flowers that we see all around us are beautiful, beautiful is the

rising of the morning sun, beautiful are the variegated hues of

nature. The whole universe is beautiful, and man has been enjoying it

since his appearance on earth. Sublime and awe-inspiring are the

mountains; the gigantic rushing rivers rolling towards the sea, the

trackless deserts, the infinite ocean, the starry heavens--all these

are awe-inspiring, sublime, and beautiful indeed. The whole mass of

existence which we call nature has been acting on the human mind

since time immemorial. It has been acting on the thought of man, and

as its reaction has come out the question: What are these, whence are

they? As far back as the time of the oldest portion of that most

ancient human composition, the Vedas, we find the same question

asked: " Whence is this? When there was neither aught nor naught, and

darkness was hidden in darkness, who projected this universe? How?

Who knows the secret? " And the question has come down to us at the

present time. Millions of attempts have been made to answer it, yet

millions of times it will have to be answered again. It is not that

each answer was a failure; every answer to this question contained a

part of truth, and this truth gathers strength as time rolls on. I

will try to present before you the outline of the answer that I have

gathered from the ancient philosophers of India, in harmony with

modern knowledge.

 

We find that in this oldest of questions a few points had been

already solved. The first is that there was a time when there

was " neither aught nor naught " , when this world did not exist; our

mother earth with the seas and oceans, the rivers, and mountains,

cities and villages, human races, animals, plants, birds, and planets

and luminaries, all this infinite variety of creation, had no

existence. Are we sure of that? We will try to trace how this

conclusion is arrived at. What does man see around him? Take a little

plant. He puts a seed in the ground, and later, he finds a plant peep

out, lift itself slowly above the ground, and grow and grow, till it

becomes a gigantic tree. Then it dies, leaving only the seed. It

completes a circle--it comes out of the seed, becomes a tree, and

ends in the seed again. Look at a bird, how from the egg it springs,

lives its life, and then dies, leaving other eggs, seeds of future

birds. So with the animals, so with man. Everything in nature begins,

as it were, from certain seeds, certain rudiments, certain fine

forms, and becomes grosser and grosser, and develops, going on that

way for a certain time, and then again goes back to that fine form,

and subsides. The raindrop in which the beautiful sunbeam is playing

was drawn in the form of vapour from the ocean, went far away into

the air, and reached a region where it changed into water, and

dropped down in its present form--to be converted in vapour again. So

with everything in nature by which we are surrounded. We know that

the huge mountains are being worked upon by glaciers and rivers,

which are slowly but surely pounding them and pulverising them into

sand, that drifts away into the ocean where it settles down on its

bed, layer after layer, becoming hard as rocks, once more to be

heaped up into mountains of a future generation. Again they will be

pounded and pulverised, and thus the course goes on. From sand rise

these mountains; unto sand they go.

 

- Swami Vivekananda

 

.... to be continued