Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 123
HINDUISM charm about it which keeps many a modern man and woman enchanted by it, without bothering about its rationale. The most powerful attraction it possesses lies in the hope that one would return to this miserable earthly life again. Man is the strangest of all the living paradoxes. All his life he continues to complain against the strings of miseries attached to life, hoping for death to sever them, yet how he longs to return to the same earthly dungeon again!. The imprisonment of life and the bondage of sorrow are in fact one and the same thing. How can deliverance from sorrow be possible without death? Yet how he yearns at the same time to pay an unlimited number of visits to the same wretched abode. Evidently, the charm of this philosophy lies in the universal love of life ingrained in the fibre of the living. . Yet, those infatuated by this promise of another tomorrow, should not forget that human society as a whole has substantially deteriorated in moral and religious conduct. For such as these to entertain the hope to be reborn as humans yet again, is a dream most unlikely to be fulfilled. If the Vedic philosophy of Karma is right then most probably the majority of the humans of today will be reborn tomorrow as monkeys, wild boars, crocodiles or mere worms. To live again is good indeed but will it be worth the risk at such a price?. Returning to the issue of the four rishis the recipients of the Vedas - if one accepts the time scale in which they are fitted, they must have been born aeons before life began on earth, in an age when the earth's atmosphere was empty of oxygen. What Karma preceded their promotion to the rank of rishis, is the question. Who could survive in an oxygen-free atmosphere generation after generation after generation and what did they feed upon is no less an important question. All that polluted the 123