|
|
What drove me into such reflections is the result of a chance
happening - my perusal of a remarkable book, The Celestine
Prophecy: An Adventure by James Redfield (1994). The book,
it appears, has received extravagant praise, and at least, one
commentator goes almost overboard when he observes: "You
have never read a book like this"! But I happened to chance
upon yet another highly impressive book, River Out of Eden
by Richard Dawkins. Briefly, his argument is that "nature
lacks all purpose", or that the human search for "the
meaning in everything from love to "the lizard on our
dining table" — the inescapable "how" and
"why" of things, persons, places, events, happenings
etc.— would yield no real returns. It is futile to go peering
into voids and horizons for the connection "between this
and that".
No wonder God and
his tribe would, in the end, explain nothing — great
disasters, devastating wars, gratuitous suffering, or atavistic
evil in the form of an Ingo, a Hitler, an Adi Amin, Hiroshima
or, nearer home, in the form of the LTTE "hell" in the
"paradise" island of Sri Lanka, or of the mindless
terrorists' outrage in Kashmir, in NEFA, in Kabul etc. That the
Darwinian nature is not the Wordsworthian valley of peace and
serenity, but a phenomenon "red in tooth and claw", as
Tennyson, (otherwise a God-fearing Victorian) put it, deviating
into Darwinian doubts, again underscored a century ago the idea
of nature as nature as nature with no spark of divinity in it.
And Wordsworth too had his moments, or "intimations"
of doubt regarding the incursion of evil and suffering in human
life on a scale that frightened him.
And before I move
on to James Redfield and his book of "Insights," I may
add that what Dawkins and others of his way of thinking are
saying today was dramatised almost in a poetic vein, by the
novelist Joseph Conrad, towards the end of the 19th century. In
novel after noval and in tale after tale from Heart of
Darkness to Lord Jim and Nostromo, he seems to
be pointing towards the pointlessness of the happenings beyond
human ken. The universe for him was just a grand dazzling
awesome spectacle, nothing else, or at its worst, just "a
knitting machine" with its droning, chattering tic-tic-tic.
And now to the
other book, James Redfield's narrator hears of an ancient
manuscript found in the rainforests of Peru which offers
sequentially a series of "Nine Insights" to those in
quest — scientists, priests, environmentalists, academics the
etc. — till "we move towards a completely spiritual
culture on earth." In its own way it's a modern Pilgrim's
Progress, and the seeker goes on from one
"Insight" to the next higher till the purpose of human
life become transparent to all mankind. Nothing then remains
unexplained, unconnected, unknown. No imponderables, no chance
happenings, no rogue or freak wanton occurrences.
In a manner,
Redfield's book harks back to "the First Cause" though
not in terms of Christian theology or philosophy, but in terms
of modern theories of quantum physics and Einstein and the New
Biology.
Redfield seldom
quotes a poet or a novelist, or cites example from literature or
theology, but I'm reminded of the American confessional poet,
Theodore Roethke, who even as he blasphemed and fornicated,
achieved a state of "mystic" consiousness in the midst
of forest trees, wild flowers and foliage. For he appropriated
energy from nearly all sources within his reach from his German
father's "greenhouse" and trees, from the soil's dirt
and dung, from student lovers who walked into his classroom, or
into his magnetic parlour. Of course, in Redfield's scheme of
progression, such a person still remained incomplete and
dangling even when he was broadly speaking, in sync with the
things of this beauteous and bountiful world.
But the long
argument stipulated here between a Dawkins and a Redfield (how
names can, at times, be so suggestive: 'daws' and 'kins' and a
'red field') brings my "musings" to a perplexing
point. For, each view, considered separately sounds right, and
each raises a swarm of doubts when viewed from the other end of
the telescope. And this existential dilemma which has tormented
writers from the Greek tragedies and Shakespeare to Melville,
and from Conrad and Dostoevsky to Sartre and Camus, remains to
raise questions that in their very nature are unanswerable. So
the agony and the ambivalence abide.
The fact is man
cannot help but seek "causes", and cannot help but
return with dusty answers. And thus he seeks to set up Utopias,
though as history affirms all Utopias in the end turn into
dystopias. As Aldous Huxley's Brave New World showed, utopias
invariably end up as travesties and tragedies. And yet Redfield
with a vast knowledge of life's terrors still affirms "a
bright new world", complete with a lush green earth,"
"a spiritual economy" in place of "the money
economy" - all by the middle of the new millennium! So, all
Doomsday literature is to be found soon in libraries and museums
only! Naturally, this leaves me less fascinated and more bemused
than ever before.
|
