6 August 2021
The epoch of humans as we can call the period that is now widely referred to as Holocene is perhaps drawing to a close. Unlike hominins and hominid species before the advent of humans, who saw cyclical changes in climate, from being hostile to adverse to conducive due to forces they least understood and could scarcely anticipate, humans now are at that vantage point in their evolution where they do understand and where they can predict to a large extent. More importantly, the effort is now called ‘forecast’ since it involves data interpretation, it involves a set of observations, notions and conditions that will lead to predictable outcomes, repetitively for it to now be placed as a science. It is no more the duty of Shamans, of Witch Doctors, Sooth Sayers, Astral Communicators and others of their ilk.
One cannot examine the human with any other species, even though we now know that most species do have communication, not just within themselves, but with other species too, most startling in breaking our understanding of plants versus animals, is the finding that a ‘forest’ is a herd of trees and shrubs and even grasses…That this is a live communicating and adapting organism at one level, made up of millions of species as individuals at another. So when humans made distinction of flora and fauna to decipher dietary prescriptions as Vegetarian and not, now the science can argue that a cereal is a foetus of a grass, a fruit is the womb of a tree or shrub, and so on, for at a fundamental level, what we see as blood is as much sap as it is anything more, just a conveyor of vital ingredients.
Why the human stands apart is that somewhere along the evolutionary trajectory the human has convinced themselves that they are distinct entities, not by observation or science, but by presumption. It is now clear that many animal species too enjoin in mourning, in remembrances, and may be it is a stretch, but they would perhaps suffer the pangs of cosmic existence like early homo sapiens did. Cosmology is a subject of much conjecture, much reasoning and evolution across what we can call-faith. Faith is what was a system of beliefs that later became organised to religion. Religion is where politics comes in, a wholly new development in the natural world, one that brought the human out from the preserve of nature to a world of their own making.
There is however that theme of Eden. Of Hiranya Garba. Of a pristine verdant source region, from which human emerged. The seedling, or cradling of humanity as it were, is not as ubiquitous as it is foundational to this divergence of human from the rest of nature’s species. If today Neanderthals are written about as Kindred, one day, the very cosmos will be written about as Constant Companions? After all, as science expands human understanding, we must realise how from once considering human racial features as distinct species or framing for the European the ‘reason’ other than plain greed and hunger for power and politics, of civilising the lesser races and bringing them to the Christian fold through colonialism, today, sufficient science has allowed us to contemplate how mere ‘providence’ or ‘randomness’ allowed our particular species to come to dominate the earth, when there were possibly several other species of hominids and hominins that could have well replaced us. However, this much is also clear, that today, no ‘hominid’ or ‘hominin’ species is present in nature, and there is no threat to the human dominance as a biped erect species of ape origins. What the fossil and lithic evidence suggest, is that most of our knowledge until the advent of what we call ‘modern science’ is a shared endeavour, that perhaps we not just encountered but also communicated with the sister species, until one point where we were left standing alone. At this stage, with our readily available evidence of how human activity has directly or indirectly contributed to a mass extinction of species in last 100 years, it is tempting to place the very disappearance of kindred species of hominins and hominids at the door of human interference. However, I hope, evolutionary sciences and paleoanthropology will offer clues in the coming decades to suggest that a chance did exist, of the species not as disappearing but as assimilating into what we are now. That somehow, the homo species of Earth as they migrated and gathered and hunted, managed to mate and procreate across species to forge what we now easily recognise as human. That is, our bodies today, is encoded the strands of biological evidence of these encounters and assimilations, that the sapiens is more a composite of all homo species, before and alongside this dominant one, that it was an extraordinary evolutionary process, undertaken more by unique traits of global migration of populations, evolution of tools across species, and communication across species, which allowed such an assimilation. As of now, evidence of Neanderthal genetic contribution is the only bit of the puzzle to support this contention.
For sometime now, I have been mulling over the various theories of civilisational greatness, whether it is ‘Chariots of the Gods’ which is a modern speculation or Itihasa Puranas, the familiar theme is of ‘intervention’. That whenever the human faced a cornered situation, there was always some external source that offered codes, means and methods, to offset those situations. If the modern theory of Erich Von Daniken is of Aliens, of extra terrestrial intelligence, the more poetic ancient narrative has been of special beings, Angels and Demons both, or of extraordinary animal spirits that walked with us, that interjected on our behalf. We know that Ramayana alludes to how horse drawn Chariots were technologically from Devas led by Indra. That is how Indra’s Chariot with its charioteer arrives to aid Rama in the final battle versus Ravana. We also know that Ravana had chariots, he also had a Vimana. So in cornered situation, Rama received a chariot from Indra to rout Ravana, and then a vimana from Vibeeshana who succeeded Ravana in Lanka, to go back to Ayodhya. Perhaps Daniken is not wrong in thinking that every advancement of human that was civilisation-critical was a ‘gift’?
If you see evolution of what is actually a crude way describe the evolution of divinity in Dharma, the first of his kind to tame a horse and ride it was most probably Hayagreeva. There are still adherents for whom, an endeavour in education is blessed by invoking this person, even as subsequently the inventor of the script to write down the spoken and memorised, most probably Ganesha, has more widely replaced Hayagreeva, because horse taming or riding was now common place and lesser importance to the ability to decipher and inscribe the spoken word! It is from this palimpsest understanding of what we think of as concrete tradition, unbroken across ages, that I can go as much forward as to bring into our fold of human understanding the various species described in Itihasa Purana, from Vanaras, to Rakhasas, from Devas to Daityas, from Yakshas to Nagas, Gandharvas and Kinaras as being our kindred homo species, who at various stages were superior to our own, with whom we interbred, with whom we interacted and interceded. Again, the Ramayana offers a clear episode where Rama’s father goes to war to fight for the Devas against the Asura Shambara and how Kaikeyi’s rescue led to her being offered two boons that led to Rama’s exile. We are also aware from the various episodes relating to Indra that there are several Indras in succession, that from time to time, even humans ascended the throne of the Devas and became Indras, the famous Nahusha recounted in Mahabharata is one such!
So it brings us to this question, why would a species that benefited from so much randomness, a species born through inadvertence, suffer from hubris? Is it part of a larger cosmic drama that the Nataraja so evocatively portrays of creation and dissolution, like an inevitability, or is it some later day tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading us astray? Why is it that large portions of the human population today is under some stranglehold of hubris, a complex that asserts a divine immortality to the species, when all the evidence of science offers its imminent imperilment?
Especially when we are in the Information Age, when it is so easy for humans to connect globally, how does a surfeit of knowledge actually create this vacuum of understanding? Why do we see Greta Thunberg as an exception, when her concerns as a teenager for the Climate of our Earth should actually not have been her concern at all. Why are we witnessing students striking on Fridays, and yet not as drawn to their cause and legitimate concerns about their immediate future, as we are to QAnon and other theories of Scientism? It would seem to any reasonable person that the collective wisdom of humanity today is more engrossed in arguments that favour inaction, status quo and a convenient expression called ‘Normal’.
Can we not see that what we call ‘Normal’ today is actually an advertising gimmick? Is this the dopamine trick where lab rats are shown to starve but keep reaching for that spike of chemical that pleasures their being, which is now hypnotising humanity? The urge for instant self gratification, where concepts like ‘retail therapy’ or ‘rave partying’ are new religious orders? Much of the efforts of the scientific community has been undone largely in the face of this pandemic of Covid19 only by this packaging of what humans now treat as ‘normal’ and the addictive madness to ‘return to normal’. This normal is a gilded cage, presented as some inevitable space where all humans must arrive and conform to.
In another era, humans would have waited out this pandemic, taking refuge in the knowledge they then possessed. If it included abandoning entire cities, of segregating entire affected populations apart, such exodus or banishment was carried out with a determinism that switched their collective understanding of ‘normal’ or ‘expectancy’. In this age, despite the science, despite the technology rapidly stepping to the plate, whether it is #ClimateAction or #PandemicWave, we see humans resisting largely the course that science delineates for them.
What is this addictive normal that has mesmerised humans to deflect, to be devious and to deny their prospective existential crises. What can you say, when today Covid19 has spread and caused so much distress, where individually there is perhaps no human not directly affected by it, and still we find ourselves in droves moving and marking return to ‘normal’, much of it, against the science and the regulatory advise that conditions such return, including the wearing of proper masks? Will we brace to the reality of Covid19 only when we are ourselves individually gasping for air? Will we brace to a flash flood, to a huge landslide, to massive forest fires, only when we are at its receiving end? Will human today accept the implications of the crises human behaviour has promoted only in their own dying moments, a later day contrite Ravana laid low by Rama’s arrow, as his life currents ebbed away? Or are human actions today a play of the very cosmic intelligence that through inadvertence brought about our evolution, preparing us for our dissolution?
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