The Path Of Knowledge

3rd Nov 05

If perchance you meet a great musician, and express your affection for him and inform him that you are totally ignorant about his musical compositions, the musician will feel and even tell you that you know him not in the way he wants to be known. He will say: I am inseparable from my music. Is it possible to love me without knowing and loving my compositions? And you may reply: Well, if you are inseparable from your works, my affection for you will make me love your music too in the course of time. You are talking about the path of devotion. The musician is talking about the path of knowledge. The Bhagavad-Gita extols the path of knowledge. “I am extremely dear to the wise man and he is extremely dear to me,” the Lord tells Arjuna, and adds:. “In the very last of all births the enlightened soul worships me, realizing that all this is God. Such an evolved soul is truly rare”. For such a man, all the externals acquire a transparency and reveal the divine essence seated in all created beings and things. The path of knowledge is so exalted because it enables the wise devotee to expand his conception of reality and realize that the essence seated in all beings is God.And the devotion or faith that flows from the knowledge about, and understanding of, creation is firmly rooted and does not degenerate into“calamitous” bigotries pandemic in our world. As all artists would prefer to be appreciated discriminating connoisseurs, the wise devotee is dear to God because he sees, understands, appreciates,admires and adores Him through His creation. The wise man is in no need of a simulacrum, because he has seen, felt and experienced the Real both within him and all around him.Man’s conception of God slowly expands as he comes to observe the works of God and begins to realize the power of God. The gift of our knowing and realization is an innocent sense of amazement and of admiration. The astrophysicist watches the universe through the most advanced telescope. What does he see? There are trillion suns with their systems in our Milk way galaxy alone. There are trillions of such galaxies in the universe. The light from a star blast that took place 12.8 billion years ago has reached the Earth this year traveling six trillion miles every year. The speed with which these stars and galaxies are moving and expanding is equally incredible. Our apparently stable Earth moves on its orbit round the sun 1,07,180kms per hour and rotate on its axis 1674 kms per hour. When a big star burns itself out, it emits powerful Gamma rays that are capable of snuffing out all vestige of life from all possible Earth-like planets of the entire galaxy to which it belongs. It is not as mall miracle that so far, that is, since the beginning of life on Earth, no such accident has occurred in our Milky Way galaxy, so that we are still living. The outer space is full of mammoth clouds of loose cosmic debris of varying sizes. They hurtle in all directions. Thousands of them have missed the Earth by a whisker. One big meteor could have destroyed life on the Earth. Those who watch this cosmic drama exclaim: What a vast and splendid spectacle we witness? Who is that Being, (or What is that Force) that made this universe and holds it in place? Who saves the Earth from so many inter stellar dangers? They wonder whether it is possible for man to fully comprehend the Maker of it all. They are astonished and humbled. Humility is the most precious gift of this knowledge about and contemplation on the works of God. In course of time this humility sprouts,takes root and becomes a tree of true belief. Man’srealization of his fortitude comes from his realization of the infinity surrounding him. Other scientists look at the cellular system through microscopes, which enlarge the entities a million times, thereby enabling those scientists to see them and analyze their properties. A cell is so tiny that it becomes visible to our naked eye when it is enlarged at least one thousand times. Within each human cell reside more than 30,000 genes arranged on three billion DNA base pairs and 90,000 to 250,000proteins having distinct characteristics, codes and separate functions. Scientists say that the mechanism required to make a single bacterium is infinitely more complex than that of a jet engine or a super computer.It can only be imagined how much of complexity and what kind of ingenuity would have been required to make a human brain.Albert Einstein, in his writings, referred to God as the Old One. According to him, there are two types of God: the God of Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Israel,partisan to a family and a race; and the God of Spinoza who reveals Himself in the orderly harmony of what exists. The first description of God is typical of the path of devotion; and the second, of the path of knowledge.