Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Legend states that Siva himself still lives in the city. While I studied
with Brahmin scholars whose lives and approach to Vedanta have
scarcely changed in three thousand years, I became convinced that
there was another version of what and when and where the Vedic
age was. It's worth explaining briefly the argument behind this
alternative version - if it prompts even one reader to take a look at
the Vedic texts.
They hold within them enough information to rebuild human
civilisation from scratch, if necessary. I think someone did believe
that might be necessary one day.
The Vedas still represent eternal truth in the purest form ever
written.
And they are what drew me to India in the first place, what kept
me there, and what draws me back.
First, it is essential to willingly suspend a belief in evolutionism
in order to imagine the world I am going to describe - evolution as
'progress,' rather than change, I mean. Technology certainly evolved
at a rapid pace from the end of the nineteenth century on, when
man began to gauge the quality of a civilisation according to its
level of technological advancement. However, Arnold Toynbee, the
greatest historian of his age, maintained that the test for a major
civilisation was its fostering of a major religion.
The human race, in fact, reveals a marked deterioration in the
quality of its advancement over the past five hundred years. It's made
no progress. Yet Progress became a secular religion - even after
Progress had advanced to the point of enabling mankind either to
blast the planet into a radioactive wasteland or to poison it into
uninhabitability. Better health care and global communications
cannot be considered worth this kind of cost.
After Darwin, who was, to be fair, misunderstood, the concept
undermined those sciences that developed around the same time as
the theory of evolution - notably archaeology, Egyptology, and
anthropology. Embraced by the academic orthodoxy, evolution-as-
progress became intrinsic to the very thinking process of Western
man, conditioned into him from early childhood on.
Above all, the notion of advanced civilisations, of 'ancient wisdom'
existing long before written history even began, was complete heresy
