FOR scientists around the world, the study of our planet's
climate has become one of the most highly charged fields of modern
inquiry. Humans and all other species live - and often die -
in direct response to climate, and experts admit that the complexity
of the climate system still baffles them.
That Earth has warmed and cooled in natural cycles over the aeons
is a known fact, but the question now is: How much does human
activity on the planet, especially our burning of oil and coal,
increase the volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and
contribute to climate change? An article in National Geographic
(May 1998) encompasses both the human element and the natural
fluctuations in climate over geologic time - with no human influence.
Curt Suplee, a science writer, gives a picture of the efforts
being made today to "unlock the climate puzzle":
In 1995, after years of intense study, the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sponsored by the United Nations,
concluded tentatively that "the balance of evidence suggests
that there is a discernible human influence on global climate."
The amount of that influence, the group noted, is unknown because
of "uncertainties in key factors," including the degree
to which clouds and the oceans affect the rate of temperature
change. It may take a decade or more of additional research to
resolve those uncertainties.
Meanwhile, much is known. And although the specific consequences
of human activity remain ambiguous, our ability to alter the
atmosphere is incontestable. ...
For many scientists, the critical issues are magnitude and
speed of climate change. While a number of temperature shifts
have occurred since the end of the last glacial ice age, some
10,000 years ago, the 20th-century warming of 0.5 degree C is
unusually large, abrupt, and widespread. "If climate keeps
changing at the very rapid rate we think it will," says
Thomas J. Crowley, an oceanographer at Texas A&M University
in College Station, "the magnitude of future greenhouse
warming will be large even on a geological scale."... How
urgent is the need for immediate action of the sort contemplated
at the 1997 climate change conference in Kyoto, Japan, in which
the industrialized nations agreed in principle to cut their emissions
of greenhouse gases? No question is more hotly debated among
scientists and policymakers alike.
The Secret Doctrine tells us that there was a time during
the early Races, down to the close of the Third Root-Race, when
humans and the rest of life on Earth were not subservient to
any climatic changes, for "eternal spring ruled over the
whole globe" (II, 135). We are further told that subsequent
fluctuations in climate, caused by violent shifting of the Earth's
axis (II, 314), have affected humans in various manners, including
changes in stature and complexion (II, 249, 777 fn.). "Humanity
is the child of cyclic Destiny," and with climatic changes
one sub-race after another has disappeared, only to beget another
higher race on the ascending arc.(II, 446)
Species and genera of the flora, fauna, and the highest animal, its crown
- man, change and vary according to the environments
and climatic variations, not only with every
Round, but every Root-Race likewise, as well
as after every geological cataclysm that puts
an end to, or produces a turning point in the
latter. (II, 262-63) Science confesses its ignorance
of the cause producing climatic vicissitudes
and such changes in the axial direction, which
are always followed by these vicissitudes; nor
does it seem so sure of the axial changes. And
being unable to account for them it is prepared
rather to deny the axial phenomena altogether,
than admit the intelligent Karmic hand and law
which alone could reasonably explain such sudden
changes and their results. It has tried to account
for them by various more or less fantastic speculations;
one of which would be the sudden, and as imaginary,
collision of our earth with a comet...as the
cause of all the geological revolutions. But
we prefer holding to our esoteric explanation,
since FOHAT is as good as any comet, having,
in addition, universal intelligence to guide
him. (II, 329-30)
A fossil find made by P. K. Bose and his team in Churhat, a town in Madhya
Pradesh, has been hailed by experts across the
globe as "staggering." Using refined
fission-track and potassium-argon dating techniques,
Bose and his colleagues, including two German
scientists, have established that the twisted
tracks on Churhat's typical sandstone must have
been ancient worm-like animals which existed 1,100
million years ago, not 570 million as previously
believed. (India Today, October 19, 1998)
Since shallow seas covered central India that long ago, say the
scientists, these complex multicellular animals must have spent
their lives burrowing in the sandy seabed. When the beds slowly
turned to solid rock about 1.1 billion years ago, the animals
got preserved forever. And what is left of them are these tracks.
The discovery has been reported by Bose, a professor from Jadavpur
University in Calcutta, in the October 2 issue of Science - a
prestigious American journal. For the first time, he says, there
is hard proof for what molecular biologists voiced all along,
that multicellular animals first showed up a billion years ago
and then gradually evolved into bigger life forms. Scientists
call it the slowburn theory of evolution.
What says Occultism regarding the evolution and age of life-forms
on Earth?
The astral prototypes of the mineral, vegetable
and animal kingdoms up to man have taken ...
300 million years to evolve, reforming out of
the cast-off materials of the preceding Round,
which, though very dense and physical in their
own cycle, are relatively ethereal as compared
with the materiality of our present middle Round.
At the expiration of these 300 million years,
Nature, on the way to the physical and material,
down the arc of descent, begins with mankind
and works downwards, hardening or materializing
forms as it proceeds. Thus the fossils found
in strata, to which an antiquity, not of eighteen,
but of many hundreds of millions of years, must
be ascribed, belong in reality to forms of the
preceding Round, which, while living, were far
more ethereal than physical, as we know the
physical. That we perceive and disinter them
as tangible forms, is due to the process of
materialization or crystallization referred
to, which took place subsequently, at the beginning
of the Fourth Round, and reached its maximum
after the appearance of man, proceeding parallel
with his physical evolution. This alone illustrates
the fact that the degree of materiality of the
Earth changes pari passu with that of its inhabitants.
And thus man now finds, as tangible fossils,
what were once the (to his present senses) ethereal
forms of the lower kingdoms. (The Secret Doctrine,
II, 68 fn.)
Not too long ago the only heavenly bodies astronomers
knew of were stars, planets and comets. With the
discovery of quasars, then pulsars, then black
holes, the heavens seemed to expand. This October,
scientists announced a new kind of celestial object
- a magnetar. A burst of electromagnetic energy
issuing from a "starquake" on this body
smashed against Earth's atmosphere, ripping apart
air molecules, disrupting radio communications
and knocking a couple of satellites temporarily
offline. Fortunately, this new-found star is 20
light-years away from our planet, and its radiation
was so weakened by the time it got here that no
one was harmed.
An infinite universe holds infinite possibilities,
and astronomers determined to know more about
it may in due course well discover other celestial
objects they know nothing of today.
According to today's scientists, all of humanity is genetically interconnected.
"Race doesn't matter; in fact, it doesn't
even exist in humans," says Alan R. Templeton,
an evolutionary and population biologist at Washington
University in St. Louis. He has analysed DNA from
global human populations that reveal the patterns
of human evolution over the past one million years.
In his paper, "Human Races: A Genetic and Evolutionary Perspective"
(American Anthropologist, Fall 1998), he concludes that in the
scientific sense the world is - or should be -"colourblind":
Race is a real cultural, political and economic concept in
society, but it is not a biological concept, and that unfortunately
is what people wrongfully consider to be the essence of race
in humans - genetic differences. Evolutionary history is the
key to understanding race, and new molecular biology techniques
offer so much on recent evolutionary history. I wanted to bring
some objectivity to the topic. This very objective analysis shows
the outcome is not even a close call; there's nothing even like
a really distinct subdivision of humanity. ...
For race to have any scientific validity and integrity, it
has to have generality beyond any one species. If it doesn't,
the concept is meaningless. ... In many other large mammalian
species we see rates of differentiation two or three times that
of humans before the lineages are even recognized as races. Humans
are one of the most genetically homogeneous species we know of.
There's lots of genetic variation in humanity, but it's basically
at the individual level. The between population variation is
very, very minor.
Colour complex and racial arrogance have been the bane of human
societies for too long, and Templeton's findings are a strong
indictment against such discrimination. Not only does it engender
bitterness and hatred in its victims, but its effects are morally
and culturally disastrous to those who indulge in it. But, while
genetic findings can convince us of the identity of our physical
origin, that by itself, as H.P.B. writes in The Key to Theosophy,
makes no appeal to our higher and deeper feelings. Matter,
deprived of its soul and spirit, or its divine essence, cannot
speak to the human heart. But the identity of the soul and spirit,
of real, immortal man, as Theosophy teaches us, once proven and
deep-rooted in our hearts, would lead us far on the road of real
charity and brotherly goodwill. (p. 43)
A group of scientists and animal rights activists have appealed to the
New Zealand parliament to grant the right to life
to man's closest biological relatives, such as
gorillas, chimpanzees and orangutans. If the parliament
consents, then New Zealand will become the first
country in the world to grant a special status
to the great apes and recognize their rights The
activists argue that there is now "a mountain
of evidence that the great apes are as intelligent
as young human children and very similar in their
emotional and cognitive development. (The Times
of India, November 2)
If many more countries adopt similar resolutions, killing,
maiming or hurting the apes would become a crime punishable by
law. And if, as the Great Ape Project of New Zealand argues,
the animals' emotional development or response is similar to
ours, non-physical crimes against them too should be penalized
in the same manner as we punish those who, say, inflict upon
us mental torture, sexual harassment or unjust discrimination.
Although all animals have varying degrees of intelligence and
are entitled to a more just existence, the anthropoid apes belong
to an altogether different category. They are half-ape and half-man
- the offspring of human and animal parents. The Egos caught
in these anthropoid bodies as the result of man's bestiality
are destined one day to be men. They are known in esoteric teaching
as the "Delayed Race," for they will become fully human
when the time is ripe.
"It's time our schools stopped teaching the divided life," writes
Parker J. Palmer in the September Shambhala Sun.
We should search instead for "the heart of
knowing":
Most educators know that what will transform education is
not another theory or book, but a transformed way of being in
the world. In the midst of the familiar trappings of education
- competition, intellectual combat, obsession with a narrow range
of facts, credits, credentials - we seek a life illumined by
spirit and infused with soul. ...
Today, we must seek what is life-giving in the midst of a system
that deadens learning. The profound human transactions called
knowing, teaching, and learning are not just about information,
and they're not just about getting jobs. They're about empowerment,
liberation, and transcendence. They're about healing and wholeness,
about reclaiming the vitality of life.
The question that we now must wrestle with is why there is so
little life-giving power in the words education, teaching, learning.
They've become boring words, flat words, dull words, pointing
to experiences that are also boring, flat and dull.
Education is dull because we've driven the sacred out of it.
... My definition of sacred is very simple: It is anything worthy
of respect. And as soon as we see that, the sacred reveals itself
to be everywhere, for there is nothing rightly understood that
is not worthy of respect.
THE emergence of the global society, impelled
by science and technology, demands a new, holistic
paradigm that stresses convergence in place of
conflict, complementarity in place of competition,
compassion in place of cruelty, and a global ethic
that would link the deepest insights of science
and religion. Without such a new structure of
thought and action, the future of human civilization
on this planet itself can be in real danger. ...
Whether this happens will depend upon the way
present generations respond to the unprecedented
challenges that we face as we hurtle into the
21st century. The process of globalization has
become a reality in many spheres. But, unfortunately,
people's minds are still largely imprisoned within
pre-global concepts and approaches. This gap between
the emergence of a global society on the one hand,
and the non-emergence of a global consciousness
on the other, is fraught with grave danger. ...
Ultimately, the harmony we seek lies in the deepest
recesses of our consciousness. It is there that
we must find the divine light, what the Bible
calls the light which lighteth every man that
cometh into the world; the Roohani Noor of the
Sufis; the Ek Onkar of the Sikh Gurus; the Light
of the Atman of the Vedanta. In the darkness and
confusion that surrounds us, it is this light
alone that can give us the passion to move onwards
astride the irreversible arrow of time, into the
future that awaits us.
- KARAN SINGH |
