Asatyam apratistham te
Jagad ahur anisvaram
Aparaspara-sambhutam
Kim anyat kama-haitakum
This is something lifted from the Bhagvad Gita, so unless you are one of those very rare Sanskrit scholars, most of the above will be gibberish to you. Note the kama in the last line though, it will come in useful. Even I didn’t know what the hell it means, that was until I read (OK, one of) its translation(s). You see, I laid my hands on a book called ‘Bhagvad Gita as it is’, by his divine grace AC Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, the founder of the international society for Krishna Consciousness. All of the Gita stanzas I have used are from this book, and the translations used are his. Without his translations, I would have never realized the underlying secret that I think the Gita is trying to hide.
Now, as I have taken a major religion into hold, this is a very delicate topic to handle, so I will try to be as politically correct, and more importantly, polite to the religion as possible.
There is however, a very subtle difference between the Vedic and the Hindu religion. The Hindu religion, is to be despised as it involves a lot of tomfoolery with fire and chants. All the other religions in the world, actively promote some kind of ritual or other in order to gain entry into a transcendental spiritual world, a state of awakeenment. That’s a word I was forced to make up, take it as to mean a semi-enlightenment. Now, this awakeenment makes you indistinguishable from a transcendental being they call god, and like, you are the huge overlord of the universe, and you are free from multiple births on the earth. That is why, religions are so sane.
The Vedic religion on the other hand, is less of a religion as such in this context. It is more like a faith, or a dedication to a certain set of educated, and thus malleable ideas, rather than a blind conviction of a totally false set of irrational beliefs.
The guys who wrote the Vedas were really cool people. They did a load of research, and probably were as advanced as medieval Europe. The rest of this paragraph isn’t the product of any research, and thus isn’t a fact, but it just my surmise. I think that the Vedics really dissected the world around them, wrote down the various sciences in the Vedas, and some left over stuff in the Upanishads. Their intention and aim, was probably the same as what is mankind’s intention and aim, even now.
They were, and we are in an eternal search to an answer to our existence. The purpose of men, or even a single man. We are, basically in search of an aim and intention in our lives. Maybe we already know this purpose and refuse to accept it. Maybe the Vedics discovered it, and wished to hide the scary truth, as it would have to change the very nature of man’s sentience. The Vedics probably realized that there was indeed no difference between man and beast. And they wished to hide this chilling fact by inventing God.
And how they succeeded. And there lies the difference between Man and other animals, It is not the so called soul, it is not the evolution of intelligent languages, it is not the opposable thumb, it is not the fact that you are reading this article which is a huge manipulation of the biosphere, but it is simply the totally irrational belief in god that a few of us have.
And I am being polite not to Hinduism, but to Vedism. That is the religion I am talking about. Ved, literally means knowledge. And god is necessary in the lack of sufficient knowledge to explain stuff. That is why, knowledge and God are opposites, but ignorance and god go hand in hand. I also pity the Vedics, because they had to do it. All their learning was reduced to peanuts when they realized Mankind’s purpose.
According to me, god was invented by the Vedics to give man a purpose in life other than the menacing one that the Vedics discovered. In order to hide a pretty morally sickening purpose, the Vedics invented an eternally unattainable one, in the form of god, a supreme consciousness, and a quest to get close to it. It is impossible, because it did not and does not exist. The underlying ‘morally sickening’ purpose is however still valid even today. This hidden and yet obvious purpose in man’s life is what the article will be about. To do that, you will have to go back in time around 8.7x10^17 seconds.
Once upon a space and time, there was this thing that is now called earth by a self-defined most intelligent species that lives on it. This blue and green oasis in the desert of space was once a fiery hell, with the entire world being covered by a uniform mass of hot and molten rock. And over time it cooled, and a totally magical thing called light forced a few organic compounds to go where no organic compounds had ever gone before. To the land of “hey! look at this, I made myself”. A few self-replicating amino acids kicked started life on a lifeless planet. And thus eukaryotic guys, in other words Life was born, and the self-replicating started like hell. Once it began, there was no way to stop it. Life survived all those ice ages, continental drifting, meteors, apart from your normal tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, volcanoes, earthquakes et cetera. This stubborn thing called life pulled through everything, and not only did it pull through, it sort of did pretty well actually. It evolved into a thousand different things, all of which will never be discovered by the most remarkable one of them all, a really nice little colony of amoebas called humans.
Humans are somewhat the lords of the eukaryots. They are so advanced, and the amoebas, or cells are so modified, especially in the brain, that a point came where humans become so much more advanced than their cousins, that they found it necessary to distinguish themselves, from everything else.
This arrogance, of being fundamentally different from dogs and radishes and ice, made man develop a great civilization, which is now a huge tumor on earth. Man, set out in search of a purpose, and all he found were a few immaterial but somewhat logical sciences that can never be totally explained, and god, an unreal but absolute explanation for everything. Naturally, he opted for god, and in many ways, it was indeed the better course. And the Vedics probably realized the real and yet simple purpose. If you are thinking that I am building it up to a really lengthy climax, then Surprise! I have already told this purpose.
That brings us back to the translation of the opening stanza from the Bhagvad Gita.
“They say that this world is unreal, with no foundation, no god in control. They say it is produced of sex and desire and has no cause other than lust”
Scared? Don’t worry, Hinduism had adopted the Gita as its holy book and all, and it most certainly does not believe in what the above says. But the most damning conclusion of my theory is already here. To be fair to both Hinduism and Vedism, The ‘they’ in the stanza, refers to demons, described, quiet naturally as people who laze and drink and eat and have a lot of fun. People without a religion. People without a faith. And yet, here, you can most see how much the truth was despised. Those who were filled with lust, were simply branded as demons. And this is where the taboo of sex started. That is why some of the more conservative of us are embarrassed so much about sex. That is why sex carries this guilt with it.
That is the purpose of all animate existence – sex. There is no helping it, the fact that we are intelligent beings, will always hold true, but we can never run away from the fact that we are relatively short-lived intelligent eukaryotic beings, and therefore destined to ensure our own survival by making as many kids as possible.
This wouldn’t have mattered at all if we were immortal. Then, there would be sense in al all-powerful entity such as god, simply because, then, there would, really be no sense in life. But since we are not immortal, though we try like hell and fantasize about things like afterlife, we are forced to follow what is embedded in every cell of our bodies. To continue to let our genes stay alive. In the extended phenotype, Richard Dawkins, a renowned ethologist, categorically states that all eukaryots are merely vehicles to carry genes from one generation to the next. These vehicles – amoebic colonies or eukaryots have no other purpose but to carry their genes forward through time, and these genes can exist only in the short-lived bodies of these eukaryots. Man, too is classified right there. He has no purpose other than carrying forward his genetic material. If you need any elaboration, think about the ‘purpose’ of any other animals (I am not saying plants because you cannot even remotely related to them), animals like dogs, bears, lions, elephants, and I will even give you dolphins. Do they have any real ‘purpose’ in life? Would it be fair to our very near cousins actually, to be so arrogant as to have a ‘purpose’ simply because natural selection opted for a bloated brain?
Such a basic and blatant but somewhat disgusting purpose can never be handled by any human being in the modern society, and the Vedics tried really heard to squash all the lust out, though they left some provision for supposedly normal patriarchal system to facilitate begetting, in an ultimate display of hypocracy.
According to me, the Vedics hated sex. It all started with the arrogance of being fundamentally different from the rest of the biosphere, but their pride was shattered when they found out that everything was fundamentally, the same, and that some of the more interesting specimens under study made spontaneous copies of itself. And there, one of those filthy specimens included everything from pigs to fungi, and included without doubt, man. Like the Schrodinger’s cat paradox, man realized that he couldn’t study animal life without classifying himself as an animal. Man was an integral part of the biological system. He found out, much to the adverse affect on his ego, that he was not actually much better off than pigs or fungi, and that all his intelligence and brilliance had evolved due to, and would survive only by, and the whole purpose of which, was merely sex. The purpose of belief in god, was to rid the body from hell, which is earth. The Vedics hated their own lives for what they were. They deemed their existence to be hell, because they were forced to accept a very unclean explanation for all their advanced lives. The intensity at which the Vedics hated sex, and every association with it, can be seen from another stanza of the Gita, that demonizes everything that is likely to allow a man to have more sex:
Ahankaram balam darpam
Kamam krodham ca samsritah
Mam atma-para-dehesu
Pradvisanto bhyauyakah
“Bewildered by false ego, strength, pride, lust and anger, the demons become envious of the supreme personality of Godhead, who is situated in their own bodies and in the bodies of others, and blaspheme against real religion.”
And another
Tan aham dvisatah kruran
Samsaresu naradhaman
Ksipamy ajasram asubhan
Asurisv eva yonisu
“Those who are envious and mischievous, who are the lowest among men, I perpetually cast into the ocean of material existence, into various demonic species of life”
Do you even need more convincing, the Gita rants on and on against these sexually charged, but unfortunately absolutely human ‘demons’? The world is already consumed in material existence, as that is the only kind of existence possible. You either have this, or you have God, and either path shatters us so much, that we choose a suitable mixture of both.
The Gita talks of a supersoul, an enlightened being that attains godhead. It predicts the existence of a spiritual world beyond. The protocol it prescribes for gaining this state of eternal enlightenment is abhorrence to all material passions. And anyone doing otherwise is contemptuously subjected to hell, which, reading between the lines, seems the very existence on earth! If you get the drift of what I am trying to say, you would have smiled at the previous line. Earth is hell, my dear long dead Vedic friends, because you have no purpose in it, and you are no different from all the other animals, beasts to use a stronger word, and to use a yet stronger word, demons. The Gita forces only this part strongly, and takes the existence of the transcendental as a fact. That is why, the rest of the Gita is god-promoting nonsensical propaganda, whereas those talking about the need to rid oneself of the material desires is written with so much emotion, a good attempt to humanize man. Mankind, has and has never had, and will never have, any divine purpose. Face it, its OK. You will be standing up to the truth, which the Vedics say you must, but they themselves didn’t.
This is my theory in a line, that the Vedics were some really learned and therefore confused guys who couldn’t live with the fact that humans exist only to have sex, and therefore invented god to give mankind a valid and feasible purpose. Naturally, belief or disbelief in god is not of any considerable material consequence at least, so go ahead and take whichever road you please. Theism, is thus, a disease to the genes.
There is no moral of the story, as the ‘moral’ would be either hypocritical, or totally immoral. In conclusion, I offer this; another stanza and another translation, which will, I believe speaks for itself, if nothing else, then for its absolute hypocracy:
Rsibhi bahudha gitam
Chandobhir vividhaih prthak
Brahma-sutra-padais caiva
Hetumadbhir viniscitaih
“That knowledge of the field of activites and of the knower of activites is described by various sages in various Vedic writings. It is especially presented in Vedanta-sutra with all reasoning as to cause and effect”
You know what I am talking about ;).
-Aditya MJ
PS,
This is going to be one hell of a post – script. I actually thought that I would end the article there. In fact, I did, and this is a continuation, to discuss the issue a little more.
After reading the article, some people might think me to be a pervert who encourages people to indulge in kinky practices, as that is the only reason we live. I just wanted to clarify that.
Anudvega-karam vakyum
Satyam priya-hitam ca yat
Svadhyayabhyasanam caiva
Van-mayam tapa ucyate
“Austerity of speech consists in speaking words that are truthful, pleasing, beneficial, and not agitating to others, and also in regularly reciting Vedic literature.”
What amazes me about the Gita is that it gives loads of information on how to attain godhead, and entry into the next world, and the only source of happiness in this world is in the course of attaining some crap in the next world. It never advices people to eat or drink and be merry. Not even being happy without eating or drinking toxic stuff. Not once in its fat self does the stupid thing have anything useful. It either talks about the greatness of god, a load of damn near impossible stuff to do to attain some crap in an imaginary after-world, or it says that only demons have sex.
The Vedics probably troubled us all with the Gita because they believed that they were the product of demons.
I do not believe sex to be the only objective of man, so most of this continuation would seem to be opposing whatever I have built up so far. Actually, there is this underlying frustration in what I have written so far if you go back and read it. The whole thing needs further clarification.
About a few days after I finished writing the first part, I read a book called the da vinci code. If it is to be believed, sex being tabooed hasn’t happened with vedism alone, it has also happened with Christianity. But I think the book was unjust when it claimed ‘and other religions followed suit’. Vedism is elder to Christianity, and even to the very legends of Christianity by a few millennia. (By the way, I’ve just discovered a disgusting thing about Microsoft, Christianity, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Hinduism automatically capitalizes when typed out in small letters, but islam doesn’t, and its no consolation that it shows up with a red line underneath it.) I don’t know about
The thing is, for whatever reasons, sex is considered to be a bad thing to the society. And surprisingly, I totally agree. This is against the sentiments of the previous pages and the code, I know, but I am not totally comfortable with this sex thing, ever since it was used for anything other than making babies.
That is the whole purpose of sex, and normal life, to make babies. To propagate ones chromosomes to the next generation. We humans are nothing in the timeline of the universe. Probably even our kind of life is nothing. But within our narrow space, we are all being cruelly used. Cruelly used by our extremely selfish genes that want to make replicate themselves. Human beings are like clothes that these genes wear from time to time in their nearly eternal lives. And again, for more information and pleasure, read the selfish gene, the river out of Eden, and the extended phenotype by Richard Dawkins.
So the only real purpose for man is to have sex, but only to make babies. Any other kind of sex, is just another indulgence in fantasy, something like god.
Kind of heart wrenching isn’t it? We are all here, to do nothing else, but have sex, only to make babies, and to ensure that they grow up to become healthy and fertile adults. And this is something that we refuse to accept in our individual lives. We need something more, something to occupy the mind, and challenge it. The mind is restless without something to dwell in.
And what is wrong with that? If clothes have become so damn intelligent, than what is the purpose of remaining just clothes? We could be something else. What mankind needs, is a real purpose, something that he can dedicate the use of his immensely powerful brain for. Something that he can use his abilities better for. Such a thing as a human brain cannot be wasted on such inconsequent things like god or sex. The human brain is such a wonderful development, that we humans, have the right to be arrogant and claim that we are indeed different from our animal cousins. Progress was never a bad thing.
Many animals use tools in their lives. Chimps use gummy sticks to take out tasty ants from anthills. Eagles use stones to smash turtle shells before eating up the soft (and splattered) insides. Beavers even build dams. So our industrial progress itself doesn’t differentiate man from other animals, but our efficiency at it does, at least at this point of time. So what if the entire purpose of mankind could be scientific endeavor. That’s just my suggestion though; there are some people who say science is merely a modern fantasy, like god used to be. We do not know if dogs or beavers believe in a God, so we cannot claim to be different from them even there. I was wrong when I said that a belief in god separates man from all other animals. But I’m sure I’ve hit upon the real distinction now – it is the fact that man alone on earth has a huge chunk of population that is embarrassed by and are averse to sex. What we need is to change this, accommodate and accept sex, and at the same time engage the mind in something other than stupid things like god. Obvious alternative answers emerge, dwelling the mind of philosophy, music, painting, in a word - art… but generally speaking, all of this has now degenerated to another form of hideous kink. That is why such kind of art is hated, not because it is prudish, but because it debases the very foundations from which it arises. The object of art is not to appeal the senses, but rather to portray the wonder of the human mind, and appeal to the intelligence.
So basically, yes, god, and kink, are different forms of the same petty fantasies to which the excess availability of gray matter in the human brain has succumbed to, but it can succumb to something much more useful.
And what this useful purpose is, every individual has to decide for himself, depending on the type of brain that he is fortunate enough to have.
-Aditya MJ
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