One day I stumbled
upon a new Apple computer in our school computer lab. I was struck by its look;
frame and screen jet black, lost in primordial darkness out of which came light
and life. God stood on the brink of darkness, and said, “Let there be light”,
and light was born, says the Bible. The 22 inch monitor was sharply outlined against
the snow while wall behind it, but the infinite darkness, however, did not lose
its glory in the surrounding light. It was sitting majestically on the crowded
table dwarfing all other systems around it. The poise, the detached unconcern,
the shine of its skin as if merged in its soul, reminded me almost of the
ultimate truth, that the outer and the inner are a single utility.
She was sitting there,
‘like a spider amidst its self-created net’, as the Upanishad says, and
inviting the passerby to get caught in its silken wonder. It swallowed me up,
and I became its devotee. Truly, I realized, devotion is all about being
swallowed up. You retain a semblance of your personality, as much necessary as
to feel how slowly you are disintegrating into your God. It was a piece of poem
which was singing the greatness in its creator, Man. It had utility and beauty; mathematics, aesthetics,
architecture, and ecstasy blended into a form, the dream of computer users. The
keyboard stunned me, as if I encountered a prodigy, a child of complex
intelligence, just a shade bigger than my palm, worthy of being held up in
both, appreciation and reverence fused into its immaculate contours.
I stood at a distance,
forgot (or feared?) to take a chair. Someone came and switched it on. Ah! She
lighted up in all her glory, like a maharani suddenly unveiled, her dominance
complete and unassailable. The fastness and promptness of her response to the
tap of keys, the uncluttered opening and closing of programmes, the sharpness
of the functions it performed took me to a world where harmony of thought, word
and deed is the password.
Ah! Harmony! In a
world ‘out of joint’ as Shakespeare called it. In a world ruled by ‘passionate
intensity’ of ‘the worst’, where ‘the best lack of conviction’ (W.B.Yeats), here is a sage sitting on the
table in front of me, wearing with great ease beauty in form, clarity in
purpose, cosmic in vision, and harnessed power in its operation; all this an
intelligent aligning of lines and numbers, of shape and colour, of matter and
philosophy. “What a piece of work is man, how infinite in faculties”, wondered
Shakespeare. “The greatest wealth of man is his creativity”, said the Dalai
lama, and what a tantalizing thing is this creativity! While I stood there
admiring the harmony of form and faculties of the little queen, somewhere out
there she is being used to precisely destroy humanity and its creative genius,
the civilisaton! ‘And yet, the quintessence of dust’, to remember Shakespeare
again. Is contradiction an essential component of ‘all things great and grand’
?
All things man has
achieved have glittered and passed, appeared again with a new glitter and faded
away. But man is going on, unfazed by the rise and fall of the great and the small,
in his insatiable thirst for the infinite. He has not halted in his search for
the ultimate achievement, though sometimes questioning it, pushing it away, yet
never abandoning the search. From ‘the quintessence of dust’ he has risen to
‘in apprehension, like a god’, fallen back again, not satisfied even in a god.
Even when ‘things fall apart, the centre cannot hold’ as W.B.Yeats lamented,
like a phoenix he is born again and again to integrate himself and the race
into the search for transcendence in transience.
Is this little queen
the new saviour? If anything can save man, lead him further in his journey
towards the ultimate achievement, it
is his knowledge harnessed to truth and beauty. It is not new to him either, he
has done this several times in history, and will do it again. Man is moving
from the individual identity to his own universal identity, and this is a
perilous journey, fraught with unforeseen challenges, most of them coming from
within himself. There is a constant struggle in his consciousness, like a baby
eagle which emerges from his egg shell to come face to face with the limitless
sky, finds suddenly it needs to grow and fly. We are discovering the
inevitability of being the mankind within the small frame of our body and mind,
and the exploding awareness of expanding consciousness we find difficult to
manage.
This overwhelming
feeling of being defeated by the borderless dreams man has cherished over time
immemorial, bursts into a creativity unknown till now. In science, in power
both military and political, in writings reviewing the human predicament, in
search for comfort and unbridled pleasure, and in the total quotient of
unhappiness, our times are bursting at seams to expand beyond all limitations. There
is so much knowledge available to us, but sadly
we have failed to harness it into what we are looking for – a unified
field of truth, joy, and balance. It is no more ignorance which is a threat to
human existence, but unharnessed knowledge. But after my encounter with the
Queen, the Apple computer, I was convinced, on a metaphorical level, that we
can save ourselves, we can recreate ourselves. When the inherent limitless Self
is impatient to break through imposed limitations, the time for turning of an
age arrives. It can be a new big bang, a new melt-down into another mass of cosmic
waste, or, if man can use his staggering knowledge acquired over centuries of
painstaking search for the meaning of life, a new AUM to vibrate us into a
world of truth, beauty and balance.
Can science be the Second
Coming for a confused humanity?
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