Race Day : South Africa

GODREJ LOUD

NSIT SOLAR CAR

OFFICE-OFFICE

the daily grind of the office wears down the most ambitious and hardworking of the lot.
It leads to different perspective and outlook on varied personality.

WHY DO WE PRAY

A close inspection of human behavior results in one realizing that in all
communities even in distant far reaching islands, or dense forests cut off
from the mainland and other tribes have all developed some sort of
religious tendencies as far as God is concerned. Everyone prays to the
Almighty in some form or the other.

One would ask why is this so prevalent. Why is praying to God or some
superpower so pervasive and rampant.

It is then that one realizes that it is not an external phenomenon. It is
something which is inherent to Human Beings. One may feel that other
species of slightly less intelligence viz. the chimps and other life forms
do not exhibit such herd behavior. After all human beings in their present
form have only existed for about 10000 odd years and before that we are
made to believe that we were in the process of descending from the
primates. Even if the evolutionary cycle for advanced intelligence is over
20000 years, it is peanuts compared to the total evolutionary cycle of
several hundred million years.

So, why is it that Humans every where without fail pray, have some
religious/tribal gathering with a God/Idol etc.

It is quite confounding because there is no good reason to do so. No one
has ever seen God, most of us on the mainland connected societies pray to
Great Men or Women of past who because of their deeds attained demi god
status. There is nothing except folklore, tertiary evidence at best to
compel most of us to kneel down and pray to an abstract concept.

The icing of the cake is when people pray and ask for blessings, blessing
for a good life, fulfillment of wishes, asking for boons so on and so
forth.

All this leads me to think that though science cannot explain it but
something is not right in this entire scheme of things. After all Einstein
would have us believe that the entire Universe is just energy. Mass is
readily convertible into energy and vice-versa. So what is energy.
Newtonian physics defines it as something which gets work done. Stunningly,
if energy is just getting converted from one form to another and no-one the
wiser, what is really happening.

It all feels like an artificial construct with some loose ends. There seems
to be a abnormally large gap between the human intelligence and the next
best thing i.e. the primates or the dolphin. It is as if the humans were
copy pasted on an otherwise bleak landscape. In the first glance, Humans
have been very successful in the evolutionary cycle, but then who were we
competing against. There are practically no folklore about human war with
some other organism. This brings one to a situation where the entire
universe (astonishing amount of theoretical space) seems a hallucination.

It is here where it becomes truly complicated. The World that we know it is
an artificial construct. Maybe what we call living is just a consciousness
without a physical reality. The World is a playground of these conscious
energy forces. A game of sorts. Like any game platform, there is a master
controller, the Rule Maker. This Rule Maker has divided his
responsibilities of managing the World to various sub-programmes who each
have respective responsibilities but at times may exceed their brief.

The individual consciousness is then harnessed and distracted by this Life.
Within the game, the consciousness plays as per the rules laid down by the
Rule Maker but somewhere deep within we all know that this is a sham.
Since, the game is difficult and painful, the individual consciousness
forever beseeches the Rule Maker to make it easy for itself. This inherent
flaw of appealing to Rule Maker and the possibility of being heard, results
in the almost universal concept of prayer.

By its very nature, prayer is analogous to sending a request to a higher
power to get something.

Now comes the interesting part, the individual consciousness can choose to
pray to the Rule Maker directly or in some cases pray to the
sub-programmes. Each sub-programme (ala Creator, Preserver, Destroyer, and
thereafter Lakshmi, Ganesh, Shani, Yam etc) would have a fan following for
itself based on its appeasement of the prayers. The stronger the
co-relation the higher the following individuals. In the meanwhile
individuals would have discovered that certain sub-programmes (henceforth
to be called as demiGods) are more receptive and powerful in certain kind
of issues and lead to fulfillment (perhaps like Ganesha or Lakshmi) of a
certain kind.

Eventually the Central Rule Maker would have found that such fan following
of individual sub-programmes (demiGods) is leading to a situation where
general rules are being bent and resultant large scale dis-satisfaction
within the conscious population and therein would lie the genesis of the
mean reversion to praying to Central Rule Maker as a single God.

However, the Rule Maker would have found it difficult to wean the
individuals away from being supplicants to sub-programmes and he would have
slowly made such demiGods powerless and hence the resultant misfortune of
their followers.

This policy would have contributed to the immense success of followers of
Central Rule Maker for a while but as soon as the followers gain number the
Rule Maker would be hard-pressed to listen and accept so many individual
requests. No centralized system can entertain and satisfy a progressively
increasing number of users and is bound to collapse. It is where Rule Maker
would realize the benefits which sub-programmes played for the benefit of
system stability and providing a modicum of relief to the individual
consciousness trapped in the illusion of this world.

BT BRINGAL...