Social and Spiritual Consciousness: Is Nature the Manifest God?

Even those who feel uncomfortable to believe in God, will agree that we are a product of the world outside us. We are a complex mix of earth, water, fire, air, and space, all illuminated by intelligence. We must breathe air every minute, need food and water every few hours and need the balance of fire in the universe. We cannot afford to pollute these components if we wish to survive.

These life-giving agencies, water, air etc., were called gods by the ancients. It was not due to ignorance. They knew the highest reality (God, as we call) as not a person sitting in high space, and they also knew the need for coexistence with nature, that the life of all living beings depended on these which nourish us every minute. Thus, they regarded them as gods.

The Gita tells man, (3-11), 'you take care of these deities, and they will take care of you. By mutually taking care, you both prosper'. This philosophy was drilled into the mind of the common man in many ways. When a person digs the ground to build a house, there is an apology to earth. When a person takes a dip in a river, he apologises to the river for causing some pollution. It implies that we must merely take a dip but not use detergents or wash clothes or leave waste in the river. The opening lines of Yajurveda show the student requesting the tree to allow cutting of a branch for his ritual. In South India, we see that many people claim lineage (gotra) of trees. The star under which a person is born tells him/her that a particular tree is auspicious for him/her and that such tree must be grown.

Ecology is harsh to human faults. The western world, for a long time, took nature for granted. It thought that man was the boss of what all existed and so recklessly exploited it. To its dismay it is realizing that man must coexist with nature, live in harmony with nature, so that both can survive. All such aberrations entered the Indian mind too, and we see earth showing its impatience in God's own land, Joshimath. Man had dug too many pores into earth and shook the balance.

Tragically, man still says that he would conquer. Yuval Noah Harari says that humans as we see will disappear and a new composite of man-machine would evolve and that many ordinary people would be wiped out and a new race would rule the earth. Will the man-machine interface have greater harmony with nature? Can that be God's plan?

(Writer is former DGP, Andhra Pradesh)