Ugadi - A new beginning: Cycles of life, death and time

"As the seconds pass, we look back at what our lives have held. As the minutes pass, we see what fell through the cracks, parts of our lives we withheld. As the hours pass, we think of what we learned. As the days pass, we wish a lot could be returned. As years pass, you stand alone. As your life passes, you did well, live on."

The question always lingers on, does the time pass by or we pass by?

This is more of a philosophical question. There are diverse interpretations to it. It is all about human being's experience and observation of time which differ sharply from each other. We at least know of two views - cyclical and linear. Our civilizations and philosophies have all been influenced by thinking on either lines and have shaped our outlook.

"In China the cyclical concept was basic to Taoism. In India the idea of cosmic cycles (yugas) is a fundamental tenet of Hinduism; a complete cycle, a mahayuga, lasts twelve thousand years and ends with a violent destruction of the world that is repeated ever more dramatically at the end of every thousandth cycle.

It is less often realised that the Ancient Greeks, the very precursors of our own civilisation, carried the concept of circular time to its ultimate conclusion. Pythagoreans, Stoics, and Platonists all agreed that within each aeon, or cycle of duration, the same events were reproduced over and over again.

This concept of cyclical time can be taken even further to the extreme in 'less advanced' societies such as the Balinese. Prof Davies of the Oklahoma University, describes how they not only have a ritual and lunar calendar, but perceive themselves to be living in a 'timeless present'.

We the Indians believe in the cyclic theory of time and it has influenced all three fields of religion, of history and of personal life. As for history, it has influenced both human and cosmic nature. This is inherent to most of the older civilizations. Some of this knowledge has been inherited from the so called pre-civilizational societies (pardon me for the term. Who are we to judge them so).

Let us look at the cyclical thoughts that influenced mankind thus: Seasons have shaped and moulded our view more extensively than any making the environment the most important aspect of our life. Advent of agriculture made all the difference to the impact.

We don't have to delve much into this theory as cyclic time theory is inherent to our DNA. We all believe in the theory of Karma and also in the afterlife (if not at a younger age). Even in Mahayana Buddhism the historical or original Buddha immediately brings to our mind a long vista of putative Buddhas of the previous and future times. Some would even point out that Eucharist, a rite, is cyclical.

Cyclic view has been prevalent among the Hindus always and also among the Chinese, the Aztecs and the pre-Christ Greeks

Gods guiding the cosmos and leaving it to sustain itself till it reaches the brink of disaster only to be restored back to normality by the Gods is Empedocles (a pre-Socratic) concept that Plato dealt with to turn psychological concepts into philosophical ones. Of course, there is no greater calculation or observation that has gone into the concept of time as in the Hindu version of it in the world and it is the most complex one. Let the Bible-led Christian belief claim anything but they don't have any answer to our 'Panchangam'. That is ancient science. Then we have the Aztecs of Mesoamerica who beat the modern Westerners and came close to the Hindus in the scale on which they envisaged the flow of time and in keeping astonishingly accurate time count through a set of interlocking cycles of different wavelengths.

We are not the only ones who believe in the cycle of life and death and also of time? We have had company since ancient times. Let's celebrate Ugadi that hails yet another cycle.