Short Essay o the Space-Time Background

In addition to the unity of moral and spiritual outlook described above, we may also note the prevailing sense of the vastness of the space-time world, which formed the common background of Indian thought and influenced its moral and metaphysical outlook.

The Western belief that the world was created six thousand and odd years ago and all for the purpose of man constituted a narrowness of outlook and exaggerated the importance of man.

This belief has been shaken by the biological discoveries of Darwin and others who show that the evolution of living beings has to be conceived in terms of millions of years, not thousands.

The science of astronomy, again, is gradually generating the belief in the vastness of the universe, the diameter of which is ‘at least hundreds of millions of light-years.

The sun if this calculation is a mere speck in the universe, and the earth is less than one-millionth part of this speck.

And we are reminded that each faint speck of nebula observable in the sky contains ‘matter enough for the creation of perhaps a thousand million suns like ours.’

Our imagination feels staggered in its attempt to grasp the vastness of the space-time universe revealed by science.

A similar feeling is caused by the accounts of creation given in some of the Puranas, which would, but for modern discoveries, be laughed at as pure fantasy.

In the Visnu-Purana, for example, we come across the popular Indian conception of the world (brahmanda) which contains the fourteen regions (lokas) of which the earth (bhutala) is only one and which are separated from one another by tens of millions (kotis) of yojanas, and again the infinite universe is conceived as containing thousands of millions of such worlds (brahmandas).

As to the description of the vastness of time, we find that the Indian thinker, like the modern scientist, feels unable to describe it by common human units. The unit adopted for the measurement of cosmic time is a day of the creator Brahrha.

Each day of the creator is equal to 1,000 yugas or 432 million years of men. This is the duration of the period of each creation of cosmos.

The night of the creator is cessation of creative activity and means destruction or chaos. Such alternating days and nights, creation and destruction (srsti and pralaya), form a beginningless series.

It is not possible to ascertain the first beginning of creation. It would be arbitrary to think that creation began at first at some particular time and not earlier.

As there are no data for fixing the first beginning of the universe, Indian thinkers, in general, look upon the universe as beginningless (anadi).

They try to explain the beginning of the present creation by reference to previous states of dissolution and creation and think it idle and meaningless to enquire about the first creation.

Any term of a beginningless series can only be said to be earlier or later in relation to others; there is nothing like an absolute first in such a series.

With this overwhelming idea of the vast universe as its background, Indian thought naturally harped on the extreme smallness of the earth, the transitoriness of earthly existence and the insignificance of earthly possessions.

If the earth was a mere point in the vast space, life was a mere ripple in the ocean of time. Myriads of them come and go, and matter very little to the universe as a whole.

Even the best civilisation evolved through centuries is nothing very unique: there is not one golden age only in the life of the earth.

In the beginning less cycles of creation and dissolution, there have been numberless golden ages as well as iron ones. Prosperity and adversity, civilisation and barbarity, rise and fall, as the wheel of time turn and move on.

The general influence of this outlook on metaphysics has been to regard the present world as the outcome of a past one and explain the former partly by reference to the latter. Besides, it sets metaphysics on the search for the eternal.

On the ethical and religious side, it helped the Indian mind to take a wider and detached view of life, prevented it from the morbid desire to cling to the fleeting as the everlasting and persuaded it always to have an eye on what was of lasting, rather than of momentary, value.

While man’s body is limited in space and time, his spirit is eternal. Human life is a rare opportunity. It can be utilised for realising the immortal spirit and for transcending thereby the limitations of space and time.