Myths

What is a myth if not the truth for some. Someone somewhere in some remote part of the world probably looked at the sun rising in the east one day and had a sudden great epiphany about some aspect of the cosmos. Or maybe it was a starry night and he was stoned out of his wits. Or she. Or it. Whatever works for you. The person/sentient being came up with a big brainwave that set off the EEG and gave a nice fuzzy feeling afterwards. Then the same entity/existential construct went up to his or her best friend and shouted boisterously, "You gotta hear this Mac!"(or Joe, Cynthia, Reshma, Odombo, or whatever else you prefer). And Mac heard it. And liked it. And passed it on to other people (or maybe he just thought his friend was off his rocker and was cautioning the others to keep all sharp objects out of his reach). Anyway, end result was dissemination of said idea. A few drunken binges later, we have a belief, a way of life if you must insist. And then came the naysayers.

It's almost inevitable really. Your parade will always get rained on, regardless of how gingerly and non-offensively you went about setting up the darned thing in the first place. Maybe they were pissed with you, or they actually genuinely believed in their essential rightness, but soon enough there is a competing truth in the market. And more. And one of them catches on more than yours, hence rendering you well and truly screwed. Supply and demand. Simple enough. And hence lady and gentlemen we arrive at the creation of a myth.

Obviously science is logical, cogent and comes with all the right credentials and references. I am not foolish enough to think that the sun revolves around the earth or that my behaviour is dictated by four humours.  But it is in the end a truth simply because it is believed by most people. The heliocentric theory simply just caught on. Before that was egocentrism. Similarly with the four humours. They were actual realities for people at some point. For them Freud and Jung would be myths, mere constructs of fevered imaginings. Some of our truths will stay, others overturned by posterity. And on the generations of humanity will march onwards, filling in the universe one theory at a time till finally the whole cosmos is spread out across the skies in front of us in all its glory. Or maybe the universe might end five minutes before that final awakening. Fascinating journey it would be nonetheless.

What about the past then? How did we come to be? What happened before the beginning of time? Did time even have a beginning? Did someone create all of us and everything around us? Doesn't there need to be a creator for everything to come into existence? Or maybe we don't need one anyway. Time had no meaning before the Big Bang. Nothing mattered before that infinitesimal infinity. It is only after that cataclysmic explosion is when meaning came into existence. It is futile to search for anything before that. What is is, there was nothing before. Two alternatives but no definite truth to believe in yet. No matter how sceptical I might be about creationism, I don't have anything else that I could believe strong enough in to disparage it as a myth. So here I stand with a foot in each boat waiting patiently for another epiphany. Who knows when that will come.

The celestial orb pirouettes in the sky,

What secrets it keeps, what dreams it hides,

Such vistas and landscapes I weave with my mind,

What is truth, what fiction, how do I divine?