The Genius of Dnyaneshwar Dnyaneshwari Verses 1–122 Geeta Chapter 11
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Chapter 74
From the unusual to the cosmic
It is true that the earth draws its sustenance1 from the sun and the sun our source of light constitutes the most important subconscious2 thought of our lives. The sun is power itself, the brightest thing that we see (or sometimes unbearably bright for us to see). The way it rises and sets, the colours that it brings to the sky, or on the other hand the merciless nature with which it beats on you at midday in the tropics, all this make up our permanent mental environment. The very fact that we see, we owe it to the sun. Be that as it may and having paid our odes3 to the seasons, which owe their passage to the movement of the earth around the sun, man has always had greater fascination for the night sky. The moon appears friendlier; it varies in size and shape and what to say of the twinkling stars and the dome-like tapestry4 that they weave over our heads! The rapid occasional journey of the meteor5 or the clouds that pass across an otherwise clear night sky playing hide and seek with the moon are the stuff not only of children’s stories but also of adult fascination. The sun is a navigational aid but as compared to the stars at night it is far less helpful. Man has somehow identified the night sky with the cosmos6 because there are so many things packed in it and also because during the day the sun dominates the sky too brutally for him to see anything else. In this chapter in the Geeta, Arjun wants to see it all. He has seen the unusual and the exceptional manifestations in the earlier chapter (Chapter 73, Vibhootis) and what he now wishes for is an all-encompassing view, a view that Copernicus, Polish scientist (1473–1543), and Galileo, Italian scientist (1564–1642), and Newton, British physicist, (1642–1727) saw and interpreted and which recently Carl Sagan, American physicist (1934–1996) so beautifully paraphrased7 and produced in a book called Cosmos. In this book Sagan skilfully weaves the history of human thought with that of the discovery of the details of the cosmos. Men of all kinds feature