January 25, 2007

• TV has been interesting the last couple of nights.  One program was about a the Kumbh Mela festival in India.  Here is a very interesting place where you can go so see the festival.

   

  http://www.karlgrobl.com/km/index.htm

   

  

   

  The sadhus, or holy men (some of who were wearing nothing but ashes) were impressionable.  They renounce worldly concerns, live on alms and spend their lives wandering to avoid attachment to people or places.  This man was in the TV program, and I borrowed his picture from the above website because as I looked at him, a thought struck me.  Why has he been holding one hand in the air for 27 years until it has become a useless claw?  Are there not other things that God wanted him to do with that hand, and with the life that he has spent devoted to holding it aloft?  There was another sadhu who was spending his life standing on one foot, and another who had given up speaking, because he said that the god inside of him was silent, and he would remain so, too.  I am not a member of this culture and have difficulty understanding as an outsider.  It seemed like the many thousand holy men that gathered spent their time in some sort of meditation that involved punishing their bodies and begging for a living.  Is that a life?  But then again, I suppose that the logic is that by supporting these fellows that one is able to earn Karma points, so the supporters are more than glad to enable.

  Found this:  Agence France-Presse ・Posted January 8, 2007 03:05 PM

  LUCKNOW, India (AFP) - Indian holy men or sadhus have threatened to boycott a major religious festival, in which millions of people wash away sins in the Ganges river, saying it was too polluted.  Thousands of sadhus in their trademark saffron-coloured clothes held protests for a second day Monday, demanding that the river be cleaned up before the next auspicious bathing day on Sunday, a Hindu leader said.

  "The water in (the) river is so dirty that no one can take a dip. It is dark red whereas the Ganges used to be bluish green," said Shankaracharya Vasudvanand Saraswati, who heads the main Hindu monastery in the holy city of Allahabad, where the festival is taking place. "If the government takes no corrective measures we will have no option but to boycott the (Ardh Kumbh) festival," he told AFP by telephone.

  Billed as one of the world's biggest human gatherings, the festival started last week with Hindus taking a dip at the confluence of two sacred rivers--the Ganges and the Yamuna.  The Ardh Kumbh mela, held every six years at Allahabad to mark a mythical battle between gods and demons over a pitcher or kumbh of the nectar of immortality, was expected to draw as many as 70 million people over the next six weeks.  Devotees believe the holy waters wash away sins, liberate them from a continuous cycle of birth and reincarnation and guarantee immortality.

  "The pilgrims come here to wash away their sins but after a dip here, they may carry skin diseases with them," said Hari Chaitanya Brahmachari, another powerful Hindu figure who runs the monastery in Varanasi a city on the Ganges.  Brahmachari has filed a court case against the state government of Uttar for not keeping the Ganges clean.  State officials said they will release fresh water via canals and dams to help improve water quality for the mela.  The Ganges, which rises in the Himalayas, is polluted by industrial effluent and human waste as it winds through the Indian plains before emptying into the Bay of Bengal.

   

   

  OK, on to last night, which was FASCINATING.  I found what I think was the program on DVD, but I probably can't play it in Japan.  Read about the contents below, borrowed from Amazon.com in Japan.  I don't really know if everything presented in the program was true, but it nevertheless kept me on the edge of my seat.

  

   

  Amazon.com
  Complex yet utterly compelling, The Exodus Decoded is presented by movie director James Cameron (Titanic) but is the passion of Jewish-Canadian filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici. Jacobovici has extensively researched evidence that the Biblical account of the Exodus was real, and concludes that it actually took place in 1500 BCE (during the reign of pharaoh Ahmos I), historically known as the Hyksos Expulsion. The Hyksos people were a Semitic race about whom little is known. But their departure from Egypt, following a long enslavement, along with early writings and other physical evidence, make a strong case that they are the Hebrews of lore. Jacobovici suggests the Exodus is also connected to the catastrophic eruption of the Santorini volcano, which ended the Minoan civilization and triggered a limnic eruption (a surge of carbon dioxide) in the Nile river delta. The latter would have killed the river's fish but likely chased out all the frogs, a phenomenon that could have been considered one of the famous plagues in the Exodus story. (Jacobovici makes a case for the other so-called plagues also being a consequence of the eruption.) Whatever one's opinion of The Exodus Decoded as a historical documentary, it is engrossing viewing, shot in some truly exotic locations, often under the highly suspicious eye of Egyptian authorities. Several moments--such as the revelation of a Hyksos slave's rock carving, pleading with God to be rescued--are astonishing. --Tom Keogh

  Video Description

  At the very heart of Judaism, Christianity and Islam lies the story of the Exodus, an epic tale of plagues, miracles and revelations. But the truth behind these events has been obscured by faith and time--until now. After six years of unprecedented research, host Simcha Jacobovici and a team of renowned archeologists, Egyptologists, geologists, and theologians shed revelatory new light on the Exodus and the era's ruling Egyptian Dynasty. Their new theory pushes events hundreds of years earlier than previously thought, allowing age-old stories to sparkle with new perspectives and startling historical import. Using elaborate, state-of-the-art CGI, THE EXODUS DECODED offers a stunning virtual account of stories like the birth of Moses, the ten plagues, and the parting of the Red Sea, revealing once and for all the difference between acts of Nature and the hand of God. (STOP THE MUSIC!!!  There is absolutely no difference whatsoever between acts of nature (lower case!) and the Hand of God - Who do they think made, upholds and controls nature, anyway??  Explaining Biblical events in scientific terms is no threat to my faith whatsoever.  It is only logical and right that the two would agree.) 

  Anyway, it was extremely interesting.

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