Priya Nath had often put together Science and the Reality of Shri Nathji in the following manner:
That so much of energy could be contained in something as small as an atom was a great marvel in itself. Who put it there? The scientists were merely taking it out. Who put the electric charge on charged particles? Who made the invisible, eternal, all-pervading force of Gravitation? Who caused all of Nature to have the movement it possesses today? Who created the millions and millions of stars, the millions and millions of galaxies and clusters of galaxies–all of which exist in such an ordered state around us?
A scientist cannot visualise a table creating itself. Nothing can move unless moved by a force. Surely the wood did not cut itself, nor the nails hammer themselves. The carpenter can be visualised in the table.
The marvellous structure of the atom, a tiny nucleus with electrons going around in orbits, points to some Intelligence that created it. The special quantised orbits in which electrons move, and the manner in which they jump from one orbit to another following fixed rules of jumping back and forth–rules of quantisation–proves that there is a keen, directing intelligence behind everything. The manner in which light is emitted from these atoms in fixed packets, quantas, proves that there is some invisible Intelligence that fixes everything.
The complex structure of the human body–the nerves and cells, the eyes, the ears, the nose, the throat, etc., etc., all point to a supreme creative power. No chemical factory could compare with the human stomach, no computer could think in the manner a human brain does. Besides, computers are man-made machines, they didn’t build themselves. Someone was needed to build a thinking machine like a computer. Surely, someone was needed to build a thinking machine like a brain. And that someone had to be God. Man had yet to duplicate His Creations.
Jee men ye hai ke hoon sanate saane pe nisaar
But ko bithhaake saamne yaade Khudaa karoon
I could sacrifice myself on the Creator of creation,
This world is the idol through which I worship God
There is a fantastic inter-play of creation and destruction in the Universe. Stars are born from the gases around them, they begin to emit light, they burn the nuclear fuel within themselves, and they finally explode or die out. The Universe had a beginning in some big bang explosion. The Universe is expanding, and will continue to expand until it reaches a limit, and then it will contract, fall back upon itself, and ultimately destroy itself in another explosion.
There will be another creation, and then another contraction and another destruction. The cycles of creation and destruction will continue. This is the oscillating theory of the Universe that astrophysicists conceive of. It is very similar to the concepts of the Yugaas in Hinduism–successive cycles of creation and destruction.
The futility of man’s existence on earth is amply revealed by science. The earth revolves around the sun. The sun is a star giving out light. It is burning the nuclear fuel within itself. As evolution proceeds, it shall gradually expand, become a red giant, and engulf the earth, burning it to ashes. This shall occur only after millions and millions of years. But the end is certain.
Even if this does not happen, the sun will ultimately stop giving light. All life on earth will then freeze to death. This event, too, will occur only after millions and millions of years.
If man were to escape this doom by shifting the populations of the earth to some other planet in some other galaxy, or around another star, doom would still lie in wait for him. The fresh star around which man would settle down, would die out with time as well, meeting a fate similar to that of the sun. Man would either perish or escape to another planet around another star in the Universe. But would that save him from the inevitable doom in store for him? No! The new star would be doomed to die as well.
And, ultimately, the entire universe would fall back upon itself, annihilating all forms of life.
Here is the inevitability of the fate of man. He cannot stay in this world try as he may, for there is death and destruction everywhere. As Shri Nathji would say:
Har shaakh par hai baag men sayyaad ki nigaah
Matlab ye hai kaheen na meraa aashiyaan rahe
The Hunter has his eye on every branch of this tree of Life;
So that none of these shall become my home.
It is strange that with so much of vastness around man, with so much of the grandeur of creation and destruction around him, he still clings to the perishable world, which he, and all his descendants must leave one day.
Shri Nathji’s Urdu Verse amply illustrated this:
Kaisaa banaa hai dekhiye ye ittefaake dosti
Duniyaa hai naapaayedaar shaidaa marde jaan nisaaar
What a strange coincidence of friendship is this,
This world is but perishable, and man would die for it.
If a man were absolutely certain that he would die of a disease within a month, his attitude towards life would become changed. But here is mankind and all its future generations marked out for annihilation, and still all of mankind clings to the matter of the earth, as if it were going to make it its home for generations.
Shri Nathji would tell people time and again:
This moment before you is very old. It has come after the passing away of minutes, hours, days, weeks and years, and countless millenniums in the beginningless ocean of time.
“Treat it very carefully. Do not let it go to waste. Try to realise God, now! This very moment! In Him alone lies a release from all death and destruction. He is the final destination.
“Man is walking on a path thinner than a hair’s breadth and sharper than a razor’s edge; it is the Path of Death. God is the only Salvation:
Dekhte hain tujhe phir phir ke zaeefaane saraat
Dagmagaate hain kadam kaun samhaale, aajaa!
Weak and insecure, they turn to thee again and again,
Their footsteps falter, who shall save them, – O come!
All the material prosperity of man, all the advancements of science; the wars and disputes over territories, the petty bickerings and struggles of mankind stand out as naught when confronted with the staggering vastness of the infinite universe around him.
When the astronauts set foot on the moon and looked back at the earth and the rest of the Universe, the extent of the smallness of man become clear to them. Man was but a tiny speck of existence in the ocean of existence around him.