In the age of science, information and knowledge, our basic article of faith is that, in order to manage any process, we should be able to measure it and understand it in precise quantitative terms.
As T S Eliot observed, today we measure our life in coffee spoons. We seek to understand the most involved webs of human feelings as chemical processes and reactions.
To nurture our zest for life, we believe that we only need to activate our adrenal glands that will, on their own, produce certain chemicals and send them into the bloodstream; and lo and behold, we will automatically be charged with a passion to live and achieve.
Likewise, if we stimulate our pituitary glands, the brain will begin to secrete certain chemicals that will signi-ficantly ease our muscular movements.
Then we will no longer feel that we are chunks of flesh, meant to sleepwalk our way through life. We will feel that we are inspired bundles of high energy, raring to go.
We are confident that our blood chemistry will enable us to summon our failing courage and rekindle our lost hopes.
This mechanistic world view is the result of the basic limitations of the western paradigm that is uncomfortable with the intangible refinement of the world of the infinitesimal.
Scientific laboratories are struggling to come to grips with the micro cosmos through angstroms and nanoseconds.
Science feels equally lost when it faces the grandeur of the infinite. For the Occidental mindset, it is a mission impossible "To see the world in a grain of sand,/ And heaven in a wild flower,/ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour".
Einstein's Theory of Relativity was the first to rattle the deterministic foundations of western science. The legendary physicist proved that there was nothing absolute or immutable about a given span of time or a given distance in space.
Quantum theory shook the foundations of western physics further. It proved that you cannot specify at which precise point in space will a subatomic particle like an electron be, at a given point in time. By S H VENKATRAMANI