The cow at the river

The cow is a holy animal in India, but its environment has been desecrated. Streets look more like refuse dumbs than like streets.

The cow looks among paper and plastic bags for something good to eat…: a peel of a banana thrown away by a tourist? The water is black of contamination. The cow symbolizes ‘Mother Universe’ and lies at the origin of our concept of the ‘Milky Way’ (‘Via Lactea’; that makes one think of the french ‘lait’ (milk) and that is probably related to ‘Laxmi’, the Goddess of luxury). ‘Luxury’, that word has in India an immaterial as well as a material meaning. In the west it has mostly to do with money. And there is the core of the matter: Money and gold have in the west no spiritual value anymore. Before the Renaissance gold had in Europe still a mythological value, later it became fully economic. As the discovery journies are of during and after the Renaissance, a mentallity of ‘economics’ has been brought to the rest of the world. Because of this the bond with the cosmos, with the divine has been broken and all these societies were forced to give up heir cosmic view and to go for the (big) money…!