1. HOMER (Ancient Greece - 8th Century BC)

The Homeric world picture was of a flat, disk-shaped earth, with the sky set over the top like an inverted metal bowl and Hades underneath the earth in a more or less symmetrical relation to the sky. The sun, moon, and stars were taken to move across the fixed heaven from east to west. The space between the earth and the sky contained aer (mist), and above that was aether (the bright air of the upper heavens). The earth was completely surrounded by the river of Ocean.

The historian Herodotus observed that Homer and Hesiod together had determined for all the Greeks what their gods were like. There is one general feature about the Homeric gods that is of much importance: They were not dark gods, accessible only to mystics and appeaseable by magic, but on the whole very human and rational. They had powers over the world of human experience, and their powers were defined and hierarchical.

The actions of the human characters in the Iliad and Odyssey are represented as being influenced or manipulated more or less constantly by the gods. Actions that might be otherwise difficult to explain, such as a sudden access of superhuman courage, are especially attributed to the intervention of a god.

2. VYASA (Ancient India)

"While we enter into the path of the Spirit, humility is the great weapon we have, and we have no other weapon." - Vyasa

Nobody is born and nobody dies– only they shift their locations – and so Masters like Vyasa could summon anybody from anywhere, just as one can write a letter to a person in Kanyakumari and request him to be here, or one can go to New York and see someone there. There is no birth or death involved in this; it is only a change of position or location. So, no one is destroyed. Everybody is here and everything is just now, in one place or the other, in one form or the other; and all the heroes of ancient history are even today alive somewhere. They are not destroyed. Everything is everywhere in a most concrete form.

Such a realisation was a possession of this great Master Maharishi Vyasa who has given us the great message of the Mahabharata (story of Pandavas) and the Bhagavadgita.

3. THALES OF MILETUS (624 - 543 BC)

The Greeks often invoked idiosyncratic explanations of natural phenomena by reference to the will of anthropornorphic gods and heroes. Thales, however, aimed to explain natural phenomena via a rational explanation that referenced natural processes themselves. For example, Thales attempted to explain earthquakes by hypothesizing that the Earth floats on water, and that earthquakes occur when the Earth is rocked by waves, rather than assuming that earthquakes were the result of supernatural processes. Although the theory is wrong, Thales’s hypothesis is rational because it provides an explanation which does not invoke hidden entities.

Thales, too, to judge from what is recorded of his views, seems to suppose that the soul is in a sense the cause of movement, since he says that a stone [magnet or lodestone] has a soul because it causes movement to iron. Some thought then that the soul pervades the whole universe, whence perhaps came Thales’s view that everything is full of gods.

Thales' most famous belief was his cosmological thesis, which held that the world started from water.

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