My home is here in Mississippi.
I've lived in many other places.
New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago,
but this place defines me.
June-bug.
Got him when he was four and a half months old,
undernourished,
but he had attitude.
Got a great walking gait.
It's the smell of grass in the spring,
the sound of birds.
I just know I'm home.
My parents lived right here on this land
and you can't understand me
without understanding where I was created.
Every religion has a creation story,
so,
what do those stories tell us about
who we are and where we came from?
I'm setting out to discover
where we began...
Jerusalem is conceived of as Eden, as paradise.
To unearth civilization's oldest roots...
This is the Mayan part.
This is the Maya Genesis story.
To locate the Genesis of religion itself...
People are literally living with ancestors.
And I'll go back
to the dawn of time...
Hindus do not believe in one creation.
They say that these are cycles of creation.
To discover if science and religion,
can co-exist.
The big bang is not creation because
we don't know what was before the big bang.
There are billions of us on this planet.
It's hard to believe we all came from one man
but we did.
Who were they?
When and where did they live?
Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions trace us
all back to Adam and Eve.
The book of Genesis says they came from a place called Eden,
near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers somewhere
in the ancient Near East.
No-one has yet found the location of the Garden of Eden,
though many have tried,
but why do we want to find it?
Well, the reason is interesting.
The Garden of Eden doesn't just represent the beginning of humanity,
it is the beginning of our conversation with God
and finding out when and where that took place
would tell us an awful lot about who we are.
So I'm off to Jerusalem.
This is one of the oldest cities in the world.
There's evidence of people living around here for more than 7,000 years.
Today, it's the religious centre of the Jewish world.
It was around here that Genesis was first written down,
about 2,500 years ago.
Archaeologist Jodi Magness
is taking me to the church of the holy sepulchre,
where there is a little known link
to the Garden of Eden.
So this is it,
this is the church of the holy sepulchre.
Many Christians believe this is the site where Jesus
was crucified and buried,
but another ancient tradition says it's also the burial place
of Adam.
The area that we're walking into here is
underneath the Rock of Golgotha,
which is the rocky outcrop
on which Christians believe Jesus was crucified.
And this is called the Chapel of Adam.
There's a tradition which goes way back in Christianity
which connects this spot to Adam, the first man.
When Jesus was crucified on top of the rock above us...
Mm-hmm, yeah?
His blood
flowed down through a crack in the rock
and Adam, the first man,
lay buried underneath
and when Jesus' blood flowed onto Adam,
Adam was then resurrected.
Almost 1,700 years ago,
when Roman emperor Constantine built the church,
he also made a shrine around this crack in the rock of Golgotha,
the chapel of Adam.
But doesn't this contradict that section of the Bible that
says that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere near
the Euphrates and the...
Tigris.
Tigris?
Well, the version of the story that ended up in the book of Genesis
seems to place the Garden of Eden somewhere in
Mesopotamia, which is the area of modern Iraq.
But how do think tradition...
Mm-hmm.
Of Adam gets to be here in Jerusalem?
Well, I think Adam probably does have
a very special connection with Jerusalem.
The Garden of Eden, or Paradise,
becomes conceptualized as the spot where the presence of God dwells.
In early Judaism, in the time of Jesus,
the presence of God dwelled in the temple, on the Temple Mount,
and hence Jerusalem was conceived of as Eden, as Paradise.
So you are saying Eden could also be a metaphor?
Right, well, yes, of course,
Adam was the first human
and in Hebrew the word Adam,
Adam just means man.
Hold up, hold up.
You just said something now,
the word just means man.
-Yes. -Adam...
Yes, also, the name Adam,
if you take off the 'a'
and you just leave 'd-a-m',
in Hebrew, dam, that means blood.
Or if you add an a-h to the end,
Adamah, means land.
Land itself into blood.
Yep.
Okay, all right.
Could the story of Adam and Eve's expulsion
from the garden also have metaphorical meanings?
Adam and Eve lived in a land of plenty,
but when they ate the fruit of the forbidden tree,
they were cast out and forced to work the land.
In other words,
they became the first farmers.
I'm heading to a region where researchers are digging
up some of humanity's oldest farming communities,
in central Turkey.
I'm interested in finding out if the birth of farming
and the birth of belief in God are connected.
Could this have been Eden?
Amy?
Hello, come on over.
Archaeologist Amy Bogaard has been digging
with a team here at Chatalhoyuk for two decades.
Welcome.
Thank you.
So,
Chatalhoyuk,
9,000 year old settlement.
9,000 years old.
Amazing, isn't it?
So at its maximum extent, it's 13 hectares.
That would be like 20 football pitches,
-Okay. -...in extent.
Mm-hmm, right, NFL football pitches or
soccer pitches?
I don't know,
probably soccer.
Okay, but they're all
pretty much the same size.
You can see that these houses are densely crowded together.
There isn't much space between them.
There is no space between them.
Yeah.
They had no windows or doors.
Every house would have its own entrance from above.
It would?
Yes.
Chatalhoyuk was a city with no streets.
The people who lived here walked across town over the rooftops.
Roofs were also where they worked.
The people of Chatalhoyuk
were some of the world's first city dwellers,
but I want to know
whether they were also some of the first believers.
Did they think their world was created by a God?
Amy takes me to a house that may hold the answers.
What's the point of that,
red rimmed hole that looks
like a very definite, has a definite reason?
It's a typical sort of feature
that's found at Chatal which is a niche for hiding
things away, like the cash obsidian, you know,
volcanic glass, 'cause it's a valued, you know,
cutting material.
You actually don't find it everywhere.
Right.
The most important hiding places
archaeologists have found at Chatalhoyuk
are beneath the sleeping areas.
Okay, so what are those holes up there?
Those are actually burial places, those are burial pits,
-where... -Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait.
A human being is not gonna fit in there. A baby, maybe.
The way they can fit mature adults in pits
like that is to bind them up very, very, very tightly
in a flexed position
and the holes are periodically reopened and new
individuals added through the lifetime of the house.
Wow.
People are buried under the platforms
so that people are literally living with ancestors.
It sounds like this has some religious content.
I... I think you're right,
and they start to raise questions about what you might
call ritual practice, which seemed to have been crucial
for life in this community.
Could these burials be evidence of belief in God?
Anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse is trying to get
inside the heads of these early city dwellers.
So this is a
pretty authentic mock-up of what a
typical kind of house in Chatalhoyuk would have looked like.
These are the kinds of objects
that we'd expect to find in one of those houses.
Over here, we've got examples of wall art.
You know, here we've got bull heads.
We often find
these inserted into the walls.
In one case, I've seen them arranged almost like a sort of
protective shield around one of these clean spaces;
and we know that these clean spaces were used for sleeping on.
So, Harvey, you're an anthropologist...
Mm-hmm.
So you're more into what people are
mentally into, right?
Well, my
imagination runs riot in an environment like this because
I've seen the kind of stuff that comes out of the walls
and that they've been taking out of the floors.
We know that there were very interesting rituals
surrounding the burial of human remains,
but those objects would be periodically
in many cases brought out.
What they were doing with them, we don't really know,
but in many cases they were put back very carefully and replaced.
It's almost as if
this isn't just a domestic dwelling,
this is like a kind of living temple.
You used that word, temple.
Temple. Well,
what is a temple,
you know, if not a sort of,
an environment in which the ritual life
of a community is conducted?
And I think that's what is going on in these houses.
Here in Chatalhoyuk,
there were obviously,
all kinds of rituals,
particularly burial rituals,
but no sign of an organized
religion, so the question remains
unanswered for me.
Did religion
allow man to
live together, grow food?
Or did civilization give rise to our belief in God?
While in Chatalhoyuk,
I heard about another excavation
just a few hundred miles to the east
that may hold the answer for me.
It's an 11,000 year old site
that lies between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers,
the biblical location of Eden.
Okay, we're now in enclosure D,
the best preserved of the enclosures that we have here,
so we've had radiocarbon data and they've come back
as 9,400 plus or minus, BC.
It's called Gobekli Tepe
and here I may find evidence of the very first moments
humans worshipped the divine.
Stone age architects
built 20 monumental sectors here
made from large T-shaped pillars.
Archaeologist Lee Clare
leads the team trying to decipher its mysteries.
The two central pillars stand in the middle of a
round oval building and the wall surrounding it,
at regular intervals we see smaller T pillars.
Fearsome animals were carved into some of the pillars,
but the stones T shapes may represent the human form.
They could be men or they could be Gods.
If you look closely around the top,
the T is the head
and then we have on the side, the broad side, the arm coming down.
You can see a belt buckle here.
They could be mythological ancestors.
Alternatively, they could be really the first
deities, first Gods,
that these people were possibly worshipping in this circular structure.
Lee and most archaeologists believe
these stone circles were used for rituals,
but no-one appears to have actually lived here.
The people of Gobekli Tepe were roaming hunter gatherers,
not settled farmers,
so why did they build a permanent place to worship,
tied to one spot?
It's one of the main questions we ask our self at this site,
so why did they come?
Now, the thing is,
at this time the communities were growing larger and larger
and there was more stress on the local resources
and because communities were growing,
there was obviously a risk of conflict.
People have problems keeping track of relationships,
keeping track of networks.
The growing population meant that people
who scarcely knew each other had to work together.
That was a recipe for conflict.
The religious rituals at Gobekli Tepe
may have eased those conflicts.
Possibly for the first time in human history,
people from different groups came together around shared beliefs,
and in those first formative moments of religion,
they may have shared stories about where they all came from,
stories that celebrated a shared past
and drove them together to the future.
Gobekli Tepe traces the birth of religious worship
back more than 11,000 years,
long before there were
Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists.
People came together
to talk,
eat,
worship.
It could be
that the driving force behind our greatest achievement,
civilization,
was God.
But today, we no longer share one story of creation.
We live in a global society
made up of many different cultures
and science has given us a new perspective on creation.
It even claims to know the ultimate secret of our cosmic origins.
Can science and religion agree on creation?
The story of our creation
has puzzled me ever since I was a boy.
It began right here,
in a church in Greenwood, Mississippi.
I was about their age when it happened.
I remember the minister reading from the book of Genesis.
There are 807,361 words in the Bible.
It doesn't take 807,000 words for me to believe the Bible.
It only takes ten words.
'In the beginning,'
'God created.'
Are y'all gonna be with me?
'The heavens and the earth.'
But for me, this beginning was a profound puzzle.
One moment there was nothing,
the next everything.
You're looking good.
Trying to make it.
If God created the universe,
who was around to create God?
When I got older, I heard scientists had found evidence of the big bang.
According to that theory,
the entire universe burst out of a single point
in an instant of fiery creation;
and now that science knows so much about our cosmic origins,
what place is there for religious belief in the beginning?
I want to know about the Islamic story of creation,
so I'm going to Cairo...
one of the largest and oldest cities in the Muslim world.
Islam has deep roots in science.
Muslim astronomers were charting the heavens
soon after the time of Mohammed.
I hadn't noticed that before. What is it?
This is the minaret of Al-Hussein mosque.
Harvard historian of Islam Ahmed Ragab
is taking me to one of Cairo's spiritual centres,
the Al-Hussein mosque.
So they start by forming lines all facing Mecca
and the lines are all closed.
You shouldn't have any kind of gaps.
Space between?
Yeah.
In other words, they just go toe to toe.
-Mm-hmm. -Right, right.
Muslims come here every day
to give thanks to God for all that he creates.
And afterwards,
some head just around the corner
to the two and a half century old El Fishawy coffee shop.
Speak to me about the Islamic concept
of creation.
In Islam, the beginning of the story starts with this
massive cloud of smoke,
from which the heaven and earth are pulled
from inside the smoke
and then the earth after that gets formed into what it looks like
before the beings are created.
Interestingly, that is very,
cosmic.
Right.
You think right away about the clouds of dust
in the cosmos that formed worlds.
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, so this ideas about these massive clouds
and things coming out of them
is actually very powerful in a lot of mythological traditions
around the world
and it is part of this Islamic narrative of creation.
In Islam,
the moment of creation exists alongside
the scientific view of earth's formation.
The same is true for traditions much older than Islam.
Aboriginal people have lived in central Australia
for tens of thousands of years.
They've told the story of this land's creation
for as long as anyone can remember.
Oh, this is beautiful.
My grandfather's family
have been caretakers for this place
and now it's gotten passed down to me.
Warren Williams
and the Arrernte people call this place home.
This place is so big, you'd have to see it from space.
You could probably see it on satellite image.
Well, yeah.
Cultural astronomer Duane Hamacher
tries to connect aboriginal creation stories
to modern science.
So Warren is taking him to where his ancestors say it all began,
a bowl shaped basin called Tnorala.
It's traditional for the Arrernte to tell their creation story at night,
when they can see their creators,
the sky guards.
This sky tonight,
it's gonna be really good tonight.
Oh, they're all coming out now.
Wow.
The story takes place in an era called the dreaming,
when the sky guards lived in the Milky Way.
The dreaming is a period of creation
when everything was beginning,
when the ladies were dancing at a ceremony
and one of them had a little baby in her arms.
So she put the baby in a Turner,
like a, it's a wooden cradle,
but all that dancing started vibrating,
shaking the Milky Way and the Turner fell out,
and it fell to earth and created
the crater that we see now.
That's fascinating because, according to scientists,
it was an asteroid or a comet
that hit the ground
and what it did, you know, a massive explosion,
created this big meteorite crater.
Duane wants to know more about the Turner, or cradle,
that Warren and his ancestors see as the cause of their creation.
This one here.
So you can see the Milky Way quite clearly
and that looks like that Turner from the front
-falling out of the Milky Way. -Yeah.
In western astronomy, we call that corona Australis.
That constellation means the Southern crown.
But you're right, it looks exactly like a Turner falling out the Milky Way.
It looks like an upturned cradle.
At daybreak,
Duane asks Warren to show him exactly where the star baby landed.
-Goes right through here? -Yeah.
Check it out.
It's right in the centre of the meteor impact crater
geologists called Gosses Bluff.
So this is it?
Yeah, this is where it began.
Well, the rocks fell down here to the ground
and formed this
and the first man got created,
the first woman got created
and, like, now I'm here because of them.
It started here,
just fell from the sky at night, made all this.
Science has never really considered some of these old creation stories
to have any validity,
and what we're finding out
is that the creation story from the aboriginal perspective
and from the scientific perspective, here at Tnorala,
Mmm.
Are identical, they're exactly the same.
For the Arrernte,
life began here
and tradition requires a greeting to the ancestors
whenever you enter this sacred space.
Hey!
Science can live side by side
with aboriginal and Islamic accounts of our origins.
Now I'm curious about science and the Judeo-Christian creation story.
So I've come to Rome,
where Michelangelo's breathtaking Sistine Chapel ceiling
depicts the book of Genesis.
In six days, God creates light,
makes the sun and the moon
and creates man.
I've come to speak with the Pope's chief science representative,
Monsignor Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo.
Now, you are the Chancellor
of the pontifical Academy of Sciences.
Exactly.
When did that get started and why?
In 1603.
1603?
And three, yes,
and the leader of the first generation was Galileo
and the idea is to have
a new academy
to develop the scientific reason of things.
So we have the two different approaches to the idea
of creation. There is the book of Genesis
and then as the big bang.
The big bang is not creation
exactly, because
we don't know what was before the big bang.
My question exactly.
And for this reason,
creation is nothing to do with the big bang.
The other thing is the idea of the Bible is not
a scientific idea of creation.
In other words, science can't prove it or disprove it.
Exactly.
We say in the Bible is the idea of creation,
but in the geological sense of creation,
not the scientific...
Not the scientific.
sense of creation.
Thank you, thank you, indeed.
The Catholic Church no longer sees the book of Genesis
as the literal description of creation.
In fact, the first scientist to propose the big bang,
George Lemaitre, was a priest
and a member of the pontifical academy of science.
So how exactly does belief in God
fit into modern cosmology?
So this incredibly high vaulted ceiling,
it's just like reaching for heaven.
Yes, in a certain sense.
This is a representation of heaven.
Oh!
Of a theological heaven.
I'm meeting with Father Giuseppe Tanzella-Nitti,
a scientist at the Vatican observatory.
I'm very, very fascinated by you.
You are an astronomer
and you are a holy man.
Yes, my field of study was
radio galaxies, quasars, extra galactic objects
and it was another kind of heaven.
I remember that,
when we take a galaxy spectra,
I used to pray during the waiting for the spectra
and to say, 'God, I thank you for this marvellous universe'
that you gave us.'
There must have come at some point
a question for you
about the nature of creation.
We think that there's, like, a big schism between
the biblical sense of
creation and the other one is the scientific sense,
the big bang, and it's all very different.
Creation from a theological point of view
is perfectly compatible with the big bang,
because you need always a first cause.
God the creator is outside space time.
It's before any time,
so the act of creation
is an everlasting act
because creation is the way in which
God continuously holds the universe.
For Giuseppe and others like him,
cosmology not only allows room for divine creation,
it offers new ways to understand God
as the master of space and time.
I like what father Giuseppe says about
creation as a continuum,
that it didn't begin and end with the big bang,
that it is God's ongoing activity
which includes evolution.
Think what he was saying is God does not exist
outside space and time.
God is space and time.
The idea that creation is ongoing sounds like a new one,
but it's not.
In the depths of the Guatemalan rainforest,
lost cities reveal the endless creations of
the ancient Maya.
What if there was not one moment of creation,
but many?
I'm heading out to explore the remains of the ancient Mayan empire...
There's a little swampy grounds where we're going.
Where a new discovery sheds light on their Genesis story.
Few roads cut through the dense jungle of northern Guatemala today,
but archaeologist Richard Hansen tells me that 2,000 years ago,
this was one of the great cities of the world.
We like to think of Los Angeles and New York as being a modern city,
but these guys had the same perspective of their own cities.
Right.
They had water delivery systems, they had free ways...
Oh yeah, very first free way system in the world.
Welcome to El Mirador.
This pyramid is one of the largest structures in the world,
in terms of volume.
It's more than a half a mile long at the base.
At a site called El Mirador,
Richard found the remains of an ancient city,
the Maya knew as the snake kingdom.
It's such a rich archaeological site,
he set up a permanent camp in the jungle to explore it.
This is the laboratory.
This is our doctor.
If you ever get in a problem, he can fix you right there.
Really?
He's an outstanding doctor.
I got this.
Miguel.
Miguel?
Morgan.
Morgan Freeman, Si.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah, it was nice to meet me, wasn't it?
It was, it was very nice to meet you.
Set?
Okay, let's do it.
Richard is taking me to see something he's only just uncovered.
Okay, this is
one of the most interesting excavations we have right now.
Oh my goodness!
This is art that was carved in stucco
hundreds of years before Christ
and it has incredible scenes
showing the entire pantheon of the Mayan religion.
So what we're talking about is,
this is the actual story of creation here.
This is the Mayan Bible.
This is the Maya Genesis story
with all the deities that are needed to tell the story.
Yeah, this is unbelievable.
I mean, if you just think about the fact that
it wasn't done in the 15th century or the 16th century.
It was done 2,000 years ago at least.
This is the oldest version of the Maya's sacred story of creation
that's ever been found.
The focus is on two swimmers carrying a severed head.
It's this head right here that gave us
the clue who this might be at the first place.
We think this is Hunahpu.
This is father of the hero twins
that serves the whole process of creation.
Gracias al Hau.
Gracias al Corazon del Cielo.
Gracias al Corazon de la Tierra,
Gracias al Corazon del Agua.
Fragments of this creation story,
survive even to this day in a religious ritual
in which I am privileged to take part.
Gracias, al Corazon del Fuego.
The ritual recalls the saga of the Corn God
being tricked into going down to the underworld,
where he's decapitated.
His sons, known as the hero twins,
set off to rescue him,
but they can only get to the underworld by being burned to ash.
The ash represents the hero twins.
She'll mix up the corn with the ashes and that goes into the water.
As their ash sinks into the subterranean waters,
the hero twins regenerate.
They return to earth with the Corn God's head
and plant him in the ground.
It is from this corn
that the first Maya people are made.
Now the hero twins are in the river,
so this is what they're gonna be serving,
and passing around.
In a sense, we all become a part of the hero twins' story by doing this.
We don't perform rituals to celebrate Adam and Eve,
but the hero twins were crucial to Mayan culture.
Their story of death and rebirth was tied to the growth of their staple crop,
corn, an act of creation that the Maya depended on every year.
And, Richard tells me,
their architecture also focused on creation.
It mirrored a source of power they saw in the heavens.
To show me how,
he takes me 40 miles away to the ruins of the city of Tikal.
The temples here are arranged in groups of three,
a triad.
So Richard,
now, I can sense here that
there is a pattern, but
something's missing. What am I missing?
Well, there is a pattern, Morgan, this is a definite pattern here
and it's consistent through centuries of time.
There's one big building over here with the stairway facing inward,
another building over here with the stairway facing inward.
Okay, and a third one, what, what?
The third one was right in front of us.
-Oh. -There's the third structure.
It's been dismantled, of course, it's gone now,
but the big building was right in front of us,
it was as high or higher,
which was built to make the triad, three stones.
Richard and other experts believe
that this arrangement of stone temples
is a deliberate echo of a triangle of stars
in the constellation Orion.
At the centre of the three stars is a fiery nebula,
a cosmic cloud of star creation.
We know from contemporary Maya that there is a celestial heart.
-The inside of... -A celestial...
Orion, it's in the constellation of Orion.
Even today, when the Maya light a traditional fire,
they begin by flagging three stones.
A fire of creation emanates from their centre,
just as it does with the triad of stars in Orion.
You're telling me that the Mayans
got this triad,
this manifestation of creation,
from the constellation Orion?
It looks like this is what they were looking at.
We know that they were very aware of three primary stars,
so the Maya were able to replicate that pattern
with these three stones in these three structures
and that is replicated over and over and over again.
They're tying us to the heavens.
They're letting us see the creation symbolically.
Looking around here,
I'm struck by the scale of what the Maya created.
Huge cities,
colossal pyramids.
It was a civilization whose religion
was focused on creation
and the continued regeneration of creation.
And yet
it all crumbled.
Everything the Maya created,
collapsed.
It strikes me that we don't spend enough time
celebrating the paths our ancestors trod to get here,
or giving thanks for the forces that sustain our lives.
But there is one culture that gives thanks for its creation every day
and I'm in Varanasi, India to see it.
India is home to a billion Hindus,
the third largest faith in the world.
It has many Gods
and many creation stories.
One of the best known
centres around the river that gives them life...
The Ganges or Ganga.
Morgan, now we are at the river Ganga.
Ganga.
Ganga, the holiest of the holy rivers
and the centre of Hindu universe.
It only exists because it is the sacred, the pure,
the holy from the heaven.
It only exists because...
You believe.
-You believe it's true. -Yes.
Ah, love that. Okay.
I love that.
Historian Binda Paranjape
takes me to a shrine to Ganga.
Careful.
Yes, Ganga's not only a river,
but a Goddess.
So the idea is that you bow down even before you enter the shrine,
but not for a short person like me.
Ah!
And then you'll come to a place
where you see Mother Ganga.
What's she holding in her upper left hand?
She's holding a lotus.
-A lotus? -That is supposed to be a...
a mark of purity,
-Right. -because lotus emerges out of mud,
but it does not take any stains of mud.
In the beginning,
Hindus believe Ganga flowed in the heavens,
but she was held captive by the creator, God Brahma.
Then Brahma decided to send the river Ganga down to earth.
But there is one problem,
that Ganga has got such mighty force
and if she comes in the earth, the earth will drown.
So the God Shiva,
blocked Ganga's fall,
gathering her waters in the locks of his hair.
So Shiva just opened one lock of his hair and the Ganga flowed.
She's the mother because she gives birth to everything.
This holy river came from
the river in heaven that we call the Milky Way.
They say that Milky Way actually is a reflection
that you see in those waters which are still beyond.
Scientists have dated the universe
to about 14 billion years,
best we can figure.
Hindus...
have it at what?
Hindus do not believe in one creation.
They say that these are cycles of creation,
Okay.
And the primordial creation could be
something like 8.6 billion years old.
Actually, this whole creation, it is
very difficult to comprehend
because we say that Gods like Brahma has created the universe,
but then they ask a question, 'who created Brahma?'
Right.
And then...
That's always the question, though.
Creation happened and then the Gods happened.
They say that the sages, when they were in their trance,
they got that revelation, that how the creation happened.
But since it isn't that level of consciousness,
you and me, we commoners will not understand it,
so we believe that it's beyond us.
The Hindu philosophy,
is not to try to solve the riddle of creation that happened long ago.
It's to give thanks every day for the forces
that allow us to be here and continue to sustain us,
including the river Ganges.
You can come a little close.
We are going to see the ritual, which they call it aarti.
-Aarti? -Yeah, it means showing the lamp to the God.
The aarti has taken place on the banks of the holy river
every night for hundreds of years.
The prayer is that
'God, you are like my father, you are like my mother,'
My mother.
'My whole existence is you.'
-My whole existence is you. -You.
I'm just like a shadow.
I am a vessel.
That contains you.
That's wonderful.
Seven priests
offer all the elements to Ganga...
Water,
air,
earth in the form of flowers,
and the most important of all, light,
which represents our souls.
As the ceremony closes,
people gather at the water's edge
to place the light of their own souls
in a tiny vessel.
This is our individual way of offering ourselves to the river
and, uh, candles that take our soul to the river.
It's the light of my soul.
My soul and it says that you take it wherever you think it good for me.
The Hindu version of creation appeals to me.
It says the Gods weren't even around
at the original creation.
They have this great saying from the Rig Veda
about the beginning.
There was neither
non-existence
nor existence.
It's saying the idea is beyond human definition,
beyond human intellect.
Just,
accept it.
Where did we come from?
A man and a woman banished from paradise,
who began to work the land?
Hero twins planting the corn they need to start a civilization?
A great river that gives life to an entire people?
These ideas about where we came from
are the oldest stories we have.
They are shared words and distant memories
that form the glue of our civilization.
We don't all share the same creation story.
We all come from different places,
but all of us,
whatever we believe,
can share in one thing,
the wonder
and gratitude
that we are here at all.
It is my fervent hope
that people will open their hearts and minds
and see that,
our beliefs don't have to divide us.
They have the power
to unite us,
to allow us together to achieve remarkable things.
As it was in the beginning,
is now
and ever shall be,
world without end.