Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (ereader for textbooks TXT) 📖

Man’s Fate and God’s Choice - An Agenda for Human Transformation

Man’s Fate and God’s Choice

An Agenda for Human Transformation

 

Bhimeswara Challa 

 

 

To the ‘hundredth monkey’—potentially anyone from the mass of mankind—

who can tilt the scales and save the world

 

 

[The author] reflects upon the crisis of contemporary civilizations and outlines a blueprint for a new world order based on progressive spiritual values and change of human consciousness. The strength of this treatise is the sweep of Challa’s reach and his treatment of a vastly complex set of issues that bedevil humankind today...

India International Center Quarterly, Summer 2012

 

 

As a thinker and erudite scholar, [the author] has made a profound study of the world situation and the moral decadence of man... [This book] deserves to be on the shelves of university, college and public libraries...

Triveni Magazine, July–Sept 2011

 

 

It is difficult to pigeon-hole this book as... a ‘prophetic discourse’, a ‘journey into the human mind’, a ‘guide for human survival’, a ‘spiritual treatise’. It is an amalgam of all these and more... the volume reaches out to those who are already uneasy about the way we on this erth are progressing.

The Book Review, India, June 2013

 

Well-planned and cohesively written, the book is noteworthy for its delightful blend of information and arguments, and reveals the depth of the author’s understanding of the human predicament... This is a closely argued and thought-provoking book...

The Hindu, 13 Sept 2011 

 

 

[This book] is a gripping exposition on human nature and self-transformation without preference to religion... Challa has critically provided a foundational argument for a deeper discussion of philosophical and practical ideals concerning self-transformation... harmonizing the head and the heart is the way for humans to function as spiritual beings. Recommended by the USR.

The US Review of Books

  

 

 

Contents

 

Preface

 

Chapter 1. Man in Context

God gotten weary of Man! To let fall a tear for humanity Brooding on the brink

Risks, change and transformation The three ‘I’s of the human condition

Chigyogoisui — unity of knowledge and action Malaise of modern man

God and good men Narcissism and nihilism

The way forward — the way inward

 

Chapter 2. The Human Condition

The human in the universe

Harmonizing personal and collective identity Pleasure and pain

Man — a mixed blessing The rope and the snake

Dwanda-atheetha and the principle of polarity A thinking pigmy

Power, passion and love Moral foundation of mankind

Knowledge, ignorance and illusion The self and the razor’s edge Human depravity

Evolution and culture Acceptance and tolerance Civilization and chemicalization Consumerism and its critics

Comparison, competition and convergence

 

Chapter 3. Of Human Baggage and Bondage

Bondage and liberation

Human activity and its toxic fall out Lives of quiet desperation

The quest for ‘good governance’ Earth and its false gods

Evil — be thou my good Money, sex, and power End, means and violence Seeds of self- destruction

 

 

 

Chapter 4. The Sacred, Secular and the ProfaneThe three strands

Religion, spirituality and science — the struggle for supremacy Transhumanism and technology

Limits of science, and the science of limits Innovation and integrity

Religion and its future Spiritualism and self-fulfillment Knowledge and desire

The Masters and the message

Cleansing consciousness and cultivating love

 

Chapter 5. From Mind to Heart — the Odyssey Within

Harmonizing the head and heart Man — ‘a mental case’ Harboring holistic heart

Restoring equilibrium in human consciousness Mastering the mind and harnessing the heart

 

Chapter 6. Contours of Consciousness Change

Consciousness — all there is Hallmark of human intelligence

Moral decadence and consciousness change

 

Chapter 7. Transformation and God

Three paths to human transformation The phenomenon humans call God Free will, fate, and surrender

Faith, divinity, and doubt

Transcendence, immanence, and indifference of god ‘Critical mass’ and the ‘hundredth monkey’ Transformation, nature, and science

 

Chapter 8. Models and Metaphors for Human Transformation

Lessons from the living world Human effort and divine dispensation An epitaph for mankind

Preface

To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘all is not well’; indeed ‘something is rotten’ in the state of humankind; and our time too appears ‘out of joint’.

The world of today has much in common with the fictional Denmark of Hamlet— chaos, disorder, distrust, bloodletting, breakdown of the ‘great chain of being’, and collapse of the natural and moral order. Like Hamlet, the tormented prince we too wail inside our wounded minds: “To be or not to be: that is the question; whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them? To die, to sleep; No more…” Those famous words have inspired a wealth of literature. German philosopher Schopenhauer summed up: “The essential purport of the world-famous monologue in Hamlet is, in condensed form, that our state is so wretched that complete non-existence would be decidedly preferable to it. Now if suicide actually offered us this, so that the alternative ‘to be or not to be’ lay before us in the full sense of the words, it could be chosen unconditionally as a highly desirable termination…”

The choice—transformation or termination—is more stark and real today than in that Shakespearean world. The thought of ‘termination’ is finding growing acceptance in the mainstream of mankind. Such is the daunting intractability of modern life that, for a growing number of people, the only way to ‘terminate’ a problem is to terminate life. Many are not even sure if they are already into ‘posthumous existence’, as the terminally ill Keats once described, a kind of life in the twilight zone, a kind of ‘living dead’. Everyone is fleeing, running away, but few know what it is that they are escaping from; even less where they are headed to, or what they are looking for. Always in doubt about our true identity, our instinctive orientation, our distilled difference, we oscillate between the reality of our animal origin and our aspiration to be a ‘god’. The medieval Persian poet Saadi wrote, “What a strange elixir is Man, he is a compound of the animal and the angel, moving towards the former makes him lower than the animals and by moving towards the latter he can surpass the angels”. Trouble is, we want to be both, deathless like an angel and carefree like an animal.

And, while trying to emulate the angels, in our behavior we are inching towards a state of being ‘lower than animals’.

Animal or angel, ‘civilized brute’ or simply human, we all struggle, in moments of ‘quiet desperation’, with questions such as ‘Who in the world am I?’ ‘Why am I?’, and ‘What should I be?’. These are no longer philosophical questions to be pondered over in solititude; on how each of us faces them—not necessarily find answers—could hinge the fate of humankind. Clearly, we are in a time like no other in the history of the human species. Some even say that the primary reason we are out of sync with Nature is because we are the only species that operates on a different sense of ‘time-frequency’ than the rest of the biosphere. In their view, we need to return not only to the natural world but also to ‘natural time’ to lead a harmonious life. Man has always been a seeker, be it of liberation or salvation or Self- realization or the Elixir Vitae, eternal life. Man’s yearning to know the meaning and mission of his being has spawned a wide spectrum of knowledge, from the esoteric to the occult, from the religious to the scientific. But with no breakthrough or beacon, and a good deal of confusion in the cranium, we wander in the wilderness of the wasteland, searching for a place where we can ‘find’ ourselves, a place where we need not be anyone or anything else, or where we can cease to be pretenders, which is what we are much of our life. Our highest good is tainted by our oversized ego. What has happened is that instead of embarking on the spiritual journey of self-discovery, we have become self-righteously self-destructive, always trying to find short cuts to pleasure, profit, and power, and trying to look for scapegoats for our own faults and failings.

 

What is new is that for the first time in the history of the earth, a single species, the human, has acquired the awesome power to chart the course of its own evolution and alter the course of practically all other species. And also to quicken what Jonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth, 1982) calls ‘the death of the earth’. The irony and tragedy is that with that kind of power man is perhaps the most miserable creature on earth; to borrow the words from the song Epitaph by the rock band King Crimson, ‘every man is torn apart with nightmares and dreams’ and no one cares ‘as silence drowns the screams’. Many things have gone awry in our long march from the life of a hunter-gatherer to the post-modern man or posthumous man, and we can only speculate if it is all in tune with divine will or if it is purely a product of human will. Perhaps our greatest failing is that, despite our obvious interdependence, we have failed to imbibe a strong sense of species-hood, of solidarity, of respect for each other, of a shared destiny. Indeed, take away the capacity for interbreeding and reproduction, and we would hardly qualify as a ‘species’ in the way we relate to each other. But instead, what unites us all is a ‘sense of victim-hood’, the entrenched conviction that we are being wronged by our fellow-men, by our fate, and by the gods.

That state of mind, or rather of consciousness, warps our vision and distorts our behavior. Our actions contradict our own acumen, run against our own narrow self-interest. That we are dependent on Nature, that earth is our only home, is evident even to a school child, and yet we wage a suicidal war on the ecosystems and biosphere that sustain our life; and, to top it all, we feel that it is our God-given right. At this juncture in the ‘life of life’ on earth, the human is at once the prey and the predator: prey to his own mind and predator to everyone else. He is hands down the deadliest animal on the planet, feared by all and fearful of his own shadow. He is the greatest polluter of the planet. The Nobel prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen says that man now plays a ‘central role in geology and ecology’. Whether it is still Earth or it has already become ‘Eaarth’, as environmentalist Bill McKibben calls it, clearly our planet is in peril. That humankind is unwilling to unequivocally accept this state of peril is itself a sure sign that we are in peril. To be fair, what we are doing to the planet we are doing no less to our own kind. Wanton wrongdoing, wickedness, intrigue, habitual humiliation and hurting of others, and reflexive violence have become inseparable from our daily life, possibly beyond our control. While the scriptures proclaim that we are essentially spiritual beings encased in a human body and awaiting liberation, in actuality, human beings have been reduced to unconnected brute empirical entities, each trying to outsmart the other to expand its own lebensraum, and fated to worshipping false gods and the ‘good life’, endless economic growth, and obscene opulence. While the scriptures say that “you shall not hate your brother in your heart’, hatred is the overarching emotion today. It is behind family friction, conflicts with neighbors, national turmoil, ethnic strife, and religious antagonism. It is hatred that kills millions in acts of violence and vengeance; and it is hatred that has led to hundreds of millions of deaths in devastating wars throughout time.

Something seismic, something utterly mysterious has happened in the human spirit and psyche at the deepest levels, and equally mystifying is that we do not have the foggiest idea what it could possibly be. But on one sentiment and statement almost everyone concurs: we are in trouble. We are in trouble because all of our relationships begin and continue, not rooted