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

us, and the earth will become ‘Mother Earth’, and we will probably treat other species with a little more humaneness. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says there are two kinds of attributes in the living world, the divine and the demonic; while the proportions might vary, most human beings manifest both attributes in their behavior. Lord Krishna explains the attributes that lead to a demonic life — lust for worldly wealth, wrath which comes when lust is obstructed, and greed for gratification. As a bare minimum, no one, save the psychopath and the sadist, ought to be able to derive pleasure in the pain of another human, indeed any other living being. Being kind and considerate should not require an epic struggle; and as the Buddha metaphorically puts it, we should not be able to eat a single meal without sharing. That kind of change could come only with a change in the consciousness.

The challenge is that consciousness is not static, either for an individual or a species, and yet we have to be able to orchestrate the change. The impulse and impetus for that change must come from both the universe within and the world without. Continuance of the status quo on either front is inimical to human growth. And lack of growth is death, and growth unbridled is chaos. The direction of growth is also important; suffering, it is said, is due to wrong direction. The Russian philosopher and mystic Peter Ouspensky uses the term ‘consciousness’ for the “designation of a complex of all psychic functions in general, or for their separate manifestations.” He says that “it is necessary to regard consciousness as distinct from the commonly understood psychic functions: thought, feeling and sensation. Over and

 

 

 

469 Miguel de Unamuno. BrainyQuote.com. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/migueldeun147359.html

 

above all this, consciousness has several exactly definable forms or phases, in each one of which thoughts, feelings and sensations can function, giving in each different results. Thus consciousness (be it this or something other) is a background upon which thoughts, feelings and sensations reveal themselves.”470 The nexus between mind and consciousness has long been a subject of intense speculation and considerable research. It cuts across many fields like religion, philosophy, psychology, epistemology, neuroscience, cybernetics. There are differences even among scientists. One school of thought is that once we fully comprehend the chemical and electrical processes in the brain, both mysteries — of the mind and of consciousness — will be resolved. Others say it arises elsewhere: in some even subtler, yet- undiscovered brain processes, or perhaps what is condescendingly, if not contemptuously, referred to as mind-stuff quite distinct from the brain. Spiritualists say that consciousness is singular and cosmic, not separate and personal, and not realizing this is at the root of the problem, and that our destiny lies in transiting from the corporeal to the cosmic consciousness, which the Mandukya Upanishad describes as the fourth state of consciousness, extending beyond the wakeful and the two dream states. The universe of consciousness is the most mysterious, and on how deep we can delve might depend our spiritual progress.

Paramahamsa Yogananda, the Indian spiritual master (The Autobiography of a Yogi, 1946) said, “The so-called miraculous powers of a great master are a natural accompaniment to his exact understanding of subtle laws that operate in the inner cosmos of consciousness.”471 Experts like the American psychologist Julian Jaynes (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976) say consciousness is not perception or cognition. It is a bundle that includes thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations, sentiments, memory and self-awareness. Everything, in the cauldron of life, churns and changes — body, mind, personality, sexuality — but something stays. We do not look, say, think, and feel the same throughout our lives, but in the totality of life on earth and in the tapestry of creation, there are no carbon copies. The residue, the one we cannot define but still constitutes the continuity, is consciousness, and it separates the living from the dead. The essential question is, if consciousness is not constant and the one we now have is different from that of our predecessors, and if human consciousness is qualitatively different from that of other species, how much and what is the nature of consciousness that must remain in us, for us to be called ‘human’? This is an important question in the context of consciousness change and in the agenda for human transformation. How much of consciousness, if any and in what form, has survived the tens of thousands of generations that have passed is debatable, but what one can infer is that human consciousness at the operational level has been profoundly transformed over the long struggle for human survival. In his book Julian Jaynes proposes that ancient consciousness was radically different from modern consciousness. He suggests that ancient human beings had no sense of an interior, directing self. Rather, they accepted commands from what appeared to them to be an externalized agency, which they obeyed blindly, without question. He wrote ‘that ancient peoples did not access consciousness (did not possess an introspective mind-space), but instead had their behavior directed by auditory hallucinations, which they interpreted as the voice of their chief, king, or the gods’. Jaynes was of the view ‘that the change from this mode of thinking (which he

 

 

 

470 P.D. Ouspensky. Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought. A Key to the Enigmas of the World. 1922. Accessed at http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/to/to02.htm

471 Paramahansa Yogananda. Ascension Gateway.com. Accessed at: http://www.ascensiongateway.com/quotes/paramahansa-yogananda/index.htm

 

called the bicameral mind) to consciousness (construed as self-identification of interior mental states) occurred over a period of centuries about three thousand years ago and was based on the development of metaphorical language and the emergence of writing.’472 Jaynes proposes that a series of unprecedented environmental stresses in the second millennium BCE forced the two halves of the brain to merge into what he terms unicamerality. A cultural, rather than a biological, transformation. The stresses might have included natural disasters like floods, population growth, forced migrations, warfare, trade, and the development of writing.

Irrespective of whether the heart was in the driver’s seat or the mind, or for that matter the navel, through human evolution, the two instruments or agents for human transformation have always been the mind and the heart. The Dalai Lama said, “The key to transforming our hearts and minds is to have an understanding of the way our thoughts and emotions work.”473 And the way to that is by identifying the opposing sides in our inner conflicts, positive and negative thoughts and emotions; by examining how thoughts and emotions arise; and through sustained efforts to cultivate the positive aspects within us and through what he calls ‘constant familiarity’. The Buddhist scripture Sutta Nipata says that if a man’s thoughts are unsteady, if he does not know the true law, if his peace of mind is troubled, his knowledge will never be perfect. According to the Dalai Lama, “The nature of human thoughts and emotions is such that the more you engage in them, and the more you develop them, the more powerful they become. Therefore we have to develop love and compassion consciously in order to enhance their strength.”474 Modern man takes great pride in his civilization and views it as the crowning glory of his consciousness. Implied in that pride is that the ‘pre-civilized’ man was ‘barbaric’, perhaps not even worthy to be called fully human. Based on the new archeological and anthropological findings, several scholars now believe that there was a Golden Age, a spiritual one, spanning thousands of years, before the advent of the mind-driven civilization, which for unknown reasons perished without a trace. There were civilizations more ‘civilized’ in the true spirit than the current one, even in the Stone Age, and the ‘tribal man’ was a better human being than the ‘technology man.’ Some occultists like Madame Blavatsky believed that the earliest humans were giants, both physically and spiritually, and may even have had a third eye! Feeling, to them, was what thought is to modern man. Modern civilization has been built almost exclusively on mind power and material progress, measured by how much we spend and plunder the bounty of the earth and its exquisite ecosystem. Man is so ‘civilized’ and so ‘clever’ that he does not realize that to harm Nature is to ‘cut a piece of his own flesh,’ and that the extinction of any other species is a step towards his own extinction.

Some things need constant remembrance and one of them is this: every species is specially endowed and equipped strictly and solely for that form of life, and every condition is inherently tightly conditioned, including the human one. No form of life, ant or human, is capable of knowing the essence of any other form of life. Every species is naturally gifted with certain advantages or abilities that are innate to that species and essential for its survival, but extraordinary, if not unnecessary for, or non-existent in, others. Flying is natural to birds,

 

 

 

 

472 Wikipedia. Julian Jaynes. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Jaynes

473 Cited in: Perry Smith. Excerpts from Dalai Lama’s Book of Transformation. Accessed at: http://www.perryland.com/Noteworthy8.shtml

474 Cited in: Perry Smith. Excerpts from Dalai Lama’s Book of Transformation. Accessed at: http://www.perryland.com/Noteworthy8.shtml

 

but impossible for wingless creatures. Many species can see, smell, and hear better than humans. The speed of a cheetah is hard to rival, but its speed is limited to short distances. Many mammals can swim, but not as naturally and adroitly as fish. Some birds use star patterns to navigate; some use the position of the sun; some can hear low-frequency sound waves; some may use the earth’s gravitational and magnetic fields. That birds fly but man cannot, that dogs can sense emotions and man cannot, does not make them superior to man. So is the case with man; that certain things he can do better than a fish or a cat or a dog does not make him a greater being. In fact, many of the scientific ‘accomplishments’ of man were rooted in adapting to the natural functions of other species, even insects.

 

Hallmark of human intelligence

Everything in the world is appearance derived from our senses. That is the message both from the scriptures and, of late, from science. Vedanta says that the world is nothing but a manifestation of the Brahman, but that we mistake it as the phenomenal world because of maya, which also is divine manifestation. This means that what human intelligence actually sees and perceives is the appearance, not the actuality. The noted Australian ‘Nobel’ neurologist John Eccles pointed out a truth that materialists, including scientists and ordinary people, do not readily grasp. He argued that there is no sight or sound ‘out there’ in the world, no touch or taste, no beauty or ugliness, no sensation of light or objects. All these are created in subjectivity; they exist only in consciousness. Such ‘scientific inference’ is nothing but Vedantic revelation, embedded in the concepts of avidya and maya. The operative term for consciousness is ‘intelligence’. The source of our conduct is ‘intelligence’, and therefore if our conduct is to change, ‘intelligence’ must change. As individuals, we differ from one another, more than in our physical frame, in our ability to understand complex issues, to adapt effectively to the envelop of the environment, to deal with cognitive complexity, to learn from observation and experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles, and even in terms of how we relate to one another. In one word, as commonly understood, we differ in our ‘intelligence’. One of the central issues that philosophers have been debating over for centuries is the nature of human intelligence. One of the questions often debated is if we acquired our uncommon capacity for rational thought