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

conscience, a man might not murder, but he can still kill with words or do deliberate things that bring intense suffering to others if his very Being is violent; and he deludes himself that he is ‘good’ and ‘decent’. What has been variously called the ‘inner voice’, or ‘voice within’ or the ‘still voice’ or ‘voice of silence’, has to be anchored in our consciousness, not conscience. If morality is rooted in the subsoil of consciousness, not the topsoil of conscience, then we will be naturally and spontaneously malice-free and non- violent in thought, word, and deed; we cannot be any otherwise. What is based on conscience is a matter of fear, punishment, and greed. To make man a better being, conscience is a poor proxy for consciousness. In the sense that conscience is supposed to make us feel guilty when we do bad things, does not let us do things we want to do or not to do things ‘when someone is looking’, it is a limiting virtue that is wholly inadequate to solve any of the problems that beset us. It is the uprooting of our moral instinct that led to the erosion of the universal values and principles around which we could wrap our lives. And that has unleashed all the dark forces, internal and external. We need consciousness-change, not conscience-pricking.

Indeed, that will be a throw-back to the previous ages like the Tretha and the Krita Yugas — and perhaps to the living world of Nature. We have forgotten that we came from Nature and will go back to Nature when our time is done.

In human consciousness, despite our pride in our reasoning capacity, belief plays a big part; indeed life hinges on it; without some sort of belief in someone or something, it is almost impossible to go through the grind and grime of life; but our beliefs — and disbeliefs

— are selective; and our ‘behavior’ scarcely conforms to our beliefs. Certain things we cannot directly sense but we still believe; others, we just disbelieve; both are projections of the mind. Oftentimes — and it is happening more and more these days — it is belief, not disbelief, that is making us commit atrocities, without the slightest tremor or trepidation. And

 

our much-valued conscience poses no problem. Still, in matters of faith, one should not seek ‘proof’. ‘Proof’ itself is not infallible. Because, if it is infallible, then he who offers and he who accepts proof would likewise and equally be infallible, which we know is not true. Faith, as Tolstoy said, is the force of life; and as Tagore wrote, “Faith is the Bird that feels the Light when the dawn is still dark.”481 And Soren Kierkegaard called faith the highest passion in a human being.482 The New Testament says, “We walk by faith, not by sight.”483 Faith is abject acceptance of things unknown since they transcend the ‘powers of human conception’, and on which, as a theosophist principle puts it, ‘all speculation is impossible.’ We must accept that certain knowledge we might never have, because we do not need to know it for just ‘being human.’ Nature is built on the principle of ‘need-to-know’. Just as some animals can see, hear, and smell better than humans, maybe there are some among humans who could see and sense things that other humans cannot. Those are the prophets, saints, and rishis. We must recognize, therefore, that some knowledge and some answers might remain hidden from the prying perception of humans, and that some other knowledge might be known only to a few among us, obscured as it remains from the vision of the rest of us.

If human transformation does not materialize with the power of human ‘intelligence’, a ‘burst of evolution’ could do it for us; and maybe send us back to being a simian again, to start all over again, this time, and hopefully, under a more watchful eye of Nature, evolve into a less self-destructive form of life. Evolution is propelled by the weakness of one species, which opens the door to the advent of the next one. Our intellect’s chronic inability to distinguish between what a thing actually is and what it seems through the filter of our senses, has attained criticality, and is warping everything we think and do. For that to change, we need nothing less than a new consciousness. We should not forget that historic man, the present man, the one revealed to us by archaeology and anthropology, is of recent vintage, and that prehistoric man was on earth for a much longer time and might well have been a better human. His life, in the words of John Gray, was of noble idleness and his world a partial paradise. Gray adds that almost certainly the Paleolithic humanity was better off. True or not, it is a sobering thought and a devastating verdict on human civilization. Going back to the forgotten past may not be such a bad idea, but in the design of Nature and life, it is not possible. We also know in our hearts, if not in the mind, that things cannot continue much longer the way they are now, and, unless somehow something fundamental changes, the human race might not last beyond this century.

Our mind-dominated ‘intelligence’ is obsessed with pleasure and pain; everything we do, pursue and value is to maximize the former and to eliminate the latter, to the exclusion of almost everything else. Indeed that is the measure of our life, the essence of ‘happiness’ and the touchstone of ‘success’. The problem from which stems much of our misery is that we do not know how to harness the duo; instead we are governed by them; they are our masters. The scriptures tell us to treat both pleasure and pain with equal fortitude and equanimity, but our ‘intelligence’ refuses to relent; yet, we really do not know what is true ‘pleasure’ and real ‘pain’. When Samuel Johnson was asked what pleasure men take in making beasts of themselves, he answered that “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a

 

 

 

481 Cited in: Janna Lynn. Cry of the Hawk for Her Beloved. Poems. Accessed at: http://seven_directions.tripod.com/id7.html

482 Soren Kierkegaard. BrainyQuote.com. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/s/soren_kierkegaard.html

483 Cited in: New Advent. Sermon 77 on the New Testament. Accessed at: http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/160377.htm

 

man.”484 The ingrained idea is that being human itself is a story of anguish, anxiety, and pain. For thousands of years, through religion, psychoanalysis, and science, men have been laboring to overcome this condition. Men far less corrupt and coarse than us have tried and failed. It might be because man wants pleasure and no pain, whereas the two are one of the many pairs of apparent, not real, opposites that are innate in nature. Vedanta says that pleasure and pain, like bondage and liberation, are the manifestations of the ego-mind.

Philosophers such as Jeremy Bentham, Baruch Spinoza, and Descartes have hypothesized “that the sensations of pain and pleasure are part of a continuum. There is strong evidence for biological connections between the neurochemical pathways used for the perception of pain and those involved in the perception of pleasure and other psychological rewards.”485

Through the turbulent passage of life, pain and pleasure hold us in thrall and cause the ebbs and flows, the highs and lows of life. The English jurist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham wrote, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think…”486 Neither pain nor pleasure can exist without the other; alone, neither has legs to stand upon. We must learn to turn them into tools and means for a greater cause, not as ends in themselves. But it is the nature of the human mind which seeks to separate them, to shun pain and to embrace pleasure. It is the mind that drags the consciousness towards the ‘painful’ pursuit of pleasure, which is synonymous with happiness, the holy grail of the human condition.

Our ‘intelligence’ might not be able to rid us of the constancy of pain of some sort or the other, or give us eternal pleasure, but that does not deter it from dangling the vision of eternal life before us. That has been an age-old quest: to become an angel on earth beyond the reach of decay, disease, and death. While that prospect has remained a dream, science reassures us that there is now, or soon will be, a real ‘prospect for immortality’, for those who are about to die or are just dead, or for those who want to ‘take a not-so-brief-a-break’ and are willing to be deep frozen and stored away, to be brought back to life fifty or hundred or five hundred years hence. We are also told by ‘experts’ like Robert Ettinger (The Prospect for Immortality, 1962), “Indeed, in theory, it is possible even now.”487 So, our ‘cemeteries’ will turn into dormitories. In other words, if civilization endures, humans eventually will achieve biological immortality; whether this happens soon or later is of no consequence in the saga of the species and its successors. We are further enlightened that it is not that unnatural or uncommon as we presume, and “that some animals of the lower orders (Rotifera, Tardigrada, Anguilla), some vegetable seeds and some microbes can have all internal activity interrupted for a long time by being reduced in temperature to close to absolute zero — and then, upon being thawed, resume all normal functions again.”488 What science is trying to do is to extend to superior organisms what is natural to lower organisms. For science, everything is one and

 

 

 

484 Samuel Johnson. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/he_who_makes_a_beast_of_himself_gets_rid_of_the/263212.html

485 Wikipedia. Pain and Pleasure. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pain_and_pleasure

486 Cited in: Consequentialism. Wikipedia. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequentialism

487 Robert C.W. Ettinger. The Prospect of Immortality. 1964. Accessed at: http://www.cryonics.org/book1.html

488 Jean Rostand. Preface to ‘The Prospect of Immortality’ by Robert C.W. Ettinger. 1964. Accessed at: http://www.cryonics.org/preface1.html

 

once, one body, one life, and one death; and life and death are the exact opposites, and the only way to cure the problems of life is to prolong it indefinitely; or at least make it so stretched that death, if it were to occur, becomes pointless or profitless. Science may offer us extended longevity, even eternity, but it has no recipe for happiness or a solution to any of the social problems. Already, for more and more people, the volitional embrace of death seems less forbidding than life, and more alluring than what living in this world is demanding of them, and if one must live for hundreds of years, life will become more hellish than hell.

Then men might prefer to escape to the scriptural hell. As the theologian Carol Zaleski noted, speaking of a mortality that aims only at keeping the body alive, “To be given everlasting longevity without being remade for eternal life is to live under a curse.”489 ‘Being remade’ involves a spiritual not a scientific process.

The spiritual view is perhaps best espoused in the Indian spiritual school of thought popularly known as Vedanta. Swami Krishnananda in his commentary on the Katha Upanishad expounds this school and says, “The Nasadiya sukta in the Veda says that both death and immortality are the shadows of the Eternal. Even immortality is a reflection cast by it. Life and death are