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

heart’; we mean well, at least, so we tell ourselves. In our view, it is the other fellow who is evil. To paraphrase Jesus on the cross, often ‘we know not what we do’; nor how we do what we do. One direct result of man’s moral decadence, and indifference to the means adopted, has been the steady escalation of physical and moral violence. What is mystifying is that such violence is totally unnecessary either for his survival or even for his supremacy on earth. Man’s behavioral pattern is very difficult to reconcile with much of what the scriptures and saints say of him — how ‘near perfect’ he is, so close to God, the only form of life that can arrest the cycle of birth and death, and so on. He is able to live with such behavior because of his state of self-righteous denial. Violence might be oozing out of every crevice of his consciousness, but from time immemorial man has dreamed of peace, peace within and peace without, peace for self and peace in the world, of a world without hostility and animosity in interpersonal and interstate relations. The scriptures like the Vedas abound in ‘mantras’ meant for universal peace; they all end with the invocation of ‘shanti’ or peace and tranquility. Similarly the very word ‘Islam’ means peace; the Islamic greeting is ‘peace be upon you’. Yet, violence, killings, and wars have been the constant companions of humankind. The word ‘peace’ is often used to mean the absence of war, but most of those who wage war claim that they are fighting for peace. What makes the humans thirst for war? Is it simply a byproduct of the thing we call life? Aldous Huxley delved into this theme and writes, “War is a purely human phenomenon… man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species” And again, “War is not a law of nature, nor even a law of human nature. It exists because men wish it to exist… It is enormously difficult for us to change our wishes in this matter; but the enormously difficult is not the impossible.”495

One can argue that violent responses are natural responses, and that man is no exception; but man should be able to stop their escalation and virulence. Which combination of factors and forces result in what effect is hard to anticipate. The same individual or consciousness is capable of reacting in different ways to different situations or at different times. But we cannot wholly wish away, or slyly sidestep, human violence that is often laced with malice. Horrific events have happened so consistently in human history that it is not possible to ‘rationalize’ them as aberrations or the malevolence of a few individuals. The greatest myth is that the human being is a peaceful being. Pitirim Sorokin, in his book, Social

 

 

 

495 Cited in: Learn Peace, a Peace Pledge Union Project. Aldous Huxley. Ends and Means. The Nature of War. Accessed at: http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/infodocs/people/pp-huxley1.html

 

and Cultural Dynamics (1957), noted that in the past 800 years, most of the world’s countries spent about half that time in warfare. Fighting, according to him, is seemingly so natural to the human temperament that no amount of education can cure this universal malady. And that goes for culture too. We have to accept the reality of the deep roots of destructiveness in the human psyche. What man has been trying to achieve is external peace without internal peace, and establish order in the world in the absence of harmony in the consciousness. Time and again it is noted that what we do not have inside we cannot project outside, and what we feel inside cannot but find external expression. That applies to war and peace. And the simple absence of war or even violence does not amount to peace. Ahimsa or nonviolence is not shanti or peace. It is the negation of any kind of force or coercion in human behavior. Peace is a rare sublime state that humanity has seldom, if at all, experienced. The ‘paradox of peace’ is that the more we chant the ‘mantra’ of being at peace with ourselves, or with others or with Nature or God, the more it gets distant. Everyone is avowedly, if not ostentatiously, for peace; no one wants violence or war, save perhaps a psychopath. But for the most part, peace is just a means. Everyone wants something — control, conquest, land, resources, — and peace provides them the opportunity to exercise or fulfill that want. Even those who wage war claim that they are fighting for peace. The massacre of thousands of non- combatants is publicly touted as the necessary price of peace. We are getting pretty close to George Orwell’s fictional superstate Oceania, teeming with Thought Police, Thought Crimes, Ministry of Truth, and Big Brother, where “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery” and “Ignorance is Strength.”496 The constitution of UNESCO famously declared that since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace have to be constructed. What was meant by ‘mind’ was consciousness. The mind per se is the problem, not the solution. In the cauldron of our consciousness, our way of wanting peace is not letting others be at peace; deep inside, what we desire is not peace but victory; we demand surrender, not shared sacrifice.

Many things man wants to be (and, even more, does not want to be), but, after millions of years of evolution, millenniums of progress and centuries of science, man remains finite and fragile, vulnerable and wayward, troubled and tentative, ignorant and arrogant. It would do a world of good if we could demystify and demythify our ingrained and unshakeable beliefs about ourselves. We cannot speak for the other yugas or the Biblical times, but we, the mammalian mortals of this millennium, are a blessed species with many blemishes, exquisitely endowed but severely flawed. And the flaws and blemishes are showing up more and more prominently, like festering pimples on our face. Then again, like all other planetary beings, we too have to function within certain physical, psychic, and mental limits. Emmanuel Kant is said to have observed that “we, as humans, do not possess the capacity to fully comprehend reality.”497 And Einstein talked of the insufficiency of the mind to understand more deeply the harmony of the Universe which we try to formulate as ‘laws of nature’ — and then go on to show condescension or contempt towards them.

Whatever it is, fate or free will, man is so enfeebled and conditioned by the external environment that unless it changes, man will not change. The external environment can change only if man changes his internal environment, his very consciousness. The French novelist Marcel Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new

 

 

 

 

496 Cited in: The Ministry of Truth. Wikipedia. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth

497 Cited in: Ernest F. Pecci. Foreword to “Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness” by William A. Tiller. 1997. Pavior Publishers. USA. p.xix.

 

landscapes but in having new eyes.”498 We know ‘the landscape’ of the human malaise; the ‘new eyes’ we need are new cognitive thinking and perceptive powers, independent of the mind.

Although most people are too immersed in the minutiae of mundane life, there is an emerging broad consensus that the human species is passing through a period of epochal transition. There is deep unsettling uncertainty about everything. The epicenter of that ‘uncertainty’ is in the brain, which manifests in the way we absorb what goes on around us and in the way we act and react. Our brain does not have sufficient information or capacity to know what is out there or what is in store. None of us can be any different from what we are with the consciousness we have. As Stanislav Grof, founder of the field of transpersonal psychology says, a radical inner transformation and a rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope to solve any of the problems the world faces, and the only hope for human survival. The 20th century American ‘mythologist’ and author Joseph Campbell brought the issue down to the practical level and said that when we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And personal transformation can have global reach, for ‘we are the world’.

American self-help guru and author Wayne Dyer says that transformation is going beyond our form. But we must first cross that barrier to such ‘thinking’. Despite random flashes of shame or guilt or remorse, none of us can behave any better with the consciousness we have. And none of us can truly quench the fires of anger, avarice, rage, revenge, envy, and malice that scald our souls given the kind of fuel we pour into our vitals. We are changing the world at an unprecedented velocity, but the kind of change that our consciousness is undergoing is accentuating the very traits that threaten our existence. There is a tendency to talk of change and transformation as something exceptional and unique to the humans. On the contrary, ceaseless change is the ‘natural’ state of Nature, and it is embedded in every form of life. The world consists of patterns of relentless transformation of energy and matter. Life from birth to death is itself a process of transformation, the unfolding of a plurality of inter-weavings of cycles and discontinuous transitions. And as we are an amalgam of multiple identities, every identity should be anchored in transformation, which means we should grow, not diminish, in every identity. In one sense, transformation is to harmonize and come to terms with our multicentered personality. Vedanta says that all living beings are subject to a six-fold change (sad-vikara): birth, growth, transformation, decay, disease, and death. In addition to this inherent transformation, there has always existed in human life another kind of ‘induced’ or ‘enforced’ transformation. Often the line between innate and induced, virtual and actual, natural and induced gets blurred. Ancient traditions and systems like yoga, alchemy, and Shamanism are replete with examples of psychic transformations. While in the ancient schools of human transformation, symbols, metaphors, analogies, parables, and myths played central roles, some say that our conceptual system, how we think, how we talk, and how we react, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Goethe said that “All phenomena are merely metaphorical.”499 The mind has also been called metaphorical or as a pattern that connects.

But the mind has made itself the monarch of consciousness and a monkey of man; that must change, and that is the change that is the need of the hour.

 

 

 

 

498 Marcel Proust. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the_real_voyage_of_discovery_consists_not_in/144224.html

499 Cited in: Ralph Metzner. The Unfolding Self: Varieties of Transformative Experience. Introduction: From Caterpillar to Butterfly. Accessed at: http://www.greenearthfound.org/products/books_unfold_tus-intro.html

 

Clearly, consciousness change at the deepest level, and more foundational than perhaps ever attempted by man, is the key to a better world and for human renaissance. Change of consciousness is a change of state. It is the only way to cool and heal the planet. It is the only path to do things differently, to change our personal habits and predispositions, our lifestyles. We do not know how many decades or years we have, before we reach a tipping point beyond which nothing we do could possibly rescue us from irreversible damage. There is a serious likelihood that current paradigms of human habitation, or even thought or even culture, will not be able to halt our march towards the extinction of humanity and probably of most other living organisms on this planet. What we need to do is ‘involution’ (as in esoteric philosophy), through consciousness change. We view evolution as ‘progress’, which has made us what we are, masters of