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

everything we see and touch. But there is a side effect. The very core of our being and our consciousness has been shaped by our ‘fight or flight’ reactions to life-threatening situations, which include, in the words of Dawson Church (The Genie in Your Genes, 2007), “shunting of blood away from the gut to the large muscles of the extremities to provide greater strength in combat or speed of locomotion away from a site of potential peril, increased blood flow to the brain to improve decision making, dilatation of the pupils to provide better vision, quicker clotting of the blood to reduce loss from lacerations or internal hemorrhage, and a host of other reactions that occur automatically and instantaneously.”500 The downside of our rise from what Darwin called ‘lowly origin’ to the present eminence is that the embedded habits, instincts, impulses, and responses now pose a threat to the further evolution of man himself. All evolution is, in effect, consciousness change, and that is inexorable. Each level of evolution stands upon the shoulders of the previous level (mind on top of life, which is on top of matter), but each successive phase increases the rate of acceleration. The consciousness we have is not the one our ancestors had not too long ago. If we are to believe pundits like Julian Jaynes, our consciousness dates back to barely 3,000 years, a fraction of a second in the human tenure on earth. Much of the damage, therefore, happened during this fraction, when man moved from a bicameral ‘animal’ mentality to ‘human consciousness’. But the combination of that ‘baggage’ and what we have fashioned as our modern or post-modern way of life, might either make us a human monster, not a ‘God-Man’, or lead us to an early extinction, not to our ‘final evolution’. It is not only the personality of man that has become decadent; even his consciousness is deviant.

Our mind-dominated consciousness is conditioned, and in that condition its content is corrupted. And content determines conduct. There is nothing that we see, think, and do which is unaffected by our consciousness; indeed, they are its external manifestations. Anything within the realms of thought, feeling, and emotion cannot escape its influence. As philosophers like Kant have pointed out, what we relate to is not the ‘world as it is’ but the world filtered through our consciousness. If consciousness is corrupted, so is our perception of the reality of the world. We must find the means to a cathartic purging of the insides of our inner being. Cleansing is normal to every organism but what we need now is an ‘accelerated purgation’. We are running against time; so much toxic filth has accumulated within. And individual consciousness catharsis, if it is inclusive of a cross-section of people, can make a species-scale difference. For there is growing evidence to suggest that a ‘collective consciousness’ does exist at some level, connecting the consciousness of every individual person into a coherent combined entity of awareness. Although science has long been

 

 

 

500 Dawson Church. The Genie in Your Genes: Epigenetic Medicine and the New Biology of Intention. Elite Books. California, USA. p.171.

 

convinced of the existence of gravitational, electric, and magnetic fields, significant research in the frontier science of parapsychology, or the study of psychic (‘psi’) phenomena, indicates the possible existence of other types of fields — including thought fields. This collective consciousness offers us ways to address humanity’s toxic triangle of indifference, intolerance, and injustice, and to try and stem the callous abuse of our planet, symbolized by wars, wanton destruction, and waste. It suggests that a field of awareness and intelligence exists between human beings, that we influence each other in many subtle and potent ways, and that our collective wisdom and creativity can be harnessed for the common good much more than we do presently. While collective consciousness can be used as a platform for shared knowledge, beliefs, and ideas, and as a basis for a ‘division of labor in society’, which is the title of a book by the French philosopher Emile Durkheim, some other thinkers like Douglas Hofstadter and Peter Russell refer to what they term Collective or Symbiotic Intelligence, which is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many disparate individuals, which is more than the sum of individual intelligences, and more likely to be more positive. There is strong evidence that we can develop and work with our collective consciousness to produce and enhance empathy, understanding, and respect for each other. In our increasingly diverse and divisive world, where we are challenged by extremely complex and daunting problems, cultivating these capacities could not only promote the common good but also ensure our survival. While for science the existence of collective consciousness might be an exciting discovery, the scriptures are replete with references to it. While science talks of connectivity, the scriptures refer to it unity, as the all-embracing Oneness; the multiple manifestations of the divine enjoying or engaged in different experiences. Terms such as Cosmic Consciousness, Christ Consciousness and Krishna Consciousness are used to describe this phenomenon. In the Sikh religion, a scripture becomes a scripture only when it is filtered through the collective consciousness and experience of a people. As each of us works to clear the dross and debris of our personal foibles, the cholesterol of our spiritual arteries — individual hurts, ill will, explosive angers, and dark urges — we will be contributing in a small way to the clearing of our negative contribution in the collective consciousness.

History is replete with accounts of those who have evolved inwardly to higher states of consciousness, who went beyond the realm of empiricism, reason, and experiment, beyond what we call the ‘scientific method’. Such people are examples of what each and every one of us is innately capable of; they are the beacons that show us what we must strive towards.

There is nothing ‘unnatural’ or out of the ordinary about them — whom we call saints, seers, rishis, and mahatmas — in terms of their biology and anatomy, brain and heart. Their daily oblations are the same as ours; they have the same sense organs as we do — and are subject to the same temptations as any of us; sometimes, they too succumb to them… In short, they too are human beings, just like anyone else that walked this earth, and will walk in the future. The only difference is that they attained a state of consciousness that empowered them to liberate themselves from a limited, artificially derived sense of identity, and to fathom a deeper peace and security within. The difference between prince Siddhartha and Gautama Buddha, and in our own times, Mohandas and Mahatma is simply a ‘level’ of consciousness. One could even say that the Buddha and Christ were not individuals; they were states or levels of consciousness. The individual we call by that name today is only a symbol and an instrument. It is not easy for the human form of life to ‘make the cut’, and it was not easy even in the past when life was far simpler and the temptations and transgressions far fewer. In the past, the number of such people was very small. A full-blown Buddha or Christ or maybe

 

even a Mahatma or Maharshi is not possible in our times. Yet, our times are more perilous than their times and we need them as never before. As the Global Millennium501 project report puts it. “Never before has humanity been on the verge of devastating the Earth’s biosphere and crippling its ecological foundations for countless generations to come. Never before has the entire human family been required to work together to build a sustainable and meaningful future. Never before have so many people been called to make such sweeping changes in so little time”. Which means more than ever before we need a ‘battalion of mini- Buddhas’ and mini-Christs, men and women who are prepared to undertake the inward journey to cleanse their consciousness. For the many crises that the world faces — moral decadence, climate change, gaping holes in the ozone cover, eroding rainforests, divisive politics, polluted rivers, acid rain, devastating droughts, mass poverty, over-exploitation of natural resources, religious savagery, pandemics of homicide and suicide, and a host of other crises — all arise in one way or another from a corrupted human consciousness.

We have to tackle our malaise and malice at the level of perception, not experience; at the level of cognition, not comprehension. We have to confront them beyond the ‘intellectual’ processes of the brain, and before they crystallize as reality and infect every thought, word and deed, feeling, emotion, and passion. By the time we comprehend, by the time we actualize, by the time we experience, it is already too late to change the outcome. We can truly change our conduct and character — and destiny — through consciousness-change; it is the only paradigm of change that does not throw up greater problems than the ones it is supposed to resolve. Given the state of the world, that kind of change seems like a rainbow on the horizon or a mirage in the desert — alluring but beyond grasp. But maybe not: perhaps, as some speculate, the so-called ‘doomsday date’ of the Mayan prophecy of 21 December 2012 might actually be the beginning of a human consciousness revolution, what Owen Waters calls The Shift. We must induce the ‘shift’ because we can no longer overlook the many design flaws inherent in our modern lifestyles that perilously neglect to account for our interdependence with Nature. We must find a way to transform our self-centered materialism into respect for life, and move from a state of callous ignorance to sensitive awareness. The crisis the world faces, we must realize is the crisis of consciousness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

501 Duane Elgin and Coleen LeDrew. Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm. New Horizons for Learning: Perspectives on the Future. Accessed at: http://www.newhorizons.org/future/elgin2.htm

Chapter 7 Transformation and God

 

Three paths to human transformation

The daunting human dilemma is this: carrying the baggage of culture, evolution and civilization, with a consciousness that is filled with mind-muddled malice, how should we make sense of what we truly want to be and what we wish to seek from Nature and God? With all our intelligence, ingenuity and creativity that we believe rivals the divine, we have no clue where we are headed or indeed where we want to head. Should we try to create a ‘paradise on earth’ or work to go to paradise? What are we expected to do in the interval between birth and death on earth? Whether we are divine artifacts or ‘fortuitous accidents of cosmic architecture’, what is our mission — and mandate on earth? What is our real ‘story’? Is it because of our long fall from the sublime grace of a natural, instinctual innocence to a toxic state of anarchist ignorance, from being the pride of the Creator to one who faults Him for his poor craftsmanship? Or is it our inverse ‘transformation’ from an innately divine being into a species steeped in narcissism and nihilism, from an essentially spiritual personality to a purely sensual predator? Whichever way it is, whether we are in a state of denial or decadence, we are groping in the twilight zone between a dying ‘way of life’ on life-support, and an emerging way trying to find its feet. Old identities and values are being deconstructed without any alternatives on the horizon. We are a species at odds with itself; no other species fears its own kind as we do. Everyone feels despairing purposelessness; but no one can name the ‘problem’. Economic, physical, and political insecurity, — and fear, almost visceral fear

of death, of change, of failure, of decline, of debility, above all of ‘others’, of the unknown stalk our lives, eroding trust, interdependence and the potential of collective effort for the common good. What