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

more importantly, it offers tools for transformation — from action to knowledge to devotion, in its eighteen chapters.

The scientific path, which is sometimes referred to as Transhumanistic transformation, is to be liberated from the vagaries of biological shackles, to cling to the body, make it more seductive, make the organs unimpaired, make human tenure eternal on earth and soak the cosmos with human intelligence. The underlying premise or promise is that once we are freed from the boundaries of our limiting bodies, human intelligence will leapfrog from the human organism to machines, making high-tech machines more human, though not biological. Man will then become a new species, Homo cyberneticus. With the aid of technological connectivity, science is hopeful that humanity will soon become a coherent species. Other than the invisible ‘hand of God’, it is our almost compulsive inclination to insert ourselves into technological contraptions as a short cut to solve every problem we face, that will have a deep and decisive bearing on human destiny. It is now very clear that our growing fascination for the apparent invincibility of sophisticated machinery, and an attendant desire to trade human sweat for metal in order to attain superhuman powers, will have a profound bearing on the direction of human transformation. Indeed, transformation is itself a code word for acquiring superhuman powers, which is really what we want. The avatar man wants to become has little, if any, to do with the divine avatars. It is hard even for pundits to foresee what would happen if the current rate of technological innovation continues uninterrupted for another millennium. Would we develop a working knowledge of all natural law and the know-how to keep the cells of our bodies endlessly renewing themselves, thus pre-empting death? Would ‘beam transport’, à la Star Trek, become possible, enabling man to de-materialize and re-materialize matter? Would computers be thought-activated and designed on an atomic scale? Above all, how would man behave, with those powers, towards another human? Do we then need a God as we now perceive and project?

For, in the scriptural frame of reference, God, as, for example, described in the Bahá’í Faith, is the single, personal, inaccessible, omniscient, omnipresent, imperishable, and almighty God, the architect of creating, reshaping and making things anew, constantly  turning things, cleansing the gathering dirt and making the world fit for the righteous. In the scientific scenario, man is the cause and consequence of everything, the virtual end of biology, and the universe is but an arena for his triumph, his mission to transform the universe in his own visage. Excluding the likes of ‘accidental’ posthumanity, induced through mutation or post-apocalyptic scenarios or becoming floating angels or gods in disguise, these are the two paths, the two choices, and the two challenges that are often offered.

There is a third one too, the path of ‘conscious’ consciousness-change: transformation of that which precedes action and becomes behavior, and quells, if not conquers, one’s own innate or acquired weaknesses and limitations. But we cannot remove the filth and foulness, the dirt and slime that lies inside; whatever we do will only be a ‘Band-Aid’ approach. A central message from the history of human transformation is that only with a fundamental change in the inside can we bring about a change in the outside, and that transformation has to be two-pronged. Just as a bird cannot fly with one wing, any modus operandi for a radical alteration of the human condition has to be a train on two tracks, not a monorail. And there cannot be any ‘sacred cows’. Transgression is a part of transformation, we go nowhere without crossing a frontier; but it must have the right limits and lines. Instead of overcoming or combating our real enemies that nestle within and nibble away at our essence, we transgress the laws of Nature. Our consciousness is full to the brim with toxins, crowded with no standing room, and we cannot put anything in unless we take something out. But for cleansing we need a cleanser, and we are befuddled about what it could be and where to find

 

Both scriptural salvation and scientific immortality overly, though not singularly, emphasize individual liberation and body betterment or spiritual enhancement at the implicit expense of terrestrial responsibility and species-scale spin-off. Any improvement within the reach of the mass of mankind, it is assumed, has to be a ‘trickle-down’ byproduct of personal ‘growth’. In that sense, the desire for self-salvation is the ultimate temptation, and physical immortality is an impediment to spiritual evolution. So many factors crowd in when we seriously think about transformation that it becomes almost impossible for us, the garden- variety human beings, to see clarity and unity. A contemporary spiritual guru, Sri Chinmoy, summed it up well: ‘the animal in us needs immediate transformation. The human in us needs conscious liberation. The divine in us needs perfect revelation. The Supreme in us needs complete manifestation. To see God, we need transformation. To be invited by God we need liberation. To be loved by God we need revelation. To be immortalized by God we need manifestation.’ By revelation, Sri Chinmoy meant sharing the fruits of realization and by manifestation he meant perceiving all life on earth as divine.507

We have to bring about a symbiosis between science and spirit, what Jeremy Rifkin called transition ‘to biosphere consciousness’ (The Empathic Civilization, 2009). The premise is that new communication technologies, enhanced awareness of the potential of renewable energies, discoveries in evolutionary biology, neuro-cognitive science, are pushing us to recognize that human beings are biologically empathic and our true nature is not rational, acquisitive, and aggressive, and that we are, in the words of Rifkin, ‘deeply connected with each other in the ecosystems that make up the biosphere’. The assumption is that each of us, at the core of our biology, is not an autonomous, self-centered, and materialistic being.

Whether we can translate that ‘empathic connectivity’ into the consciousnesses of the multitude and realize that one’s daily consumption of energy and other resources ultimately affects the lives of every other human being and every other creature that inhabits the earth, is the question. And we need to put in place the mechanism or modality that allows innate empathic sensitivity to nurture and mature, leading to consciousness-change.

Although human culture and modern civilization have radically altered the dynamic of every experience from birth to death, our abysmal ignorance, about the fundamentals of birth, life, and death, has become a forbidding barrier to further evolution. We must remember that the contingencies of happenings that led to human arrival are simply a sequel to the blind, amoral, and aggressive march of evolution. Even in evolutionary terms we face an anomaly. Natural selection, the engine behind evolution, is supposed to make organisms more suitable and fit for their environment. But that is not happening in the human world. It is possibly because the environment itself is getting worse, caused by the dominant organism and, in turn, weakening the organism itself. It is hard to foresee how this incestuous ‘story’ will reach its climax. Then again we quibble and quarrel over the ‘story’. Some scoff and say it is the usual ‘doom and gloom’ stuff of half-baked heretics, that human organism is not getting weaker but stronger; that we are living longer and healthier than ever before; that the human body is breaking many barriers either in speed of motion or in scaling heights or in endurance. And, as for the ‘problem of the environment’, solving that problem too is well within the realm of human ingenuity. Debates and dialogues go on but we just cannot seem to get anything right about anything that truly matters; often, we seem shackled by our own intellectuality, paralyzed by analysis. At times, it does seem that someone out there — or up there — is out to cut us to size, and is enjoying our discomfiture. Although outer space is no

 

 

 

507 Sri Chinmoy. Transformation, Liberation, Revelation, Manifestation. Accessed at: http://www.srichinmoy.org/resources/library/talks/transformation/transformation_liberation/

 

longer so dark, deep, and forbidding, the inner space remains impregnable. We still ruminate if we are the products of ascent from animals, or descent from angels, of evolution or involution, or a product of a still unknown process, or that somewhere, somehow, something went terribly awry in the metamorphosis of or transition from Spirit into matter. We still squabble if man is simply another manifestation of matter, a coincidental cauldron of atoms and molecules, with no particular purpose, as science suggests, or if he is a sublime spark of the Supreme Spirit intended to eventually dissolve into the Infinite, as the scriptures propound.

Despite occasional bursts of grandeur and glory, the human form of earthly life has not yet risen up to its full measure and seems paralyzed by its inherent instincts and impulses, emotions and passions. The world of matter outside and the world of spirit inside have been out of tune. That inefficiency, most of all, is manifested outwardly in man’s ‘natural’ inability to put other humans on the same footing as his own, by the reflex to view another person at best as a competitor, usually as an adversary, all to savor what life has to offer. Neither angelic descent nor animal ascent can account for this predisposition. Blavatsky wrote, “With right knowledge, or at any rate with a confident conviction that our neighbors will no more work to hurt us than we would think of harming them, the two-thirds of the World’s evil would vanish into thin air.”508 We have not found the ‘right’ knowledge and the dance of evil on earth is deafening. According to Blavatsky, the only decree of the absolute of Nature is that we should live in harmony in the world of matter as it is in the world of spirit. We have not found harmony in either kind. Although one might argue that ‘blind’ reverence led to the virtual extinction of some animals and reason has virtually transformed us into craftier beings, there are signs that we are headed the same way as the animals. Man’s attitude towards Nature has always been, from the first days to the morrow of this millennium, ambivalent, ranging from standing, in Einstein’s words, rapt in awe, to condescension and contempt, and we still have not found the right fix. The ambivalence comes from the fact that we have forgotten, as Thomas Berry reminds us, that the human story is part of the earth story, not the other way, and that we see ourselves as a transcendent mode of being, independent of the earth community. Berry also says that there is a radical discontinuity in the governing principles of the universe, as we tend to assume that the natural world is somehow lacking the spiritual mode of living and that man did not emerge out of the normal evolutionary processes. It is this basic assumption and its reckless translation into our economic life that has given rise to the planetary physical alterations which some scientists like Alexey Dmitriev say are a part of a larger paradigm of global change in the vital processes of living organisms, or of life itself, which may lead to a total revision of the range of species and life on earth. Perhaps our penchant for self-destruction is a part of or a prelude to that paradigm shift. Apocalyptic or prescient, all signs point to the strong probability that the current cusp of change is not cyclical but seismic, not transient but tectonic. And it is also self evident that man, as he has now evolved into, with the consciousness that he has, cannot cope with what will be required to ensure that such a shift does not become cataclysmic. Our vision is not good enough to see if the faint light at the end of the tunnel is the edge of the way out or the headlights of an oncoming train. Our loves, hates, triumphs and tragedies, passions and foibles are