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

our lives upside down. We want to ‘choose’ and ‘control’ everything in every circumstance, from what we eat to whom we mate, what we buy to how we die. The unexpected, the unintended, the unpredictable, the chaotic are constants in our lives. No matter how much we want to orchestrate events, too often the result seems to depend on essentially independent factors that exist outside the context of the process under way. If the result is favorable, we call it good fortune; and if it is unwelcome, it becomes ill luck. Fate seems to delight in thwarting our carefully crafted designs to lead lives of perfect order, tranquility, peace, and prosperity. We want to fool fortune but we end up, in Shakespeare’s phrase, as a ‘fortune’s fool’. Fate, it has been said, is beyond the control of gods and goddesses; it is the raw power of Nature that controls the ebb and flow of cosmic energy. Some say it hides in the deep cosmos; and some insist that it is in the depths of our subconscious.

The fact of the matter is that we seem at the mercy of so many factors and forces, pulls and passions, compulsions and constraints, that we cannot recognize the difference between what we do and what we have to do, much less what we could and what we ought to do. As Edwin Arnold (The Light of Asia, 1879) hauntingly puts it, “we are the voices of the wandering wind; which moan for rest and rest can never find; Lo! as the wind is, so is mortal life; a moan, a sigh, a sob, a storm, a strife.”13 We want to go home, after losing our way on the moot of life, but we do not know where and what our home is, and end up like the child in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), peering through the window on a stormy night and crying “Let me in, let me in!”. We do not know what accounts for time’s unidirectional flow, and if there are truly any ‘times’ save the present ‘time’.

In the Katha Upanishad, the Hindu God of Death Yama asks Nachiketa, the embodiment of the eternal seeker: “What are a billion years compared to eternity? Not even a

 

 

 

13 Edwin Arnold. The Light of Asia. 1974. The Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Chennai, India. Book III, p.33.

 

glimmer. Why, then, do we scramble after such short-lived earthly goals, goals that even if attained, prove to be worthless since they vanish away so quickly?”14 Why, indeed! Perhaps we scramble after such earthly goals because they are the only ones our senses can grasp, our mind can relate to, and because they give the appearance of giving ‘pleasure’. Vedanta says that everything in life is merely appearance; the world we experience is not the same as the atomic, physical universe. It is the mind that causes this delusion. It has become almost impossible to perceive which is the more dominant force — our mind, or our sensory sensations, or something still unknown. As a result, we seem almost pathologically powerless to alter our behavior even when we know that such behavior can be catastrophic. While we can see fairly clearly the probable consequences of our actions, we seem incapable of injecting those factors into our daily decisions. Our inexplicable paralysis to act upon the growing menace of violence so visible, and the corrosive coarseness of our conscience make us wonder if man has incurred the Cassandra Curse: ‘we simply will not believe anyone will believe us’ and so we refuse to believe ourselves, or believe that we can change our behavior. So we hibernate but hope; drift but dream of glory and greatness.

 

 

To let fall a tear for humanity

Dreams and destiny have their own dynamics, but, to paraphrase Shakespeare, (Henry VIII) this is a testing time in the life of our species — a time that bears a weighty and serious brow, full of scenes to draw the eye to flow, to let fall a tear. As a lyric goes, ‘a simple tear within itself is the key that holds the secret to our humanity’. But few among us can spare a ‘tear’ for humanity because we do not innately and effortlessly feel connected to the amorphous entity of humanity. Although in the deepest and lonely depths of our hearts, the ultimate mystery of our existence rankles, there are many who find no problem in believing that human species surely is doomed, but that somehow they themselves would be saved! In the myriad things that constitute the mosaic of life, the most important things, the ones that cause most misery, have roots so simple, so obvious, and so familiar that we pass them by with barely a glance.

They escape our attention because they are too close or too deep; right in front of us and inside us; resulting in our losing our way between the casual and the primal, the immediate and the important, the event and the eventuality. We find it hard to realize that the earth is not the lifeless ground under our feet, open to endless exploitation, a bottomless sink for the industrial civilization. We are increasingly incapable of perceiving her as the Mother, who carries us on her back, who steadies us when we stumble, and forgives us for all the indignities we heap on her. Most people do not care what happens to earth’s plant and other animal species; they do not even care about their own species. Unconcerned about the consequences, we are depleting our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, fish, rivers, and arable land — without a thought to recycling or replenishing. It is becoming clearer as every day passes that a warped understanding of the biosphere, the global ecological system that integrates all forms of life on earth, has much to do with the perilous state of the world. If we continue to contaminate the bed we sleep on, one day we will choke on our own waste. As the American ecotheologian Thomas Berry puts it, we have some sort of moral sense about suicide, homicide and genocide, but not of biocide, the killing of life supporting systems and ravaging of the earth itself.

 

 

 

14 Swami Nirmalananda Giri. Commentary on the Katha Upanishad. From the Unreal to the Real: Eternal Values. Spiritual Writings, Atma Jyoti Ashram. Accessed at: http://www.atmajyoti.org/up_katha_upanishad_7.asp

 

At its very epicenter, the point where the seismic rupture begins, the issue boils down to this solitary truth: all through the labyrinthine path of evolution and despite our strong social predisposition, we have not managed to acquire any enduring sense of what we might call species-hood, the sense that we have something vital at stake, above all else, in the well- being of another person. We hardly give any weight simply because the ‘thing’ we are dealing with is not an ant or animal or angel but one of our own kind, made up of the same body, blood, brain, and nervous system. We have never managed to truly believe that we have a shared destiny on a crowded planet, and that coming together is better than standing apart, that another person’s misfortune can be of no profit to us.

Instead, what we have is ‘victimhood’: everyone, even a scamp, thinks that he is a quarry, a stoic sufferer. It is a state of mind in which we don the garb of a champion of the oppressed while trampling on the down-and-out, dissociate ourselves from any responsibility for what happens to us or done by us. We do not seem to be accountable to anyone, feeling morally right in whatever we do, and we expect unquestioned sympathy for all the wrongs, real or imaginary, done to us. There are many fringe benefits of victimhood; and in the contemporary culture, new rewards are continuously being discovered. There are many villains out there but the real ‘villain’ lurks inside us: to divert our own minds, we simply look for an external enemy. Man has always viewed himself both as a master and a martyr, a chosen being and a scapegoat, and the mix comes out in myriad ways in everyday life.

Our long trail of evolution seems to have loaded us with some very hoary and many unsavory predispositions and traits, a hangover of the struggle for the survival of the fittest; of our hunter-gatherer past when having those ‘negatives’ conferred a reproductive and combative advantage over other species. Some biologists and anthropologists speculate that humans may well have a ‘rape gene’ or a ‘killer gene’, with strong roots in evolution tucked away in some corner of our consciousness. That does not deter us from laying claim to constitutional ‘perfection’, which shows up in such expressions as man is ‘almost perfect’, ‘near perfect’, ‘potentially perfect’. We also say that the human has limitless potential, leaving the question unanswered as how something perfect can still have so much unfulfilled potential. To borrow a phrase from the American philosopher Reinhold Niebuhr, our eternal ‘pilgrimage to perfection’ will go on until we learn to turn that pilgrimage inwards.

Life is a stream of ‘disharmonies’, capable of no perfect way; no ideal ‘perfection’ in organic life can exist; no ‘perfect’ dieting, no ‘perfect’ mating no ‘perfect’ bliss, no ‘perfect’ conduct or character — and no idyllic human society. A partial being cannot be perfect; an unfinished product cannot be a masterpiece. From the biological point of view, individually we are a series of involuntary ‘experiments’ on the part of an imperfect species towards an uncertain end. Neither scripture nor spirituality, or even science, can change that truth, even if man becomes ‘immortal’, which some scientists like Ray Kurzweil say is as close as twenty years! We have not found a way to connect man as an autonomous unit of life (born apart, living separately, and dying alone), and as mutually enriching members of a common species with an indissolubly shared destiny. One of the claims that we often make for our greatness  as a species is our capacity to conceive and create what we call ‘civilization’ and there is no attribute we cherish more than ‘being civilized’. It is innate to every ‘civilization’ to lose its vision, vitality and inner energy and fall into a state more sordid than that of the savages. The world today, borrowing a phrase from D.H. Lawrence, is like “Augean stables with metallic filth”. Lest it be forgotten, monstrosities like Nazism, as Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman reminds us, was not caused by the suspension of civilization, but were products of civilization. He argues that civilization, instead of making us moral, overcomes morality. We often think of ‘being moral’ or a ‘good person’ in negative terms; not violating a rule, law, canon or a code of the state or scripture.

 

More fundamentally, the essence of morality or goodness ought to be how we act with regard to other living beings, what we do to lighten the load of another person; whether we are able, even momentarily, to bring back a smile on a somber face. We humans are bred to believe that civilization is what separates modern society from our primitive past, and ‘being civilized’ is the highest acme of being human. What we actually experience, and what we call ‘civilization’ is, in its bare bones, a life suffused with the three ‘C’s — comfort, convenience and control — in hot pursuit of the three ‘P’s — pleasure, profit, and power. Such is their corrosive effect and corrupting influence that, as the American astronomer Carl Sagan noted, it makes us “wonder whether civilizations like ours rush inevitably into self-destruction.”15

We are ‘civilized’, but find it difficult to be spontaneously ‘civil’ to each other. The paradox is that a particular society might have all the outward trappings of civilization, with great achievements in fields such as the arts and architecture, but its people pursue moral decadence as the mark of being civilized. Rome