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

surrender all the time to someone or something, for survival, or as an easy way out, and sometimes to stoop to conquer; there is an element of expediency, coercion, and force in all these actions. When it comes to God, we want to be the boss, we want him to be at our beck and call, respond without whimper to our every call for help. We would rather accept enforced surrender to another human, than willingly give up something we do not own to someone who is its rightful owner. It is based on the premise that everything — our life, property, our time on earth, our rights, our values belongs to God, that we are only the trustees, and surrender is returning to the rightful owner when we feel we can no longer shoulder that responsibility. Spiritual surrender is only an ascent and evolution is no descent or defeat; it is finding God by removing the veil that separates. But it is difficult because it calls upon us to do the hardest thing in life: to shed our ego, the ‘I-identity’. But if man could do that or at least wholeheartedly make an attempt, then God might come calling and even become his sarathi or charioteer, as He did for Arjuna in the great battle at Kurukshetra, in the Mahabharata, or come to our doorstep and wait for our call, as He did for Pundarikaksha, a great devotee in Hindu mythology. But God will not bear arms and fight our battles. Just as Lord Krishna vowed that He would not even fight for Arjuna in Kurukshetra, and did not violate His vow even under extreme provocation when the great Bhishma seemed invincible on the battlefield. In our case too, we must fight our battles with our own arms, but when we finally surrender, our battle then becomes His battle. Which means that we should make human effort wholly human, and the result and outcome wholly

God’s existence, omnipotence or omnipresence is not irrelevant, but that does not diminish the potency of human effort. It is man’s malevolence that is the issue. Just as gravity is a reality whether one believes in it or not, so is God. If God, as a Force that creates and controls the Cosmos, is altogether missing, He cannot obviously do anything to anyone. But if He is anything like the Biblical or Quranic or Upanishadic God, and if man is resolute to hasten his own extinction, He might not stop him. But if man wants to get back from the abyss of moral decadence and sincerely tries to go on to a higher level of consciousness, God might give a hand; nay, even carry him on His shoulders. And none will be happier than Gaia, Mother Earth over this. If man wholeheartedly asks for help, deep from the ‘lotus of his heart,’ help will come from a Consciousness far superior to the human intellect, in ways that are unimaginable. Gerard Hopkins in his poem God’s Grandeur said, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”549 The British philosopher and mystic Paul Brunton once asked Ramana Maharshi the question uppermost in most minds: “Will the world soon enter a new era of friendliness and mutual help, or will it go down into chaos and war?”; Ramana Maharshi replied, “There is One Who governs the world, and it is His lookout to look after the world. He Who has given life to the world knows how to sustain it also. It is He Who bears the burden of the world, not you.”550 Sure He does, but in His myriad manifestations, what is our responsibility? Sri Aurobindo wrote, “Our life is a paradox with God for key.”551

 

 

 

549 Gerard Manly Hopkins. Bartleby. Accessed at: http://www.bartleby.com/122/7.html

550 Cited in: Richard Pettinger. Life of Ramana Maharishi. Accessed at: http://www.writespirit.net/authors/ramana_maharshi/life_of_ramana_maharshi

551 Sri Aurobindo. Savitri. Canto IV: The Secret Knowledge. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry, India. p.67.

 

And that “the force of man can be driven by God’s force. Then is he a miracle doing miracles?”552 But we want to capture the key and discard God. American preacher Barbara Brown Taylor said, “As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly towards one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”553 We want God as a symbol of human hostility, a source of ultimate pleasure and unending happiness, and a permanent troubleshooter, sometimes all at the same time or at different times. Long ago, St. Paul the Apostle said that men and women have turned their backs on God and, consequently, have become perverse in their behavior.

 

Faith, divinity, and doubt

Modern man’s posture towards God is so complex with so many contradictions, that it is almost impossible to draw any across-the-board conclusions. Perhaps a good starting point might be to desist from any such inferences, because the same man is capable of devotion and doubt, implicit faith and bizarre behavior. It is all a matter of ‘balance of advantage’, which gives us instantaneous gratification. Although we value certainty and faith, some consider the transition from certainty to doubt and devotion to rebellion as a sign of spiritual progress.

Despite our armor of arrogance, the ‘dynamic of doubt’ rules our lives. We are uncertain and distrustful of everything, and everyone; including or above all, ourselves. We just do not know how we will behave in a certain circumstance, in a state of certainty or doubt. Both certainty and doubt are double-edged. The Buddha called doubt a ‘dreadful habit’. Our doubt is so deep that we do not know what things we cannot — and must not — change and have to accept, and things that we can — and must — change. The common phrase is ‘these days you cannot trust anybody’. Such is our state of mind that we cannot even trust ourselves, let alone others. We are not even sure at times if God is a friend or a foe; is he having fun at our misery? Or is he as helpless as any of us? We are a bundle of contradictions when it comes to the interplay of belief and behavior. Sometimes we think it is okay to think honorably and act dishonorably, to mean well and behave abominably. Sometimes we do not behave the way we believe, and at other times we behave better than we believe. Some devout people believe that it does not offend their religion if they are prayerful but treat others shabbily; that malice in the mind is okay as long as the lips are prayerful. Even the scriptures advise us not to ‘believe’ or follow any exhortation without applying our discerning, discriminatory faculties. The Buddha said, believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true. At the same time, the sanctity of faith is also extolled. The Bhagavad Gita says that ‘man is made of faith, and as his faith is, so he is’; the Buddhist scripture Sutta Nipata says that ‘by faith you shall be free and go beyond the world of death’; and the Quran says that ‘God has endeared faith on to you and has made it beautiful in your hearts’. In a world of unrest and uncertainty, turmoil and torment, with a feeble and fickle force at the controls, how can we sift the wheat from the chaff, and choose not between black and white but among a galaxy of grays. So often, either we are paralyzed or confused and end up making wrong choices. Doubt too is thought, of the mind, and faith is an emotion, of the heart. But both are tools; we should not end up as their tools. But who is that ‘we’? Once again it is the mind.

One of the great problems with religions is that they seem to let us off easily for bad social behavior, or at least we tend to think that ‘being religious’ is to be absolved from the

 

 

 

552 Sri Aurobindo. Savitri. Book VI: The Book of Fate. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry, India. p.458.

553 Barbara Brown Taylor. Leaving Church: a Memoir of Faith. 2007. HarperCollins Publishers. New York, USA. p.106.

 

need to be humane. Our motto seems to be: it is God that matters, not men. While it is true that most people do not know, much less understand, their own religions, let alone of others, that seems to have little bearing on their conditioning and content of actions. Jesus, for example, said in his Sermon on the Mount, ‘whosoever shall smite you on your right cheek, turn to him the other also’ and ‘love your enemies’, but no one does that — or never did — and yet deem themselves good Christians. Buddhism perhaps more than other religions, lays great stress on good intentions, but the social conduct of many Buddhists is no different from that of others. In Islam, faith is incomplete without virtuous action, but that does not prevent a jihadist from blowing up innocent people and children. The Upanishads proclaimed Aham brahmasmi and Tatvam asi, implying that divinity is inherent in all living beings, but no Hindu even remotely comes close to following that in his behavior. Our mind plants the seed of ambiguity, misgiving, and doubt, samsaya or sandeha in Sanskrit, and offers many explanations and excuses for our non-behavior as well as misbehavior. Whether to engage our intellect as faith or doubt is the question. Voltaire said that doubt is uncomfortable and certainty is ridiculous. We seek certainty in absurdity. At the practical level, doubt is what consumes all of us and few, if any, humans have been spared from it. Even Christ on the Cross and many saints could not retain total faith in times of unbearable torment or suffering. Doubt torments much of our mundane life because nothing seems to happen as we wish and when we wish. Not everything happens as we wish, because we do not control all the forces that influence the outcomes, and our wishes often are unrealistic. But without some sort of faith in something or someone, life is impossible. When no one can assure a certain result to anything, we tend to think that life itself is a progression of approximation. No matter that we cannot be certain of anything, but when it comes to divinity, we want foolproof, ironclad certitude. There are no guarantees in life, and in our futile search we seek God as a guarantor; and when He does not appear to oblige and we cannot read His mind, we call him inscrutable. We turn to God as a matter of ‘best belief’ or a ‘safe bet’, or out of dire need to help us out of our doubt-laden predicament. And, from God, we expect nothing less than immediate, unquestioned and total affirmative response or implicit obedience, failing which we say He is no God. Yet, what we expect from God we do not show towards other humans, much less other creatures on earth. We want ‘proof’ for everything, and more so for God; while in the case of human affairs it is the prosecution that must establish guilt beyond ‘reasonable doubt’, in the matter of God, it is He who has to convince us beyond a ‘shadow of doubt’. To quote the Greek philosopher Aeschylus (Agamemnon), we want God to help ‘quit us of our toils’, to carry our burden on His back.

Throughout human history, faith and free will, the two principal modes of belief, the two wings of the human spirit, have been a part of human consciousness in varying degrees of conflict or compatibility. Our inability to bring about amity or division of labor, so to speak, between these two strands of human thought is responsible in no small measure, among other things, to the acrimony between religion and science. In fact, science is used as a cover by