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

was a great civilization, but the Romans — behaving in the belief that they were the elite of the world and that enjoying the ‘good things of life’ was their earned right — were far from ‘civilized’, in the true sense of the word. In fact that was why Rome, like almost all others, collapsed; and some historians are saying that our modern civilization is showing the same star-crossed symptoms of decadence and arrogance. Philosopher Adam Ferguson wrote that “not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood, but the species itself from rudeness to civilization.”16 If not being rude is the standard, it is anyone’s surmise how many in the contemporary world are ‘civilized’. If ‘being civilized’ is treating others with respect and, as Robert Frost wrote, acceptance of eccentricity to the point of doubtful sanity, then most of us are uncivilized. And if treating Nature with civility is the test, then the or even the primitive was clearly more civilized.

Without the slightest trepidation we assume that the modern man is the most civilized.

The only ‘evidence’ for this plaint premise is that we have no evidence that other civilized forms, perhaps even more culturally and technological advanced than ours, ever existed. Evidence is elastic, expansive. And while there is widespread scientific acceptance that man came from a simian, there are many scholars and theosophists and occultists who say that there is a high probability that civilizations far greater than ours thrived in our ancient past, and that men then were not ape-like but ‘god-like’, both in body and spirit. That might explain why some, if not all, of the profoundest of insights, philosophies, and revelations that human genius has given birth to, were of hoary antiquity. They could not have been the imaginations or hallucinations of ‘advanced apes’ or brawny barbarians. With all our great achievements in the arts and the sciences, contemporary civilization almost seems chronically incapable of producing men and women of high imagination and soaring spirituality. It might be partly because our heroes and role models, the ones we admire and want to emulate, are men of muscle, women of bodily beauty, sportspersons and movie stars. Almost like a self- fulfilling prophecy, we lament that ours is an age of mediocrity, mechanization, and moral laxity. And such men prefer to go with the flow of the time.

That ‘flow’ that man is floating in is closely identified with the emergence of the machine as inseparably intertwined with human life. Man today is perhaps more ‘mechanized’ than ‘civilized’, and there is almost nothing man can any longer do now with

 

 

 

15 Carl Sagan. Who Speaks for Earth? Transcript from the final program in the Cosmos television series first shown in 1980 on the Public Broadcasting System, USA. Accessed at: http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan_cosmos_who_speaks_for_earth.html

16 Adam Ferguson. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 1767. Part First. Of the General Characteristics of Human Nature. Section I. Accessed at: http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/ferguson/civil1

 

bare hands — from cooking to cleansing, eating to entertainment, walking to ‘making love’. That mechanization is not confined to gadgets and appliances for use by or as supplement to the human hand; it is far deeper and extensive. Even more disturbing, there are predictions that machines with human-like intelligence might even outnumber carbon-based life forms, and that eventually humankind and machinery will fuse into one, something similar to what futurist Ray Kurzweil in his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) called a ‘Spiritual Machine’, although one wonders why he chose to call them ‘spiritual’ when they are the very antithesis of what we normally understand as spiritual. Even if we discount the ‘spiritual’ aspect, there is no doubt that advances in artificial intelligence will profoundly impact on human consciousness and blur the boundary between machine and man. The scientific air is already thick with talk of human chip implants to improve our memory by enabling us to search our own memories like any other computer search engine. Of all the uncertainties that we face, perhaps the greatest and the most baffling is how technology is going to affect human nature.

The tragedy is that, though technology has given us the infrastructure for a heterogeneous but harmonized humanity and a platform for transforming competitive, national societies into an enlightened planetary civilization — instant communications, intermixing of people — the reality is that more walls are being built between man and man, and that humankind is more fractured and fractious than ever before. Ensconced behind walls, we communicate with each other through the mediation of technology. Technology is also the medium for man and his desires — what we desire and how we get what we desire. The Upanishads tell us that desires are so thickly overlaid with dark clouds that they prevent us from seeing what they really are. Desires are our most primal motivator and mediator; they are our destiny. We cannot run away from them, we can only turn them around and make them agents of change. St. Augustine said that we wonder at the ‘wonders of Nature’ but pass by ourselves without even wondering about ourselves, the wonder of wonders.

Whether we are actually a ‘wonder’ in any positive sense is another matter. But that is only just one of the plethora of paradoxes, ironies, asymmetries, and contrasts that underlie the human condition. The paradox that has bedeviled human life most of all is that man is part of Nature and yet has demonstrated the ability to transcend Nature; but in so doing he has disturbed the equilibrium and balance of Nature. Another paradox is that he is ephemeral and finite, and yet a spark of the eternal and Infinite dwells in him, while he spends all his life unaware and unmindful of it. Man has long labored under the tension between the subjective (I am) and the objective (it is), and between being an autonomous individual and the reality of his desperate dependence. No one could be quite sure what any human being would do or would not at any given point of time or at different times. We have no clue as to what makes us behave the way we do. Evolution itself is paradoxical, so is life. But paradox is not necessarily negative or always inimical; it could be positive, a powerful engine of creativity and innovation. However, the way it has matured and impacts human life, it has turned into a mortal peril. It has been said by saints and philosophers alike that in creating man, God has given him the unique power to fashion himself into whatever he wants, power to degrade himself into the lowest forms of life, or rise up, with intellect and discriminating capacity, to the highest forms, beyond the realm of the human.

Another anomaly that mocks at human capacity for rational thought is mankind’s eternal search for eternal life, while inventing every day new ways to shorten each other’s lives. Much of his life is spent in erecting barriers to death, and at the same time man embraces death for as many reasons as his intellect can conceive. While man dreams of immortality — which he misconstrues as making the material physical body (or rather the body bolstered by machine) perpetual on earth and to transport it to other worlds — what he gets, as a verse in the Upanishads puts it, is ‘death after death’. While all life is subject to

 

decay and dissolution, he craves for illusory continuity. And all through life, he suffers in varying degrees of intensity until the dreaded hour strikes, none the wiser as to where he came from, why he has to die, and where he is heading to. In the Mahabharata (Santi Parva), it is said that there is only one foe of man, and not another; that foe is identifiable with ignorance. In ignorance man enters this world, in ignorance he exists, and in ignorance he exits. We are ignorant if birth is a blessing or a curse, if a baby is a better ‘human’ than an adult; and if death is deliverance or a prelude to punishment, and how best to use the interval; whether to make merry while the money lasts, or do penance for the sins of our species while the body is decaying. We know neither how to live and let live, nor how to die in dignity.

Indeed we live as if we will never die, and die as if we never lived. We exult at the dawn of spring, unmindful of the fact that as the seasons smile our life ebbs.

At the core of our unrest and quest is self-definition; the yen for identity is timeless, and now, topical, it is both defining and destabilizing the ebb and flow of our life. Every color of collective identity — ethnicity, race, age, language, gender, and nationality — has become a ‘bone of contention’, a reason for rancor, a headwater of hate and a backwater of blood. So much blood has been spilt on earth through human actions for millenniums, to discern, to protect, and further one’s place under the sun and one’s particularity as a person and as a people, that it is a mystery why earth has not turned red and all crop beetroot. While Hitler was an extreme example, all of us are ruthless when it comes to lebensraum, ‘living space, land and resources’. Distinctiveness has come to mean divisiveness. All life, and individual identity and personal worth and value have come to be negation, not being another person, not belonging to another faith or nation and so on. Negation can, in spiritual terms lead to the Upanishadic maxim neti, neti (‘not this, not this’) as a way to define the core of our soul, or it can become, as it has in the contemporary world, a springboard to selfishness.

We must draw a distinction between ‘Non-Being’ and ‘not being’. The former is a state of ontological differentiation between two beings; the latter is a state of assertion by exclusion, denial of any other identity. The Buddha said enlightenment is the ending of identification. It is in fact an echo of the central theme of an ancient spiritual text, Ashtavakra Gita, which some scholars think is as lofty and topical as the more famous Bhagavad Gita: If you detach the body and rest in intelligence you will at once be happy, peaceful, and free from bondage.17 Some other translators use the word ‘consciousness’ instead of intelligence. An ancient Hindu text says that the jiva (individual soul) and Shiva (God) are one; when in bondage it is jiva, and jiva freed from bondage is Shiva. And when Shiva as jiva leaves the body, it becomes a sava (corpse).

Most of the time, we are a blend of all three, jiva, Shiva, and sava. What we do in daily life is fight the demons of different identities, personal, social, spiritual, obligatory, each at war with another, camouflaging our true essence, the Shiva inside, and draining all spiritual and psychic energy. We are all human collectively but, as the psychologist Carl Jung noted, each of us carries his own life-form — an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other. The much-advertised process of ‘globalization’ has shrunk geography but widened the chasm between man and man, by making human interfacing optional to human existence. The evaporation of the historic delineations of territorial boundaries has not done anything to make the world a safer or a better place. The world is electronically interconnected, but humanity has never been more emotionally disconnected than at the morrow of this millennium.

 

 

 

17 Swami Nityaswarupananda (tr.). Ashtavakra Gita. 2001. Sri Ramanasramam. Tiruvannamalai, India. Chapter 1. p.5.

 

Emotion, it has been said, has a vital spiritual function and is the language of the soul. Indeed, as Jung noted, emotion is the chief source of ‘becoming conscious’ and there can be no true transformation without an emotional undercurrent. Our muddled state of mind about our primary identity