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

16 and 17. Accessed at: http://www.saibabaofshirdi.net/satcharita/sai16_17.html

 

Rarely, a wise man, desirous of immortal life, looks at his inner self with his eye turned inward. The ‘catharsis’ consists in returning to the righteous path, and the Upanishads clearly state that through intellect alone, man can never realize the Self or God. In fact, they say knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance: ‘Into blinding darkness enter those who worship ignorance, and into deeper darkness those who worship knowledge alone’. Most people are almost hypnotically heading towards that ‘deeper darkness’. But such is human thought that all this sounds so academic or esoteric; what we fear is the reality of the darkness of this life, not of the dark shadows of afterlife. But then again, maybe, just let us hope, it is still not too late to save ourselves from meeting a dismal fate; maybe there is still a window open to retreat from the brink of the abyss. Although drowned in the shrill sounds of civilization and materialism, there is, even if sparse and splintered, a subtle spiritual awakening in the nethermost depths of several troubled souls. But that awakening must be able to gather sufficient momentum and be self-sustaining in order to fuel further growth. The critical context for a species-scale evolutionary transformation that is revolutionary in its impact is critical mass, which, once assembled, becomes such a gale or force that it sweeps aside everything on the way. In thermodynamics, at a ‘critical point’ or a ‘tipping point’ (temperature and pressure) a ‘phase boundary’ ceases to exist, as for instance, when water turns to vapor. The critical mass is to kick off or jump-start to reach the critical point of no return. Once we attain such a criticality, it could then trigger a cascade of consciousness- change. The idea of raising consciousness through reaching critical mass is being promoted by a number of New Age spiritualists!

How an idea becomes an avalanche, a small change becomes a global phenomenon, has long intrigued human imagination. It is an important field of inquiry because, diverse, disparate and inherently divisive as the human race is, it is almost impossible for all human beings to embrace the same idea or ideal, particularly when it calls for sacrifice or acceptance of any hardship. That has been a stumbling block to human progress. Researchers have now discovered a behavioral phenomenon that they call the Hundredth Monkey effect: when a limited number of people know something in a new way, it remains the conscious property of only those people. However, there is a point at which if just one more person tunes-in to the new awareness, that new awareness is picked up by everyone else. It answers the lament ‘what can I do?’ The profound meaning and message is that individuals — even a single one

And that although the exact number varies, when only a limited number of people know a new way, it may remain in the consciousness of those people only, but if just one more person tunes-in, it might be possible that the new knowledge and awareness may spread unstoppably across consciousnesses, and lead to species-scale transformation. Much of the previous effort might have failed because we were always missing that ‘one person’ and the ‘consciousness to consciousness’ contagion. We must believe and behave as if everyone and anyone could be the ‘hundredth monkey’, capable of making the decisive difference to induce a leap in our consciousness. It can, in turn, create the context and conditions to solve hitherto intractable problems like nuclear proliferation, energy crises, climate change and global warming.

Since the evolution of Homo sapiens, every major evolutionary change coincided with, indeed was preceded by, shifts in human consciousness, some temperate and some tectonic. Something happens which breaks the previous equilibrium, and suddenly it becomes advantageous for new things to develop. For something to happen, something needs to be present in the first place which is capable of evolving. A trigger event or a circumstance might inspire or influence consciousness to suddenly evolve into a radically different form.

Just as the advent of human consciousness ruptured the ‘world of apes’, the rising of new consciousness will doubtless disrupt the world of humans. It would induce rapid positive changes in the collective consciousness of humankind, the kind of changes that might make

 

us suddenly realize that we can actually live in peace and work together and share common space on this space, on this tiny outpost in the Milky Way, and still have a rollicking time at it. It is a kind of change that alters our perception and perspective on the priorities of life.

Some philosophers compare the self of man to a seed, a member of the old plant when humanity was closer to Nature. But now, the capsule is wide open. Henceforth, one of the two things, they extrapolate, may happen to it: either it may abide alone, isolated from the rest of the earth, growing dryer and dryer, until it withers up and crumbles; or, by uniting with the earth it could blossom into a fresh life of its own.

Whether we are the ‘associates of apes or angels’, ‘divinity messed up by maya’, or naked men dressed up in culture, at the end of the day, whether we blossom or fritter away depends on us and on how we relate to the totality of life. It is not inconceivable that those things in the world that are so trying and make us tremble, could be the fertile womb in which human potential could incubate into its promise. Unfortunately, we have developed a mindset that disconnects many things that need to be connected; for example, prayer and personality, conscience and conduct, belief and behavior, power and responsibility. What are at stake in our actions are not only our personal lives but also the direction and destination of human evolution. The German philosopher Schrodinger wrote, “In fact every individual life, indeed every day in the life of an individual, has to represent a part, however small, of evolution [of our species], a chisel-stroke, however insignificant, on the eternally unfinished statue of our species.”579 Indeed, the most charitable view of the human species is that we are still a ‘work in progress’, and every thought, word and act of every individual is an input. We are a part, not only of a colossal cosmic context, but also of an unimaginably bigger process of creation. After millions of years of evolution, millenniums of culture and centuries of civilization, do we have within us what it takes to behave as parts of a larger whole? Can we begin to germinate the thought that all sentient beings on earth have an equal moral standing? We think of sin as a grave moral transgression or murder, rape, etc. But sin can be as trivial as the denial of something that is someone else’s due, or deliberately hurting others, particularly the defenseless. For example, the Hindu scripture Padma Purana says that things like back biting, seeing faults in others and demeaning their efforts, acquiring others’ land by unfair means, killing innocent animals, telling lies, showing disrespect to the guests, etc., are all considered to be sinful deeds. It also says that anyone who obstructs a hungry man from having his food, or a thirsty person from quenching his thirst, commits a sin similar to that of killing a brahmin. And sin can be economic and ecological too. If we apply all these yardsticks, few of us would be considered sinless. We are precariously perched, in the words of Graham Greene, “on the dangerous edge of things”, and on “what it always has been — the narrow boundary between loyalty and disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind’s contradictions, the paradox one carries within oneself.”580 Call it the brink of the abyss or the edge, or the ‘edge of the brink of abyss’; the truth is, we cannot tarry too long without tumbling over. We must simply and swiftly get onto the high road of transformation or call it quits, and use whatever little time we have to taste all the forbidden fruits on the planet of pleasure.

The crux of transformation is cleansing, change, and growth. All three are part of the self-adjustment inherent in Nature and in the Natural world, there is no need for any external

 

 

 

579 Cited in: Ivan M. Havel. Remarks on Schrodinger’s Concept of Consciousness. Accessed at: http://www.cts.cuni.cz/~havel/work/schroe94.html

580 Cited in: Matthew Price. Sinner Take All. Graham Greene’s Damned Redemption. BookForum. Oct/Nov 2004. Accessed at: http://www.bookforum.com/archive/Oct_04/price_oct.html

 

intervention. Human beings, also a part of Nature, are not exempt, but the human has harnessed an external force — technology — to trigger fundamental changes in his context and content of living. Technology, as Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful, 1973) noted, unlike the laws of Nature, is not self-limiting and self-correcting, but it is now the primary force behind man’s attempt to remake himself. He is going outside the laws of Nature and that takes him into unchartered waters.

Cleansing is an important requirement for spiritual progress, it is sometimes described as a way of ‘soul cleansing’. In Sanskrit, it is called samskara suddhi, which means cleansing of the past impressions recorded in the mind. Both change and growth are inherent in Nature and every form of life goes through the two. Natural growth occurs without effort, whereas transformation requires the elements of choice and action. The best things in life are hidden within, but we cannot find them since we know not the way. All our stimulation and satiation are external. As the young narrator of Steven Spielberg’s new television science fiction mini- series Taken so aptly remarked, “It’s like trying to find your way back from what you’ve become to who you know you could have been.”581 That is the gap to fill, the transformation that we need to make happen. Filling that gap also involves achieving greater understanding of why intolerance not acceptance, competition not cooperation, aggression not accommodation, has come to occupy so much of our psychic space. We must fathom why man as he is, scripturally so close to divinity and so well endowed, behaves so recklessly. It is high time that we reclaimed the lost essence and realized our full potential, which great masters have told is manifest in everything we do, the divinity nesting in the ‘cave of the heart’. It is a kind of transformation that allows the species to ultimately transcend into the posthuman ‘human’ phase of evolution. It is not what science is trying to do with biotechnology and nanotechnology; it is, as it were, to transform a small core group of humans into ‘immortal supermen.’ It has to be a transformation that allows us to harness our spiritual potential. But we need spiritual infrastructure for spiritual transformation. Our behavior, individually and collectively, is inextricably entwined with our culture and civilization, and for them to change we need a new context of life. Given the state of knowledge and our ability (or the lack of it), it would be an uphill task. We are like the “fishes that are taken in an evil net and as the birds that are caught in the snare” (Ecclesiastes 9:12)582 and however much we whine and wriggle, we cannot come out without help from a source beyond our own species.

Equally, we cannot, in the words of the sage Aurobindo, simply wait for “some tremendous dawn of God.”583 We must make ourselves worthy, but how? The conundrum is that the human condition cannot change unless human behavior changes, and human behavior will not change unless human consciousness changes, and that cannot happen unless the hold of the mind on consciousness slackens, and that cannot come to be because we are essentially mental beings. And then, as many human inventions have shown, what we deem impossible or improbable could become possible.