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

This is the idea captured in the The Black Swan Theory. One single sighting of a black swan in Australia in the 17th century changed the connotation of the ‘Black Swan’ metaphor, from ‘perceived impossible’ to ‘improbably’ to ‘possible’. It highlights a fateful limitation to our learning from observations or experience

 

 

 

581 Cited in: Transformation via the Human Algorithm. Order of the Great Diesis. Accessed at: http://www.harmonicresolution.com/Transformation.htm

582 The Bible. (King James Bible). Biblos. Accessed at: http://bible.cc/ecclesiastes/9-12.htm

583 Sri Aurobindo. Savitri. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry, India. p.137.

 

and the brittleness of our knowledge. After all, the historical fact is that almost all consequential events in history, which seemed beyond the realm of possibility, came unexpected, which we convince ourselves as rational or predictable in hindsight.

Still, to try to make the impossible possible, to remove the sting from the unexpected, to dream till dawn, and to ask not only ‘why’ when we see misery, but also ‘why not’ when we want to reach out to a better life, that is much of the stuff of the best of human effort. But the bulk of it is to preserve the status quo. We need to discover self-interest in change. As Delbert Thiessen points out, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”584 But the point of departure has to be that although we might appear to be the masters of the universe, we are not masters of our lives, not even of the next minute. There is a superior force or process that stretches before birth and beyond death that has a big say on how human life, indeed all life, unfolds, and how and when it ends up in the womb of Eternity. In the Bible, it is said, “And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” (2 Corinthians 3:18).585 But that ‘unveiled face’ is now defiled and we want to push Him aside and play His part in human transformation. Not only that, we are ‘transforming’ God himself, judging Him, instead of fearing His judgment. Too often, our quest for ‘meaning’ is a means to acquire more wealth, not wisdom, more temporal power not spiritual power.

Many people feel many things that muddle up their minds and unsettle them, but it is given to a few to find the words that capture that sense of the blend of hope and fear. One such person is that little girl, Anne Frank, and the words in her famous diary: “I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness. I hear the ever-approaching thunder, which will destroy us too. I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think, it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”586 But the ‘flicker’ is too feeble to turn into a light robust enough to lead us ‘from darkness to light’ — Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya, as the Upanishads proclaim. The prayer is to be led from the world we experience, which is a world of darkness, towards the Supreme Light, the divine. We need the guidance of the divine hand. The way to gain that ‘guidance’ is to do our dharma, individually and collectively. By doing our swadharma, our individual ‘dharma’, which is an input into the species-dharma, we can mold our destiny and change or even dissolve our ‘karma’, which is the sum of every thought, every word, every emotion, and every act of commission and omission experienced by every human being born on earth. The Italian Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas wrote, “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.”587 At this juncture in our tortuous tenure on earth, we seem to have failed all the three ‘knows’; we just do not know what to believe and our belief has no bearing on our behavior; we have no control over our desires; and above all, we have no clue as to what we should do to make a difference.

 

 

 

 

584 Delbert D.Thiessen. Bittersweet Destiny: the Stormy Evolution of Human Behavior. 1996. Transaction Publishers. New Jersey, USA. p.287.

585 The Bible. New International Version. Bible Gateway. Accessed at: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=2+Corinthians+3:18&version=NIV

586 Cited in: Kristen Nummi Nummerdor. The Dream Lives On: Student Group Leaders Speak On The Legacy Of Martin Luther King, Jr. Accessed at: http://mit.edu/activities/thistle/v9/9.02/8dream.html

587 Thomas Aquinas. Wikiquote. Accessed at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Aquinas

 

Sri Aurobindo wrote in Savitri: “Man must overcome or miss his higher fate. This is the inner war without escape.”588 In most cases, that war is too subtle to be noticed and it continues from life to life. Sri Aurobindo also said that the human, as he is now poised, is not the final rung on the evolutionary ladder, and that the transformation of man into a spiritual being must happen within Nature because, according to him, the divine Reality must itself manifest in Nature. He said that, “an evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence.”589 Elaine Matthews echoes the same view: “the transformational impulse may well be the most powerful impetus behind human evolution.”590 Nothing in life is accidental or redundant. Nothing stands in solitude. Everything is part of a process. And nothing is a copy of anything else. Every individual and species is a particular and unique package, a piece of cosmic matrix, specially designed for that particular form of life to exist, survive, and multiply on earth at that particular time. What that species knows and could know, or is allowed to know, is also constrained and contained. Every creature, from a mosquito to a predator, instinctively performs a cosmogonical function that flows out of its form, the abrupt absence of which over time could cripple the delicate balance inherent in Nature. That is why there is no sin in a tiger killing a deer, but if a deer, with a gun, kills a tiger, that becomes a sin. Humans alone, it is said, can sin and also blush; sin because we know we are sinning, and blush because we cannot hide the secret pleasure we get out of it. Transform we will be, smiling or scowling, with or without our cooperation. It is a question of direction. The direction man has now apparently chosen is to be a ‘Matrix-like’ man, to attain immortality like the gods, which really is to become ‘beings outside time’ and make the future meaningless; an experiment no man has ever ventured before. Even within the confines of intelligence we have, one could sense that unless there is an evolution of consciousness, that will be an apocalyptic catastrophe. Mortal man is bad enough on earth; Nature does not need beings on earth with the ambition — and ability — to ‘play God’. If, as Goethe said, the greatest act of faith occurs when man finally decides he is not God, perhaps the greatest mortal risk arises when the human mind fancies itself the architect and arbiter of life on earth. The human brain, which will continue to be the manager and manipulator of human life, was not designed for an immortal man. Scientists talk of replicating or ‘downloading’ the brain, but it is not clear what it means and implies. Can the brain work indefinitely, and if it does, will it be the same? Can we arrest its ‘aging’? And even if we could, the question is about the mind and consciousness. What are the genetic implications that would lead to stagnation of the genetic pool and eventually lead to early extinction, earlier than of a mortal man? Purely physical immortality, which is focused really not on life but on death, could be the last straw on Nature’s/God’s back. Rather, we must seek to be worthy of God’s help. And God will judge us, not by what we do to Him — it hardly matters to him — but by what we do to each other. We want divine grace but we cannot bring ourselves to treat each other with civility and dignity. We want a divine hand to bail us out of our troubles, but we would rather smother than hug someone in distress. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger, one of the past century’s most perceptive thinkers, summing up the state of humanity famously said, ‘only a god can save us.’

 

 

 

 

588 Sri Aurobindo. Savitri. 1993. Book VI: The Book of Fate. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry, India. p.448.

589 Sri Aurobindo. The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life Upon Earth. 1971. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry, India. p.27.

590 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.83.

Transformation, nature, and science

Whatever be the state of divine disposition or displeasure or weariness with mankind, the transformation we must strive towards is one of consciousness that enables us to change not simply the way we relate, but the very way we relate ‘to the way we relate’; to change not only the way we analyze and understand, but the very way we understand ‘the way we understand’; and to change the way we perceive and react to virtually every experience from birth to death. As Heidegger said, echoing the Vedantic wisdom, we should shift the focus from looking at everything from the perspective of a being, to an inquiry into the content of being itself. That requires summoning of the deepest inner reserves to somehow change the content of our consciousness and context of human life. Consciousness change, lofty as it is, is still a means. The goal ought to be to virtually become a ‘compassionate species’, whose first impulse would be cooperation, not competition. A way towards that goal, according to some researchers like Alison Gopnik, is to retain or recapture the consciousness of a baby, which they say is more naturally compassionate — and more evolved with more neural pathways — than the consciousness of adults. With the kind of consciousness we have, we have fashioned a world that reminds us of the words of General Omar Bradley (a hero of World War II): “The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, and power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”591 For enabling a conscience to serve as a moral compass and as a ‘light of God in the darkness of His absence’, we need, quite simply, a new ‘adult’ consciousness. The fact is that simply having a conscience, whatever it might actually be, has not helped much in managing human passions and attributes like anger, hatred, intolerance, and malice. Baring his soul, Gandhi wrote, in his autobiography, that although God governed every breath of his life, he felt very far from God, and that “the evil passions within that keep me so far from Him, and yet I cannot get away from them.”592 It is the same lament as that of St. Paul and many others, who fought relentless, often losing wars within to subdue and conquer their sensual passions and cravings. A passion or a craving by itself is neither good nor bad; if they contribute to good action they are good; and they are evil when they lead to bad actions. Although many do not admit frontally, the assumption is that self-interest and altruism are inherent opposites. And yet we do know that conscious pursuit of self-interest is not necessarily incompatible with its attainment, and that the thrill of a selfless