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

act far outweighs the short-term gains from a selfish act. Our moral responses are varied and circumscribed because they are anchored in our conscience, not in our consciousness.

Our moral sense, so to speak, should be delinked from the state of our conscience and be directly rooted in our consciousness. Then we do not have to bank on the so-called ‘prick’ of conscience; then things such as not hurting anyone by word or deed, spontaneously helping someone in need of help, become a part of ‘just being alive’. Then God might do the same to us as what we do to our fellow humans. He might then be too glad to forgive and give a reprieve, offer us another chance to endure on earth for the full length of our tour of duty, and go on to meet our destiny with the sense that we have not failed our maker. Saint Ramakrishna, with his uncanny directness and simplicity, asked, “How may we conquer the old Adam in us?” He went on to say, “When the fruit grows out of the flower, the petals of

 

 

 

 

591 Omar N. Bradley. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/omar_bradley/

592 M.K. Gandhi. An Autobiography or the Story of My Experiments With Truth. 2008. Navajivan Publishing House. Ahmedabad, India. p.15.

 

the flower drop off of themselves. So, when the divinity in thee increases, the weaknesses of thy human nature will all vanish of their own accord.”593 The Indian spiritual guru, Eknath Easwaran suggests the example of a hummingbird to show how one can live in harmony with Nature: “A hummingbird threads its long, delicate bill into the center of the flower, not even touching the petals, and sips its breakfast. A moment later it is gone, having drunk only what was necessary and leaving the flower pollinated. Precise, efficient, agile, respectful: I think humanity can find no better teacher in the art of living.”594 The world will be a far better place and life immeasurably more fulfilling if only we can learn, as Dante said, to find tranquility through that true love that makes us desire no more than what we have, nor covet what others have, for our selfish benefit.

That sounds simple but it goes against the grain of what man has come to stand for, what evolution has made us to be: greedy with an insatiable appetite for ‘more’ of everything. That can truly change not at the level of conduct but only at the depth of consciousness.

Albert Einstein said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”595 The French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said that we are not physical beings with spiritual experience, but spiritual beings with physical experience. In other words, being spiritual is the true purpose of ‘being wholly human’. That again is a truism, but how can we make that practical? We have been talking of spiritualism for thousands of years, from saints like Saint Teresa to Mother Teresa, from scientists like Einstein and Oppenheimer to Narlikar; and now even business tycoons and movie stars have joined the bandwagon. But we are nowhere near becoming a spiritual being; if any, we are more sensual — and sexual — than ever before.

We are more confused than ever; not sure about what spirituality entails, much less how to attain it. It has been variously called ‘going beyond the world of proof and reason’, ‘journey within’, ‘realm of faith, mystery and belief’, ‘way to our well-being’, ‘and selfless service’, ‘communion with God’, and so on. And its relationship with religion remains fuzzy; it is not possible to be truly religious without being spiritual. But what is less clear is whether we can be truly spiritual without being religious in its truest sense. We may not be able to turn spiritualism into a formula, but we know what it is not, by elimination, if not by affirmation. In transformative terms, religious transformation tends to make a person more shrill and strident, while spiritual transformation makes a person softer and subtler. In the former, the mind plays the dominant role while in the latter it has to be the heart. The way to spirituality and to true transformation ought to be to transform our understanding of the heart not as the one which simply keeps us alive, but as one that gives meaning to life; as an organ of intelligence, cognition, and comprehension, much like the brain. With the heart in its rightful place in our consciousness, we must orchestrate the process of conscientious change, beginning with our own selves. Gandhi said that we must be the change we want to see in the world. And we cannot be the ‘change’ unless we are able to reverse what we have injected into our ego-centered consciousness for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

We must reverse the corrosive corruption of consciousness, due to which ‘a man fails to express a given emotion, makes him at the same time unable to know whether he has

 

 

 

593 Sir Francis Younghusband. Dawn in India: British Purpose and Indian Aspiration. Chapter XIII: Indian Spirituality. Frederick A. Stokes Company. New York, USA. p.240.

594 Eknath Easwaran. The Lesson of the Humming Bird. In Context. No.26, Summer 1990. Accessed at: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC26/Easwaran.htm

595 Albert Einstein. BrainyQuote.com. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/a/alberteins130982.html

 

expressed it or not’.596 In other words, he is not conscious of his own duplicity. Equally important is to get out of our addiction of short-cuts and quick-fixes of technology, and get ‘addicted’ to love, kindness, and compassion. Researchers are saying that the way the brain is structured, it might be possible to ‘self-dope’ ourselves to socially beneficial behavior. That is an intriguing possibility, but right now developments in bio-, cyber-, nuclear, and nanotechnologies open up new dangers of error or terror, and in our interconnected world, they could pose risks, even a remote probability of which becomes unthinkable. Unless ‘we, the people’, not only the scientific or the political community, get a hold on the dialectics and direction of science-based technology, no positive or spiritual transformation can be induced in the human condition. Technology is continuously transforming us and will continue to do so ad infinitum, and experts predict that the transition from modern man to nanotechnology- improved man might well be more dramatic and drastic than from the Ice Age to this millennium. It is hard to visualize how the human persona will change if human beings resort to internal and external technological enhancements, not only to overcome any ‘natural’ impairment but to qualitatively improve their physical and mental powers. Maybe, after a century or two, which incidentally is the time some environmentalists give to human tenure on earth, babies might be born incubated in the laboratory with myopic eyes, and have an organic Blackberry instead of a brain!

If we were to preempt that possibility, however slim and far fetched it might be, we must stimulate another, a humanely human kind of transformation, triggered by ‘self- reinforcement’ of desirable qualities, instead of gadgetry or mechanized add-ons and plug- ins. Sages, rishis, and spiritualists have long dreamed of transforming self-consciousness into cosmic consciousness, in which one lives in perfect harmony with the universe without the sense of separation. And through that sense of oneness, we will be able to cease to identify ourselves with the present part we are playing in the divine drama, but instead identify with the play as a whole and its Director. Paramahamsa Yogananda, the acclaimed author of The Autobiography of a Yogi (1946) said, “The so-called miraculous powers of a great master are a natural accompaniment to his exact understanding of subtle laws that operate in the inner cosmos of consciousness.”597 That ability within the limits set by Nature for the human form of life is another matter. To acquire that capacity might need transformation not only of the ‘conscious consciousness’ but also of the ‘unconscious consciousness’. A guru of positive thinking wrote, “There is consciousness of the ego and the world around you, and there is consciousness of the Real Self, the Real You.”598 Vedanta calls the cosmic or pure consciousness, cit, which in fact is singular. Whichever kind of consciousness it might be, it must make it possible to ignite our latent faculties of viveka (discriminative capacity) and vairagya (renunciation of the fruits of one’s effort), bring the intelligences of the mind and heart into a state of harmony and equilibrium, and through that, fundamentally alter the nature of our thinking and feelings, thoughts and emotions. We must go beyond brain-based, sensory cognition and comprehension, and discover new dimensions of consciousness. And we must shed, like a snake that sheds its skin, the fallacy that what we cannot experience does not exist, what we cannot comprehend is fanciful, and that our current paradigm of

 

 

 

596 Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.). Art in Theory: An Anthology of Changing Ideas 1900-2000. 2007. Blackwell Publishers. Massachusetts, USA. p.538.

597 Paramahamsa Yogananda. Consciousness. Ascension Gateway. Accessed at: http://www.ascensiongateway.com/quotes/subject/consciousness/index.htm

598 Remez Sasson. Quotes on Mind and Consciousness. Success Consciousness. Accessed at: http://www.successconsciousness.com/index_000017.htm

 

intelligence is unmatched in the universe. In short, what is needed is a shift in our sense of identity and awareness of ourselves and the world around. Only then we would be able to seek answers to fundamental questions such as ‘who am I?’, ‘what is life?’ and ‘what am I supposed to do?’ and ‘where do I go from here?’ That could also, in turn, empower us to cleanse our psychic space of our obsessive fear of death and pursuit of sensual pleasure, prurient thrills, power for control and wanton wealth, and help us not to be such a pathological prisoner of anger, greed, and violence. Only then we might be capable of desisting from nagging, nibbling, and negating each other till death does us apart, and begin to view, relate and behave towards another person as if we are him. And then, how do we deal with death? It is doubtful if we will ever be able to look at death as being as normal as the rite of passage from youth to old age. Or as the humanist Rabindranath Tagore put it, “Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come”599. At the least, we should not live as if there is no death, or die as if we never lived. Even if we cannot do any of them, we must, above all or at the least, exorcize malice, the one attribute that can scorch everything by its very proximity, from our consciousness.

The chief obstacle to transformation is the disequilibrium and dysfunction within, our inability to find in the depth of our soul, values worth living for and worth dying for. If we cannot induce synergy within our own consciousness, how can we hope to bring about bliss and peace on earth? For mankind to make any serious dent on the plethora of problems that threaten to hasten its own extinction, we must recognize that the root of the malaise is the closing down of inspirational love, and that the remedy can only come through a return to heart intelligence. For that, we need a new paradigm of human cognition, a joint venture between the intelligences of the head and the heart, each supplementing as well as moderating the natural traits of the other, leading to the evolution of a new consciousness.

The odyssey towards heart intelligence has been described as “one of the most exciting, thrilling explorations you will ever take, a journey that will bring more fulfillment and wonder than you have ever imagined, and open doors that you never even knew existed — a journey into your own inner heart. As you venture into your heart and discover your other intelligence that