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

While transforming the very basis of life engaged in active metabolism, man has also transformed himself, the two processes becoming interactive and increasingly indistinguishable and destructive of both. We must realize and recognize that our relentless pillage, and corruption of Nature with concoctions of dangerous chemicals, is irreparably damaging the biosphere, and insidiously altering the very biology of the human organism, a danger that pioneering environmentalists like Rachel Carson (Silent Spring, 1962) have so vividly portrayed.

Our skewed ‘transformational’ abilities are not directed only against Nature. Natural selection, experts tell us, does not operate in the human sphere exactly as it does in the rest of the living world. Unlike other species, what we know and learn is passed onto our descendents through education, through institutions that nurture transformative practices, through our cultural and religious traditions, and so forth. The hope is that, as we begin to get a deeper understanding of our potential, its enormous range, and how we are both the beneficiaries and the victims of the cultures we live in, we will be able to harness and direct our pregnant potential in the right direction. Transform we must, but we must also remember that, in a crooked way, transformation was what most tyrants and gurus of fanatical cults have tried to engineer in the human psyche, from Genghis Khan to Pol Pot to Jim Jones, at such a horrendous cost. They found what they saw in man — a hindrance to their ambition — and tried to change man as a way to erase an obstacle. But the very idea of transformation involving our personal lives makes us uneasy because it means being something we are not throughout our lives, and that we instinctively resist as a reaction to our fear of the unknown. But, for any change in the mass the individual has to be the basic unit; a society is but a conglomeration of individuals; and in our interconnectedness, the consciousness of each must reflect itself in the consciousness of all. To put the matter simply, because we are the world, the vision that transforms us transforms the world. Some things require repetition, and one

such thing is that transformation is not an exotic phenomenon. It is in situ, ingrained in Nature and in life. We are ‘transformed’ all the time, from birth to death and beyond death. The rites of passage — from infancy to adolescence, from youth to old age and indeed death itself — are nothing but transformation. Even in this very life, there is nothing in us that connects to our past, not even memory; we might not even remember many things that happened. Both body and mind change continuously. So, who or what is this ‘I’, beyond which we cannot even envision, and we strive so much to keep it alive and appease its every whim and fancy?

The paradox is that we are transformed ceaselessly, but still remain essentially the same. But what that ‘same’ is, we cannot fathom. The process of transformation is never sudden, never like a low-pressure area strengthening into a cyclonic thunderstorm overnight. It is rather a process of subtle, almost imperceptible change, much like a gentle breeze that gathers incrementally greater momentum to form a strong wind, and eventually becomes another kind of thunderstorm. The ‘temporal trajectory’ of human transformation is akin to this latter kind of thunderstorm. But first, we have to embrace and energize a conscious transformation, so to speak, in which we play our part. The best ‘modern’ example is Mahatma Gandhi. By his own effort — and God’s choice — ‘Mohandas’ became a ‘Mahatma’. What he called My Experiments With Truth (the title of his autobiography) is a tale of transformation — from a sensual man into a spiritual man, from a violent man into an apostle of non-violence, from a shy young man into a charismatic leader, from a self- confessed coward, into a man who took on, and toppled, a mighty empire: in short, the transformation from a mere man into a Mahatma. Gandhi transformed, not his life, but himself, by relentlessly chipping away at his imperfections; he did not become a ‘perfect man’, but a transformed man. He was the one man, extraordinarily ordinary, as susceptible to senses as any of us — ‘a hapless unprepossessing youth whose only distinction is a marked fear of the dark’604 — who, as it were, reincarnated without dying, into an altogether different man, an embryonic posthuman, if you will. Perhaps more than any other contemporary human, Gandhi was the symbol of transformation delineated in scriptures like the Sermon on the Mount and the Bhagavad Gita. He remained physically the same, but controlled his mind and transformed his consciousness by turning to his heart — the inner voice — for guidance and inspiration. He proved that man can be spiritually transformed while still living in the material world, and that bodily immortality is not necessary, that it is even counterproductive. In so doing, he told us that all of us can, too. How did this Mahatma do it? What was that ‘critical point’? Gandhi was appalled at what he saw of himself and simply decided, deep within himself, to do something about his own condition, not the conditions around. On that dark night at the obscure railway station of Maritzburg, in South Africa, which he himself later described as the most defining moment of his life, he was thrown out of a First Class compartment of a train because he was not a ‘white man’. It was at that point that he decided to do something rare in human struggle: never to yield to force and never to use force. In other words, he chose to transform himself, to fight the real enemy, within, not the world around. We must first ignite deep within a desire to cleanse and change ourselves, and then find our own Maritzburg, a spark of our own that will shake us out of our complacency, inertia, and ‘quiet desperation’, and jump start the process of inner transformation.

To simply stay put, to hang in, to linger and languish and die when the hour strikes, might be comforting. But any choice of status quo is the choice of death as a species.

604 Michael N. Nagler. In the Foreword to “Gandhi, the Man: the Story of His Transformation” by Eknath Easwaran. 3rd edition. 1997. Nilgiri Press. California, USA. p.6.

Assuming that we summon our will to opt for radical transformation of the right kind, where do we go for guidance and a roadmap? What did our ancestors do? They turned to religion and scriptures. But the record is clear. Only a few saints, rishis, and sages have been able to draw upon them for inspiration and for practical help. The very tools and techniques they advocated like total surrender to God, mind control, and detachment from the fruits of one’s effort were beyond the capacity of most mortal men. What the other potent transformational force, science-based technology, has been doing is to focus on the body, make it impregnable and immortal. As we have noted before, without a fundamental change in the mindset of man, such a focus could make man a virtual monster and could well hasten human extinction.

What are we left with?

Before we proceed any further, we must face up to one basic problem. Human transformation cannot happen at the level of behavior; we need to dive far deeper into our own selves and change the forces that influence our decision making. Unless the way we choose and decide is changed, we cannot be any different from what we are. Our responses and reactions, indeed our perception of our ‘problems’ and our mindset about possible solutions must therefore change. Only then would sharing become intrinsic to the human way of life; and sharing then cures the malaise of separatism, not only of suffering. The burden of the body is what we carry on our backs. It is the body that we cannot get away from. The question is, Satprem, the disciple of Sri Aurobindo, speculated, will the body of the successor species have ‘five fins, wings or a third eye?’ Satprem said that “our deficiency is not only a lack of imagination about the future but above all an incapacity to conceive of anything but an improvement or an extension of the present.”605 Would the future man be able to loosen himself from his moorings and levitate as St. Teresa of Avila reportedly did, and as Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s Transcendental Meditation claims we can do, with proper yogic practice? That raises a more basic question. What is our duty in relation to the species that would inherit our mantle as the dominant form of life on earth? If, as the illustrious evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley wrote, “Man is not merely the latest dominant type produced by evolution, but its sole active agent on earth. His destiny is to be responsible for the whole future of the evolutionary process on this planet…”606 Then how do we approach it?

A related question is: where is science headed in the field of human transformation? On that single question could depend how the future of the human species unfolds. Science by far is the most unpredictably transforming power in the world, and opinions even among scientists vary so widely that it is hard to even make an informed projection of its probable direction and impact. In 2001, a study examined three major forces that will shape the 21st century: Erosion, Technological transformation, and Corporate concentration — ‘ETC’607. Erosion refers to the forces eroding our ecosystems, human cultures, and equitable societies.

605 Satprem. The Mind of the Cells or Willed Mutation of Our Species. 1982. The Institute for Evolutionary Research. New York, USA. p.15.

606 Cited in: Timothy J. Madigan. Evolutionary Humanism Revisited: The Continuing Relevance of Julian Huxley. HUUmanists. Association of Unitarian Universalist Humanists. Accessed at: http://www.huumanists.org/publications/journal/1999/evolutionary-humanism-revisited-the-continuing- relevance-of-julian-huxley

607 Pat Roy Mooney. The ETC Century: Erosion, Technological Transformation, and Corporate Concentration in the 21st Century. 2001. Dag Hammarskjold Foundation (DHF, Uppsala, Sweden) and Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI, Winnipeg, Canada). Development Dialogue 1999:1-2. Accessed at: http://www.dhf.uu.se/pdffiler/DD1999_1-2.pdf

Corporate concentration is going to be, according to this study, a major threat with corporations converging and merging and intruding into the entire human living space and, as author Pat Mooney says, “No one gains more from knowing and controlling genomics than your insurance company”, and “What happens to genetic privacy when your doctor is also your insurance agent?”608 The kind of ‘transformation’ in the human condition that science is trying to kick start is technological. With regard to the third force, Technological transformation, the study says, “As the critical elements for human survival (our biological environment and our cultural diversity) collapse, powerful new technologies are being brought forward to manipulate our world.”609 Not only the world, but our own bodies have become the laboratories of manipulation. The thrust of the scientific effort is to cling to the ‘gross’ body, the outermost extension of our indwelling divinity. Science aims to make our body stronger; keep it ticking forever; rid it of decay and disease and even death; its dream is to make man a nanotech ‘terminator’ who can ‘romance the robot’, conquer space, and at some point, abandon this planet after sucking out every ounce of its juice and emigrate to ‘other earths’. In one sense, science is planning to use technology as a short cut to salvation, leaving the body structurally in the ‘as is where is’ state, and subsume the next phase of evolution. The closest theological parallel is the Hindu ideal of jivanmukta; a state of blissful consciousness that can be reached, or more accurately realized, only through supreme spiritual practice in this very body. According to Advaitic philosophy, one who has actually realized God or the