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

harmony, and brotherhood, and cleanse the world of poisons and restore the purity and sanctity of the earth.622 The prophecy of another Native American Indian tribe, the Hopi, says, “When the earth is dying, there shall arise a new tribe of all colors and all creeds. This tribe shall be called The Warriors of the Rainbow, and it will put its faith in actions not words.”623 After all, a legend is a happening waiting in the wings, and the way a rainbow actually materializes offers hope that anything is possible if a certain conjunction of factors and forces can be induced. Just as many different colors combine to make the rapturous rainbow, we too need a magical process to harmonize the myriad divisions of humanity into a coherent community. Just as a rainbow constitutes a symbol of unity in diversity, which displays a colorful image of different colors, not mixed or fused, but alongside one another, so should humanity not seek uniformity or homogeneity, but learn the art of cooperative coexistence. In another sense, what the rainbow in the sky illustrates is what the Upanishads tirelessly teach, that the Reality is One; diversity and multiplicity are only appearances.

 

Human effort and divine dispensation

Whichever way we go on the path of our labyrinthine evolution, the way of the ant or bee or the rodent or the butterfly, depends on two kinds of choices — ours and God’s. Our choice, among other things, stems from the state and nature of our knowledge. In the scheme of the Scriptures, knowledge of one’s self and of the universe (called anfus and aafaaq in Islam; atmanjnana and shristijnana in Hinduism), along with divine grace (or will) constitute the two agents of change and the two triggers of transformation. It is the will to ‘know’ that made man, according to the Bible and the Quran, even superior to the angels. The Upanishads say that all come in will, consist of will, abide in will, and exhorts man to meditate on Will, and such a person indeed is Brahman. The problem is that our will to acquire knowledge is often stronger than our insight into the limits — and temptations — of knowledge. While God hoped that the combination of reason and Revelation would enable man to be a wise viceroy on earth, man has found a way through the mind to subvert both. Our will takes the shape of ‘want’, and ‘want’ becomes thought, word and action and in the process gets sullied. In one Hindu ritual, the person chants, ‘I will absolve myself from the sins of my behaving as I wish, talking as I wish and indulging in drinking and eating as I wish.’ In the Christian theological doctrine of ‘total depravity’, the Fallen man is utterly incapable of truly choosing God or

 

 

 

622 Manataka American Indian Council. Cree Prophecy. Warriors of the Rainbow. Accessed at: http://www.manataka.org/page235.html

623 Manataka American Indian Council. Hopi Prophesy. Warriors of the Rainbow. Accessed at: http://www.manataka.org/page235.html

 

bettering himself, and he needs God’s Grace to escape God’s wrath. It is man’s apostasy from God that is responsible for the wretched state of the world. The Hindu scripture Yagnavalkya smruti says that effort is what you do in this life, and destiny is the expression of efforts made in previous lives; the self-effort of the present life determines the future destiny of our soul.

In other words, the fruits in the form of debits (unrighteous acts) and credits (righteous acts) created by the self-effort of this birth will be reaped in future lives. Upon the death of this body, the only thing that goes with the soul is our karmic actions. But ‘will’ is not action, and we know very little about how ‘will’ translates — or does not — into behavior. Then again, we are bewildered how, as the Bhagavad Gita exhorts, one can be detached from the fruits of action in the midst of ceaseless action, and how one can annihilate avarice while living in a world suffused with sensory pleasure.

Whether human effort can be corrected solely through human will has been a subject of intense theological debate for long. It perhaps depends on the timeframe and our understanding — or interpretation — of the words and concepts: will, effort and grace, and of how they interface. Swiss philosopher Frithjof Schuon (Roots of the Human Condition, 1991) says that man’s whole nature, vocation, and duty is to know totally, to will freely, and to love nobly. All three seem to be woefully wobbly. Knowing has not helped us much in doing the right thing; our will has not made us any wiser. And love today has no soft feathers, only sharp teeth. The Buddha said ‘only when you reject all help you are freed’. And one might add, ‘only when you do not want to cling to something can you truly enjoy having it’. Life is inextricably tied to action and, as a Sikh scripture says, ‘without self-effort or exertion one cannot even jump over the footprint of an animal’. Hannah Arendt wrote that pain and effort are so ingrained in the human condition that we cannot remove them without changing life itself, and that an effortless life would be a lifeless life. Sustained effort, nishkamakarma, can make the ‘moment of the miracle’ not so miraculous; it can make the supernatural natural, the extraordinary ordinary. But making it possible is not the same as making it happen. Since every effort is a question of ‘choice’, what impels us to choose a particular path? Is that entirely an exercise of free will and our analytical capacity? Is it all self-induced and self- devised or self-inflicted? Is it something that gets done by us or through us? We might say all good things about will, action, and effort, but it is an illusion to think that we ‘rationally’ and volitionally choose anything. There are no absolutes in life, and many a time, we are unable to do things we are capable of doing or do things we do not want to do. It is not as if we think through, identify the options, choose the most cost-effective and correct alternative, and implement it. It is usually a convoluted, unconscious process that becomes action. We all agree that we make choices and every choice leads to consequences, and that we are responsible for our actions — and silences. But behind that truism lie several subtleties. The question is why and how we ‘choose’ something over another alternative? The fact is that we really do not know what happens inside us before a thought, a feeling, or an emotion germinates and then becomes behavior. Is it confined to our own personality, parentage, and predilections, or to other factors and forces — divine will, fate or karma — that become deterministic? The key is the mind. Whether the effect is positive or negative, it is caused by our own mind; the mind is the conduit for karma as well as its consequence. And the outcome can be many times more expansive than the original karmic action. According to the  Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna, if we cheat one person, we will be cheated by other persons in one thousand lifetimes. Kahlil Gibran wrote that we choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them. There is a Sanskrit proverb that says ‘Buddhi karmanusaray’, meaning the mind works according to karma. It means that effort, even if it is intentional, is not wholly of the human will, and the choices we make are a function of the outcome we are destined to cause or trigger. Put differently, it means that the nature of the effort we make is programmed to fit the predetermined result. That ‘program’ is nothing but the actions and efforts of

 

countless lives. Nothing happens to us that we did not cause ourselves. A Buddhist teaching says that through endless time we have all done everything any human — and non human — can do. We have all been murderers, molesters, mothers, fathers, brothers, doctors, and every possible thing. All these actions have sown seeds that come to fruition through future lives. They come to fruition not only through what we do, but also through what others do to us.

The pain caused by someone else’s actions might be the ‘harvest’ of a seed sown long ago by us.

But what about that mighty force, the human will or will power, in the shaping of our destiny? The debate between, in the words of Rumi, ‘necessitations and the partisans of free will’ is timeless, and is at the root of morality and religion. Whether the two are really independent of each other or really complementary, and where one ends and the other begins, and how the two could be harmonized, are age-old questions. If our actions are devoid of will then we are blameless, and if we are wholly empowered by our actions, then the divine becomes ornamental. Such is the degree of ambivalence and ambiguity that even within the same religion, if not the same scripture, different passages appear to give different messages. If God is the sole source of knowledge and power in the universe, and is everything, everywhere, inside and outside, as the Upanishads proclaim, then how could the human will be any different? On the other hand, another Hindu scripture Yoga Vasishta, seems to offer another message; it extols human will as the paramount force. Learned commentators try to reconcile and bring out the nuances, but for the uninitiated and the ordinary, it all aggravates their state of confusion about the true nature of their identity, essence, and empowerment. In the end, it all comes down to that one word: ‘choice’. For what we call ‘will’ is really the faculty of choice, the immediate cause of action. And choice means the refusal of one alternative and the assent to another. Every choice has a consequence and every consequence calls for another choice. And choice can be volitional or involuntary, and it also brings up the question of levels of consciousness. Who controls the consciousness, controls choice.

What we have to ponder over is this. Of the millions or billions of choices we make in a lifetime, how many, if any, are truly free, unfettered, and volitional? We think we have the ‘freedom of choice’, but in actuality we are managed and manipulated to make the choices someone else wishes us to make. We actually have less freedom and little choice. We may have been free in exercising our will, but not in choosing what we willed. The daily reality is that there is hardly anything that we can truly and wholly do but not out of necessity, and we should perhaps thank God for that; for, had it not been so, the consequences would have been catastrophic. Will becomes wish and wish turns into a want, and then the mind goes berserk. For the sake of what man believes to be ‘freedom’ — political, economic — he seems prepared to surrender his free will. To fulfill his wants, his sensual desires, man is prepared to sell his soul and sup with the devil. That is no longer a fictional scenario or a theoretical possibility. Scientists are predicting that soon behavioral engineers and neuroscientists will be able to so condition our brains that every choice we think we are making is really what the State or someone else wants us to think we are making, the concretization of the scenarios of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). In one sense, free will in the human context is an oxymoron; it is really an attribute of God; and so is unfettered sovereignty. As the Creator of the world, God is sovereign in the true sense of the term. He has chosen to bring into existence a world of substantially free agents. God’s relationship with His creation is dynamic,