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

not deterministic. He has foreknowledge of everything that will ever occur as a direct result of the future free will choices, without Himself being the free agent that causes them. Still, we must acknowledge the fact that the human intellect is either unsuitable or insufficient to definitively settle the equation between human effort and divine devotion in shaping human destiny. On the one hand, the scriptures maintain that no amount of self-effort can be enough to intuitively perceive divinity, and on

 

the other, they proclaim that Divine help cannot come without utmost effort and spiritual discipline. The Bhagavad Gita simultaneously advocates the two apparently adversarial practices of abhyasa, ceaseless effort, and vairagya, renunciation of the fruits of that very effort; to strive as if effort is everything and to surrender to God as if anything else is useless. The Indian scripture almost dismisses the divine role in human affairs and extols human will and effort. Perhaps the debate in one way exemplifies the limits of human intelligence. After all, what we choose to call human will is but a divine manifest.

One could say that karma is God’s law of perfect justice, through which He makes sure that a good or a bad thought, word or deed is rewarded or punished, partially or wholly, on this earth. Logically, it means that He can change anything He wants. The story of Markandeya in the Hindu scriptures, in which Lord Shiva intervenes and saves a boy from predetermined death, a part of his karma, illustrates this point. In another story, coincidentally narrated by the same sage Markandeya to King Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata (Vana parva), Yama, the king of death restores Satyavan to life as a boon to his virtuous wife Savitri. One of the names of Lord Vishnu in Hinduism, Dharmadhyaksha, according to Sri Adi Shankara’s interpretation, means the One who directly sees the merits (dharma) and demerits (adharma) of beings by bestowing their due rewards on them. What we do not know is what should we do and what we ought not to do to make Him bestow his grace or mercy.

But even if God wants to do something, the actual ‘doer’ is man himself. As German theologian and writer Dorothea Soelle puts it, “God has no other hands than ours. If the sick are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be comforted, it is our embrace, not God’s, that will comfort them.”624 All creation and all creatures are ‘God’s own hands’ and He deploys them as he deems necessary and suitable. The architecture of life itself is divine. Life on earth is based on such superhuman fine-tuning and extraordinary combination of forces and factors, that all of it cannot simply be dismissed as cosmic randomness or fortuitous coincidence. Some scientists say that but for a certain ‘tweaking’ of some ‘cosmological constraints’, the universe would have been filled only with huge black holes or would have been totally devoid of stars. Hugh Ross in his paper Limits for the Universe lists 47 items in the universe like gravitation, oxygen and ozone levels in the atmosphere, magnetic field and nuclear force and their precise presence as evidence for design in the universe.625 Others like Stephen Gould and James Wilson turn the ‘evidence’ around and say if the world were designed by God, things would be more perfect — inferentially, our lives would be better.

We might know the precise ‘mix and match’, but clearly both human will and divine disposition will have much to do with human future. Whether we go off the cliff like the lemmings, unable to bear the burden of ‘civilized’ life, or develop a ‘human pupa’ to become a ‘human butterfly’, or emulate the ant or the bee and reorder human society with a perfect ‘division of labor’, or just implode from the pandemics of suicide and homicide, would depend, in the final reckoning, on the content and balance in our consciousness between the two intelligences of mind and heart. For, without a catharsis of consciousness there cannot be, as all human history shows, any comprehensive change in human behavior. It is only then that man can achieve, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, “the change from a mental being to a

 

 

 

 

624 Dorothea Soelle. Quotes about God. Religious Tolerance. Accessed at: http://www.religioustolerance.org/godquote2.htm

625 Hugh Ross. Evidence for Design in the Universe. Limits for the Universe. Does God Exist? Accessed at: http://www.doesgodexist.org/Charts/EvidenceForDesignInTheUniverse.html

 

spiritual being.”626 For us, to make any advance towards a consciousness that we are not isolated bodies adrift in a sea of matter but are connected souls in an ocean of spirit, we need a consciousness change. We must induce congruence between three parallel processes: evolutionary imperatives, technological change, and spiritual transcendence, similar to what French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called ‘Omega point’, the maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.

The journey of our healing, reclaiming, re-unifying all that is separate in us and our spiritual evolution are one and the same — evolution in consciousness. There is nothing else going on

regardless of what anything that appears to be, or looks like, or is believed to be. There is nothing but the ongoing process of liberation, the evolution of consciousness. To change the internal image of reality, we need a consciousness change. For us to overcome the twin drags of attachment and separateness and cultivate what is called ‘holy indifference’ or non- attachment to the fruits of one’s labor and the Oneness of all Life, we need consciousness change. In the Chinese Consciousness-Only school of Buddhism, Buddhahood is not a goal to be attained through the acquisition of new knowledge or new conceptual understanding, but it is the end product of a fundamental internal transformation, which is the transformation of consciousness. And which means that, we need to go ‘behind behavior’ and the façade of ‘social civility’, and change what transpires inside us before it comes out and impacts the world: consciousness. Man could then be still a man, but cease to be a threat to life on earth, and acquire a compassionate consciousness. For real consciousness change we need to bring the heart to the epicenter of human consciousness. Acquiring the skills and techniques to tap the boundless positive energy of the heart ought to be on top of the human agenda — scientific as well as spiritual. The foreword to Paul Pearsall’s book The Heart’s Code, suggests that if the 20th century had been the Century of the Brain, the 21st should be made the ‘Century of the Heart.’627 Some others say that the challenge of the 21st century is to trigger what they call the ‘Silent Revolution of the Heart’, an inner revolution that would help us move from hatred and fear to compassion and love, from darkness to light, and from separatism to wholeness. That would mean concretizing the maxim of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: Tamaso ma jyotir gamaya; lead us from darkness of the mind to the light of the heart. That would mean shifting the focus of intellectual and scientific spotlight towards finding ways to design the tools required to unleash the intuitive intelligence and energy of the heart. The heart can then be a powerful force for spiritual transformation of the human species.

 

Can we do it? Can we do all this on our own, with our own will, wit and wisdom, body, mind and heart? We should not be afraid to admit that we need help; that is wisdom. In life, we seek help so many times from so many people but when it comes to something so seminal, something that man never attempted before — human transformation through induced consciousness-change — we want to do it all alone. It is for this generation of men to create the context and conditions that are both necessary and sufficient for Nature/God to lend a helping hand. And in that ‘context and conditions’ we must figure out what ‘being human’ ought to be in relation to non-humans. Although we are hardly ‘humane’ to other humans, as a species we have no moral right to treat other species the way we do the ‘human’

 

 

 

626 Sri Aurobindo. The Future Evolution of Man: The Divine Life Upon Earth. 1971. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust. Pondicherry, India. p.56.

627 Paul Pearsall. The Heart’s Code: Tapping the Wisdom and Power of Our Heart Energy. 1999. Broadway Books. New York, USA. p.xiii.

 

way. Every insult, every act of indifference, intolerance and injustice and malevolence, cruelty and violence exacts a cost, and the costs continually add up until the time comes when we, as a species, are called upon to recompense the cosmos. How soon or how far we cannot tell, but surely we will. In Nature, stagnation is the sure road to extinction. How to trigger and direct a metamorphosis that would negate the effects of stagnation and status quo is a huge challenge. And if it is not ordained and orchestrated soon, there is a reasoned and reasonable probability that the human species might not endure on earth for more than a century or two. Whether that would be a catastrophe for man or a welcome opportunity for other species is another matter. But since we are human, our interest lies in our continuity. Death for an individual and extinction for a species may be, when everything else fails, the Final Solution, but only after exhausting everything else. Shakespeare said, “All the world is a stage; and all the men and women merely players. And one man in his time plays many parts.”628 Once you are a player, you will not quit until your part is finished, or you drop dead, or the director brings down the curtains; the players change, the parts change, but the play goes on. In the cosmic play, in the divine drama, we constantly change and exchange parts. But every part, memsahib or a maid, saint or a sinner, mahatma or a monster, is what we have ordered for ourselves. Why and how someone happens to fall into any of these typologies has little to do with his merit or demerit in this life. And depending on how well — or badly — we play those parts, the roles can be turned around. According to some Eastern religions, even the form of life can change — an animal into a man and vice versa, as an episode in the Hindu epic Mahabharata illustrates. In that episode, a kindly saint, Jadabharatha, who took care of an orphaned deer and got obsessively attached to it, becomes a deer in his next life, and later becomes a man again.

Humans have been around for quite a while, over a million years (no more than a blink of the cosmic eye), and the question that arises is: are we at the end of the beginning, or at the beginning of the end, on the cosmic scale? According to the Hindu concept of cyclical Time, we are at the beginning of the beginning of the last of the four major yugas, or ages, the sinful age of Kali Yuga. Brian Swimme tells us that, “the human species is the youngest, freshest, most immature, newest species of all the advanced life forms in the planet. We have only just arrived. If we can remain resilient, if we can continue our questioning, our developing, our hoping, if we can live in awe and in the depths of wonder, we will continue moving into the only process that now matters — our authentic maturation as a species. It is in this way and only this way that we will enable the Earth to bloom once again.”629 The fact is that for the ‘Earth to bloom’ again, two things are crucial: at the most fundamental and deepest level,