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

our perceptions and priorities must change; and we must remove the cobwebs that camouflage our relationship with God and ‘get it right with God’. After all our labyrinthine labors, we will be ‘back to God’. The great German poet Goethe (Faust, 1808) wrote, “As man is, so is his God. And thus is God oft strangely odd.”630 Joseph Campbell said, God is a metaphor that transcends all levels of intellectual thought; indeed even in terms of a conceptual framework. In fact, our understanding – rather the lack of it — of underlying forces and of God is linked. David Anderson said, “The God or Gods we worship are more a

 

 

 

 

628 Wikipedia. All the World’s a Stage. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world's_a_stage

629 Brian Swimme. The Universe Is a Green Dragon: Reading the Meaning in the Cosmic Story. In Context.

No.12, Winter 1985/86. Accessed at: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Swimme.htm

630 Goethe. Quotes About God. Religious Tolerance. Accessed at: http://www.religioustolerance.org/godquote1.htm

 

part of us than we realize… Only by understanding how in our own minds we have defined their nature can we begin to understand the underlying forces that make us behave the way we do.”631 The famous physicist Richard Feynman said that God was invented to explain mystery, to understand things we do not understand, and as our understanding grows, the need of God diminishes. And despite the resurgence of ‘believers’ in the human world, we are more adrift than ever before. Not only are we drifting in the sea of samsara, the phenomenal world of sin and suffering, but also, we find ourselves clutching to God to save us. But what would it take for God to grasp our outstretched hand?

One analogy is that of a grazing cow. Those who swear by free will say that the cow is unfettered and grazes wherever it wants. Those who say that ‘divine will’ guides everything, believe that the cow is tightly tethered; it simply cannot go beyond a few paces by itself. The third stand is that although the cow is tethered, the rope is long and the cow can go very far but within preset parameters; God or fate or karma, whatever one prefers to call it, decides how tight and how long the rope should be. The sage Ramakrishna often used the third scenario to describe the nexus between God and man. We crave for divine help, but we shun those who crave for our help. We must remember that the distance between man and man is the gap between man and God. The fail-safe way to improve our standing with God is to improve our equation with other humans. Gandhi said, “I know that I shall never know God if I do not wrestle with and against evil even at the cost of life itself.”632 God will not offer His holy hand unless we help one another. Once, a man asked Jesus Christ, “Lord, are only a few people going to be saved?” Christ replied, “Make every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to.”633 The door is narrow but open, and the price for entry is struggle and surrender, just as the caterpillar struggles to come out of the pupa before becoming a butterfly. The sage Ramakrishna said: If we take one step towards God, He will take ten steps towards us. It is also said that what you earn by your compassionate effort, even God cannot take it away from you; on the other hand, He would multiply it manifold. It is a sterile exercise debating if our relationship with God should be ‘Creator-created’, ‘Father-child’, ‘Director-actor’, and so on. The Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (Tragic Sense of Life, 2005) draws a distinction between ‘God idea’ and ‘God Himself’, and says, “Those who believe that they believe in God, but without passion in their hearts, without anguish in mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.”634 Unamuno says that God and man, in effect, mutually create one another, and  that “We need God, not in order to understand the why, but in order to feel and sustain the ultimate wherefore, to give a meaning to the universe.”635 Einstein said, “I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this

 

 

 

 

 

 

631 David Anderson. Quotes About God. Religious Tolerance. Accessed at: http://www.religioustolerance.org/godquote.htm

632 Immortal Words: an Anthology. 1963. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Chaupatty, Bombay, India. p.54.

633 Cited in: J.C Ryle. Self-Effort. Bible Bulletin Board. Accessed at: http://www.biblebb.com/files/ryle/PRACT2.TXT

634 Miguel de Unamuno. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/those_who_believe_that_they_believe_in_god-but/174029.html

635 Miguel de Unamuno. Wikiquote. Accessed at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Miguel_de_Unamuno

 

or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details.”636 But then, as they say, the devil is in the detail!

The one connecting thread in all human thought is that man has a stirring part in the Cosmic Play, and that God has nothing much to do but save us when we stumble, or punish us when we sin, and that when such an intervention is not possible by His staying away from earth, He must come down and be one of us, to rescue the faithful and the righteous, and slay the wicked. As Richard Feynman puts it, “The theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.”637 It is deeply ingrained in the human consciousness that human birth is the pinnacle of creation and evolution. According to an estimate, it takes more than 8 million previous incarnations of lower forms of life to be born as a human! If that were so, what a mess we have made of it! Be that all as it may, the real tragedy is that we want to ‘know’ God, but we make no effort to know ourselves. We want to read His thoughts, reach close to Him, but behave directly in defiance of what we know He wants us to do. The New Testament says, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than man’s wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man’s strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25).

Indeed any juxtaposition of a divine attribute with human intelligence is incongruous. We are ‘human’; our consciousness is human; our wisdom or the lack of it is human. That is our boundary and circumstance of life on earth. So much has been said and written about God and man that it is easy to miss the wood for the trees. We must come to some kind of a modus vivendi and a modus operandi, a new understanding and a new way of putting that understanding into practice. It should be based on four essential principles: 1) We must revisit the man–God relationship and seek ‘God within man’ rather than seek ‘man within God’, in other words, not seek God as an external benevolent force; 2) We must change our awareness of God in our consciousness and see, as the Bhagavad Gita exhorts, His amsa or spark in everything and everywhere and in every act as an oblation. For purposes of practicality, we must, since we cannot see the ‘invisible’ divine within, train ourselves (as Swami Vivekananda said) to see the ‘visible’ God in every other person. Gandhi said “If you cannot find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him any further”638; 3) Religion might help, but our relationship with God must be autonomous; we  do not need an intermediary between God and us, it has to be personal and embedded in everything we do; 4) As Paulo Coelho puts it, we must turn daily chores into divine tasks. For every thought we entertain, every word we speak, and every action we perform has a cause and a sequel spread over multiple lives, and the only way that divine grace could be attracted is to render everything as an act of total surrender to Him. The sage Aurobindo wrote that the first word of the Integral Yoga (complete union into and with the divine) is surrender; its last word is also surrender. The Hindu scriptures say that the only dharma (required and prescribed) of the Kali Yuga is chanting — seeing God through sound, as it were — and reflecting upon the holy name of God, through which every sin gets cleansed away, just as the rays of the summer sun melt hard ice. In the ancient Hindu scripture Skanda Purana, Lord Sadashiva (one of the Gods of the Holy Trinity — Brahma, Shiva and Vishnu) tells the celestial sage Narada that in the sinful Kali Yuga, the way to attain liberation (moksha) is by chanting two sacred mantras: ‘Gopijana-vallabha-charanau sharanam prapadye’ (I take

 

 

 

636 Albert Einstein. Lost Pine. Accessed at: http://www.lostpine.com/quotes/wisdom_022.htm

637 Cited in: Steven Weinberg. Without God. The New York Review of Books, USA. 25 September 2005. p.73.

638 The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 28 July 2008. p.18.

 

shelter at the feet of He who is the beloved of the gopis); and ‘Namo gopijana- vallabhabhyam’ (Obeisance to the divine couple, who are dear to the gopis). Sadashiva clarifies that these mantras can be recited even by the greatest sinners, at any time or place, without any ritual or purification; but the mantras cannot be recited by those who are not devoted to Krishna or Hari, even if such persons are the noblest and the best of men.

It has also been said that God’s names like ‘Rama’ are more powerful than the God incarnate Himself who bears that name. In the Hindu epic Ramayana, Hanuman even tells Rama that he valued Rama’s name more than Rama himself, because He (Rama), even though a divine avatar, was still a mortal whereas Rama nama was eternal. In fact, by chanting that name, Hanuman gains the strength to fly across the ocean to Lanka, and even to move a whole mountain. For human transformation, of the color and character that modern man needs at this juncture on the evolutionary path, what we need is an ascent in the form of human effort, and the descent of divine grace towards man. Mother Teresa said, “God does not require us to succeed; he only requires that we try.”639 But to try we need faith, and faith falters, as Mother Teresa herself admitted. But if we keep trying, we shall overcome.

Cleansing and purification must be a continuum of life, for life without smut and sin is impossible. That is why most religious rituals are processes of purification. They enjoin us not only to purify ourselves but also to keep the elements of Nature pure. Zoroastrianism preaches that the four elements of Nature — fire, water, air, and earth — should be kept pure and all its customs, including the way they dispose of the dead, have that objective. We must recapture reverence and rapture for Nature. We must try to move from a passive and, more often, helpless acquiescence of life and make it, in its own right, through our thought, word, and deed, a positive force in the cause of the cosmos. The human function is to fight, evil, injustice, and suffering. We must begin to see another person as a subject in his own life, not as an object in ours. And consider the distance between him and ourself as the distance between two of our own organs.

 

Man without God. The unsettling thought is that if our behavior is so unbecoming even with the vast majority of us being ‘believers’, how would it be if