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

both mind and heart play complementary roles. For any of that to happen, we need a powerful spark, a spur, a stimulus, an agent provocateur that brushes aside all inertia and opposition. That could come from the rumblings of restlessness, yearning, longing, and churning that sweep the globe without finding an utterance or an outlet. And, in turn, for any of these to happen, we desperately need in abundance both mercy and grace of God — mercy for our trespasses, and grace for our transformation. For, God too has a stake in our future; indeed, even more than we do. What we have invested is much less compared to what He has put into the ‘human experiment’, whether it is making us in His own image, or as the only blessed form of life on earth with the potential to directly dissolve into Him, as the Upanishads proclaim. In Hindu scriptures like the Vishnu Purana, it is written that the final avatar of God, Kalki, will not only restore dharma on earth but will also awaken the minds of all those who live at the end of our age. This means that the advent of the next avatar might also entail and result in consciousness change. Hopefully, God has not yet wholly given up on man. Human transformation, at this moment of truth in human evolution, will open the pathway to becoming a ‘better being’ and take the human race to its tryst with destiny. We have to undertake this task, as Lord Krishna tells Aruba in the Bhagavad Gita, as a service and surrender to God. To paraphrase the words of the Soto Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki, in so doing, ‘we should burn ourselves completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of ourselves.’

By leaving nothing we become everything, and by finishing ourselves we complete God’s work — which is the reason for our being, our mission on earth. Sages like Sri Aurobindo have dreamed of man overcoming his limiting nature and emerging as a new species, a Gnostic ‘divinized’ being. And saints like Augustine emphasized that only through God’s will can human beings progress into higher beings, for we have no inherent power to overcome our innate limitations. We know we are ‘limited’ in many ways; what we are not sure of are the ‘limitations of the limits’. The scriptures say that God has given man the power of choice, of reasoning, and of discrimination between right and wrong, and consequently made him accountable to his actions. And it is made clear that, as the Quran

 

 

 

644 H.P. Blavatsky. The Voice of the Silence. 1998. The Theosophical Publishing House. India. p.111.

 

puts it, none charged with his burden shall bear another’s burden, and that whosoever goes the right way does so for his own good, and whosoever strays from the right path does so for his own hurt. The only way we can truly do the good we want to do, and not stray from the dharmic path, is through purification of the consciousness, what is called chita suddhi in Sanskrit, and melanoma in Greek. Our mind-driven consciousness, the product of billions of years of evolution, is so full of ill will and intolerance that we will, more often than not, choose the path of the pleasant or sensory pleasure, preyas, over the one of goodness, sreyas. All that is ‘pleasant’ need not necessarily be bad, but to choose the one that gives pleasure but that is not bad, to perform one’s own swadharma without encroaching on an other’s, requires a kind of surgical subtlety and spiritual sensitivity that most of us are incapable of. The clarion call of our time is cathartic consciousness change.

 

An epitaph for mankind

The message for our future is crystal clear. We must remember that the deadliest weapon of mass destruction is the human mind. Hitherto it was preying on other species; now it has turned a ‘man-eater’. Rather, it has turned man into a virtual cannibal, making him kill other humans for as many reasons as the mind can come up with. And it has virtually ‘occupied’ the human consciousness. Nothing positive is possible unless the mind is dislodged from its position of preeminence. And that is not possible unless we find a countervailing force to checkmate and balance the monopoly of the mind. Given the configuration of the inner forces that drive our behavior, that can only be the awakening our dormant heart intelligence.

Nothing else will work; everything else is Band-Aid on a gangrenous wound. While we would like to leave behind the human baggage, become a monarch butterfly and soar into the sky with wondrous wings, it is more likely that our present mind-dominated consciousness will make us meet the fate of the lemming jumping off the cliff en masse, or get pushed over by the pressures of our way of life. It is idle (and futile) to speculate if God is or is not, or who or which is the primary mover and shaker in human life — human effort or divine energy. In truth, they are the same. But purely pragmatically, for man’s sake we should hope that He or It is there, alive and not averse to helping us. Without His special grace, humanity is no more than its own unchanging dust heap.645 It is clear that neither individual action nor abnegation, personal resolve nor renunciation, will help man achieve consciousness transformation: we need the ‘descent of the divine Spirit’ into our consciousness.

Our effort should be two-fold: to create the conducive context for divine descent; and to move from ‘vertical’ transformation, that is, individual growth, to ‘horizontal’ transformation, that is, create the ‘critical mass’. That takes us back to the nagging question: when and how does divine help materialize in human life and what are the prerequisites? The most reasonable assumption might be that it materializes, as the Holocaust survivor, Corrie ten Boom (The Hiding Place, 1971) wrote, only when the best of human effort is done with the faith that ‘God’s power alone be free to work’. And that Power is exercised through ‘His image on earth’. God’s grace makes human effort tangible but does not take its place. What we do not know is the mix and meeting point between human will and divine disposition in the vortex of daily life. We must also remember that when things became too bad on earth, God chose to become an avatar in myriad forms, including the human form. He chose to use human hands and the human body — not the human mind — to do His work. Human behavior, which in its barest essence is how we treat other beings, can influence divine

 

 

 

 

645 Peter Browne. A Surprise from St. Augustine. The New York Review of Books, USA. 11 June 2009. p.41.

 

disposition. For whatever reasons He made us as we are — limited, frail, and subject to pain and sorrow — in taking human form, God did not spare himself to show that in the cause of creation no one is exempt from the natural laws of life on earth. Indeed, the avatars of God suffered more than ordinary men. In the Christian belief, God chose to enter human history in the person of Christ, and in so doing sent his ‘only son’ to bear unbearable pain and to die for the sins of the faithful. That was not of necessity, but of His choice; out of love, not out of need. In spiritual terms, total, unattached effort — Nishkamakarma in Sanskrit — is another way to God. But first, we must abstain from Nishiddhakarma, forbidden acts in daily life, which is even more difficult than Nishkamakarma. We instinctively tend to do that which we are not supposed to do. Things that are bad for us seduce us easily. But things that are actually good for us fail to appeal to us; we shun them compulsively, finding powerful explanations and excuses to justify our procrastination or state of denial. The mind cannot resist both temptation and trespassing.

Without getting bogged down with the nuances of conflicting dharmas and the relativity of righteousness, we must remember that we often tend to mistake what is pernicious and dangerous for what is useful and desirable, and what appears as good to us with what is truly good. We must remember that we cannot do a wrong thing even for a good cause; not even for a divine cause, and even if we are seemingly selfless. We must cultivate a culture that induces fraternal affection for humanity and a compassionate sensitivity to all life

and a pious love and adoration of the divine. We must draw an indelible line between spiritual surrender and capitulation to force, tradition, terror, or tyranny as a matter of expediency. This surrender is elective, liberating, and ennobling. Capitulation is enforced, diminishing, and denudes us of our dignity, which is the most precious human trait. In evolutionary terms, going up to the next level is giving up the baggage of the present level, which is to surrender the comfort and inertia of the status quo, our predispositions, preferences, prejudices, and our mind-driven thought processes. How to fine tune and fuse self-effort and spiritual surrender, self-belief and self-abnegating faith — two apparently antithetical forces — and how to actualize it, is the defining dilemma that mankind

As individuals, we will have to make choices that will impact on us all. If we persist on this noxious path of hate, with the attitude of an eye for an eye, with the desecration of Nature, trembling with fear and riddled with egoism, we will disappear as the dominant race of this planet. If we become conscious of the oneness of life, and realize that we all form part of a great organism, and that we should respect one another and be grateful to Mother? Earth for its forbearance, then we will move directly into the path of positive growth. And if we do not and stay the course of the status quo, then, whatever might happen or not, we will have forfeited our moral legitimacy to linger a minute longer. Our Planet Earth, the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the galaxy, and the cosmos — and God — are awaiting our decision.

The choice is here. The time is now. It is the crunch time, the daunting hour. The bell tolls for us all. And if we — this generation and perhaps the two that follow — fail or falter, the epitaph on the human grave might well read thus: “Here rest the remains of the species Homo sapiens, a creation so majestically sculpted, so munificently blessed, by Nature and by the Master; it had its own golden moment, under the high heaven and on indulgent earth, to make man a god on earth; yet, it so senselessly, so needlessly, squandered itself; confused, not knowing what to do in the brief interlude of a single lifetime, it turned on itself, leading to its premature passage — and even the All-mighty Allah, the All-pervasive Brahman, the All- merciful Father in Heaven — could not do anything.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imprint