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

19 Richard Lewontin. The Wars Over Evolution. The New York Review of Books, USA. 20 October 2005. p.52.

that every risk offers an opportunity; they are two sides of the same coin. Existential risks offer evolutionary possibilities that might otherwise take much longer time to mature, or pose dangers that might well lead to our own premature passage. Cognizant that the world faces enormous risks that require concerted and coherent actions, the world is groping for ways to cope with them.

Consistent with our penchant to create an institution when we face any crisis, an independent organization called the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) was established in 2003, whose objective is to help understand and manage emerging global risks. The fate of this too is likely to be no different from that of many others. Institutions are useful as they provide a process and a platform to address an issue but their efficacy and effectiveness depend on their human infrastructure. What is needed is a fundamental change in our mental and psychological faculties of risk perception, risk analysis, and risk aversion, so that every individual action contributes to meeting and mitigating the enormous challenges that humanity faces. Most of them, like climate change — perhaps the greatest crisis the world faces — are caused or aggravated by isolated human actions fuelled by different priorities, and their solution also lies in a basal change not only in what we do, but also how we do the ordinary things of life. There is enough evidence in human history, particularly in the past century, for us to recognize and take very seriously the fact that, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski puts it, the Devil is part of our experience; it has found a cozy corner in our consciousness. And it does seem that the seed of the divine innate in us, designed to come to fruition and make man a god, is drying up, with the devil virtually standing unchallenged. And if evil exists in the world so that with the faculty of free will we can abjure it in favor of goodness, as Jewish mysticism hypothesized, we have belied that divine expectation by making evil our ‘natural’ choice.

But perhaps the greatest ‘risk’ humanity faces stems from a source embedded deep within: our consciousness and the way it has come to be. Although we are not conscious of it, our consciousness is the casualty of our culture and civilization. It is consciousness that makes us what and who we are, and differentiates us from other living beings. Almost everything we associate with human society — religion, education, recreation, money, market, the way we care for our very young and very old — is corruptive. Our ‘way of life’ has not found a way to stay connected with the divine within and still enable us to do our daily duties, the essence that is held in our scriptures and spiritualism. In practical terms, such a profoundly conscious approach, the essence of the scriptures and ancient wisdom, would mean putting the other person, his needs, his wants, and even his weaknesses, ahead of us, no matter what the circumstance — at once the easiest and the most difficult thing to do in real life.

Such is the stubborn strength of our mind-centered and malice-soaked consciousness that it has remained almost impervious to the preachings of the scriptures and the teachings of prophets like the Buddha, Christ, Mahavira, and Zoroaster. It is our consciousness that stands between them and us. Their very name evokes reverence in us but something holds us back from practicing what they exhorted us to do; and that is our consciousness. Periodically, we pay homage to them, and then, without even the slightest feeling of inconsistency or incompatibility, continue to plod on with our pettiness, perfidy, pride, vanity, malice, and malevolence; always trying to put someone else down with a disparaging word or a dismissive gesture, always trying to exploit every discomfiture to our selfish advantage, and leaving no stone unturned to throw stones at the weak and the vulnerable. What propels us is that very consciousness. The demon in us often shows up while dealing with the defenseless; we flaunt our manhood and valor against those who are dependent on us and who cannot retaliate; that demon is our mind-centered consciousness. Furthermore, we tend to think that we are responsible only for what we do, not for what we say. It is a trick that the mind plays

on us. We must remember that whatever we say — in anger or in an inebriated state — is what is already inside us. The mouth is simply another gate and, as Publilius Syrus, the 1st century Latin writer of maxims had put it, speech is the ‘mirror of the soul’; a projection of our personality. Words matter as much as deeds, if not more, because we are more garrulous than functional, and a wounding word is sharper than a physical blow. We are all snared with the words of our mouths, and our words can cut to the core of another person’s self-esteem. The boneless tongue can be more deadly than the slithering snake. The word of man, as the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted, is too frail to be truthful but strong enough to be deadly. And as Louise Hay says, if we are to be responsible for our lives, we have got to be responsible for our mouths (The Power Is Within You, 1991). The toxic burden that the earth carries comes more from the noxious mouth than by the vicious hand. As a Yiddish saying goes, words should be weighed, not counted. If our mind is the invisible enemy, our mouth is the visible one.

Whether it is the hand or the mouth, words or deeds, the fountainhead is the mind. Whatever was the place of the mind in human consciousness in our prehistoric past, it has now assumed unchallenged ascendency. Despite occasional attempts to control it, it has steadfastly refused to yield its primacy and has ‘successfully’ fought off the forces of love, goodness, and compassion. As the American social philosopher William Thompson puts it, “for the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough and the cultural transformation swift enough for the individual mind to be a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture”20 — and, one might add, of human destiny. The paradox is that it is the mind that has created the mess we want to get out of, and it is again the mind that is supposed to save us.

The enduring dilemma is that, as Albert Einstein cautioned us, the intelligence that caused the problem cannot solve it. For example, we assume that our intelligence, a mental capacity that encompasses many abilities, such as to reason, to plan, to solve problems, to think abstractly, to comprehend ideas, to use language, and to learn, evolved for our survival and for the exploitation of resources in the service of growing populations. But for that ‘intelligence’ we would not be where we are now. But that very intelligence is ill-suited to the living context in which man’s foe is not another predatory species, or harsh Nature, but another man with the same kind of intelligence. Our material world is a mental world; our technological world is mental; our whole existence is mental. In short, our reason — which the Indian sage Sri Aurobindo called the ‘Governor of Life’ (The Human Cycle, 1949) — is the Rubicon that we must cross; but we cannot cross it because that very reason itself tells us that if we do cross it, we know not where to go. We want to rise like a Phoenix without burning ourselves and our nest. We are caught in a classic Catch-22 conundrum, a kind of ‘double bind’: what we must do, we cannot do, because, to do what we must, we have to do what we cannot do.

The ‘inner world’ of our consciousness is what shapes our beliefs and limits and leverages our experiences of life. Until we set this ‘world’ in order, our visions of a ‘new world order’, of a ‘just human society’ will remain as they have been all through the ages: utilitarian. Every day, we journey externally but not move even an inch in a whole lifetime on the ‘inner journey’. A journey that, as the Upanishads describe, is from the phenomenal world of existential ignorance to spiritual Self-realization, or simply from the ‘self’ to the ‘Self’. It is the same journey from the state of being ‘unenlightened’ to ‘enlightened’ in

20 William Irwin Thompson. BrainyQuote.com. Popular Quotations. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/williamit306481.html

Western philosophy, symbolized in Plato’s celebrated allegory of the cave, or the Myth of the Cave. The trouble is that the mind transforms or rather tarnishes everything it touches. Its sense of reality is highly circumscribed, like that of the humans in the ‘cave’, chained all their lives, facing a blank wall, seeing only projections on the wall of shadows of things. Scientists like Arthur Eddington say that we visualize theories about life and the Universe which are shaped in our own image and patterned after the forms of our own minds. But we are still not quite sure what the mind is in relation to our brain and consciousness, or of its origin or its real role; but the mind does seem to have acquired the avatar of a rogue elephant on the rampage.

For the record, let us recapitulate, how, for something so synonymous with man, the scriptures have described the mind: mischievous, monkey-like, feeble, fickle, frivolous, spiteful, wayward, wind-like, and so forth. In this conception, the mind is the storehouse of all the negative drives or thoughts. It has been said that every thought creates certain vibrations around us and becomes a prayer, and that every prayer is answered. If a thought is negative and gets answered as a prayer, then our prayers cancel each other’s effects. The fact is that we have not managed to be either tidy or thoughtful in our thoughts, and our emotions rarely have compassion in the default mode. If malice is the most pernicious of human attributes, the mind is the mother of malice. And, for whatever reasons one could surmise, the mind seems to have reasoned out its options and come to the conclusion that if being nasty gets all the nice things, why be nice at all? If being rude and crude makes another person obey your command, why take the trouble to be civil? If humiliating another person takes you on a high, why be humble? If insulting someone makes you feel great about yourself, why fight that temptation? If violence (which is not necessarily or only physical harm) is a shortcut to success and survival, why tread the arduous path of persuasion and peace? And if someone stands between me and my want, the mind reasons, what is wrong in removing the obstacle, whatever be the means? Our mind wants to succeed in every circumstance; in effect to be a ‘complete power’ beyond all imagination. The irony is that we fear our inadequacies; what we should fear is our power.

In the Hindu scripture Srimad Bhagavad Gita, it is written that our senses and their gods are under the control of the mind, described as the invincible enemy of an irresistible force, which sets the wheel of samsara (the living world) in motion, and that anyone who brings the mind under control is the ‘God of gods’.21 From antiquity to modernity, we have been at it, to turn ourselves into such ‘Gods’. Apart from the fact that much of human interfacing is to impose one’s will on another’s mind, mind-control is now the ultimate tool of conquest and terror. The fear of one’s own mind being broken down and then reshaped to someone else’s specification and requirement haunts