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

many people. It is the absolute invasion of privacy; a process through which one seeks to control not only how another person acts but how he thinks and feels. Increasingly it is the favorite of tyrants, cult leaders and state surveillance agencies and ‘secret services’.

In a more subtle sense, such mind-control is the objective and thrust of the information, communication, and entertainment infrastructure that underpins modern life. While what man needs is cathartic cleansing and consciousness change, what he is aiming at is ‘brainwashing’. Although the term is of recent vintage (1950), coined by the American journalist Edward Hunter (from the Chinese hsi nao, literally ‘wash brain’), the attempt itself is timeless. In fact, it is what much of human interfacing is all about, to externally subvert and

 

 

 

21 Swami Sivananda. Sarva Gita Sara. 1999. The Divine Life Society Publications. P.O. Shivanandanagar, Himalayas, Uttar Pradesh, India. pp.173–174.

 

undermine the autonomy of another individual’s own thinking and choices, to bend the other’s will to our own at its very source — the mind — through persuasion, manipulation or coercion. Force, intimidation and coercion will always have their attraction to those who have the means to bring them to bear. Their use in human affairs is timeless, but what has made this a mortal danger to mankind is the tool of technology. We are told that the technology is already out there with which one can hack straight into our brain, to confine us to an electromagnetic field that cocoons and conditions our every thought, to, in effect, erase our life’s memories and substitute them with a new, false set…

We have learnt by now that it is foolhardy to dismiss such predictions as science- fiction. In fact, the greater danger perhaps is not what such actions seek to do to us, or with us, but what unexpectedly could emerge and transform us into beings that even ardent technophiles would not want to be. One of the lessons of human history is that the impact of any kind of knowledge depends on who the knower is. The same knowledge could yield different results if applied by different people. Piety, purity, or the lack of them, has a vital bearing on the delivery. And man has unfailingly shown that he misinterprets or misuses every kind of knowledge or power he has access to. The scriptures are a case in point; the ease and dexterity with which we make a mockery of them is appalling; and our unquenchable thirst for scientific power will fare no better with the kind of consciousness we have. That over one-third of mankind is still denied the basic needs of a dignified life is a stark reminder of our ability to misuse or misdirect every kind of power. That we keep on amassing weapons of mass destruction, nuclear and biological, capable of killing us many times over is another.

Knowledge development, according to evolutionary epistemology, is supposed to be the direct extension of evolutionary development, but somewhere down the line they got disconnected. What evolution has made us to be was not what Nature intended; nor what we want to be. We have focused on knowledge, not the knower. Innate in each of us is an embryonic empathy that struggles to blossom from the deepest depths of our being but the wages of evolution weigh it down. In truth, notwithstanding our claims of having mastered the universe and mapped the genome and unlocked the secrets of life, we have not made much, if any, headway in the four fundamental directions of knowledge — knowledge of self, knowledge of God, knowledge of the world as it really is, and knowledge of afterlife. There has always been tension between our knowledge of how to get the best out of life and a good afterlife. But the knowledge experts reassure us that we are in the throes of a ‘knowledge value revolution’, of a post-modern knowledge society, which will usher in a glorious future for mankind, and make the world a better place.

The spiritual dimension of our ‘being’, which the scriptures and the saints say is our true essence, is twisted so much in practice that it is hard to distinguish a truly spiritual seeker and a crafty charlatan. There are more ‘brands’ of spiritualism than perhaps of soaps in a supermarket, and the ‘consumer’ is clueless about how to separate the fake from the real. In the Mahabharata, while describing the ongoing Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, it was presciently written that men of our age will have the capacity “to fool the world that man’s insatiable appetite for wealth and power was really a spiritual quest.”22 The Dalai Lama says that the essence of spiritualism is in our attitude towards ‘others’. If we are callous, condescending and casual to their distress, then we are not spiritual. Our fuzziness about spirituality extends to other critical areas like love and hate, which have always shared an uneasy relationship and

 

 

 

22 N.S. Rajaram. Nostradamus and Beyond: Visions of Yuga-Sandhi. 2002. Rupa & Co. New Delhi, India. p.73.

 

now seem seamless. For any of that to truly and substantially change, we need systemic transformation, a complete change in perspective, goals, and priorities. In the Mahabharata (Santi Parva; Section IX), King Yudhisthira, remorseful that he was instrumental in unknowingly slaying his own elder brother Karna in the battle at Kurukshetra, tells his younger brother Arjuna (who was actually the killer), that he would go off into the forests divesting himself of desire and wrath, and turning his gaze inwards and casting off pride of soul and body. In that single sentence, Yudhisthira expresses the thrust of the direction of the desirable human transformation — to control, if not abjure, desire, wrath, and pride, and to ‘gaze inwards’. The phrase ‘transformation’, more often ‘change’, is one of the most frequently used expressions in human communication. The irony is that we still behave with the intent that, as the French saying goes, ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’ (the more things change, the more they are the same). After all, we are dealing with humans and human nature, and these are hard nuts to crack. Like much else in life, we want to ‘control’ change too; apply it selectively on our own terms. Even time we want to be able to pass selectively. What Einstein said about relativity — when you are with a pretty girl, an hour seems like a minute, and when you sit on a hot stove for a minute it is longer than an hour — applies equally to all life. We want to bend time, space, and fortune to our resolve randomly and relatively. We want choice over what we want to change and what should be stable. We dream of soaring to new heights, but are addicted to the comfort of the ground.

The underlying premise of human transformation is that man has not attained his full potential, and that, through a still indeterminate process, man can become a radically different

— and better — being than he is, and do things he only dreams of doing. On the other hand, the transformation that scriptures like the Upanishads envisaged is the inner transformation, in the midst of outward conformity and continuity. A good chunk of our life is spent tiptoeing through the minefield of sensual, moral, monetary, and ethical temptations and trespasses, always struggling to hold ourselves back from doing what we want to do, fearful of committing a crime or a sin. For only we, humans can commit either of them. We hesitate, not because they are bad but for fear of the aftermath. Animals cannot because their intent is innocence. For example, animals kill for food and survival; man murders for game, gain, and power. Wisdom is not only how knowledge is used, but also knowledge not used with the power to use. Perhaps the greatest of all temptations is to keep shut some doors that science and technology open for us. The kind of transformation currently underway is technological, focused on the physical, raising profound questions about its sustainability and implications. While there is little doubt about the potential power of science, the question is: can man be trusted to marshal it for the common good? Chances are that unless we latch on to it for ‘moral progress’ — shift the focus from what science could do, to what it should and ought to do — it might lead to making man a greater menace than he already is. In spiritual terms, transformation means awakening, awareness, growth, and renewal; indeed it is the ultimate evolutionary step that the spirit can take; the birthright and basic duty of every living creature. In this view, the meaning and mission of life itself is transformation; it is to do God’s work on earth, which, in the contemporary context, is to see that the ability of the earth to sustain human life is not destroyed by human conduct, and to treat every person we encounter as someone whom God wants to help through us. Put another way, without conscious effort to overcome the weaknesses inherent in the ‘animal inside man’, man is no different from other animals; if at all, he is far worse. Humans, it is said, are a unique kind of amphibians — half spirit and half animal. As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals, they inhabit the earth. Spiritual progress is to transcend the animal half. This offers an opportunity to become — or evolve into — someone radically different between birth and death. It means that man alone has in him what it takes to transcend his lineage, environment, and consciousness, and to become a Christ or a Buddha — but also to become a Ted Bundy

 

or a Charles Manson. A Sufi poet noted that Nature has taken a million years to make man, but we have only a lifetime to become more than man. Of all the generations, at least over the past ten thousand years, our generation, and the one to come after us, have the uncommon opportunity to be the orchestrator of such alchemy of the human condition. For what has always been on the fringes of human endeavor — the preserve of saints and sages — is today moving into the mainstream of human aspiration. Unable to cope with the modern-day strains and stress-related problems, transformation is being sought as a solution to life’s problems and as a tool for personal development at the expense of psychological, much less spiritual, development. Humans have always dreamed of states of existence different from the ones that they are in, in their everyday lives; they yearn to become the best they could be. We have the rare capacity to conceptualize our existence independent of any external or transcendental authority, and thus to transform the attendant conditions in full cognizance of the historical potential and evolutionary implications of such a transformation. How we pursue transformation, consciously or subconsciously, physically or spiritually, intellectually or intuitively, are the questions that apply to every individual.

Behind any significant, not symbolic, transformation there has to be deep disaffection, if not disgust, with the status quo. The gut-wrenching feeling of dissatisfaction with our mental state and physical constraints has been the starting point and the main motivating factor for sacred as well as secular scholasticism. Transformation, most thinkers, including James Redfield, author of The Celestine Prophecy (1993), consensually agree, begins with an overpowering restlessness, a sense of gnawing discontent. If restlessness can be converted into a quest, and if that quest becomes an inward journey, it can lead to a moment of blinding insight, a riveting revelation. It can pave the way to what the Upanishads call self-realization, to that split-second parting of the mind’s veil of cosmic ignorance, which was what the Buddha experienced in his transformation. From ancient mythologies to modern pop culture, humans have created myriad images of transformations of the body and mind into apparitions that allow them