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

environment than wild animals in the jungle, and that the phrase ‘human zoo’ is more appropriate than ‘concrete jungle’. Nothing any animal has done to another animal in the jungle can be compared with what man has done to another man in the civilized world. Some like Paul Wapner even argue that we would be better off if we ‘cultivate wildness’ in our cities, homes and within our own selves as way to live in harmony with Nature.

 

The three ‘I’s of the human condition

Whether living in a human zoo or in a warped world, what we most often manifest in life, more than love or hate or faith, are the toxic triad of indifference, intolerance, and injustice. While we all want, at a certain level of awareness, to be good, decent, and caring, what we actualize in the vortex of daily life are these three. Of them, indifference seems relatively benign but it is the one that is most deleterious. That is because our mind does not let indifference come in the way of our feeling good about ourselves: either it is the suffering of a neighbor, or the travails of the ‘bottom billion’, to borrow a phrase from Paul Collier. The ever-escalating horrors we see in the world are but a reflection of the growing number of ‘good’ indifferent people. Bernard Shaw called it the essence of inhumanity. Manifested as an unfeeling passivity, apathetic ataraxia in the face of need or suffering of another person, few are guiltless. As the Nobel laureate, author, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said, indifference is tempting, even seductive, the all-embracing opposite of every human value that pervades the human universe and reduces the other to an abstraction. Indifference is more than not extending a helping hand to those in distress; it is a state of non-existence, virtual non-being. The worst of people’s trials and troubles do not in the least affect the tenor and tempo, the pulse and beat of our languid lives. Ignorance is bliss but knowledge does not impel us to pause. The moral of our mindset is that nothing is sinful that which we do not know; the narrower the arc of our ‘knowledge’, the less accountable we are.

The second ‘leg’ of the triad is intolerance, which is but an acute extension of indifference. Even tolerance is an extension of indifference. The French philosopher Voltaire answers his own question “What is tolerance?” by saying that “it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly

 

 

 

 

27 Now Chimpanzees Might Get the Rights Reserved for Humans. The Deccan Chronicle. Hyderabad, India. 15 July 2008. p.15.

 

— that is the first law of nature.”28 Intolerance has also been described as an expression of violence. Bernard Shaw said that all improvement in human affairs is grounded on tolerance. To tolerate means to bear or to endure, as it were, a lesser nuisance; acceptance comes from the recognition that there are no absolutes in life and every one is a speck of the divine.

Intolerance manifests in numerous contexts — social, economic, religious. Since no two things are entirely equal in life, the scope for intolerance exists in almost every relationship. Intolerance leads to the loss of discriminatory capacity and ultimately to violence. It is the chief source of negative energy on earth. While we routinely — and stridently — proclaim that creativity comes from the clash of opinions, what we truly like is, as the phrase goes, to embed ourselves in ‘the reassuring womb of an echo chamber’. The first step to combat intolerance, as the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper puts it, is to “claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant”.29 And it has to be addressed from many fronts, starting with education from the earliest phase. Today, by the time a child comes out of the kindergarten, intolerance would already have taken root in him; what is instilled in a child’s mind is that the burden of life is to compete, to prevail, to be a winner, and that mindset inevitably produces intolerance.

The third leg of toxicity that consumes much of life is injustice, which is often the visible face of intolerance. For Alexander Hamilton, the first duty of society is justice; and for Benjamin Disraeli, justice is truth in action. On both counts, human society has failed. Much of our life is spent in the shadow of what William Lane, an Australian social reformer characterized in his work Creed of Humanity (1890) as ‘the savage brutal competition which drives us to tear each other’s flesh’, and which makes man an embodiment of merciless malevolence. Competition can be constructive or destructive and the latter seems more suited to the human mind. Competition, like conflict, is inherent in the living world, but it is only in the case of the human that it comes in the way of coexistence and cooperation. Only humans have not fathomed a way because we alone do not know what ‘enough’ is. In the Mahabharata, it is written that “contentment is the highest heaven; contentment is the highest bliss. There is nothing nobler than contentment.”30 That is one thing that eludes the human mind, while discontentment manifests in many ways.

The malevolent mix in the morass of life manifests itself in many ways, most of all as anger. Modern man is, above all, an angry creature. Anger excludes none and afflicts everyone — young and old, rich and poor, male and female. Logically, since the historic human is now living longer, healthier and more prosperous (at least some sections of humanity) than ever before, that should have made mankind happier and harmonious. But what we have is the opposite. Anger comes often from fear, and it was designed to help during times of mortal danger. But the triggers have changed, have been trivialized and the anger response has remained and got entrenched. Sometimes, we are even angry that we have to share our living space with other creatures. Perhaps, the explanation is that there is some chemistry to anger, and our growing intolerance, irritability, and rage perhaps is fuelled by our ingesting, inhaling, and imbibing mindboggling varieties of chemicals in our daily life.

Almost everything we put into our body and brain is toxic. Chemicals are affecting — and

 

 

 

28 Voltaire. The Quote Garden.com. Quotations about Prejudice. Accessed at: http://www.quotegarden.com/prejudice.html

29 Karl Popper. All the Best Quotes. Intolerance Quotes. Accessed at: http://allthebestquotes.com/theme/intolerance.htm

30 The Mahabharata. Book 12: Santi Parva: Rajadharmanusasana Parva: Section XXI. Accessed at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/m12/m12a021.htm

 

infecting — not only our external environment but also our internal balance. The smallest things, arising out of unfulfilled desire and disobeyed demands tend to throw us off balance into frenzied fury and violent temper. We are in such a state of human hostility, that any denial of a demand can become a death sentence, and a rebuff or reprimand can lead to an acid attack and, if one can grab a gun, to mass murder. Other triggers are the coexistence of obscene opulence and dehumanizing poverty, and displacements of discriminated populations and enforced abdication of homes and homeland.

The toxic effects of anger have long been recognized. In Buddhism, anger is the foremost obstacle to bodhichitta — enlightenment of the being. The Buddha told one of his disciples, “Manjushri, what we call anger destroys all of the virtue accumulated in one hundred kalpas [periodic manifestations and dissolutions of universes that go on eternally].”31 In the Bible, it is said “But now ye also put off all these: anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication, out of your mouth.” (Colossians, 3:8) The Prophet Muhammad said “do not be angry and furious.”32 The Buddha even said “you will not be punished for your anger; you will be punished by your anger.”33 In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says that the three gates of hell are anger, lust, and avarice, and further singles out anger and says “From anger proceedeth delusion; from delusion, confused memory; from confused memory, the destruction of buddhi (reason); from destruction of buddhi, man perishes”.

According to the theory of karma, if you generate an intense karma through anger, you will delay experiencing the results of your virtue simply because the intensity of your anger is greater than the intensity of your virtue. The sage Narada, while urging the rishi Valmiki to write the epic Ramayana, describes the qualities of Lord Rama, and mentions krodh-jeet, the conquest of anger, as one of them. Such is its hold over human frailty, that anger is included as one of the seven deadly sins — the cardinal sins — in early Christianity. Yet none of this has made any dent in the armor of our anger. Anger seems to serve several purposes: it offers us an alibi, it releases our pent-up emotions and frustrations; it gives a sense of control; it makes us feel good, and superior to the recipient of our anger. We give vent to our anger at home, on the street, at work, at play and even in a place of worship. It is a passion that causes more harm to the one who exhibits it than to the one who receives it. And anger is not always an aberration or a wayward emotion; it is also a kind of ‘lie-detector test’. Often, it is through anger that what is within us is blurted out, and our raw cogitation and feelings come out spontaneously. The words that we utter when we are angry are not, as we like to think, what we do not mean, but what, deep inside ourselves, we want them to mean.

 

Chigyogoisui — unity of knowledge and action

The ‘human way of life’ is marked by man’s almost insatiable thirst to know, which is to infer more than what appears to be, a trait that distinguishes him from his fellow animals. It was because we were able to go beyond the limit of ‘need to know’ that we have been able to fashion a way of life so different from any other. At the same time we are paralyzed by our inability to act with the knowledge we have. In scriptures like the Quran, it is said that one of the manifestations of God is as a conveyor of knowledge. But it is also said that no one can live without action, karma in Sanskrit. How to harmonize knowledge and action and devotion

 

 

 

31 Bardor Tulku Rinpoche. Why We should Give up Anger. 2005. Densal, Issue 1703. June 2005. Karma Triyana Dharmachakra. Accessed at: http://www.kagyu.org/ktd/densal/archives/1703/anger.php

32 Anger and Islam. Is Anger Lawful Or Not? Accessed at: http://www.islamawareness.net/Anger/anger.html

33 The Buddha. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/anger

 

— jnana, karma and bhakti — is one of the main messages of the Bhagavad Gita. The Upanishads say that a life of bare knowledge or of bare activity are alike, and are fraught with evil. How to synthesize and harmonize them is the practical question. Adding to the quandary, the Advaita Vedanta differentiates five kinds of knowledge: prattaksa (gained by the senses); anumana (gained by inference); upamana (gained by analogy); arthapati (gained by superimposition of known knowledge on apparent knowledge); and agama (gained from sacred texts like the Vedas). The highest knowledge is Self-knowledge, what the Upanishads call ‘Self-realization’. The human faculties of observation, deliberation, and discrimination, viveka in Sanskrit, have been crucial for human survival. They are needed because everything in life is ‘mixed-up’ and we need to ‘discriminate’ and decide. But they have fallen short of being able to discriminate the ephemeral from the permanent, the perishable from the imperishable, the pleasurable (preyas in Sanskrit) from the beneficial (sreyas). We rely on our intellect (buddhi) to do so, opening a wide crack between knowledge and wise action.

Man’s struggle to comprehend, so to