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

reaction, not a labored or reciprocal response; and passion should reinforce compassion. We must distinguish also the difference between co-dependence, which is largely based on reciprocity, and compassion, which is an unconditional commitment, and whose reward is in itself, a kind of self-enrichment. Passion or compassion, it is what we generally refer to as culture — broadly defined as the full range of learned human behavioral patterns — that colors almost everything we perceive, think, and do. And to change human condition, we must change human culture. Some see the current planetary crisis as a transition within the larger perspective of human social evolution.

It is also now being hypothesized that the process of natural selection can act on human culture as well as on our genes, and that the cultural traits affecting survival and reproduction evolve at a different rate than other cultural attributes. We now read about ‘cultural engineering’, which really is manipulation of the thought processes of the individual to not-so-‘freely’ choose what someone else ‘freely’ wishes us to choose. Our culture and consciousness are so far removed from genuine and authentic compassion, that a radical redesigning of the human culture becomes indispensable. The seeds of compassion must be sown in consciousness in the cradle. It has been said that by the time a child reaches the fifth year, almost up to 80 percent of its brain is developed, and much of the predispositions and its basic character and values are molded. Bahá’u’lláh, the Persian founder of the Bahá’í Faith, taught that each human being is “a mine rich in gems”, unknown even to the owner, let alone to others, and inexhaustible in its affluence. Life in this world, according to him, is like the life of a child in the womb of its mother: the moral, intellectual, and spiritual powers that a human being develops here, with the help of God, will be the ‘limbs’ and ‘organs’ needed for the soul’s progress in the worlds beyond this world. Paradoxically, we are prepared to do anything for our children, even give our lives, but do little about the environment in which they grow their ‘limbs’ and ‘organs’ in the world. Consciously or subconsciously, in the name of upbringing, we try to make them our own mirror images, which means that the future generation inherits the same mindset as ours, and more likely an even more corrupted consciousness.

Neither culture nor civilization has made any difference to the central realities of life. For many people, indeed for the vast majority, suffering and sorrow, bereavement and grief appear to underlie much of mundane life. Pain or suffering is one of the most studied subjects, embracing a wide range of disciplines and fields. Much of the thrust of the scriptures and of the teachings of prophets and mystics and sages are about how to deal with suffering.

A new academic discipline on the study of infliction of suffering, called panetics has come into being, and an International Society for Panetics was founded in 1991. But the end, or even the beginning of the end, is nowhere in sight; indeed, the more one tries to shed suffering the more it sticks. And modern man seems more susceptible to suffering, and it is the root of the turmoil and terror in the world. Most people spend enormous energy to avoid suffering in their own lives and in the lives of those they cherish. We tend to view God’s goodness from the prism of our own suffering. We spiritually suffer, primarily because we are unable to share our prosperity and others’ adversity, our hopes and others’ pain. Sharing

 

is the antidote for suffering. In other words, it is sharing, or rather, not sharing, that is the ‘trouble’; not suffering. In his book The Search for the Miraculous (1947), the Russian philosopher P.D. Ouspensky says that without sacrifice nothing can be achieved in life, and that a man will give up anything but not suffering.

But, some say the ways to mitigate and manage suffering are as commonplace as suffering itself, if only we do not try to avoid it like the plague. The deaf-blind American author Helen Keller said that “the world is full of suffering; it is also full of overcoming it.”38 The way to overcome suffering is also very simple: not to impose suffering on others. And even more, alleviate a tiny fraction of the other’s agony, for the pleasure that that person gets, more than matches our suffering. Many saints have brought on themselves others’ suffering. We pray to God to relieve us of our grief but, it has also been said, grief itself is a gift of God; it cleanses and purifies, and allows us to feel the pain of others.

Loaded with pain and suffering, life seems pointless, but we cannot also see any ‘point’ beyond life, and therefore we ‘linger’, for lack of a ‘known choice’. The problem is that the three dimensions of human life — physical, intellectual, and spiritual — run on parallel tracks, very often, in most lives, without any intersections; and the physical runs ahead of the intellectual, and the intellectual ahead of the spiritual. The same signature, intelligence, that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, give substance to God, and to hypothesize, to work, worry, and worship, and anticipate outcomes, has become the stumbling block to real change. And it has failed to bring about both conceptual and operational rapprochement and reconciliation within the triad of human knowledge — religion (revealed) philosophy (speculative), and science (deductive). Each claims exclusive legitimacy and, like a jealous spouse, brooks no erosion of its monopoly.

The other ‘triad’ that underlies all human action — perception, analysis, response, whose locus is the brain —, has rarely led man to the right choices in life. The problem is that we identify ‘intelligence’ with IQ (intellectual intelligence), which is really our cerebral power to acquire, apply, and absorb knowledge, while sidelining our EQ (emotional intelligence) and SQ (spiritual intelligence). The SQ is a concept pioneered by authors Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall in their book SQ - Spiritual Intelligence: the Ultimate Intelligence (2004). The neglect of EQ, and even more, of SQ has led to the distortion of human personality, priorities, and predispositions. It has made us confuse the world we see, the ‘world’ we are within, as the world as it is, and we have lost our internal moorings, and the natural attributes of EQ and SQ have slipped into comatose slumber. What comes out is what is within. If we hate someone it means there is hate inside us. Indeed, we cannot even observe externally that which we are incapable of conceiving internally. While what we need is congruence and confluence, what we have is (despite some recent attempts to induce greater harmony between all branches of knowledge) conflict and confusion. Underlying all this restlessness and angst is the basic question: is the human form of life designed and entitled to know all? Is the knowledge we want to know, present but hidden in Nature, waiting to be fathomed and discovered, as scientists like Stephen Hawking and Steven Weinberg contend? Or is it, as scientists like Freeman Dyson argue, some of the secrets of Nature might well be beyond mathematical formulas, beyond the natural capacity of the human mind? Will we be forever, as Isaac Newton wrote towards the end of his life, be consigned to the fate of a boy finding a ‘smoother pebble’ or a ‘prettier shell’ on the seashore, while the great ocean of Truth lay undiscovered?

 

 

 

 

38 Helen Keller. WisdomQuotes.com. Accessed at: http://www.wisdomquotes.com/topics/suffering/

Malaise of modern man

We might not be privy to the ways and wiles of Nature. What we well know, at the practical level, is that the sinister shadow of evil — lurking in the dark recesses of our consciousness and waiting for a vulnerable moment to emerge — is now unbridled, no longer content to be the lukewarm absence of the good, or the occasional subversion of virtue. It is not contingent or an ugly aberration; we are not even sure which ‘virtue’ leads to virtuous conduct. Why evil men do what they do has been the matter of long-standing philosophical debate: is it out of ignorance that they do what they do (as Socrates believed), or do evil men do what they do while knowing fully well what is morally right? The fact is that most people do know; in fact, they do evil not because it is ‘good’, but because they think it is ‘good’ for them — it makes them rich or powerful, or gives the means of pleasure. While what attracts an individual to evil is multilayered and complex, the fact is that in the modern world, evil is so alive and stark, monstrous and mundane, that everyday life is nearly unimaginable without coming face to face with it. And often, far too often for our comfort, that face is our own in the mirror, the projection of our own personality. Human evil has an ancient pedigree. In the Bible (Genesis, 6.5) it is said: The Lord observed the extent of human wickedness on earth, and He saw that everything they thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil. It has grown from banal to brazen, from moral turpitude to mindless terror. It has its own sturdy legs to straddle upon, unapologetic and proud, even boastful — almost a human calling, a whole new discipline, independent of the person, cause, and event. Some even choose to be evil for its own sadistic sake, without any direct link to any expected advantage — it seems so much more ‘fun’ than any other ‘game’. Menacingly, its dark shadow crashes into every corner, conversation, and conclave, every place of work or worship. While we look for it in some dastardly deed or deviant act, the melancholy truth is that evil is embedded in myriad ways in ‘normal’, if not respectable, life. The connecting thread is the impulse to cause pain, misery, and distress to another person, or even kill or maim him, which could be as casual as avenging an insult to ‘God’, or in self-righteousness against a deliberate slight or dismissive gesture.

And what has been called the ‘unremarkable face of unspeakable evil’ is not confined to the criminal realm or to the minds of men like Caligula, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot; nor is it necessarily unlawful. Although a common phrase, there is no such thing as inhumanness where evil is concerned. We are all human, even if we or some of us do horrible things. The mind of a monster — or a Mahatma — has defied all our attempts to unravel. Judging from the way the world reacted and acted to symbols of horror, from Auschwitz to Armenia, from Bosnia to Darfur, it is hard to ‘rationally’ imagine what it takes to rouse the moral outrage of humankind or to ensure that such horrors do not recur. Equally, it is hard to even speculate what is the nadir below which man will not descend in depravity. Evil-doers do not just commit acts that do grievous harm to others; they even choose to behave subsequently in a manner that deliberately aggravates the harm. Faith or belief has never been a barrier or impervious screen to evil. While we bemoan evil and condemn evil people, the bitter truth is that most of the evil in the world is caused by people who believe they are good people. The evil they yield does not negate their ‘goodness’.

While evil is the visible face of what ails man, the mainspring of what ails man is rooted in his instinctive sense of superiority, if not sacredness, called anthropocentrism, blamed by environmentalists as being at the root of the ecological crisis. Too often, our view of what is good for the universe is what is good for us; what is virtue is what is valuable to the human race; indeed,