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

the world of mind and matter, of other people and the living environment. It is the world of action and reaction, belief and behavior. The ‘inner world’ or ‘inner space’ is the world of spirit, of our psyches, conscious and subconscious; beyond reason, beyond mind, beyond the reach of the five senses that are externally directed. The ‘inner space’ is where we make our choices and decisions. And for stability, peace, and harmony in the outer world, we need the same in the inner world. So, in order to access that ‘innerscape’ we must somehow find a way around or through our egotistical, self-righteous behavior, which views life as a game in which one man’s gain or loss is balanced by the losses or gains of another. Whether it is the energy crisis or global warming, the ‘problem’ of population or looming ‘water wars’, the clash of religions or nuclear or biological terror, it all comes down to our perception of our place and role in the human community, and to our smug sense that none of them have any bearing on our personal lives, or strong enough to warrant any compromises with our cocoon of comfort. It is not a question of ‘who is right’; it is one of ‘what is right’ and how to do the good we want to do. For that, we must move inwards, embark on a voyage within. The final frontier is the deepest depth within. The

 

 

 

47 Cited in: Soil and Health Library, Social Criticism Library. Alexis Carrel. Man, The Unknown. 1935. Chapter I: The Need of a Better Knowledge of Man. p.1 Accessed at: http://www.soilandhealth.org/03sov/0303critic/030310carrel/Carrel-ch1.htm

 

ultimate conquest is the conquest of the six enemies within man’s own consciousness: kama (lust), krodha (anger), lobha (avarice), moha (delusion), mada (pride), and matsarya (malice). No spiritual progress is possible without their containment. It is the inner jihad that everyone has to wage. For ‘good governance’ in the external world we must strive for what Margery Kempe, the English mystic, called ‘spiritual self-governance’. The Buddha said that it is foolish to guard against misfortune from the external world if we leave the inner mind uncontrolled. What the human race needs is to fundamentally alter the processes that precede and propel and then burst out as behavior in the outer world. It means that we must bring to bear a new focus and a new balance deep inside the core of our consciousness. It means that we must take conscious charge of our spiritual evolution. Though our reflexive consciousness is ripe enough, the challenges we face are grave enough to impel us to do that.

We must realize that for us to manage change wisely, we need to change the forces that presently direct the ‘change’ in human life; we have to change the conductor as well as the orchestra. To change what we see, we must change how we see. The ‘world,’ for all practical purposes, in the words of Madame Blavatsky, is nothing but an individual ‘living in his personal nature.’ Every individual is both the irreducible minimum and the entirety of life. The change we need at this juncture has to be both ‘vertical’ (individually), and ‘horizontal’ (as a species). It has to be a shift not only in the way we comprehend the external world; it must go beyond or beneath that, a shift in the ‘way we comprehend the way we comprehend’, and in the way we ‘relate with our relationships’ and in our sense of priorities. Change cannot be always and wholly endogenous or in situ; we must create the necessary context, conditions, and the potential. We have been chanting the mantra of change or challenge for centuries without being clear of what it entails and its prerequisites. Change must be seen both as a process and as a means to human betterment, and to uplift the species to a higher level of consciousness. The transformation we must seek and strive towards ought to be, as sages like Sri Aurobindo have envisioned, to evolve ourselves into a de facto new species, a higher mode of life; to struggle to see, as the Bhagavad Gita exhorts, ourselves in all and all in ourselves; not so much to remake the world into an El Dorado but to remake ourselves into better beings, not to slay the demons of the nether world, but to exorcize those that lurk within and nibble at our soul.

If there is one message from our past, it is that individuals matter, but a stray sprinkling of disconnected deeds will not do; we must convert the gentle breeze from good men into a benign gale that sweeps across all hurdles, like a rising tide that lifts all boats. The critical point for species-scale change will come when the momentum for change becomes unstoppable and irreversible even by the original agents of that change, when a ‘critical mass’ of small changes tip the balance of a whole new way of life, what Malcolm Gladwell calls the ‘tipping point’. It is the smallest number of awakened human beings whose collective conduct can initiate a significant shift in global consciousness. At some unspecified point, a single individual can make a collective difference. We must behave as if we are that one extra person who can tip the scales and turn individual motivation into a mass movement. This concept is sometimes referred to as ‘memes’, ideas that are spread by the behavior that they incubate in their hosts and become ‘social or ethical epidemics’. We do know, but not how, a trivial incident or a tiny defiance or a small disquiet in some nondescript corner can become a global phenomenon and a universal norm. The process through which it spreads is unclear, but it can be both horizontal and vertical, encapsulated in a single generation. It has happened, though seldom, when a random idea or a strange habit suddenly acquires the characteristic of a pandemic disease and human behavior dramatically changes, driven by an invisible catalyst. Right now, we need that kind of ‘positive pathogen’, if you will, a ‘white plague’, a ‘spiritual smallpox’, that invades and infects humanity and breaks through the false sense of immunity we feel from the fate of the world. In the words of the theosophist and

 

author Gottfried de Purucker (Man in Evolution, 1941), we must let the spiritual being play on the physical body as the master musician plays on a wondrous lute or harp.

The master key to unravel mankind’s misery is to strive towards an altogether new insight into ‘intelligence’. First, it is not a human monopoly; every harp of the orchestra of life on earth, including plants and trees have it, which is not necessarily inferior to the human. Second, it is not also the monopoly of the brain or the mind; it is in every cell in our body.

Third, the human heart is a tremendous storehouse of cells with memory, energy, and intelligence. Fourth, we must find a way to harness the other two intelligences, the emotional and spiritual. The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad talks of the heart as ‘the source of all things’, the way to feel stillness. For reasons still unclear, the equilibrium between the two independent but intertwined sources of human cognitive capacity — mind and heart — got distorted, with one of them, the mind, becoming the monarch, and turning the heart simply into a powerful ‘double’ pump that backstops life, fundamentally changing the human personality and predispositions. While the mind became synonymous with the practical world of strength, logic, reason, and success, the heart came to be often associated with weakness, emotion, sentiment, compassion, and love. Frontier research is reinforcing ancient intuitive wisdom that the human heart is far more than what modern medicine has ‘discovered’, and that it is actually the key for the human to evolve any further. As Gary Zukav (The Seat of the Soul, 1989) says, we cannot find our soul with our mind; we must harness our heart.

We are like the fisherman in Oscar Wilde’s beautiful story The Fisherman and His Soul (1891), a story about the power of love, described as better than wisdom and more precious than riches, and fairer than the feet of the daughters of men. The fisherman, rebuffed by the priest, goes to the marketplace to sell his soul to wed the mermaid, and says “Of what use is my soul to me? I cannot see it. I may not touch it. I do not know it”. The merchants scoff and say, signaling the state of present-day man’s mind, “Of what use is a man’s soul to us?” and “Sell us thy body for a slave”. For most of us our body is our identity, more real, and useful than the soul. We too long for ‘love’ but marginalize that which is the fountainhead of love: the heart. Tellingly, the Soul, in the same story, having been cast away without the heart, tells the fisherman that without the heart it learnt to do all the bad things and to ‘love’ them.

Elaine Matthews (Heartbeat of Intelligence, 2002) says that “as a species we have forgotten how to love. But love alone is not the key. The key is knowledge of heart intelligence.”48 Love, flowing from the heart, can also act as a bridge between the head and the heart. The ancient Chinese philosopher and founder of Taoism, Lao Tzu, wrote that “Love is of all passions the strongest, for it attacks simultaneously the head, the heart and the senses.”49 The Upanishads describe the heart as a ‘cave’ or a ‘lotus’ inside our consciousness, and as the favored abode of God. The blossoming of the ‘lotus’ is a metaphor often used in spiritual parlance. The lotus rises up from the mud of the swamp, grows through the murky waters, and blossoms into a pure white flower. The message from this is that we too can rise from the world of sin and senses, and attain spiritual illumination. The sage Ramakrishna Paramahamsa said ‘Bring your own lotus to blossom; the bees will come of themselves’.

In his book Consilience (1998), Edward Wilson says that “in the quest for ultimate meaning, the transcendentalist route is much easier to follow. That is why, even as

 

 

 

 

 

48 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.109.

49 Lao Tzu. ThinkExist.com. Heart Quotes. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotations/heart/

 

empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart.”50 It does not mean sidelining the brain or suffocating the mind; it means that the brain--mind has to learn to work in harmony with the heart. Many are the instances in history when the non-physical dimension of the heart has guided men, at times of great peril and darkness. The Peruvian spiritual author, Carlos Castaneda said that while choosing any path, choose the one with a heart. And Jesus said that those that are pure in heart will see God. The unraveling of the Ultimate Truth, the truth behind appearances that blur our vision, is possible only through deep contemplation in the heart. John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher and essayist, acclaimed as one of the brainiest men of modern times with an IQ of 200, hit the nail on the head, when he said “No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.”51 To induce and orchestrate such a change, man needs both the cold reasoning and craftiness of the mind and the clemency and compassion of the heart. For some time, the mark of human excellence has been measured by the IQ (intelligence quotient); in the mid-1990s, psychologists like Daniel Goleman discovered the EQ (emotional quotient), with emphasis on feelings as the measure of human wholesomeness; and now, at the turn of the 21st century, it is the SQ (spiritual quotient), which is