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

the least; and the ant seems so far removed from our present personality. The caterpillar ceases to be the creepy creature and soars into the sky as a Monarch butterfly. Likewise, we want to remain the same ‘crafty’ creature and still become a glistening, if greedy, ‘god’.

In any scenario, what we need for real change is a minimum mass of humans who are prepared to turn their gaze inwards and since we do not know the nebulous number, everyone should behave as if he is that one person who would tilt the scales. Whether we do a ‘butterfly’ or go over the cliff like the legendary lemming depends on the myriad choices of daily life, which, in turn, depends on the character of our consciousness. Whichever way it is, it does seem that this generation of humans has the unique opportunity denied to all previous generations, to take humanity to a higher stratum of consciousness or accelerate its extinction. Scenarists like the eminent Australian microbiologist Frank Fenner are predicting that the ‘end’ could be within the next hundred years, kindled by overpopulation and ‘unbridled consumption’. One should perhaps change the order and put our insatiable appetite for consumption (which reflects as an assault on Nature and leads to global warming and climate change) ahead of the ‘problem of population’. It is human avarice and malice that is the ‘mother’ of all problems, not the number of humans alive on earth at any given point.

Grim and gloomy as the future might seem, the history of the human race shows that, given the proper context and state of consciousness, man is capable of surprising — and surpassing

— himself. At this point in time, that surpassing has to be to overpower malice in his mind and make compassion compulsive. And our heart should come center stage. For, as the French playwright Jean Racine wrote, “A noble heart cannot suspect in others the pettiness and malice that it has never felt”. If we cannot suspect we cannot see, and what we cannot see we cannot act upon. Although their numbers are meager and might constitute only a tiny fraction of mankind, there are apparently enough humans on earth who genuinely want to embark upon the path of compassion and self-discovery. According to occult belief, just as animal consciousness evolved into human consciousness, human consciousness must eventually progress towards God-consciousness and enter a spiritual kingdom with powers and knowledge undreamt of. The only route for human betterment — at this juncture, even for sheer survival — is to move up on the spiral of consciousness and transform the very ‘nature of human reality’, which then will empower us to see and relate with the Outer reality differently. An ancient Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu wrote that “pure consciousness transforms itself…” (Trimsatika). To make it ‘pure’ we must cleanse it of mind-dominance. That is the most formidable challenge man has ever faced — and failed. We need a new catalyst, a new trigger, which so far neither religion nor science was able to provide. Recent advances in the body of our knowledge like quantum physics concerning the interplay of consciousness and the physical world, indicate that instantaneous changes in widely separated systems can occur. That in a mysterious manner the separated particles remain in constant

 

contact offers new hope that science and spirituality can join forces in consciousness-change and in furthering the cause of the ‘manava dharma’, the righteous duty of all humankind on earth. It could mean that the idea of oneness or poornam envelopes atoms and humans alike. And that, coupled with the re-energizing of heart intelligence, could jump-start human transformation.

 

 

Chapter 2

Human Condition — Paradox to Peril

 

The human in the universe

‘Being human’ — that is the magic mantra we chant to justify our condescension and cruelty over everyone else as far as we can see with the naked eye or telescope or microscope. That is what defines — and confines — our earthly existence. But ‘being human’ is also not being satisfied with ‘being human’. As Albert Camus quipped, man is the only being that refuses to be what he is. And that is at once the promise and peril of man. The promise is that that ‘refusal’ can lead to self-analysis and salvation. The peril is that, unless guided properly, it can, in the words of D.H. Lawrence, make man ‘the only animal in the world to fear’. The reason promise can so easily slip into peril is because we really do not know who we really are or ought to be. In the words of the Persian poet and philosopher Jalal ad-Din Rumi (The Essential Rumi, 1996), we wonder ‘Where did I come from? What am I supposed to be doing? Who is it in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?’ Man has long wondered how and where he belongs in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Astronomers tell us that the earth is a tiny blue dot in the Milky Way, and our sun is just one among millions of other suns in our small galaxy, which is just one among hundreds of millions of galaxies in the universe where new suns and planets are constantly being formed. Would there be any point in having a universe if we humans were not here to observe it? When American historian Harry Elmer Barnes asserted that “Astronomically speaking, man is insignificant,” George Coe, professor of religious education, replied, “Astronomically speaking, man is the astronomer.” Significant or insignificant we might be in the universe, there is no denying that our lives are interwoven with the universe. As French astrophysicist Michael Casse reminds us, “When we drink a drop of water, we drink the Universe, because a molecule of water, the H2O, gathers in itself the hydrogen — a vestige of the initial explosion, the Big Bang — and the oxygen, produced in the furnace of the stars and exhaled by them”. The particles that were composed at the beginning of the Universe, the atoms that were forged in the stars, the molecules that were constituted on earth or in another place… all that is also inside us”. At the existential level, we still debate what ‘being’ is, and if ‘non-being’ is not ‘being’; and if what we call ‘living’ is real or simply a ‘dream within a dream’. Capturing our quandary, Shakespeare exclaimed in Hamlet ‘To be or not to be’; and the French surrealist A. Rimbaud — who, in his teens, was dubbed by Victor Hugo as ‘infant Shakespeare’ — pronounced ‘I am someone else’. The Greek playwright G. Xenopoulos (The Secret of Countess Valerena, 1904) satirized the problem with the words “If I wasn’t the one I am, who would you like me to be?”59.

Whenever we think of ‘getting’ something or ‘becoming’ someone else, it always implies that what there is right now is somehow deviant or deficit, that “there is in ‘me’ something missing, and I have got to get some kind of experience or some kind of quality that is going to make me fulsome, and then, once I get it, it is going to be mine and I can keep it.” The trouble is that most of us want to be someone else, but we cannot make up our minds who

 

 

 

59 G. Xenopoulos. The Secret of Countess Valerena. 1904. Accessed at: http://www.allthelyrics.com/ forum/greek-lyrics-translation /23789-first-sentences-an-isoun-allos.html

 

that someone ought to be, because we really want to be a ‘super-being’, indestructible and impervious to age and death, to ‘time and tide’. That sets up the stage for our assault on Nature and approach to God. And we want to know if we are a lumpen mass living — as Karl Marx described the toiling peasants of France — like ‘potatoes in a sack’, or if we are divine beings with an ordained place in the universe? We may quibble and debate about what ‘life’ is but more practically, the question is: when interdependence of life on earth is so obvious, why do we experience ourselves, our thoughts, our feelings, our desires as something separate and stand-alone from the rest?

Spiritually, that quest for our essential identity is also the quest for God, and is symbolized by the Vedantic question ‘Who am I?’ That disarmingly simple but causal question, made famous by the 20th century saint of southern India, Ramana Maharshi, in the Tamil language as Nan yar, has come to capture the quintessence of man’s spiritual aspiration. Ramana Maharshi said that that very query or thought will destroy all other thoughts and, like the stick used for stirring the burning fire, will itself be burnt, leading to self-realization. The British philosopher Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 1984), who specializes on issues of individual identity, rationality, and ethics, put it starkly when he wrote that we are not what we believe ourselves to be, that actions and experiences are interconnected but ownerless. And that a human life comprises of a bundle of enmeshed mental states rolling like tumbleweed down the days and years, but with no one (nothing) at the center. All human knowledge, all human endeavors, the ‘spur that makes man struggle with destiny’ (Donald G. Mitchell), has been to overcome that which evolution has made us to be or accidentally pushed us into, biologically, psychologically or spiritually. We are the only species that is not content to be what it appears to be, that does not accept the state of its being, the condition of its existence. Man is also the one who is aware, at some level or depth, that he is more than what he has become. And that he is special, unique, indispensible and yet limited both by his body and mind. The cumulative effect of all these diverse forces, pulls, and pressures, has created a huge imbalance and dis-equilibrium that is at the epicenter of the turmoil in the human world. And the heart of man’s predicament is his ignorance about his core identity as a living organism on earth, and about what his mission and mandate on this crowded planet is. As theosophist and occult master George Gurdjieff noted, ‘identification’ is one of our most terrible foes, and man is always in a state of identification; only the object of identification changes. Identity is both a tag and a gag. But if we do not know who we are, how can we ‘become’ what we want to be? How then can we have a goal or a destination or know our destiny or direct our effort? Without clarity about the starting point how can we reach the finishing line?

That ambiguity and perplexity has led to our obsession with ‘I’, animosity with ‘Others’ and ambivalence about ‘We’. These are the most commonly used personal pronouns that occupy commanding heights in all human interactions. By the way we use these words, we understand and deal with our lives and the world at large. The word ‘we’ refers to something that concerns us as a group, a community, or a society. But behind the generic ‘we’ there is the ‘I’, and it makes or breaks the ‘we’. For any serious spiritual search or inner change, one has to inquire into this ubiquitous ‘I’ behind the collective ‘we’ and ‘they’ or the ‘others’. Unless we have a reasonably clear comprehension of the distinction and distances between ‘I’, ‘We’, and ‘Others’, we cannot make any tangible spiritual progress; nor can we truly coexist and complement each other. More so because, according to some developmental psychologists, the sense of separateness is not innate and a newborn does not have it until the age of three. Indeed, the primary reason why humans, on the one hand, plunder and poison the environment that sustains their life, and on the other hand, exploit, demean and deny dignity to fellow-men is one and the same — the denial of the same rights and respect (which they