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

hold dear to themselves) to ‘Others’, who are often considered as a conglomerate

 

comprising nonhuman forms of life, other species, other races, religions, nations, classes, and communities of all kinds. And unless we know what separates — an ocean or a valley, mountain or a meadow — how can we build a bridge across? Unless we know or understand the differences that define us — what is ‘me’ and who are ‘you’— we can neither understand the mystery of the self and the lever of the cosmos, nor make diversity bind us, or keep our faith in each other. Unless we try not to annihilate the distance or change another person in our reckoning and change ourselves and accept ‘others’ as they are, the wondrous diversity of Nature will be a crippling burden in the voyage of life. In secular tradition, the cultivation of a personal identity is considered to be an appropriate value base in dealing with the uncertainties of life and to provide a sense of coherence and direction to our intellect and effort. That ‘value base’ is something to identify with, and all the things we have tried — relationships, religion, race, nationalism, society — have largely led us astray. One must draw a sharp line between ‘I-centeredness’ (or self-centeredness), and selfishness. While the former inquiry is a tool for introspection and self-abnegation, the latter is the external symbol of egotism, the main hurdle to spiritual growth, and the one that stands between man and God. Our essential affinity with divinity is what all scriptures affirm. The Hebrew Bible says ‘Thus saith the Lord: Ye are gods and children of the Most High’ (Psalm, 82:6). If we feel bereft of the gods, it is because we have forgotten our true identity. Are we then gods in eclipse, veiled by the divine maya? Or ‘civilized brutes with hidden fangs’? Or simply simpletons, with an oversized ego, who do not even know what is good for them?

Only next to ‘being human’ is the phrase ‘human way of life’ the most commonly used expression. It is at once a euphemistic cover-up, an explanation, and an excuse for brazen human behavior. It means that with the ‘human way’ everything can be extinguished; anything ‘human’ supersedes everything non-human. Psychologists and scientists have long struggled to explain human behavior. One school of thought is that our common ancestry makes any difference between other animals and humans only quantitative, a question of degree, not kind. Some have tried to cast it in purely mechanistic and deterministic terms.

Some others have argued that non-humanistic processes of thought and knowledge cannot be equated with those of the human, that they cannot be explained, in the words of the American ‘intellectual historian’ Arthur Lovejoy, ‘ in terms of molecular displacements taking place under the skin’. The truth of the matter is that every behavior in any space and time is unto itself. Every human or every animal does not behave the same way. Even individually we do not ‘behave’ the same way all the time, and in every circumstance and relationship. And we cannot even predict how any of us will ‘behave’ in the face of a certain temptation or provocation. But all life, human or otherwise, in its essence is the same — a process of inexorable decay; even death is a ‘rigid cold decay’. We equate decay with decadence and instead of using the inevitable as an opportunity to ‘grow’, we treat it as an implacable foe.

The human too is an animal, but human life differs dramatically from ‘other’ animal life. How that ‘difference’ makes a difference to the rest of life on earth and to the one that sustains life, Nature, is the question. Scientists tell us that the evolution of life on earth is not always through natural selection and survival of the fittest, that it is not necessarily and always ‘progressive’, or that it is not predictable and dotted with contingent and fortuitous events. In that perspective, where do we fit? Clearly, life did not manifest in the human composite just a geologic second ago, because evolutionary theory predicts that such an outcome is based on themes of progress and increasing neural complexity. According to this line of logic, humans arose, rather, as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events — in Edgar Cayce’s words, “from time to time, time to time, here a little, there a little, line upon line and line and line upon line” — any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to the advent of consciousness. There could have been hundreds, if not thousands, of eventualities that need

 

not have led to the arrival of the human on earth. The broad scriptural wisdom is that the human manifest of life is very rare, that it comes after many, many millions of births, after many, many millions of years of rotation through different species of life. We have changed countless dresses as aquatic animals, perhaps as many fishes and aquatic animals as there are in all the seas, then we changed bodies as creepers, plants and trees for many, many years.

Then we changed our bodies in insect life, reptile life, and then we changed our bodies in hundreds of thousands of beasts before ‘becoming human’. The purpose of human life, in this view, is God-realization. If intended as the launch pad for divine lift-off, the reality is that, despite millenniums of the continuum of life and thousands of succeeding generations, we remain firmly grounded, if not going underground.

Throughout history, the search for individual identity has been a focus of many great cultures and civilizations. We are groping to ‘know’ the essence or attribute (or set of attributes) that make us fundamentally what we are, and without which we lose our irreducible identity as a particular reflection of life on earth. It is through identity that we  seek authenticity; without it we feel illegitimate. Our thirst for identity runs parallel with our need to form relationships of different sorts and intensity with other humans. All relationships are now under tremendous stress because we feel increasingly rootless and worthless, and we are unable to harmonize different parts with the whole; each thinks or behaves as if it is the whole and looks at other parts, at best, as irritants. By intent every relationship entails erosion of individual identity and autonomy and that creates problems. If relationships are to be enriching, not enfeebling, they must reflect and enhance who we really are, beyond any limited image of ourselves fathered by family, society, or our own minds. They need to be germinated on the whole of who we are, rather than on any single form, function, relationship or even feeling. This presents a tremendous challenge, for it means undertaking a journey in search of our deepest nature. Our nexus with someone we love can in fact be one of the best vehicles for that journey. When we view it this way, intimacy, or any connection with any other person, becomes an unfolding process of personal and spiritual development. Bika Reed, in her book on ancient Egyptian texts on spirituality, The Field of Transformations: A Quest for the Immortal Essence of Human Awareness (1986), writes that in the spiral of continuous self-creation, the inconceivable ‘I’ is the essence of life. It is based on the premise that, to paraphrase the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, the very purpose of human life is to kindle a light of meaning in the darkness of mere being. But we pass through our life without the slightest awareness that everything we believe to be true is merely an opinion, an explanation, an excuse, or a misinterpretation; that we have swindled the grandiosity of being by conceptualizing within the context of limitedness; that we have persisted in the shallows of interpretation and shadows of learning, only because of an addictive vertigo of the heights of the unknown.

Caught in the coils of the things we need to do, physical, biological, material, we are forgetful of the whole of what we ought to be — to become fully ‘human’ we have to work our way to that whole. One of the theological, theoretical — and existential — aspects of life is how to harmonize the particularity of everyday life with the Advaitic (and Buddhist) insight that everything in life is void of any absolute identity or permanence. Everything is relative and transient but we have to act as if they are absolute and eternal. The great Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna wrote that nirvana (liberation) is simply samsara (worldly life) rightly experienced in the light of a proper understanding of the emptiness of all things.

Everything is instantly autonomous, yet mutually dependent; all things are in a state of permanent flux, inducing and undergoing transformations every minute and all around. Every individual is an example of the entirety of the human species. He is unique with his own peculiarities and is also a sample and specimen of humanity. Our ambivalence and fuzziness about our essential identity — our own and that of the world — is the root cause of suffering,

 

and it arises from our tendency to think that all objects exist in the world as they appear to our perception, as independent entities. Although views might vary about what one should attempt to identify oneself with, without identity there is no action, and without action there is no creation. The Upanishads say that if we can see the ‘self’ (relative to self-identity) in the Self that is relative to Atman/Brahman (which is tantamount to perceiving the cause in the effect and the Creator in the creation), then we can relieve ourselves from the sorrow and suffering of samsara, the world of matter and mind. Man will then be able to subdue and pass over all evil, so that evil will not subdue and pass over him. The basic problem is that the modes of human cognition applicable to ‘things’, including ourselves, fail us when we raise the question of the essence of our integral identity, and the paradoxical promise innate to the human condition turns into mortal peril. Erich Fromm called man an anomaly, a freak of the universe, a creature set apart while being a part. A new theory is that we are all aliens sharing a cosmic ancestry, that human life started from outside our present planet, and was then brought here by a comet. We are not quite sure what it all amounts to. No one can be quite sure about other species but man, although immersed in the minutiae of mundane life, is a virtual hostage of his sense organs; eyes, ears, mouth, nose, and skin. Our knowledge of the outside depends on our physiological methods of perception, which are filtered through the five external openings. We rely exclusively on our senses to react, relate and comprehend, and yet if there is one lesson of life, it is that our eyes can lie, our ears can misinterpret, our skin is a captive of comfort and our mouth can be a menace. Nothing is as it smells or feels like. Expressions like ‘I saw with my own eyes’ or ‘I heard it myself’ to signify the truth might not always be what we believe it to be.

The complexity and the criticality of our true identity is such that the refrain ‘know thyself’ has been the clarion call from the Vedas to the Delphic Oracle, as a way not only to comprehend the meaning of our being, not only to be wise, as Socrates tirelessly preached, but also as a means to know or realize God. The Prophet Muhammad said that he who knows himself knows the Lord. But in one sense, the point of departure, so to speak, for knowing ourselves is to know that we know nothing; or even, as the FiresignTheatre album intones, ‘Everything you know is wrong’. And that ‘knowledge’ or rather the absence of