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

is out of balance, presaging a seminal shift in human consciousness, ending the era of psychological ‘individuation’ that began some 26,000 years ago. Instead of debating what a particular dawn of a day might portend, we should start participating and living in the moment, not fearing the future, and start purifying ourselves inside out, and embody in us genuine compassion. This is no time to try to fix things in our mind; it is the time to tune-in to our heart.

Our track record shows that mind-generated human intelligence has not managed well the paradoxes endemic to the human condition; and its increased reliance on machines like the computer as its own proxy has only worsened it. It has not found a way to harmonize the dwandas or the pairs of opposites that are inherent in nature and in life in general: pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, good and bad, success and failure, finite and infinite, and, above all, competition and cooperation. As a result, fault lines have developed between knowledge and knower, knowing and doing. Those who possess knowledge hardly have the right mindset, leading to wrong actions. And those who are ‘hands-on’ cannot see beyond the short term. Knowledge, like much else in the human world, is increasingly fractured. To carry any credibility or respect everyone today must get himself accepted as an ‘expert’ or a ‘specialist’. From cooking to killing, we have people who advertize themselves as experts and specialists and sub-specialists, who often contradict and undermine each other, based on the same set of ‘facts’. What we desperately need are ‘specialist non-specialists’ and ‘global citizens’, who look at a part in the context of the whole, and who view the world as one wholesome organism. And we must stop perceiving ‘facts’, ‘proof’ and ‘truth’ as interchangeable. The real ‘fact’, ‘proof’, and ‘truth’ is that we know nothing or nothing about ‘knowing That by knowing which everything is known’ as the Upanishad says. Such is the state of our ‘factual’ knowledge and insightful intelligence that the best brains in the business cannot even agree on the ‘facts’ of any problem that we confront. For example, on

 

anthropogenic global warming (AGM), that is, global warming caused by human actions, some experts say that, contrary to what we are led to believe, the globe is actually cooling. We are at a loss to know how to react to the news that the past month — June, 2010 — was the hottest month ever recorded. Some say that human behavior is endangering earth; others say that the earth can take care of itself, with or without man. We cannot agree whether the nuclear weapon is a terrible weapon of war, or a gift of god to prevent war and to check on our appetite for mass murder. We cannot agree on any affirmation; we agree by elimination. This was the modus operandi that even the Upanishads adopted to explain the concept of Brahman — the famous double negative, neti, neti (not this, not this). Some modern thinkers too echo the Upanishadic line of thought, its point of departure. According to Karl Popper, we cannot conclusively affirm a hypothesis, but we can conclusively negate it. The human mind is more at ease at elimination, whether it is an idea or an individual. And it ‘eliminates’ any possible threats to its suffocating hold on the human consciousness. Man’s search for another source of cognition or intelligence has also thus far failed.

All this angst leads us to a startling but obvious conclusion. The starting point for any candid and quiet introspection has to be the recognition, or confession, if you will, that the malaise and malady of man is, in the main, the mind itself. The human mind is the deadliest weapon in the world, not the nuclear or biological bomb. The theosophist Alexander Wilder said that ‘the chief problem of life is man’. And man has become ‘the problem’ because the mind governs man. Malice, the visceral will and dark desire to wish ill of others sans self- gain, enslaves us and rules our mind. In fact, behind every crisis the world faces — be it broken homes or convulsive climate change, nuclear Armageddon or noxious neighborhoods, ‘clash of civilizations’ or ethnic savagery, random violence or rabid religiosity — it is the canker of malice, far more noxious and deeper than envy or jealousy, that is the undercurrent, the driving force. Our ceaseless search for another villain is a ruse of the mind itself.

Although the human mind has been called ‘superior to everything born or begotten’, it has also been described ironically as not only feeble and fickle but also mischievous and malicious, a refrain common to all scriptures. It has been called the ‘greatest gift of God’, as well as a crippling burden. While we yearn for ‘peace of mind’, what we give to others is a ‘piece of our mind’ when their actions do not fit in with the will of our mind. The mind brooks no delay or denial, contradiction or correction; it does not let us admit our mistakes or take responsibility; for all our omissions and commissions it placates us through the three ‘E’s — evasion, explanation, and excuse. The human mind is the force in the universe that makes the oppressor believe he is the oppressed; the controller think he is the controlled. It makes the nasty person think that he is nice, much like a tiger thinking it is a lamb. It wants to prevail, not participate; wants to control, not cooperate. It has not learned how to handle both dependency and dominance. It does not let us feel guilt or shame for hurting or humiliating others. The Buddha said, “All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed, can wrong-doing remain?” One of the most powerful tools man has is the ‘tool of tools’, the mind, and that is where we have gone terribly wrong. Whatever were the driving forces or stumbling blocks, we are unable to ‘choose’ well or wisely, both as individuals and as a species. Every choice in the end is mental, and the inherent attributes of the mind stick to the choices we make, or think we make. While pundits debate about ‘the art of choosing’ (à la Sheena Iyengar) and improving our decision making capacity, the instrument chosen is the one that has got us into trouble in the first place — the mind itself. And those who say humankind is prematurely drifting towards apocalyptic disaster, as well as those who say we are headed towards the ultimate Utopia, are united on the means — the mind. Those who say that man is terminally adrift, rely on mind control, while the latter, who say that a great awakening is upwelling from the deepest depths of man, bank on boosting mind-power.

Although it is sometimes said, like in Vedanta, that the mind is the source of our bondage as

 

well as of our liberation, what we actually experience is that that which is the problem cannot be the solution, as Einstein noted about human intelligence. It is this conundrum that has bedeviled man’s attempt to master himself. Nothing seems right in our lives because, quite simply, the one thing that drives our actions and reactions, perceptions and prejudices and predispositions, is flawed: our intelligence. And our intelligence is flawed because its source of supply is the wrong one: the mind. We cannot change the ‘mind-set’, the innate character of the mind; but we can — and must — change the mindset, the ‘view from within’, to borrow the words from the Chilean philosopher Francisco Varela. What we can and must change are the assumptions, beliefs, dispositions that predetermine a person's responses to and interpretations of situations. At this pivotal point in human history, we must discard not only the dated paradigms but also the dated questions; we must dare to ask new questions.

These new questions must touch the very core of our being, and the thrust of our thought ought to be to understand how to awaken ourselves from our cosmic amnesia, and move into the embrace of the universal essence that underlies and pervades all life. Although it might seem a deficiency, man, unlike any other species, being borne incomplete, offers the potential to become radically different in the break between birth and death. That ‘wet-clay’ state, that very incompleteness, that lack of finality, makes radical transformation not only possible, but also enables man to be simultaneously a participant and a partner. It is in us to make the difference — positive or negative. Indeed, transformation is the meaning and mission — and measure — of human life. The problem is that we cannot truly change without giving up something; we cannot be transformed unless we terminate. But we have to remain the same in some way; and retain something we must, while being transformed. A caterpillar cannot become a butterfly if it wants to stay firmly on the ground. And the fact is that the butterfly is in situ; already in the creepy creature. It is not ‘visible’ before, in the words of Primo Levi, the ‘mystery of metamorphosis’, but the blueprint and the potential was always there and present. The trouble is that we do not know what is truly inside us; what is the nature of our ‘self’. As a result, we do not know what to give up or terminate, and what to hold on to, and to let what we already are to manifest. In Vedantic terms, our true ‘self’ is the eternal Self, the divine essence, which is the ‘butterfly’, and it has always been there. The caterpillar is the idea of, or sole identification with, being only human; and that has to be liquefied and disintegrated through spiritual sadhana or practice. Then, the already present butterfly camouflaged by the illusion can emerge from the cocoon of consciousness and, as Robert Frost wrote, ‘fly and all but sing’.

To evolve into a higher — and nobler — paradigm of life, to orchestrate our own ‘mystery’, we need to change the complex of controls, compass and coordinates, the thinking and the tools we have thus far used to reach this point in our evolution. We have to go to an altogether different dimension of life, to a higher cusp of consciousness. As the Czech philosopher Stanislav Grof noted, “A radical inner transformation and rise to a new level of consciousness might be the only real hope we have in the current global crisis brought on by the dominance of the Western mechanistic paradigm”. It means changing, in Alexander Wilder’s words, the ‘potencies of man’s interior being’, the forces that drive and determine everything we think, feel, say, and do. It means that for any meaningful change in the content and character of the human condition, we need a new ‘genre of inner identity’, a complete break from almost everything we have come to accept, value, and cherish. The touchstone is that we must feel, instinctively and effortlessly, pain, not pleasure, at someone else’s pain. That depth of empathy is clearly not possible without cathartic consciousness change, which, in turn, means that we must dethrone our brain/mind-driven intelligence from its pedestal and from where it dominates our lives. Consciousness and unconsciousness are relative states; states of wakefulness or somnolence. In truth, no one is fully conscious or fully unconscious, even in death. Even within a single life — from infancy to childhood to adolescence to youth

 

to old age — we function in different states of consciousness or unconsciousness. What man has to strive for is to be ‘awake’, as the Buddha described himself when asked who he was. We must awaken the Buddha within, or allow the baby Buddha struggling to come out from the darkness of our ‘womb’. Then everything and everyone will appear as different parts of the same universal body, and we will then cease to be a marauding menace on earth.