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

death is life? Then again, the concepts of absoluteness and relativeness and the dream state are introduced to explain the paradox. It means that even the real or unreal are not absolute; it is like the reality of what we see in the dream state. Whether it is mistaking a rope for a snake, or a snake for a rope, the villain is ‘dim light’, which induces the false inference and the consequent fear and loss of the power of discrimination.

That, in turn, is caused by our exclusive reliance on the six sensory organs — eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, and mind. The sense-organs, particularly the mind, dominate our consciousness and unless that ‘domination’ is greatly dimished, the ‘dim light’ cannot be brightened enough to differentiate the perceived and the actual. It is the filter of clouded consciousness that causes the confusion and suffering and misery.

Throughout history, from Babylon to Greece, India and China to Europe, the eternal symbol of the snake has been a constant in myth and mythology, culture and fable. Snakes were regularly regarded as guardians of the Underworld, or as messengers between the Upper and Lower worlds because they lived in cracks and holes in the ground. The Gorgons of Greek myth were snake-women (a common hybrid) whose gaze would turn flesh into stone. The Hindu God Vishnu, one of the Trimoorthis, is often portrayed as perched on Shesha, the giant multi-headed serpent. And in the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, Shesha incarnates as Lakshmana and Balarama respectively, the brothers of Rama and Krishna (who are the incarnations of Vishnu). The Hindu God Subramanyaswami is worshipped in the shape of a serpent. Practically every god has an animal as a companion-vehicle: Ganesha has a mouse or rat; Vishnu has the giant eagle, Garuda; Shiva has the bull, Nandi, etc. The symbolism is meant to convey the message that the difference between gods and animals is not that wide.

In many tribal cultures, snakes are viewed as highly spiritual beings. John Milton wrote in Paradise Lost about the infernal serpent that, with guile, envy, and revenge, deceives the mother of mankind. Nagalok, the snake-people, are supposed to exist under the earth.

 

Contrary to the modern view of the serpent as slimy and treacherous, the snake is also associated strangely with wisdom because it ponders before it strikes, and it is able to revolve its head without moving its body and thus can see in all directions. It is a fascinating transforming process. In the Tantric Yoga, Kundalini, ‘the coiled one’ is the invisible storehouse of energy that yogis believe resides at the base of our spine, coiled just like a snake in the equally invisible energy center (chakra) called ‘Muladhar’, close to the coccyx. The unleashing of the immense power of the coiled serpent is the aim of many yogis and aspirants. One of the snake’s most noticeable characteristics is the regular shedding of its outer skin including its eyecap as it grows. Once the skin is shed, the old inner layer becomes the new outer layer, and a new inner layer of skin begins to develop. It is a metaphor for how we shed old ways and habits as we grow into higher spiritual energy, symbolizing the process of death and rebirth. That the Upanishads, so rich with stories and symbols, chose this analogy to make such a seminal point is worthy of note. The snake evokes many emotions, sacred and slimy, awe and fear, beauty and ferocity; in this instance, it is used to illustrate the doctrine of superimposition, how an illusion becomes a reality.

We may use different analogies and myths to describe the innate secret power within, but the fact is that only a few people are able to see more than the immediate and realize how their lives are entangled with those of others. Even they fail to relate their actions or inactions to the fate of the species. The irony is that we value everything by comparison with others but we give little value to human connectivity. All life is but a ritual, biologically or socially required. Biology we are born with, and being social is what is needed to share the same earthy existence. Most creatures are ‘social’ in varying degrees, and man, in particular, has always been a social animal. Even our earliest ancestors, even with smaller brains than ours, had to be ‘social’ for sheer survival in the face of predatory animals and drastic climate shifts. But that has not made human society harmonious; we crave for company but also, even more for control. Perhaps in no other species is this one-to-one relationship as troubled and tenuous as in humans. With all our much-hyped powers of perception and seeing the big picture, we are somehow paralyzed from recognizing that, although our features and attributes may be different, we are but bits and pieces of a bigger whole. Our very cognitive process is a captive of the cycle of cause and effect, work and reward, and action and reciprocity. The doctrine of reciprocity has two facets: at one level, it is giving back what we receive; at another level, it is not doing to others that which we do not want others to do to us. The latter is one of the unifying principles in all religions, often called ‘the golden rule’. When an emperor asked Confucius what should serve as a principle of conduct for life, he replied ‘shu’ — reciprocity. How deterministic is the doctrine of causality — or reciprocity — is debatable. The human mind views every circumstance and cause as a way to fulfill a desire. A famous verse in the Upanishads says ‘You are what your deep, driving desire is; as your deep driving desire is, so is your will; as your will is, so is your deed; as your deed is, so is your destiny’. In Buddhism, desire, with action consequent upon desire, is the cause of rebirth, and nirvana is the cessation of rebirth. Deliverance from desire is the deliverance from the cycle of birth and death. Desire itself is not bad; it is selfish desire or malice that is bad.

At the root of desire is thought, and thought, as the scriptures say, is the most potent power in the cosmos. Every thought, positive or negative, seeks similar thoughts in the universe and coalesces into a formidable source of energy. A single stray thought of a single Paleolithic man might have had an influence in shaping man as he is today. A wise man once said “Watch your thoughts, for they become words. Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become character. Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” Whether or not language is the exclusive mode of communication of humans, it has significantly shaped human personality. It has two dimensions: talking and listening. Between the two, it is talking that is the

 

preferred mode. Many scriptures and spiritualists emphasize the virtues of what in Buddhism is called ‘the art of deep listening’ as a way to overcome pain and suffering. It enables us to let go of any beliefs we have about the other person, and of our prejudices and past memories of him or her that inhibit our reaching out. Habit, which is defined as an acquired pattern of behavior that often occurs automatically, is pervasive in nature. As the American psychologist and philosopher William James says, “when we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits”70. Habit shapes not only behavior but even conditions our nervous system and mode of thinking and because it is a ‘reflex discharge’ as James puts it, habit can greatly influence how we relate to another person. Everything in life — indeed life itself — is a habit; our daily chores are a habit; insulting can be a habit; so is ‘being insulted’; exploitation and being exploited become a habit. Habit, over a period of time transforms into addiction. We cannot then help being nasty or cruel if we acquire that ‘habit’, and it becomes such a part of life that we cannot do without it, whether it is finding fault with, or humiliating or exploiting someone. It then becomes, as it were, our second nature. But then habit also offers hope; if only we can make ‘being kind and caring’ a habit, then we do not have to struggle to be good every day; it could become our ‘reflexive response’ to every provocation and temptation.

 

Dwanda-atheetha and the principle of polarity

The illusion of the rope being a snake or vice versa leads us to another, even grander, illusion of the ‘pair of opposites’. In Nature, according to the Principle of Polarity, everything is dual; everything has its pair of opposites: like and unlike, love and hate. Opposites are identical in essence, but different in degree; extremes meet in a melting pot. Dwanda or duality is not some metaphysical or mystical mumbo jumbo. It is practical and pervasive in mundane life. We live in a world of duality — male and female, two chromosomes, two cerebral hemispheres, light and darkness, heat and cold, love and hate, good and bad, pleasure and pain, victory and defeat, profit and loss, happiness and misery, prosperity and poverty, life and death, etc. We recognize one of any two only if the other is also present. The ultimate state of consciousness is what Vedanta calls dwanda-atheetha, which is to go beyond the ‘pairs of opposites’. The Principle of Polarity embodies the axiom that all manifested things have two sides — or two aspects or two poles — with manifold degrees between the two extremes. The bedrock of creation is that everything is dual: everything has poles; everything has its opposite; thesis and anti-thesis are identical in nature but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes are appearances. Spirit and matter are but two poles, and a major goal in spiritual life is to experience the ‘harmony of opposites’, which really is to treat the pair as one, or that ‘the all’ and ‘the many’ are One. Jalal ad-Din Rumi said that God creates the ‘pair’ so that we have two wings to fly, not one. There is no ‘natural’ equality or absoluteness in Nature, and that leads to relativity and contrariety, and gives the fallacious feeling that we can choose one and shut out the other. Yet, there is an underlying unity between the two contrasts. It is how we achieve that harmony that makes the difference between drudgery and dedication, misery and ecstasy. We call one end of the moral scale good and the other bad, or evil. A thing is ‘less good’ or ‘more good’, the “more” or “less” being regulated by the position on the scale.

The philosophy of the ‘unity of opposites’ has a long pedigree and has been the focus of a good chunk of scriptural and philosophic inquiry. The Jewish Kabbalah describes the

 

 

 

 

70 William James. Habit. 2003. Kessinger Publishing, USA. p.3.

 

Infinite God’ as a ‘unity of opposites’, one that harmonizes within itself even those aspects of the cosmos that are antithetical to each other. The Chandogya Upanishad (7.24.1) says that the Infinite is immortal while the Finite is mortal. The Ultimate is non-dual, and any presence or awareness of duality makes the awareness finite. The Infinite is the fullest expression and manifestation of the Absolute Reality, Brahman. The doctrine of coincidentia oppositorum, the interpenetration, interdependence, and unification of opposites, has for long been one of the principal manifests of mystical (as opposed to empirical and philosophical) thought.

Mystical experiences can only be understood in terms that violate the ‘principle of non- contradiction’, which is at once of unification and going beyond both, dwanda-atheetha as it is called in Sanskrit. The premise is that presumed polarities in thought do not exclude one another