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

but are actually necessary conditions for the assertion of their opposites. Not only mystics but even some scientists like the physicist Neils Bohr commented that superficial truths are those whose opposites are false, but that “deep truths” are such that their opposites are actually apparent contradictories. The Bhagavad Gita describes a karma yogi, among other things, as a person unmoved by pairs of opposites. Lord Krishna also says, while delineating Himself, that He is the compound called dwanda among all compounds. One of the essential attributes of a jivanmukta, the enlightened one who attains liberation while still remaining in the human body, is to transcend dwanda and to be in a state of non-duality. The word ‘yoga’ comes from the Sanskrit word yuj, meaning to join or unite. It is the union of all aspects of the individual: body, mind, and soul. Hence, yoga reunites all opposites — mind and body, stillness and movement, masculine and feminine — in order to bring about reconciliation between them. Chinese sages called this dynamic interplay of two extremes yin and yang — positive and negative — and have extended this principle to the function of daily life. The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus, among others, propounded this as a way to make sense of the phenomenal world. Such insight into the unity of things is itself a kind of transcendence, and is found in various mystical traditions. The idea occurs in the traditions of German mysticism and Buddhism, among others.

Perfection means to be complete, being so good that nothing else could be better. The opposite of perfection is imperfection, which is the condition of every living creature. Anger is an impairment to perfection ; malice is an impairment; greed is an impairment; obscene wealth is an impairment; leaving someone in distress is an impairment. We often confuse perfection with excellence by which we really mean efficiency, which is really to produce maximal returns with minimal effort. In one sense, there is perfection in the imperfection of the human being; and we should focus not on the perfection per se, but on managing the mediocrities in as perfect a manner as possible; not try to do extraordinary things but do ordinary things extraordinarily. The great, ‘almost divine’ Italian artist Michelangelo said that “the true work of art is but a shadow of divine perfection.” In either sense of completeness or flawlessness, the human being is far from perfect. Our imperfection is not only physical and organic; it is equally, perhaps even more, mental and moral. Our bodies are good enough for us to exist as earthly beings. Even if we become bionic and have the strength of a superman and the agility of a cheetah, it would not make a difference to our imperfection. Even if we attain physical immortality (as science is trying to do through genetic mutations), we would still remain an unfinished product. Our minds and moral norms are not good enough for realizing our full potential and to share earthly space with other human beings or other life forms. It is really not very productive to debate whether morality is innate, or if it is simply a legal inconvenience or ‘social lubricant’ or religious rigmarole. The fact is even a monster wants to be ‘moral’. Zygmunt Bauman says that we innately have what is called ‘animal pity’, which we feel when we see others suffering. If that were true, there is little doubt then that it has been smothered by the ‘human culture’, which we have so zealously nurtured over millenniums. What the mind has done is to make human culture so elastic and so specific that

 

it lets us get away with the feeling that we are ‘moral’ while doing immoral things. Every human relationship and institution has created its own moral standard. Marriage has its own morality; so has market and so has property. And today, it seems that society’s morality cannot keep up with technology. Indeed, that technology has eroded the moral dimension of every human institution from marriage to family to nationality, inappropriate to the technology-conditioned human personality. Yet, given the context of human life and the need for intensive human interfacing, without the restraint of morality — whatever may be its source or color — the full fury of human senses would tear us apart.

We should not blink or shy away from the fact that it is the ‘fear’ of society, of God, or of Hell that keeps us from succumbing to the allure of evil. We do not fear what it takes to be evil; we fear what might happen after evil is done. Swami Vivekananda said that if the law does not restrain us, we will all rob our neighbors’ houses. Anonymity has its value but it is proximity that clouds our lives. The French philosopher of social sciences Rene Girard says that sometimes the most suitable victim is the neighbor. That is because the most tangible face of the opposite of the ‘I’, the ‘Other’, is the neighbor. That was why Jesus put the commandment ‘Love thy neighbor as yourself’ next only to love of God. ‘Neighbor’ here is not only the one living next door; it is all of humanity, which is but the creation of God. One cannot love God without loving His closest likeness. It simply means respecting others and treating their needs and desires as highly as we treat our own. Every great spiritual teacher has said that one cannot love God while being nasty to a fellow human, indeed to all life.

Evolution, culture, civilization, mind, heart, scripture or science, they all trickle down to one single thing: how do we treat and relate to others. When all is said and done, the bottom line is behavior and the true test of character is conduct. And we are also not quite sure what ‘being moral’ ought to be in terms of practical behavior. Perhaps one of the most cogent expositions on ‘goodness’ is contained in the Buddhist discourse Metta Sutta, also called the Suta of Loving Kindness. It contains, among other things, the following aphorisms. It begins with the words, “This is what should be done by one who is skilled in goodness and who knows the path of peace”, and the word ‘skilled’ gives the impression that goodness can be inculcated and cultivated. The ‘good’ are those who are “able and upright”; and “straight forward and gentle in speech; humble and not conceited; contented and easily satisfied; unburdened with duties and frugal in their ways; contented and calm; and wise and skilful; not proud and demanding in nature.” The discourse further exhorts: “Let them not do the slightest thing that the wise would later reprove. Let none deceive another, or despise any living being in any state. Let none through anger or ill will wish harm upon another. Even as a mother protects her child, her only child, so with a boundless heart should one cherish all living beings”. The discourse ends with “the pure-hearted one, having clarity of vision, being freed from all sense-desires, is not born again in this world.”71

Apart from ‘goodness’, humans suffer from a psychosis of ‘greatness’. We talk of great men, great works, great civilizations and countries as the highest realm of human creativity. We use terms like greatness, genius, giftedness, charisma, goodness, godliness, icon and heroism without clear boundaries. All of them have meaning in relation to the opposite. Someone is great because the rest are deemed ordinary; someone is godly in comparison to the garden-type mortals, and someone is heroic when he performs an extraordinary act of courage or chivalry or magnanimity. While no two lives are equal, both in terms of their content and their legacy, and no life is too insignificant to make some

 

 

 

71 The Buddha's Words on Kindness (Metta Sutta). Accessed at: http://dharma.ncf.ca/introduction/sutras/metta- sutra.html

 

difference to other’s lives, the fact also is that some men have changed the tide of history by their very presence on earth, and some others have left a trail of misery and destruction.

Loosely speaking, great men are those who leave their indelible, not necessarily positive, imprints on history; genius is one who through his cerebral strength creates something of timeless value or beauty or one with an IQ level higher than 140; giftedness is an intellectual, artistic or creative ability higher than the average; charisma is what one exudes that makes one person follow another even against his will; goodness is what is decent in man; godliness is the outward manifestation of the divine within; icon is one who is larger than life and whom we admire uncritically; heroism is an act of bravery beyond the call of duty or the bounds of self-preservation. Thomas Carlyle said that the history of what man has accomplished in this world is essentially the history of great men who have worked here.

Shakespeare famously wrote that “some are born great; some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them”. On the question whether great men shape society (as Carlyle postulated) or society makes great men (as Herbert Spencer argued), we cannot come to any definitive conclusion; the safest solution is to opt for a mix of both. Some people show greatness by their mere existence and example; some simply by a seminal idea; some by their oratory eloquence; some by their writing or visual representation; some by capturing or controlling the levers of governance; and some through the barrel of a gun. And then the question is: what motivates or inspires a hero or a great man — personal gain or social purpose? On this too, opinions vary. The German philosopher Georg Hegel, for example, argued that a great man might be motivated by personal benefit and yet be serving a public purpose. Then again, all great men do not necessarily achieve ‘greatness’. Many a ‘great man’ has lived and died anonymously. Chance, fate or luck or destiny plays a dominant role, whichever way one would wish to characterize the phenomenon. Increasingly, in the face of the ineluctable forces that are patently beyond any semblance of human control, the deeds of ‘great men’ seem to wither into transience, and they are shown up as all too human or nothing but human. And, in terms of the moral calculus, the Greek scholar Athenaeus wrote that goodness does not consist in greatness, but greatness consists in goodness. Samuel Johnson said that nothing is truly great which is not right.

Whatever might be the perils or subtleties of ‘greatness’, there is hardly anyone who does not dream of being or becoming ‘great’. Some want to be great to wield power; some want to attain fame and fortune; some want to attract social esteem and recognition; some want to do ‘good’; some just want to ‘feel good’. At the same time, we often lament that the world of today is a world of mechanization and mediocrity, starved of great men and great leaders. Greatness is necessarily not goodness; in fact, more often than not, most great men, save prophets and saints, were morally flawed men, as Paul Johnson’s book Intellectuals (1988), so scathingly shows. Someone said that it is the prerogative of great men to have great defects. The closer we get to great men, the clearer it dawns on us that they too are ordinary men. A deep disconnection often exists between public profundity and private profanity in the minds of many great men. Their soaring intellect and lofty idealism has often been powerless to withstand the temptation to take unfair advantage of the dependent and the defenseless. The general human propensity to mouth piety and platitudes, but act with malice and meanness does not spare even great men. That raises the central question ‘what is the litmus test for greatness?’ Is it ‘being good’, or is it something that is independent of one’s personal behavior? Or is it the way one alleviates the other’s pain and suffering? By normal standards of behavior, Hitler