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

our consciousness is our behavior, which is really how we externally project our desires, passions and emotions that affect the lives of other people.

There are two diametrically different paradigms of ‘behavior’ in human life: the behavior of others and our own behavior. Often, what we consider as obnoxious in the behavior of others, we are oblivious of it in our own selves; though we criticize the conduct that is repugnant in others, we fail to see it in our own conduct. Goethe said that behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image but do not see it themselves. The vehicle for behavior is the body; and the sarathi, the one at the controls, is the consciousness. Consciousness is what we are inside; behavior is what we are outside. And behavior has a huge bearing on how the human body will evolve in the future. As a matter of fact, human physiognomy has changed over evolution, a change that, significantly, has taken hardly one ten-thousandth of the total time span of life on earth. Primitive man was marked by a flattened skull of relatively small cranial capacity, a retreating forehead and chin, heavy, massive jaws, and a short, thick neck. Modern man, by contrast, has a typically near-vertical forehead, a domed occipital lobe, relatively large cranial capacity, a slender neck, jaws of reduced size, and a marked eminence of chin. This ‘transformation’ was the result of how the body and its faculties were harnessed for dedicated purposes. And that will happen in the future too. But science is focusing on reengineering the human body, leaving human behavior to human culture. Plastic surgery, prosthetics, robotics, electronic and digitized vocal chords, implants for hearing, chemicals to adjust and fine-tune brain functioning, genetics, and cloning organs are the current ways to augment and upgrade our physique.

At the same time we are soaking our body with a scary cocktail of chemicals. It is utterly amazing and shocking how resigned and reconciled we are about the poison we put into our bodies — ‘pollution in people’ — through chemicals in the food we eat, in the air we breathe and in the water we drink. Someone said that the human cadaver is so full of toxic chemicals that animals would not touch human meat. How thisgrowing menace of chemicals in our life will play out is uncertain. For example, if sex continues to be the obsessive passion for the brain and the body, independent of procreation, and if it continues to distort Nature’s priorities, then Nature itself, as a defensive measure, might change the very act of sex to bring it back within the bounds of the original intent. What role computerization will play in human evolution is anybody’s guess. One view is that computers offer one way towards overcoming the speed and capacity limitations of the human mind. It is assumed that a mental task reducible to a set of written rules can be reduced to a computer program, which leads to the euphoric expectation that practically any task the mind performs can be analyzed in detail and programmed. The virtuosity and speed of computers is galloping at a breathtaking speed. Computers with television cameras are learning to recognize faces and common objects by sight. Adding mechanized appendages to a computer empowers it to grasp, recognize, and manipulate objects, and to move through a cluttered environment. Some predict that soon, we

 

 

will have computers with superhuman mental powers with superhuman speed. Even if we discount the hyperbole, the fact remains that computers and the Internet have fundamentally altered the way the human mind was used before. It is idle to think that it will not have any effect on the evolution of the species. Some keen observers of the human condition apprehend that, for example, if the majority of mankind wears spectacles, all children born maybe hundred years from now might be short-sighted at birth, as a mark of adapting to the living environment. And if we use computers and calculators more than the brain, then the future human brain will provide for that even at birth. The bottom line is that even if computers can substitute the current mental tasks, it is still the human mind which will decide what to do, with and to what capacity, and that will not change the way humans use the tools they have.

The basic tenet is that every trivial thought we entertain, and every menial act we do (or do not), will have a say in the mental and physical make-up of future generations. Mind- incubated malice, the withering will to wish ill of others sans self-gain, has come to infect a major part of human consciousness and that has made the human condition coarse and corrosive, divisive and destructive. The missing link, the fatal insufficiency, in the human condition is harmony, which Nature has in abundance. We often confuse equality with harmony. Indeed, if there is equality, there is no need for harmony. Nothing is more unnatural than equality; the challenge is to induce equity in inequality and harmony in heterogeneity. In trying to remove inequality that is intrinsic in Nature, we end up creating more inequity.

Marcus Aurelius said, “He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the Universe.”87 The disharmony at the deepest layers of our being manifests externally in multiple ways, from broken homes to the clash of faiths, ethnic cleansing, virulent nationalism, religious zealotry, nuclear terror, and road rage. Few are satisfied with their own good; many want others to bite the dust. We are all prisoners of passions which are increasingly projected as prejudices. The end result is the warping and corruption of the myriad, often moral, choices that our transient lives entail. At the same time, we are also reassured that many behavioral tendencies could also be genetically fixed with the discoveries of specific genes that predispose a particular person in a certain direction. For instance, scientists say that they have discovered what they call a ‘divorce gene’, which means that in certain individuals, any stress in an intimate relationship might prompt them towards separation rather than reconciliation. Human behavior and responses to situations and experiences are far too complex and, according to some religions, the roots go back to the time even before birth. While, as the popular song Que sera sera goes, ‘whatever will be, will be’, and divisiveness and hatred, not compassion and love, have come to be the pervasive passions in the human way of life. Feelings of visceral dislike, a desire to annihilate the source of our unhappiness, or deeply felt loathing for something or someone, seem to occupy a lot of our psychic space. In addition, there are many who suffer from self-hatred, partly as a result of low self-esteem. This could be a hangover of our prehistoric or primal past in which survival depended on suspicion, and which became an instinct and got embedded in the brain, as a kind of protective programming. That instinct of distrust manifests as hatred when combined with other factors like insecurity, jealousy, and malice. The way to combat hatred is to cultivate love and compassion. At this point, it really does not matter if man is a ‘Noble Savage’ or a ‘Civilized Brute’ and we cannot be even sure who is being unfair to whom — man or beast. Edgar Allan Poe, in his book The Black Cat (1843), was merciless in writing

 

 

 

87 Cited in: Care2 Share. Jonathan Huie Share book. Accessed at: http://www.care2.com/c2c/share/detail/1451674

 

that “there is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.”88

 

Knowledge, ignorance and illusion

We just want to know; no ifs or buts; either in daily life or in matters of greater import. That yen for knowing — to know why the stars shine, as Bertrand Russell phrased it, has been the primary driving force in every human adventure. Being curious might have killed the proverbial cat but man has come out clearly better off. Being nosy, wanting to know that we need not — and even should not — know, the human species has achieved much. To the extent that we can discern patterns and create cause/effect relationships, our unquenchable thirst to know enables us to better predict and manipulate the future. This trait had made us better hunters, to design and build tools, to control fire, and to develop agriculture. But it has also entailed a heavy price, starting right from his Biblical banishment from Paradise. While the differences between terms like data, information, knowledge, and wisdom are the stuff of punditry, it is ‘wisdom’ that man has long longed for. The great Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, when asked what he did, reportedly answered that he was simply a lover (philo) of wisdom (sophia). But anyone can tell that ‘what we do know’ about the true fundamentals is very little: what life itself is and ought to be; why one human is alive and another dead, not vice versa; and what awaits us thereafter. Is this all some somnambulistic sleep walking, a dream within a dream? Our knowledge is mostly about ‘what’; very little of ‘how’; and almost none of ‘why’. The real knowledge that we do not have is the ‘way we know what we know’; that is how — or why — we think we know, and the certainty that comes with it. And from certainty, an emotional state which some psychologists call our ‘certainty-bias’, comes intolerance and vanity. Voltaire said that doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd. Doubt is unpleasant because we just do not know what to do, and that is deemed an affront to human intelligence; certainty is absurd because we know we cannot be certain of anything, and anything might happen to anyone, anytime.

Don Miguel Ruiz, the Mexican spiritual author of The Voice of Knowledge (2004) says that “so much of the knowledge in our minds is based on lies and superstitions that come from thousands of years ago. Humans create stories long before we are born, and we inherit those stories, we adopt them, and we live in those stories.”89 The Irish poet T.S. Eliot wrote, “Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” 90

It might sound outrageous, but some say the kind of ‘knowledge’ that most people hanker after is worse than ‘uncorrupted’ or innocent ignorance. The Upanishads tells us that “into blind darkness enter they who worship ignorance; into darkness greater than that enter they who delight in knowledge.”91 The Upanishads divide knowledge into higher and lower

 

 

 

 

88 Cited in: Laura Moncur. Edgar Allen Poe’s Birthday, January 19, 1809. Accessed at: http://www.quotationspage.com/special.php3?file=w980118

89 Ascension Gateway, Famous Spiritual Quotes, Don Miguel Ruiz Quotes, Accessed at: http://www.ascensiongateway.com/quotes/don-miguel-ruiz/index.htm

90 T.S. Eliot Quotes. Famous Poets and Poems. Accessed at : http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/t s eliot/quotes

91 Macrohistory and World Report. Changing Hinduism, Jains and Buddhists, to 500 CE. The Upanishads. Accessed at: http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch05b-ind.htm

 

knowledge; paravidya, the higher knowledge, is the knowledge of the Self, the all-pervading force that is both inside and outside, everywhere and nowhere; aparavidya, the lower knowledge, is all the rest, in a breathtaking candor, including the knowledge of the Vedas itself. There is an arresting story in Hindu mythology about the great rishi Narada. Feeling restless, Narada, the most celebrated of all sages, immortal and ever present, approaches another great rishi Sanathkumara and asks him to relieve him of his deep distress.

Sanathkumara asks him to show what he does know and Narada enumerates his encyclopedic knowledge of all the sacred texts, and then says that what he knows is