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

95 Peter Drucker. Knowledge Management, The Next Information Revolution. Accessed at: http://www.greatmanagement.org/articles/535/1/The-Next-Information-Revolution/Page1.html

essay Impact of Science on Society (1952), “unless man increases in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will only be increase of sorrow.”96 No one seriously questions that statement, but the trouble is our intelligence cannot functionally differentiate knowledge from wisdom. Albert Einstein wrote in his book Out Of My Later Years (1993), that ‘we should take care not to make the intellect our God; it has of course powerful muscles, but no personality.’ Indeed, there is an emerging branch of knowledge that the main, if not the sole, problem that hampers human harmony and further evolution is our intellect which we commonly identify with intelligence. Mahatma Gandhi said: “The human intellect delights in inventing specious arguments in order to support injustice itself.”97 It is ingenious in making the illogical appear logical, cruelty as consideration, rudeness as necessity, and bad behavior as just response. The Kathopanishad compared the uncontrolled mind to the vicious horses of a chariot. The mind is a master at offering explanations and excuses for all acts of commission and omission, constantly offering excuses and making us feel ‘good’ about ourselves. It is not injustice alone that is justified, but also intolerance, cruelty, exploitation, genocide, slavery, tyranny, and oppression. Some form of systematic exploitation of labor — physical or sexual, being held against their will, being treated as the ‘property’ of another person, being deprived of the right to refuse to work or the right to leave, or to receive due compensation as a return for labor — has existed (and still exists) across cultures and civilizations and throughout history. That many great men like Thomas Jefferson felt no pangs of conscience in supporting and practicing slavery for life is symptomatic of the human mind. It was reported that by the year 1860 almost four million slaves were held by a population of just 15 million in the United States. And many of the ‘slave-owners’ could have been ‘decent’, ‘god-fearing’ human beings. Deliberately or subconsciously, we ignore the true nature of our actions through the three stratagems of evasion, explanation, and excuse. In the womb of the cosmos, it is thought that truly matters. The Irish poet T.S. Eliot wrote “Wait without thought; for you are not ready for thought: so the darkness shall be the light and the stillness, the dancing.”98 But, for the mind, to be without thought is death; in darkness, we harbor dark desires and in stillness we scheme. For a candle to be useful in the darkness, it must be lit. Mired as we are in the physical world, we expand our life in the immediacy of instant gratification, ignoring the spiritual demands made on us. Devoid, or deprived, of Self- knowledge, we do not even try to better ourselves. Instead, we insidiously denude each other’s dignity. ‘Dignity’ is a precious human right and as the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius noted, there is a proper dignity and proportion to be observed in the performance of every act of life. And everyone is entitled to, allowed and enabled to live in dignity. And since we often deny it to others, as the Anglo-Jewish writer and the ‘activist for the oppressed’ Israel Zangwill said,99 our decision-making and our choices become skewed. The intellect that drives our lives, as Vedanta tells us, cannot distinguish appearance from reality, illusion from image. The conundrum is that the mind-driven intellect alone is not good enough to orchestrate human life, though we have come to depend upon it completely.

Isolation, in fact, can be deceptively dangerous. As Lewis Mumford, the American writer and

96 Cited in: Global Oneness, Science and Spirituality: Marrying Science And Spirituality. Accessed at: http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Science_and_spirituality/id/221066

97 M.K. Gandhi. Satyagraha in South-Africa. Accessed at: http://www.forget-me.net/en/Gandhi/satyagraha.pdf

98 J. Bottum. First Things. What T.S. Eliot Almost Believed. 1995. Accessed at: http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9508/articles/bottum.html

99 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.67.

historian of science and technology wrote, “one of the functions of intelligence is to take account of the dangers that come from trusting solely on intelligence”100 Well, it has not happened, and that makes up the story of our species and the challenge of our time. The challenge is to actualize that kind of intelligence rather than the one we have.

The self and the razor’s edge

Man has long speculated about his innate nature and wondered about his true relationship with God, and about what happens after his body crumbles and dissolves into dust. From Nachiketa of the Katha Upanishad to Larry Darrel in Somerset Maugham’s novel The Razor’s Edge (1944), many have wrestled with these issues. Incidentally, the title of Maugham’s book comes from a verse in the Katha Upanishad “Get up! Wake up! Seek the guidance of an illumined teacher and realize the Self. Sharp like a razor’s edge, the sages say, is the path, difficult to traverse.” 101 Larry, for example, ruminates: “I want to make up my mind whether God is or God is not. I want to find out why evil exists, I want to know if I have an immortal soul or whether when I die, it is the end.”102 We still do not know; probably never will, possibly because there are no answers, not even in Nature. Even the Buddha, who saw and perceived everything that human consciousness is capable of — and maybe even more —, chose not to answer questions concerning God. One gets a ‘gut feeling’ that we are passing through or passing into, or that something or someone is pushing us into an ‘unknown unknown’, as distinct from a ‘known unknown’ like death. The French Nobel Prize winning author Alexis Carrel wrote, “Mankind has made a gigantic effort to know itself. Although we possess the treasure of the observations accumulated by the scientists, the philosophers, the poets, and the great mystics of all times, we have grasped only certain aspects of ourselves. We do not apprehend man as a whole. We know him as composed of distinct parts. And even these parts are created by our methods. Each one of us is made up of a procession of phantoms, in the midst of which strides an unknowable reality.”103 In its wanderings as an ‘unknowable reality’, the ship of mankind has entered virgin waters; the compass we have is malfunctioning and we see no dawn on the horizon. It is not the fate of the living, much less of the dead, that troubles many sensitive people like American cosmologist Brian Swimme, who says that he is haunted and terrified by what ‘the unborn’ are going to see when their time comes, say in a thousand years or so. Thousand years is too long even to be ‘terrified’; there are many who think that humans have a ‘window of opportunity’ for a century or two at best.

Yet, we must continue to believe that there is a future, and that we do have some say in shaping it. As Soto Zen priest Shunryu Suzuki wrote, “As long as we have some definite idea about, or some hope in the future, we cannot really be serious with the moment that exists right now.”104 And unless we are seriously aware of where we are, what we are and

100 P.D. Sharma. Immortal Quotations and Proverbs. 2003. Navneet Publications. Mumbai, India. p.35.

101 Cited in: Suma Varughese. Enlightenment - The End of Suffering. The Guru’s Role. Life Positive. Eknath Easwaran. The Upanishads. Accessed at: http://www.lifepositive.com/Spirit/Enlightenment/The_End_of_Suffering72005.asp

102 Cited in: Shirley Galloway. The Razor’s Edge. 1994. Accessed at: http://www.cyberpat.com/shirlsite/essays/razor.html

103 Alexis Carrel. Man the Unknown. 1938. Halcyon House, New York, USA. p.4.

104 Shunryu Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. 2004. Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boston, USA. Part Three, Right Understanding. p.136.

what we want to be, we cannot make any difference. And unless one attempts to make some difference, life is not worth a bother. The next minute is as near or distant as the next millennium; and we can make a difference to the minute, but in so doing, we can change the millennium too. The future, because it is the future, might not fit neatly into our palm to be manipulated, but it might not also slip out altogether. The old adage ‘hope for the best and prepare for the worst’ is still the only way to get on with life. In fact, there can be no hope without despair and suffering; indeed, it is only when these seem intractable that we turn to hope. We turn to hope because we cannot accept that something we want is denied, and that something we crave for remains beyond our clutch. We feel entitled to fulfill our desires and dreams, and when the ground reality shows that the high probability is that they will elude our reach, we turn to hope and God. In Greek mythology, when Pandora opened her box, she let out all the evils except hope. Apparently, hope was first considered to be as vicious as all other evils. But on realizing that humanity without hope would be dysfunctional, Pandora revisited her box and let out hope too. In fact, some philosophers like Nietzsche have argued that it was a ruse played by the gods to make man suffer endlessly without escape; if hope was not given to him, they were afraid that man would call it quits and upset their cosmic play. It now seems that modern man has become wise to the ruse and that is why more and more people are choosing suicide, overcoming the obstacle of hope when their life, in their view, becomes not worth living. Many hover between ‘hopelessly hopeful’ and ‘hopefully hopeless’ conditions, never knowing how to balance, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “finite disappointment and infinite hope.”

In terms of ‘conscious compassion’, the human, as he is currently perched, is perhaps at the very bottom of the ladder. Evil — the more monstrous the better — fascinates, indeed transfixes his attention. We fight dullness with vulgarity, boredom with prurience. We seem to be nonchalantly living up to Hannah Arendt’s haunting phrase ‘banality of evil’ to the extent that we have ‘normalized the unthinkable’; the horrendous has become the honored.

There is a growing breed of men who embrace the gospel of nihilism, who think that they can become ‘overmen’ by transcending both good and evil by turning away from both; in that attempt they become easy picking for evil. It is hard even for us to know for a fact how much of our inside is immaculately pure and how much is ‘filthy right down to the guts’. Nietzsche is most often associated with nihilism. In Will to Power (notes 1883–1888), he writes, “Every belief, every considering something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true world.”105 For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we give it. The French philosopher Albert Camus wrote in his essay The Rebel (1951) how metaphysical collapse often ends in total negation and the victory of nihilism, characterized by profound hatred, pathological destruction, and incalculable death, which is pretty much what the world is today. He also wrote that the ‘rebel’ can never find peace; he knows what is good and, despite himself, does evil, which is pretty much what man is today.

The underlying reality of life is the body; it is the object and the subject, entity and experience, the medium through which we relate to the world outside. However much we might convince ourselves that we are not just physical bodies, we cannot disconnect ourselves from the sense that the