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

reality is just three: that we are inside the body, and that there is a world outside, and that there is a Supreme Force. To relate to the last two we need the first. The much-venerated-yet-despised body is essential to reach our full potential; yet it is the limitation that weighs us down. Unless we get a grip over our bodies, we can do

 

 

 

105 Cited in: William McNeill and Karen S. Feldman (eds.). Continental Philosophy: An Anthology (Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies). 1998. Blackwell Publishers, USA. p.81.

 

nothing worthwhile in life. If the Self — which is both inside and outside, everywhere and nowhere — is the Primal Force, the moola karana in Sanskrit, then how does one connect and bridge with it? The inquiry about the Self or the Supreme Soul is the thrust of the Upanishads. In the Katha Upanishad, Yama, the very God of Death says that the Self is subtler than the subtlest and beyond all logic, that it is both immortal and indwelling and that “Bodies are said to die, but That which possesses the body is eternal.”106 In a famous verse, the Upanishad compares the body to a chariot, the self to the owner of the chariot, the Atman or the individual soul to the charioteer, the mind to the reins, and the senses to the steeds. Our inability to differentiate the self from the body, the real from the unreal, is said to be the principal cause of the malaise that afflicts mankind.

That inability affects all aspects of life. Despite what scriptural axioms and religious tenets preach and prescribe, man has not been able to shift the spotlight from the stars to the soul, from craving to striving, from the struggle for sheer survival in an unfriendly world to the search for meaning beyond survival. There is a gnawing feeling that the two guiding stars of human history — religion and science — have had little bearing on the quality of the human condition. Religions, as Swami Vivekananda said, have become “lifeless mockeries.”107 We live in a twisted world of galloping religiosity and accelerating evil. Some thoughtful people are saying that the human world is in a state of “desperate ferment of faith”, of “holy restlessness” and in a “second Age of Faith.”108 What ‘being religious’ has come to mean is, in fact, having a perverse effect on those who are truly religious. In these troubled times, many people traditionally would have liked to turn to religion for solace and guidance, but what they see is that much of that very turbulence and terror is inspired by one or another religion. The scriptures also indulge in a kind of ‘double-speak’ about the role of reason in the quest for meaning. On the one hand, they say that man must go beyond the bounds of reason, logic, deduction and deliberation, to know the answers to the essential questions of life. But on the other hand, they also say that, as the Buddha said on his death bed, “be a lamp unto yourself”, and that no one’s word, not even a prophet’s, nor the words of any holy text, should be taken on faith as the Truth unless it satisfies our intellect, reason, and empirical testing. Theologians and pundits might explain the apparent contradiction, but it still further confuses the already bruised minds. When they want to take refuge under the wings of the other primary source of search for truth, science, what they discover is that much of science and its cousin technology have become an enfeebling search for comfort, convenience, and empowerment for mass murder with minimal effort. What modern technology has done is to make the manifestation of man’s primal instincts of faith, fear, anger, rage, revenge and retribution more destructive, definitive and deadly. Murder is simply the ‘natural’ — and logical — culmination of human dissent and articulate individuality. Any minor or mundane human conflict or uncontrolled human passion and unfulfilled desire can now reach its climax in a killing — and with telling effect in terms of numbers; with one weapon, the human homicidal power multiplies manifold.

 

 

 

 

106 Swami Nirmalananda Giri. Commentary on the Katha Upanishad. The Immortal Self. Spiritual Writings, Atma Jyoti Ashram. Accessed at: http://www.atmajyoti.org/up_katha_upanishad_10.asp

107 Cited in: Wikisource, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, by Swami Vivekananda, Volume 7, Accessed at: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Complete_Works_of_ Swami_Vivekananda/Volume_7/Epistles_-_Third_Series/XXXVI_Miss_Noble

108 Cited in: Pico Iyer. Holy Restlessness. [Review of the book “The Religious Case Against Belief” by James P.Carse]. The New York Review of Books. USA. 26 June 2008. p.38.

 

Other than sex, most other human desires arise from money. In the world of money, there is little room for ‘losers’. The weak, the dispossessed, the disadvantaged, and the marginalized lose out in the competitive culture of the free market. With growth and profits as the driving forces, it spawns conflict, impoverishment, and predatory exploitation of natural resources. With over a billion people starving or malnourished any discussions on matters of spiritual growth with them sounds hollow, if not hypocritical. Put simply and starkly, the continued human presence on earth is becoming a threat to continuance of life on earth. The state of man today is close to what the Shvetashvatara Upanishad described a long while ago: “Men may succeed in rolling up space like a piece of leather, yet they will not experience the end of their sorrows without realizing the luminous divine (truth within them).”109 Most lives today are robotic lives, responding to bodily needs, often unloved and unwanted, drifting from one ‘comfort’ to another, devoid of joy or élan or purpose. They live because they know nothing else. So much effort for so little gain is the sum of many lives.

Heart-centered intuition, which guided man for more than three-fourths of his existence on earth, has gone into recess, and mind-centered intelligence has taken over. The assumption is that ‘intuition’ has remained pristine, but it may also be that intuition too has been defiled.

Our spontaneity may have gone sour; we might not be able to count on our ‘gut instinct’ or heart-felt emotion to distinguish between right and wrong. As Stephen Bernhardt says, ‘human beings no longer live in a natural environment; their environment is now a result of their own intellect.’ According to Carlos Castaneda, while making choices in life we should choose the path of the heart. The intellect is a critical faculty, but it is severely conditioned, if not impaired in the search for meaning. Indeed, the mind itself is unable to harmonize its own inherent cognitive capabilities with those of the machine. Our mind-centered intellect has prevailed over the world outside and over every other living creature on earth, but has remained easy prey to our own prowling passions. Man is now a virtual hostage to his own mind. Everything ‘human’ is in a ‘state of denial’, as Jeremy Griffith terms it, or in disarray, drifting from birth to death, bereft of any intelligible purpose. ‘Being alive’ for most people is being in pain of some kind or the other, physical, psychological, or mental. Human consciousness itself is intellectually trapped and spiritually emaciated. It is driven by the mind, and the mind offers self-righteous reasoning to rationalize our every act of commission and omission, of bigotry and cruelty. Shame and remorse, among the basic requirements of human life, are in a state of exile. We may say that the world is corrupt, that mankind is crumbling, but we never question our own impeccable credentials as ‘good’, if not ‘god- fearing’ human beings. What the human needs most of all is reconciliation in his way of life, in the world of relationships; most of all within his own self. Man has acquired and accumulated knowledge to an awesome degree, but lost his wisdom somewhere in the sensory woods. And knowledge without wisdom is, as the scriptures say, the perfect recipe for ruin.

Such is the spell of egotism, which Thomas Carlyle called ‘the source and summary of all faults and miseries’, that everyone is for wisdom, and everyone thinks they alone are wise and others are ‘otherwise’. Everyone condemns egotism but puts it squarely in someone else’s court. Egotism has been called Nature’s compensation for mediocrity; the main impediment to true greatness, lasting happiness, and to transformation. All religions condemn

 

 

 

 

109 Cited in: Swami Ranganathananda. Vedanta, Science and Religion. The Approach to Truth in Vedanta. 2010. IndiaTimes Spirituality. Accessed at http://spirituality.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid- 1089740,prtpage-1.cms

 

egotism, but it is necessary for any true achievement; all great men were egotistic but they directed it to the right goals.

All human endeavors are to control and conquer time, distance, disease, death, and most often, at the practical level, another human. The desire to control is a basic desire. We want to be ‘in control’ of our lives, our body, our mind — and everything of others. At this juncture, man is at once the predator and prey, the hunter and quarry; the defiler and defiled; the exploiter and the exploited. We perpetually bounce back and forth, and none of us can be sure, like Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1597), if, in the final analysis, we are the victims or the villains.

Despite his obvious vulnerabilities, man suffers from an illusion of invincibility and paranoia of persecution. The irony is that as a species, man is the conqueror; but as an individual, he perceives himself as the vanquished. As a species, man has made the world his own; but as an individual, he is a virtual slave of the system he has installed in his own world. The physical world is just another layer of knowledge; in reality, everyone lives in a unique mental world of one’s own creation. Often, man is not conscious of what he is and what he is doing. As Brian Swimme says, “we refuse to grieve (for our ethical trespasses)” and we “are afraid that if we begin to grieve, we will become so overwhelmed, we’ll become catatonic and useless.”110 We cannot tell how long the Homo genre of life is programmed to endure on earth and who will then take over the reins of governance of the planet after we are gone. But it does appear that if the human species had not existed, Mother Earth would not have been any worse-off. And even worse, when we finally depart, it would take a long time for the planet to recover from the havoc inflicted on it by us humans.

Whenever we are carried away by our grandeur and glory, it would be useful to place the human in perspective on the grand canvas of the cosmos, where distance is measured in millions of light-years. There are billions of suns in our ‘local’ Milky Way galaxy, and billions of such galaxies tearing across the unimaginably vast expanse of space. On the other side, the microcosmic universe of the molecule, the atom, and the quark is equally staggering. Each breath we take contains a trillion atoms, and each atom is a complex universe by itself. Further, man’s claim for terrestrial hegemony and legitimacy, let alone eternity, is fast wearing thin. His self-proclaimed privileged position as the most rational, intelligent, and enlightened species on earth can no longer stand any test of logic or intelligence. Bertrand Russell wryly remarked that he was searching all his life for evidence to support the premise that man is a rational animal. That very ‘logic of rationality’ points to a contrary conclusion: that man is not only the most complex but also the most irrational being on earth, and that perhaps, man might even be, in the words of the English dramatist W.S. Gilbert, ‘Nature’s sole mistake.’

 

 

Human depravity

Poised as we are, we are uncertain as to whom or what we should turn to as a guide: scriptures or science, intuition or intellect, God or gadgets. We must remember that today much of even non-violence is