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

of another. Human behavior, more than any other factor, is now the greatest threat to life on earth and to the ecosystem of the earth. A recent research finding is one of those ‘stories’ we read and quickly pass on to more arresting items (like a triple murder, for example): namely, that man is responsible for the biggest extinction of wildlife since the extinction of the dinosaurs, with a 35 percent decrease in biodiversity over the past 35 years.166 Shorn of the scientific sophistry, it really means that man has murdered more than one-fourth of all other living creatures on earth in about half the life span of an affluent human being. There are those, the never-say-die optimists, who reassuringly say that death and extinction are part of nature, that 90 percent of all those

 

 

 

164 James B. Delong. The Arrow of Cultural Evolution. [Review of the book “Nonzero: the Logic of Human Destiny” by Robert Wright]. Amazon.Com Customer Reviews, 19 June 2000. Accessed at: http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0679758941?showViewpoints=1

165 Cited in: William H. McNeill. Bigger and Better? 2004. [Review of the book “The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World” by Robert William Fogel]. The New York Review of Books, USA. 21 October 2004. p.61.

166 The Times of India, Hyderabad, India, 27 October 2008, p.16.

 

species that ever lived are dead species, and that it is the way to make room for other life. In simpler terms, if we kill other species, it is no big deal; and if we kill ourselves, even lesser. There is nothing but death in Nature, and reaching the milestone of death is only a matter of time and effort. This is but one example of the nihilistic bent in the human way of life. What comes to mind is the question that recurs over and over again in any study of the human condition: why, with so much loaded in man’s favor in the cosmos, and being able — alone he claims — to learn from his mistakes and to anticipate the consequences of his actions, is man’s behavior so comprehensively irrational, so conspicuously irresponsible, so palpably against his own selfish self-interest?

Chapter 3

Of Human Baggage and Bondage

 

Bondage and liberation

The state of the human world reflects the state of a ‘bonded being’ bearing the baggage of a beast, bound by being human and aspiring to be a god. The duality or dwanda of ‘bondage’ and ‘liberation’ defines both the human condition and human aspiration. While we are not certain which is our natural condition — bondage or liberation — we, like Philip Carey of Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), expend much of our life to find ‘some guide by which we could rule our conduct’. Not ‘finding’, we struggle to make sense by trial and error; we seek and search, twist and turn, and often find ourselves alone and adrift. And the more we strive and strain to free our spirit, the tighter the shackles become. Most people feel that they are entrapped in a cage, caught in a world not of their making, and carry a weight not of their choice and beyond bearing. And liberation — by whatever name it is called, moksha or nirvana or salvation — for them, is simply to be free (it does not matter how) from the pressures, pitfalls, perils, and frustrations of living with fellow men, and from pain and suffering. As for the weight they carry on their beaten backs, it is not only the weight of their own lives but the sum of over a million years of struggle for survival, to be ‘civilized’. Whichever or whatever it might be, all human endeavor, spiritual or scientific, is to find a way to lighten that load, and even change the nature of the load. Because, while it makes no difference to a beast if it is burdened with sacred texts or scum, it makes — rather should make — a difference to man.

We want to escape, we want to be free, we want liberty, we long to lead our lives without pitfalls and pinpricks, we want deliverance — but we have no idea who or what is holding us back. The troubling thought that arises in this confusion is: have we got it all wrong, mistaking one for the other, and messing up our lives? The truth is that we want to overcome that which we do not know, and to achieve something we have no clue of. We have no inkling of how much of our ‘bondage’ is inborn, and how much of our ‘baggage’ is acquired; we are not even aware of their link to the motivating drives of human conduct. Nor do we know much about the mechanics of belief and behavior, and about the dynamics of the dispositions and deportment that shape our lives. Is the baggage ‘culture’ or civilization, or both, or is it really evolution? Is it religion or is it science that is the crushing pack on our back? Or are they all — baggage, bondage, and liberation — simply states of the fickle mind? Or are they byproducts of belief systems, the epicenter of which is the ‘I’ thought? We will probably never know, or know in a manner that stands the test of our intellect; but we ‘being human’ all that ambivalence and ambiguity only spurs us to speculate, search, seek, and agonize. That seeking and the frustration of not ‘finding’ affects our behavior.

The scriptures deal with the subject from a loftier and larger perspective. The Upanishads say that ignorance of the Self (or Atman or Brahman) is the root of the bondage, and the knowledge of the Self is the final liberation. The birth and the death of an individual, the process of reincarnation, the urge for action propelled by desires and the compulsion to contain the consciousness within the four walls of one’s own body — all these, according to the Chandogya Upanishad, are manifests of the bondage of the individual soul. Life is a prison-house, as it were, because of a very complicated type of nescience, or ignorance that envelops our mind-dominated consciousness. According to the Chandogya Upanishad, the first requisite for liberation is dispassion, an aversion to everything ephemeral or transitory,

 

the outward symbol of which is the body. Smug sensory satisfaction and spiritual growth are antithetical. From this premise, the Upanishad goes on to say that every attachment is a type of bondage, and in the world of ceaseless action, liberation is the release from the fetters of desire and attachment, which is not passivity or empirical inactivity but detachment from the fruits of attachment. In the ancient Indian text, Ashtavakra Gita, it is said that bondage is when the mind longs for something, grieves for something, rejects something, clings on to something, is elated about something and dejected about something; and liberation is being detached from all those somethings. In this perspective, liberation relates to a panoply of ‘bondages’ rooted in our mind: from the cycle of birth, from suffering, and above all from our identification of ourselves with the physical body, the Annamaya-kosha as it is called in Sanskrit. Spiritual seekers have tried to attain liberation through the practices prescribed in the scriptures; and the modern-day messiahs have tried to attain it by using reason as the sole guide and scientific method as a road map. For a truly spiritual person, duality is bondage, and non-duality (which is described as ‘one without a second’) is liberation. In the Hindu scripture Yoga Vasistha, it is said that there is neither bondage nor liberation but only pure consciousness, which is another way of describing non-duality. The ultimate, final liberation is from the desire for liberation itself; the longing for liberation and to leave this earth forever, is yet another bondage. For a Vedantist, once we recognize that we are neither the doer nor the enjoyer or the sufferer but an instrument of God, liberation itself loses its luster. The fact is that our consciousness, and everything in the realm of thought, are completely conditioned, be it morality or God, bondage or liberation. Despite our longing for liberty and a life of freedom, it is in ‘bondage’ that we live and die; what we should strive for is not liberation but the right kind of bondage. Liberation might set us free, but in bondage, one could set others free or help lessen their burdens. Once a person takes birth, the life of that individual is constrained and carries a cross of some sort. But every chain or every cross is not necessarily bad — it is a matter of perception. Without any chain or a cross, a person would be like a feather that gets blown all over. A chain can be an anchor and a cross can be cleansing. What is only open to us is to experience and inculcate the ‘right climate of conditioning’ that lets our life not go in vain on this earth at this time. It has been said that one of the Buddhas, the Amitabha Buddha, refused nirvana or enlightenment for himself unless he was given the ability to bestow the same bliss on those who sought his refuge.

Impure consciousness, the one we have, is bondage we should seek liberation from, and the baggage we want to be unburdened from is the weight of evolution. In the state of existence we are in, these are all, like much else in life, selective states of mind; a sage or a yogi is free even in a prison, and a ‘free’ man can feel captive in the midst of his freedom. And more conformity is required in the ‘free’ world. In whatever state or condition one is in or aims at, the effort has to be liberation from the bondage of the ego, to rid oneself of the mental impurities and to be able to see things as they are (not as they seem to be), what is called vipassana in Buddhist thought.

In practical life, the combination — or intersection — of ‘bondage’ and ‘baggage’ externally reflects as behavior, which is the code word for the way we interact with the outside world. Human behavior is so often bizarre, so much outside the realm of ‘reasonable probability’, that it raises a more fundamental question — is man born free as an integral part of the natural milieu but become bound by his culture, crippling his innate potential for goodness? or is he ‘naturally’ too dangerous an animal to be let loose? The simple question

— why certain people act and react the way they do and certain others do not, or why the same person behaves differently at different times — has baffled the best of minds. The answer lies in the three states: knowledge, ignorance, and illusion (jnana, ajnana, and maya, in Sanskrit). Put differently, when we know what to do; when we do not know; and when we think we know. These three states envelop and circumscribe our lives and become behavior.

 

And by observing and decoding human behavior, we can gain the knowledge necessary to understand ourselves and others. We can learn how to show empathy and compassion towards fellow humans in distress. And we acquire the skills to influence and modify or moderate the behavior of ‘friends and foes’ alike for common good. Human behavior, at one level, is the result of attempts to satisfy certain needs. Some of these needs may be simple to understand and easy to identify, such as the need for food and water. There are also complex needs, such as the need for respect and acceptance, the need for survival, esteem, security, social bonding, self-fulfillment. At a deeper level, human behavior constitutes the visible face of the invisible within: human consciousness. It is the mirror that reflects our true nature.

One of the most baffling philosophical but also pragmatic questions is, what really is ‘being human’? While there are several explanations, some labored,