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

a superman; instead of spiritual transformation, he is aiming for physical immortality. An ‘immortal superman’ with the present consciousness would be an intolerable burden and menace to earth and Nature — and an affront to God. How Nature/God would react is not hard to guess — the scriptures have foretold the course of this most immoral age and how it will end. But if we can mend our ways and transform ourselves in the right direction, we might still get a reprieve and last longer than a century or two, as scientists like Martin Rees predict. What we do for the rest of this century could determine the fate and future of this human species — and of life on earth. That is the great challenge of this generation of human beings — and the ‘point of departure’ for the subsequent chapters.

Chapter 2 deals with the myriad aspects germane to ‘being human’, and the fall from paradoxical promise to perilous paradox. It puts the multiple identities of man in perspective. It begins with the fountainhead of all inquiry — Who am I? — and goes on to discuss a range

 

of issues such as: human nature; human evolution or involution; the place of man in space and time; the debate about prehistoric man (god-like or ape-like); the dialectics of the real and unreal; greatness and goodness. It examines in some depth the question why man seems so predisposed to injustice, inequity, exploitation, hatred, and divisiveness. It gives particular attention to the contours and context of human behavior, and why and how it has become both suicidal and homicidal and a threat to life on earth. The chapter points out the growing toxicity in human life due to the alarming presence of chemicals in everything human, and the pollution of the living environment, potentially capable of transforming us into a ‘mutant species’.

Chapter 3 begins by reviewing the gamut of subjects under the rubric of freedom and bondage — is man born free but chained through his culture, crippling his innate potential goodness, or is he too dangerous an animal to be let loose? What makes us aspire for salvation and be addicted to slavery? Bondage and inequality run through life, and most men, in Thoreau’s words, lead lives of ‘quiet desperation’. The state of the world reflects the state of a ‘bonded man’; a symptom of the bondage is that good men seem to suffer and the bad seem to have all the luck. In that context, the chapter pays particular attention to the galloping ‘banality’ of personal, collective, and moral and economic evil, and our acceptance of that as the inevitable, if not necessary part of modern life, and to the attendant question “What is God ‘doing about it’?” A plausible explanation explored here leads to the twin doctrines of karma and dharma. The author looks at the three kinds of karma, and examines the infiniteness of dharma, the subtleties of swadharma, one’s own righteous path, and the yuga dharma, the moral way of this age. Among the topics the chapter covers are: the ‘end of the world’ scriptural scenarios and the ‘gloom and doom’ prophecies, the Hindu idea of avatars, direct divine incarnations, the last of which is due at the end of this age, the Kali Yuga; man’s mindless (or maybe mindful) assault on Nature and its calamitous consequences; our inability to manage ‘our aggregate existence’, or the humane governance of human diversity; the complex of information-knowledge-ignorance, and the perils of assembling information without wisdom; the various aspects of ‘external’ and ‘internal governance’; the paradox of a ‘globalized globe’ and of billions living lives of extreme poverty, alienation, and abandonment; the decline of the primacy of the Nation-State and its impact; the irony of our claiming to be a ‘god’ and constant comparison with animals; the rise of the ‘economic man’ and the decline of ‘moral man’; the hold of power, sex, and control over the human mind; the vice-like grip of violence on the human mind and our growing insensitivity to human suffering; the human history of war-making and massacres, and horrors and genocides, and their colossal cost for the human conscience; man’s indefatigable quest for immortality.

Chapter 4 delves deep into one of the most complex and increasingly important subjects of human thought, the two dominant strands in space and time — sacred and secular. In this setting, the chapter deals with the much-debated clash of religion and science, and describes the current state of both domains of knowledge, noting that the clash that is dissipating the human spirit is not between religion and science, but between one religion and another. Even though they are not in open conflict, religion and science have not worked out a way to work together, thus hampering both and diminishing overall human advancement.

Both work on separate agendas, religion deriving legitimacy through revelation, and science focused on its own glory. The chapter highlights some of the emerging trends in both science and religion, and their implications for the future of mankind. Religion, rather the way it is perceived and practiced, has become a major source of the very evil that it warns man to be wary of. The chapter goes on to argue that the greater danger stems from the fusion of technology with science, which has at once lethally empowered man as well as terminally enfeebled him. Technologies like nanotechnology and biotechnology are now trying to change not just the human environment, but the human organism itself. In a mood of

 

disenchantment with both religion and science, many are turning to ‘spirituality’ as a way to be fully human. This chapter, towards the end, explores the ramifications of this trend and puts this in the context of the major thrust of this book — the need for spiritual transformation through mutation of consciousness, which is fundamentally different from the physical transformation through mutation of the body that science is attempting.

Chapter 5 focuses on the prerequisites for any meaningful change in human behavior through consciousness change. Consciousness remains, in many ways, the final frontier of human quest, an enigma wrapped in a riddle. We still do not know much about it, but we know enough to know that consciousness is the master key that can unlock many closed doors in the human condition and conduct. It is consciousness that separates one individual from another, the early humans from the modern man, one age from another, one species from another, and a baby from an adult. True transformation requires consciousness change. To get rid of all that ails us, to cleanse ourselves of all the toxins that we have accumulated, most of all our sense of separation and our entrenched ego, we need consciousness change. It is the content of our present consciousness that makes non-reciprocal love and spontaneous compassion so rare. It is this consciousness that warps our decision making, and prioritization and making of choices. All the afflictions and frailties of the brain/mind are attached to the consciousness, and in turn determine the nature of human behavior. To get rid of them, we need consciousness change. To contain the pandemics of suicide, homicide, fratricide, ecocide, and biocide, we need to attack them where they germinate and incubate — the consciousness. To make cooperation, not confrontation, altruism, not animosity, our natural and ordinary impulses, we need to change the very content of our consciousness.

Chapter 6 of the book elaborates perhaps the most important aspect: if consciousness change is to become a reality, it is imperative for the human consciousness to transit from mind-centeredness to heart-centeredness. It argues that despite consistently describing the mind as feeble, fickle, mischievous, and wayward, we have essentially become mental beings, and our behavior reflects that state. The central message is that for human behavior to change constructively our consciousness must change. And for consciousness to change, the grip of the mind must be eased, and for that to happen, the human heart has to be brought back, as a source of energy and intelligence, from the margins to the mainstream. ‘A Path with Heart’, borrowing the title of Jack Kornfield’s book, has long been the spiritual path to salvation, and the scriptures, from the Upanishads to the Bible, have extolled the heart as the seat of the soul and the abode of God. It has also been said that the primary source of intelligence of prehistoric man was not in the head but in the heart, and earlier, even further down, below in the navel. Psychologists like Julian Jaynes say that till a few millenniums ago, human consciousness was ‘bicameral’, that is, it was powered by two kinds of intelligences, of the brain-mind and the heart-mind. All our troubles began when the heart regressed, and the mind virtually colonized the consciousness. The heart is the source of love, compassion, and much of what is good in the human personality. In what is described as frontier research, tools and techniques are being developed to re-energize heart intelligence. The truth of the matter is that our eyes can mislead, our ears can lead us astray, our mouth can betray us, and our mind can make us a monster, but our heart will always be faithful and unflinching in its integrity. The chapter suggests that restoring the heart to its rightful place ought to be at the top of the human agenda of this century, and offers a framework towards this end.

Chapter 7 addresses the central issue: what should man do to be fundamentally different from what he has become now, to remain essentially human and yet be post-human? To achieve that, man must shed the baggage of his post-industrial past, and acquire a new consciousness that is not exclusively mind-fixated, but constitutes a blend of two complementary intelligences — of the mind and of the heart. Transformation is neither new

 

nor confined to human aspiration. Nature and life are nothing but transformations. Every passage from infancy through adolescence to youth, to old age and to death is transformation. We want something ‘more’, something different that lets us choose or discard what we like or dislike, like eternal youth and deathlessness. This section identifies and elaborates the two classical paths to transformation: the scientific and the spiritual, and suggests that we should lay out a new, the third, path: that of consciousness change and of the heart. A large part of this chapter goes into some detail about ‘the phenomenon of God’, covering a broad range of issues such as the scriptural view; the traditional mainstream scientific view that denies divine existence and role; the recent developments that are inducing some people to change their view; the different scenarios of the relationship of God and man; the dynamics of freewill, fate, and surrender; faith, divinity, and doubt; transcendence, immanence, and indifference of God The chapter closes with an examination of the triad of Transformation, Nature and Science.

The final Chapter 8 brings the ‘story’ to its climax. It looks at the living world for inspiration, metaphors, and models for human transformation. The living world has all the knowledge and know-how for man to attain the fullness of his potential. The section identifies three scenarios applicable to the human condition: the way of the ant and the bee; the way of the ‘lemming suicide’; and the way of the caterpillar turning into a butterfly.

Clearly, we have much in common with the caterpillar, but we want to be the butterfly. Can man emulate this model, and if so, what could be the necessary elements? What could be the intermediate stage, the human equivalent of the ‘pupa’? This chapter notes that there are alarming parallels between the ‘suicidal’ lemmings of the Arctic, and the present ‘suicidal’ human condition. And it argues that the kind of transformation that man must undergo, to ensure his own continued existence beyond a century or two, is impossible without a fundamental consciousness change, and that is virtually impossible without divine grace.

Man must combine two opposites: he must endeavor and struggle as if