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

for happiness but actually courts unhappiness by unfavorably comparing oneself with others. Everyone wants happiness and good things in life without doing any good. Everyone wants to dodge the ill effects of evil while doing evil. Man asks ‘Why me?’ when it comes to change, and ‘Why not me?’ when it comes to sharing the spoils of the status quo. The phenomenal world is one but the mental worlds are as many as the number of humans on earth. What matters to most people in the real world are their kith and kin, their family and friends; the rest are at best a statistic, at worst, dispensable.

Isaiah Berlin was quoted as having said “There are 567 people in the world and I know all of them.”213 Everyone has a similar number. The wide disparity in the way we view the few,

 

 

213 Isaiah Berlin. A Letter on Human Nature. The New York Review of Books, USA. 23 September 2004. p.20.

 

and the rest, is one of the triggers for what is wrong in the human world. We shower our attention, affection, and caring for a handful and ignore the rest, as if they are aliens that deserve only suspicion, not support. Human diversity is breathtakingly beautiful; it also hides many deficiencies and discrepancies that defy explanation or any excuse. The stark reality is that with all our blinding insights into the brain, biology, and behavioral psychology, we just do not have a clue about what makes a human, about what a human becomes, and about what divides the best and the rest, the wise man and the fool, the leaders and the followers. We certainly know a lot more about the mechanisms that underlie many cellular processes but very little about the psychic — or karmic — underpinning of human personality. We know that the machine has radically altered the human way of life, but what about the human organism? Does our future lie within our genes or in our technology? Are we the harbingers of the next dominant intelligence on earth, the machine or a mix of machine and man, the former being the preponderant partner? What effect will such an ‘evolution’ have on human behavior? One widespread view is that in the age of mediocrity and mechanization, what is required to be great or good has become a casualty of what Einstein termed as the ‘worship of acquisitive success’ by contemporary society. Such people argue that our addiction to the ‘shortcuts and short terms’ of our science-suffused culture aborts the birth of seminal ideas, of truly great works of art, architecture or literature, and that the sheer act of living in our competitive and daunting world denudes greatness. And that our ordinary lives are so exposed to the slew of irresistible sensory pleasures that it requires almost superhuman effort to withstand them and be prepared to pay the price of goodness. Einstein said in the year 1949 that the economic anarchy of the capitalistic society was the real source of evil.

 

Evil — be thou my good

Whether it is economic or environmental, social or religious, evil reigns unchallenged across the length and breadth of the human world. It manifests in multiple ways, like intolerance, discrimination, exploitation of the weak, calculated callousness, wickedness, and cruelty. But they all stem from the same source of supply — mind-controlled human consciousness. The phantom of evil keeps coming back over and over again because that is the centrality of human life. It is wholly human and has nothing to do with our animal antecedents. Evil is usually contrasted with good, which describes acts that are subjectively beneficial to the observer. In some religions, evil is an active force, often personified as an entity such as Satan (Christianity), Iblis (Islam), or Ahriman (Zoroastrianism). In Hinduism, it is generally believed that there is no ‘problem of evil’ as such because it is not deemed to be all that distinct from ‘good’, and is explained or explained away by doctrines like dwanda, maya, karma, reincarnation, which seek to elevate the believer above both ‘good and evil’. The duality of ‘good versus evil’ is expressed, in some manner or another, by many cultures. But the real ‘problem’ that has haunted man down the ages and most of all today, is why we find it so difficult to be good and fall such easy prey to evil. It absolves no one; as Rene Descartes said, ‘the greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues’, and we have no idea what truly differentiates one from the other. Often it seems, as Arjuna pleaded with Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, we are propelled by a mysterious malign force. If that was the fate of Arjuna, the dearest friend of Krishna and an incarnation of Nara of the deity Nara-Narayana in the Dvapara Yuga, what about ordinary humans in this sinful Kali Yuga? First, we must understand the nature of the beast, and we must acknowledge that evil is not ‘existential’ or ‘irrational’ or ‘circumstantial’. It is caused, or greatly accentuated, by the very faculty that we are so proud of: that of thought and feeling we experience as human beings. Evil is not ‘good’ masquerading behind a mask, and it cannot be alchemically altered into ‘good’ by tolerance or acceptance. Our state of mind parallels that of Milton’s Satan (Paradise Lost; Book IV), whose motto was ‘So farewell, Hope; and with Hope

 

farewell, Fear; Farewell, Remorse! all Good to me is lost; Evil, be thou my Good…’, Evil is rampant, pervasive but no one admits he is evil. We bemoan that the world is bereft of virtue, but, deep inside, we firmly believe that we are virtuous. And when evil cannot be wished away, we turn a Nelson’s eye, and protest our ignorance and innocence. Moral philosophers have told us that indifference to evil is not only an endorsement of evil, but evil itself; there is not much difference between love of evil, and indifference to good or evil. That indifference is intellectualized, and is really an outcome of our being, as Aristotle said, ‘a rational animal’. And that ‘rationality’ is what allows us to remain indifferent to the other’s suffering while leading perfectly ‘normal’ lives, even ‘moral’ lives. Instead of being indifferent to the results of our actions, as exhorted by the Bhagavad Gita, we are indifferent to evil, and to the misery of our fellow species. And there is a moral difference between stoic indifference and selfish indifference. The doctrine of dharma also says that not performing one’s swadharma, one’s prescribed social obligation, is also evil. The very essence of the Gita is this. While etymologically, ‘indifference’ means ‘no difference’, operationally it makes a world of difference in the equation between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. For a species that claims to have high emotional intelligence and innate spiritual intelligence, the degree and extent of lack of empathy for and bonding with fellow humans is stark and striking. While admittedly all our experiences are bodily experiences and nobody can experience the same experiences as any other, the fact is that we would rather be a slave than share, and rather be in bondage than bond with those outside the narrow but rapidly shrinking circle of ‘humans we distinguish as family and friends’. That ‘discrimination’ leads to a huge chunk of humanity being left uncared for and abandoned. The best of us are indifferent to their plight, and that reduces us to an irrelevant, if not malicious, abstraction. Albert Einstein said that our task must be to widen the circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of Nature in its beauty. Helen Keller called the apathy of humans the worst of all evils. Mother Theresa said that the most terrible feeling in life is to feel unwanted and abandoned. Most people convince themselves that they are oppressed (or downpressed as Bob Marley would say) by the ‘system,’ but given a chance, they would have no qualms about sharing its spoils.

‘Modern man’, intolerant and in the grip of greed, is perhaps the angriest creature on earth. Anger has become the defining signature of man, a reflexive and addictive reaction to frustration and unfulfilled desires, a show of power and control. It is an evil as toxic as hate. It manifests as rudeness, irritation, intemperate words, and hostility, and mars every relationship. Lord Krishna, in answer to the question of Arjuna as to what impels a man to “commit sin, reluctantly indeed… as if by force constrained”,214 answers that it is “desire, it is wrath, begotten by the quality of action (rajas); all-consuming, all-polluting, know thou

this is our foe on earth.”215 We are so comfortable with and addicted to anger that we use it often as an alibi: ‘I said it’ or ‘I did it in anger’. But anger, perhaps more than any other single thing, reflects the extant state of our mind, without the camouflage and the cover of culture. Without anger, there is no avarice, malice loses its sting, and violence becomes toothless. And malice, which is more pernicious than envy and jealousy, has managed to infect the human consciousness; that is why we have not been able to be the change we want to see in the world (as Gandhi exhorted us), nor the window through which we must see the world (as Bernard Shaw put it). The ‘window’ is soiled and hence the world is sullied; every

 

 

 

 

214 Annie Besant. The Bhagavad Gita. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. 3:36, 37. p.58.

215 Annie Besant. The Bhagavad Gita. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. 3:36. p.58.

 

one wallows in misery and self-pity, blaming the society, the system, steeped in self- righteousness. The cumulative effect of the ‘toxic’ threesome is to fundamentally, perhaps irreversibly, alter the quality of human presence on earth. The British political philosopher John Gray in his much-acclaimed book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2003), says that humans seem fated to wreck the balance of life on earth, and that they will be trampled on and tossed aside ruthlessly by heaven and earth, much like the straw dogs used as offerings in an ancient Chinese ritual. Nature will not stay forever the silent, stoic, and sullen sufferer.

One of the baffling and enduring paradoxes is how to reconcile the scriptural vision of man and his behavior. The scriptures talk of man’s inherent divinity but the reality of human behavior is anything but divine. Man takes pride in his being a ‘rational animal’, which brings to mind what Bertrand Russell had to say about it: ‘All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support that.’ Man talks of human dignity and rights but leaves ‘no stone unturned’ to throw stones at the weak and the vulnerable. The worst part is that man never feels or thinks that he is wrong in his behavior. The world is full of people, to paraphrase Dostoevsky, who claim to love humanity, even die for humanity, but cannot stand the sight of another man for too long without breaking out into a brawl. What holds us back is the fear of social punishment and the prospect of hell after death. But that ‘fear’ seems to be faltering now, and man has come to believe that he can get away with both crime and sin, outsmart terrestrial law as well as divine justice.

Whether it is man’s manifestation of anger, malice, and violence, or his obsessive attachment to sex and money, or the pernicious power of the State, they are all rooted in the human inability to resist the temptations of easy life and evil. Without temptation we are all saints, and all saints struggle with the temptations of the flesh, body, and the devil. Prophets, the noblest of us like Jesus and the Buddha, were tested by temptation by the Devil and by Mara respectively, in the cauldron