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

even an avatar of God like Rama and Krishna sometimes say that a certain thing or a happening is the will of vidhata (Fate) and one has to accept it, opening the question who or which is the greater power: Fate or God. Or is it that God is Fate but not His spark, even in its most complete manifestation? The more problematic — and practical — question is: if He has nothing to do with evil or is powerless before it, can He have anything to do with fighting or eradicating evil? Implicitly, God becomes marginal in our lives. That directly contradicts the very doctrine of divine avatar, which is precisely to contain, if not eradicate, evil, and to restore dharma or righteousness to its rightful place. It means that there cannot be a world free either of evil or goodness; it is a question of balance, which again is sensitive to space and time. Another way of looking at good and evil could be in terms of what really is ‘being human’. Two of the attributes of ‘being human’, according to common belief, are freedom and free will, whether God-given or innate to the human form of life, which together make man, unlike other species, a creature of choice. All his life, almost every minute, man is called upon to make choices. And he makes those choices with the intelligence derived primarily from the brain/mind. The nature of the intelligence determines the character of the choice, the quality of life. The kind of intelligence we have brought to bear on our choice-making, particularly in the last few millenniums, has been such that the choices were based on the criteria that yielded ‘evil’ in far greater proportion than goodness. The ‘evil’ choice gives, or rather gives the appearance of giving, what man wants. It is not ‘evil’ that man chooses, but the desires that goodness does not fulfill and evil seems to. The scriptures say that the root of evil is desire. The Hindu sacred texts also say that our unfulfilled desires follow us beyond death.

What is emphasized here is not desire, fulfilled or unfulfilled, but man’s desire for the fruits of action. It is this that keeps the cycle rolling. The Maitreya Upanishad says that, “he who, being overcome by the bright or dark fruits of action, enters a good or an evil womb, so that his course is downward or upward and he wanders around, overcome by the pairs of

opposites.”222 Although the state of total desirelessness or desireless action, also called ‘choice-less awareness’ in Taoism, is extolled as pure bliss, at the practical level, it is really

 

 

 

221 Carlos Steel. Does Evil Have a Cause? Augustine’s Perplexity and Thomas’s Answer. 1994. The Review of Metaphysics. Vol. 48. pp.251-273.

222 Robert Ernest Hume (tr.). The Thirteen Principal Upanishads: Translated from the Sanskrit, with an Outline of the Philosophy of the Upanishads, and an Annotated Bibliography. 1921. Oxford University Press, London, UK. pp.417-418. Accessed at: http://www.archive.org/stream/thirteenprincipa028442mbp#page/n7/mode/2up/search/maitri+upanishad

 

the choice of the wrong kind of desires that is at the root of evil. It is not really desire per se, but what we desire, that creates evil; another cause is the lust for what we call ironically the ‘good things of life’, necessary for ‘good’ living, like money and power at the expense of someone else. It is not even perhaps the ‘good things’ or ‘good life’ we want, but how we go about getting them. Even the scriptures legitimize acquiring money and fulfilling desires, but through righteousness. In the Hindu religion, artha, money or wealth, and kama, desire for worldly things, constitute two of the four purusharthas or goals of human life, but they have to be acquired through dharma, which, among other things, is righteous conduct. In short, to ensure that evil does not dominate our lives, we have to change the nature of our desires or rather the way we fulfill them. Evil will then lose its spread and sting. Indeed, none of this is new; it has been said for thousands of years. The point to remember is that the pursuit of desires through wrong means is not imposed by any external force; it is the product of our mind-driven intelligence. It therefore means that, so long as our human intelligence does not change, men will continue to choose the path of desire and evil.

Since nothing is redundant in Nature, or in God’s creation, what is the cosmic end served by human evil? Is it the only way to remind us that ‘goodness’ exists, or does it serve some mysterious purpose? In Jewish mystical writings, evil is viewed as a necessity because without it, there would be no exercise of free will for choosing goodness over evil, and because it allows the infinite love, cascading goodness, and unconditional forgiveness of God to be demonstrated. That, in turn, raises other questions. Does God really need to demonstrate anything, does it mean that for God to get a chance to forgive, we must go on sinning? Evil is ‘justified’ in another way. In the Hindu doctrine of dwanda, everything in Nature comes as a mutually reinforcing pair of opposites: life and death, sunset and sunrise, darkness and light, joy and sorrow; and evil has to be there if we were to know goodness. At the same time, we are endowed with the discriminating capacity to distinguish between the ‘opposites’ and to make the right choice. On how we use that discriminating capacity hinges the choice we make, of good or evil. The Roman philosopher Cicero said that “the function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil.” Well, we have a perfect alibi; we have never claimed we have wisdom and in any case it is not that we do not know what is evil. By equating evil with pain, some psychologists like the Danish psychologist Eric Erikson, have postulated that evil is necessary for human development. In modern life, evil is a sort of sidekick to aggressive individualism and our attempt to meddle with and manipulate everything to our advantage. In a universe of interdependence, every alteration triggers a chain reaction, whose end often ends up as evil. The cancerous philosophy of ‘having more and bigger is better’, more often than not in relation to what someone else has, creates the momentum for a mountain of evil. Our sense of ‘feel good’ about fame and fortune invariably, though not inevitably, marginalizes morality. Our abhorrence of any kind of ‘failure’, and veneration of ‘success’ or appearance of success, implicitly builds the infrastructure for evil. Our consumptive culture of comfort and consumerism, is not only consuming the earth bit by bit, but also breaking down the moral barriers inside us.

The ‘problem of evil’ as we commonly comprehend, makes us associate evil with noxious actions, bloodcurdling horrors and culpable inaction. But the evil that does the greatest harm, that is commonplace and is barely noticed and gives us the most pain, is the way we treat each other. That evil is rooted in our mind; as a Chinese Buddhist scripture says,

“an evil thought is the most dangerous of all thieves.”223 The power of thought, for good or

 

 

 

223 Cited in: The Eternal Wisdom: Central Sayings of Great Sages of All Times. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications. Pondicherry, India. p.370.

 

for bad, is enormous. It is the most powerful emitter of energy on earth. Perhaps more than evil actions, it is the sum total of evil thoughts that creates so much negative energy. And we think of evil in the context of others, not our own selves. The Indian saint poet Kabir wrote that he went in search of evil and found it nowhere, but when he looked into his own self, he discovered that no one was more evil than him. It requires a person like Kabir to be able to look inside one’s own self. Sometimes, the world outside is compared to a mirror, reflecting our own image, our own character. But a mirror has to be clean to reflect the right image, and the mirror that obscures our vision is the mind. In a famous story in the Mahabharata, prince Yudhisthira (the righteous) and prince Duryodhana (the devious) were asked by their guru to look for an evil and a virtuous man respectively. Both, reflecting their nature returned empty handed. The moral is that we cannot see what is not inside us, evil or good, and the external can only be an extension of the internal. Some say that, like beauty, evil is only in the eye of the beholder. The perspectives of the perpetrator and the victim differ radically. The mind of the perpetrator justifies or greatly reduces the ill effect; and the mind of the victim magnifies or highlights the spin-off effects. One could say the same thing about ‘good’ too. The question really is not the ‘why’ of evil but how to handle it without being crushed by it. The simple solution is to get away from its way and do ‘good’ to as many people as one can and as many times as possible and in as many situations as it is feasible. The only obstacle to be able to do that is within the coils of our consciousness.

The sum and substance of the human way of life, so painstakingly fashioned over thousands of years, is increasingly yielding more evil than good. It is not, as often as it has been said, that man does not know, or even wants to do, what is good, but he often ends up doing what he does not want to do. The ‘why’ of this is one of the riddles of the human condition. The answer is what we might call the triple-E syndrome, the three ‘E’s being explanation, excuse, and evasion. It is these three ‘E’s that our mind pops up when our conscience pricks, and allows us, literally, to get away with murder or rape as a response to provocation. It has to be said, as Hannah Arendt reminded us, that cruelty, the deliberate infliction of pain (physical, mental or psychological) is not the monopoly of a beast or a barbarian. The human beast, perhaps, beats the rest. Even a visually blind man can sense what man has done and what he is capable of doing, but we are virtually ‘blinded’ by the three ‘E’s. It is a trick that the mind plays on us; it makes us believe that we have nothing to do beyond the narrow world of ‘kith and kin’, our near and dear. The mind even changes the fundamental character of what we do or say, and makes us believe that a cutting word is a sign of confidence, that a massacre is a means to ‘feel safe’, or that walking over a prostrate body in our path is the only way to go to the other side. Only a human mind can justify the virtual vaporization of tens of thousands of non-combatants in the course of a veritable war to get just one man ‘dead or alive’. Only the human mind is consciously capable of justifying to itself the hacking of two people in love as ‘killing for family honor’, even when one of the two is one’s own child. Only a human mind — ironically that of a gifted poet, Marguerite Duras — could make a person say that she was an alcoholic ‘because she knew that God did

not exist.’224 The mind can fool us, but not Nature. The American author Eric Hoffer (Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973) wrote that “Nature has no compassion. Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death.”225 But what is the nature of

 

 

 

 

224 Edmund White. In Love with Duras. The New York Review of Books, USA. 26 June 2008. p.30.

225 Cited in: Eric Hoffer. Wikiquote. Reflections on the Human Condition (1973). Accessed at: