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

in a trifle, like God, destroy not only incrementally but also exponentially.

The tantalizing prospect is this: can science be a tool not to hasten the passage of humankind into the dustbin of evolution, but rather be, as physicist Paul Davies (God and the New Physics, 1992), who in the past had denied divine possibility, put it, ‘a surer path to God than religion’? And be a channel for the spiritual goal of self-discovery? For now, the copulation of man’s greedy gaze and god-like power sets up the epic stage for a titanic struggle between human ambition and Nature’s stoicism and divine forbearance. Most people have a ‘gut feeling’ that the world we have grown accustomed to is drawing to a rather messy end, and the Mayan apocalyptic date of 2012 is too close for comfort. There is erudite talk of a ‘flat world’ and of what really constitutes ‘life’, but it is the reality of living that has become flat without fizz, utilitarian sans idealism, a ritual devoid of the sense of the sacred, leaving a silent scream in the souls of sullen and stricken men. While the world is gluing electronically, it is fractured emotionally. Many seek solace through frenetic activity and seamless sensual pleasure through all kinds of devices and drugs, gurus and gadgets, religion and recreation, sermons and spiritualism.

And such is the extravagant extent of human rapacity, that life on earth is approaching or passing through, according to many experts, the sixth great wave of mass extinctions (the last, some 65 million years ago, was that of the dinosaurs). Scientists project that as much as 20 to 30 percent of species on earth could well vanish by the end of this century, triggered this time primarily by the predatory activity of a single biological species: the Homo sapiens. But it also means that, unlike the previous extinctions, we have the wherewithal to preempt or abort this one by the way we live each of our otherwise matter-of-fact lives. This could be the meaning — and the mission — we are all searching for. However much we might wish to lead prosaic lives of perfect peace and perpetual prosperity, this day and age is a moment with celestial import and doomsday odds. The gods of fate have cast us all a part to play sans the reassurance of rehearsal or reprieve; and in so doing, destiny has ceded a chunk of its own

 

 

 

1  Adam Ferguson. An Essay on the History of Civil Society. 1767. Accessed at: http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/ferguson/civil1

 

zealous domain. In everything we do in the immediacy of our lives, as individuals and as a collective unit, we must never let this central thought slip out of our mind.

Looking at man as he is and the world as it is, a clutch of questions grab us by our throat and brook no dillydally or shilly-shally, nor the proverbial ‘Nelson’s eye’. At this stage in the passage of the paradigm of life on earth, is the human, in the words of scientist Gordon Rodley, a ‘monstrous, meaningless accident’ and mankind fated to fail by the weight of its own frailty? Is Man’s Fate — and what might befall him — just man’s fate; does it matter for anyone else? And is God’s choice only His preserve? At what point are we in God’s watchful reckoning or Nature’s forgiving indulgence? Are we mere puppets on a cosmic string or a blessed species blinded and brooding on the brink? Is man, in the words of the great Indian spiritual humanist Swami Vivekananda (Parliament of Religions, Chicago, 1893), “a tiny boat in a tempest, raised one moment on the foaming crest of a billow and dashed down into a yawning chasm the next, rolled to and fro at the mercy of his own good and bad actions, a powerless, helpless wreck, in an ever-raging, ever-rushing, uncompromising current of cause and effect, a little moth placed under the wheel of causation, which rolls on crushing everything in its way, and waits not for the widow’s tears or the orphan’s cry?”2 Is man, as the German philosopher and self-styled ‘immoralist’ Friedrich Nietzsche puts it, a mere condition to be overcome — for the good of the world? And is that ‘overcoming’ really to become extinguished, winging its way to a nobler species? At a time when the future seems grey and grim such questions seem increasingly pertinent. Such is our comprehensive incomprehension — or the lack of it — of what is happening around us that, while visualizing the world that awaits our grandchildren, we are puzzled if we should shudder or smile, feel scared or be elated. The great 19th century theosophist and occultist Helena Blavatsky wrote “Our age is a paradoxical anomaly. It is preeminently materialistic and as preeminently pietistic.”3 That clash between the two, intensified over the last century, now threatens to blight our future. Clearly, so much in this world is so unfair, unjust and, one might even say, unforgivable that we are almost forced to give up trying to make sense of the ‘why’ of it. Often, the ‘why not’ seems more appropriate to the vagaries of life.

The scriptures might say ‘it is all in the mind’, and science might say that it is the undue agitation of some specific parts of the brain, but the daily reality is that we are confronted by perplexes that seem hopeless, vexed by ills and crushed by wrongs that we can barely perceive or prevent, forces we can scarcely comprehend or control. We often get a gnawing sense that we are surrounded by, in the words of William Wordsworth, “the fleet waters of a drowning world”4 and that, tormented, many feel they “have no rightful way to live.”5 No rightful way to live and no place to escape to from the ruthless ritual of life. A huge chunk of humanity is afflicted with a sinking sense of visceral emptiness, a volcanic void deep inside and no help appears within reach from any quarter. Suffering, either ‘deep, unspeakable ’, in the words of George Eliot, or as chronic and low-grade, is what defines and unites much of mankind. The feeling that ‘no one cares’, or even that someone is inwardly

 

 

 

2  Swami Vivekananda’s Address at the World’s Parliament of Religions (1893, Chicago, USA). Accessed at: http://www.belurmath.org/swamivivekananda_works.htm

3  H.P. Blavatsky. The Secret Doctrine. Volume 3. p.13. Accessed at: http://www.translife.co.za/Theosophy/SecretDoctrine,The_HPBlavatsky.pdf

4  Cited in: Helen Vendler. A Powerful, Strong Torrent. The New York Review of Books, USA. 12 June 2008. p.64.

5  Cited in: Helen Vendler. A Powerful, Strong Torrent. The New York Review of Books, USA. 12 June 2008. p.64.

 

gleeful at our suffering, causes disillusionment and bitterness, much like an inmate of a concentration camp who, on his release, discovers that no one awaited him or really missed him. But suffering, as the Buddha told us, is the central fact of human life and it is its denial that causes more suffering.

After thousands of years of contemplation, reflection, analysis, evocation, and spiritual seeking, of ‘rationally’ ruminating over the most profound problems of identity, life, and afterlife, and despite our greater understanding of the ‘micro-behavior’ of Nature, man still finds himself at war, within and without, nowhere near the shores of sanity, safety or stability, none the better or wiser for the effort. The real ‘problem’ we are trying to fix is us, all of us. What man does not understand, and cannot come to grips with, is his own ‘behavior’, rather his misbehavior; his deportment, rather his depravity. He seems more able to tame the turbulence of the elements but not the sway of his senses. And every man is in conflict with another man for material gain and divine favor. Whenever we try to free our lives from circumstances and constraints that hurt and limit us, we inevitably create others of the same or of a more abstruse order that shackle us tighter.

New knowledge reveals new mysteries. Every ‘solution’ seems to contain the seeds of another problem because both are filtered through the same sieve: the human mind. As a sequel we appear afloat and adrift, rootless and rudderless, not sure which path to tread or what to do for that mercurial and much-sought-after ‘peace of mind’. Mindful that we are equally the children of the earth and the sky, the sun and the moon, air and water, dust and darkness, and that order in human affairs is intertwined with oneness of life, many a thoughtful person is searching for a symbiotic synergy between man and Nature, and between God and man, as a way to move forward. Restive but with reverence, they yearn to experience the ecstasy of resonance with the rhythms of empty space, to savor the silken whisper of fragrance of the wind and of the rumblings of the rafting rivulet as a way to the divine. Such wistfulness is also a part of a larger, and deeper, longing for self-transcendence, a hunger for a comforting shoulder, a quickening quest for ‘meaning’ that has endured all through history, cutting across all cultures and civilizations, myth, magic, and mythology.

Still, too many of us live in a fractured state of doubt, dismay, dread and denial, afraid of what the morning might bring to our kith and kin and what we might see in the mirror of our soul that might haunt us. Theories abound, but we really are unawake why so much of our existence is so disagreeable, distasteful, and destructive. We know a lot more of what matters in life than we are prepared to do what it takes to make it matter. We want to prevail; we want to succeed; we want to ‘progress’. What we have achieved since the twentieth century is what British author F.J.P. Veale famously called ‘advance to barbarism’; the savagery of a Genghis Khan’. What we do not want at any cost is being called a ‘loser’.

Indeed the most unwelcome putdown, the dreaded name-calling, worse than being called a rogue or rascal, is the use of that ‘L’ word. We are getting tired not of evil but of being good, not of greed but of God. The cause, pundits tell us, is because our mental capacity for moral imagination or indignation, evolved through Darwinian ‘natural selection’, is not able to cope with the pressures and temptations of modern life. Man’s very sense of the divine has increasingly become a reckless thought, propelling us to do things we would not otherwise do. Much of mankind, turning ancient wisdom upside down, has convinced itself that it does not pay to be caring, considerate and compassionate except to the shrinking circle of ‘the near and dear’. Such is the state of ‘quiet desperation’, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, that, exhausted with what existence entails we pine for a quick getaway to the safe shadow of a ‘green mansion’, to somehow end it all, no matter if it means suicide or homicide. The promise of our genius, the premise of our genus, is converted into a toxic peril.

The immediate task is to turn back that peril into a promise, even if it is paradoxical. We must explore how to become more fully human and still be saved from the fate of being

 

merely human. Or put differently, inject humaneness into everything human. The challenge is prodigious and we must remember that out of any deep agony can spring enchanting ecstasy and that any in-depth inquiry, like any inquest, might show up surprises that might not always tally with the expected intent. Yet we must bring to bear the audacity of unvanquished courage and steel ourselves to face the strangest, most unusual, most inexplicable experiences that might come our way. But the reckoning must be right, the coordinates correct and the goal crystal clear. And we must not fight shy of reviewing the most basic of all,