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

our hallowed assumptions about the nature of reality, of human worth and human way of life. While there could be many intermediate stops on the journey, the finishing line has to be to “consciously reinvent the human as a dimension of the emergent universe”6 and evolve into a mode of being, a form of life, in which we are deeply able to feel in our bones a cascading compassion and responsibility for all of life. Nothing less would do either to save man or the world. We need a new ‘moral fire’ within to propel us to unveil a fuller and kinder model of human essence that brings man closer to another man and thus to God. That is the trembling task; this is the convulsive challenge and the chaste choice that lays before Man — the queerest creature of all on earth that walks on two legs, to paraphrase G.K. Chesterton (The Everlasting Man, 1925).

So much of our life is a show and style, sound and fury, grounded on pride and pretence, vanity and venality, that if we were to go anywhere in our age-old aspiration to make life more luminous than the daily grind of drudgery and drift, we must be prepared to be more skeletal and more candid in our confessions about the true nature of our innermost thoughts, dark passions and deep feelings, and be prepared to explore the more obscure and frightening reaches of our souls. For what comes under the rubric of ‘human way of life’ has had its mixed moment on earth; and the moment is now to invent a new framework for and a frame of reference of living. It means letting go many things that have become almost ‘living’ parts of our organic life and which give us such a soothing sense of smug but sterile satisfaction. It also means, at once, to let go a huge chunk of us at the core, to renounce many trappings of modern life and to let something unknown, something still wrapped in the veils of virginity, to emerge from the womb of our being. We need to reappraise and reconfigure concepts like ‘progress’, ‘success’ and ‘goodness’, as we have come to instinctively understand them.

It is not to abandon or to turn the clock of history back. We need ‘progress’; otherwise life becomes a zero-sum game. We need ‘success’; otherwise we will lapse into inertia. The world needs ‘good persons’ if only to prove that human behavior is not beyond reform. But simply the status quo is untenable; it does no good to anyone, not to man or Nature or even to God. One of the little-noticed facts of evolution is that the environment of human habitation is changing so fast that it is outpacing the ability of the human organism to adapt. A new field of science called epigenetics is showing that the environment we are polluting and the lifestyle choices we routinely make, and our reflexive addictions to violence and to ‘good life’ can not only mar our lives but influence our very genetic code — and, ominously, that of the next generation (Why Genes Are Not Destiny; Time, 18 January 2010). In other words, our life is not the business of us alone; the way we go on with our daily activities, the myriad choices we make, whether volitionally or by default, carry consequences not only for us but for the very future survival and sustainability of the human race. If this ‘finding’ were further

 

 

 

 

6  Cited in: Susan Bridle. Comprehensive Compassion. An Interview with Brian Swimme. 2001. Accessed at: http://www.wie.org/j19/swimme.asp

 

corroborated, it would cast on us an awesome responsibility, and to fulfill that we have to add a new dimension to how we spend every minute of our life.

While there is lot of levity and lasciviousness in contemporary life, there is also a simmering sentiment for an undefined ‘something’ lofty and elevating, a gnawing disquiet at what human life has come to be, burdened with a motley blend of helplessness and hope, apprehension and aspiration, of angst and anticipation. With all our incisive insights into how life began and the world works, human nature remains enigmatic, human personality problematic, human behavior erratic, and human destiny clouded. And man has become what one might describe as self-righteously self-destructive and guiltlessly, almost flippantly, murderous. Even more than God, man is the mystery wrapped in a riddle. The theosophist Alexander Wilder, a contemporary of Blavatsky, wrote that the problem of life is man. Ana Maria O’Neill, the Puerto Rican writer (Ethics for the Atomic Age, 1948) wrote that once man is put together, everything else will fall into place. The big question is, when is that ‘once’ going to be? Meanwhile, practically every institution man has ‘put together’ (with what Freeman Dyson calls ‘ape-brain’ and ‘tool-making hands’) — family to society, marriage to marketplace, City-State to Nation-State — has largely failed to measure up to its intent to make the whole more than the sum of the parts, and to provide us the space for self- fulfillment without impeding others. Human culture, which is what we assume strikingly distinguishes us from other species, has not found the modus operandi to harmonize the human, as a solitary being and a social being; and as a social being and a spiritual being. We are unable to harmonize externally because there is no harmony internally. The human mind is a good ‘advocate’ but a poor ‘judge’; it is good at espousing causes, not at ensuring that that cause serves the overall good. As a result, to paraphrase H.G. Wells (Mind at the End of its Tether, 1945), a harsh queerness is coming into things human. So many horrific things happen with such banality and repetitiveness in our lives that our mind is benumbed. In our thirst for excitement and entertainment, the horrible breaks the tedium, the awful makes boredom more bearable and a day is deemed barren without an atrocity perpetrated by one of us. So much dirt, grime, and mildew has accumulated on the human slate, that we must wipe it crystal clear to even look at ourselves as we are, which means cleansing ourselves since we too are on the slate; indeed we are the slate, and the dirt and the chalk are nothing but us.

It is not only the individual that needs deep cleansing. Our collective soul needs it too. Our way of life has made human society into a conglomeration of competitive entities, each one trying to expand its ‘sphere of influence’ and power and control. That stems from our obsession with comparison. Nothing in life is valued for its own sake; but only in the context of someone else having it or not having it or wanting it. Man’s much-flaunted faculties of freedom and freewill — ‘the right to live as we wish’ (Epictetus) — have not given him either security or stability, or freedom from fear. Indeed it is fear that frames much of our tenure on earth — fear of old age, of illness, of bereavement, of accident, of loss of livelihood, of the Grim Reaper’s inexorable entry. We ‘fear’— or ‘favor’ — many things not for their own sake but for their expected consequences. And, following the advice of the Italian philosopher Machiavelli to rulers, we would rather be feared than be loved, we are enthralled by the illusion of a mastered destiny but, as individuals, we are laid waste and haunted by the fear of the future.

Nor has the freedom of choice in our elevated awareness of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ — a special gift of God — helped us to lead moral lives that add value to other’s lives. It is a harsh verdict, but our sense of the divine down the ages has not helped much, if any, in our moral progress. Nor has allegiance to theism or agnosticism or atheism made any difference. That is because we do not have in the deepest depths of our being what it takes to use that awareness wisely or to simply be able to see, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant noted, the good only in goodwill, or the bad only in actions, not as a person. Or, more ominously, as the

 

Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) upbraids the returning Jesus, and thunders: are freedom and free choice too burdensome for humanity? They are burdensome because in bestowing us, by endowing us with them, God has pretty much turned himself, in Julian Huxley’s phrase, into a smiling Cheshire cat, pretty much leaving us alone to fight our own inner battles.

And in choosing, we must discard something we cling to like our skin, like the belief in our irreplaceability and the invincibility of our intellect. Greedy as we are, we want choice without choosing; we want to feel the miraculous without miracle, order without authority, God without religion, or religion without revelation. However crushing free will is, all history tells us two things: that tyranny in the guise of security has not stilled the human spirit; and deep inside lurks a tyrant in every human. In that quandary, face to face with what free spirit, free speech and unfettered action have entailed, man today seems willing to experiment with anything that proffers to save him from himself, from euphoria-inducing drugs to ‘sacred’ self-annihilation. He talks of a ‘spiritual’ path as the way forward, but since that means giving up much of what he has become, he therefore contents himself with being a ‘spiritual tourist’ rather than a steadfast seeker.

Whether as a ‘tourist’ or an ‘immigrant’ or a ‘seeker’, what we really want is a future without worry and want. Although a much-used phrase, we are ambivalent about ‘future’: deep inside we cannot relate to that which is so hazy and we cannot, in our vision, go beyond our ‘own world’. As for anything beyond that, be it humankind or the earth, even our imagination falters. That is why, despite an avalanche of scientific ‘evidence’, we cannot bring ourselves to believe that anything can truly endanger the earth. The present generation of mankind is going through a tumultuous period of apocalyptic danger and epochal opportunity, of abysmal moral decadence and seething spiritual renaissance. Bound and bare, naked in our vulnerability, we live; we wander in the wasteland of the wanton world, laden with meaningless chores and multiple ‘duties’. But, as J.R.R. Tolkien said, not all who wander are lost; but we are lost, the present crop of men that inhabit the world. T.S. Eliot’s description of the modern man as ‘hollow man’, as a stuffed man, appears apt at this juncture. In becoming modern or post-modern, the bedrock of which is ‘rationality’, man has discovered the world but lost himself in the labyrinths of life. An issue that has for long been the subject of animated debate is whether our moral capacity is contingent on reasoning or religion, intelligence or intuition. Many people simply assume that morality comes from God, crafted during creation or implanted in our mind by religion. Some say that our brain contains unconscious biases that explain our moral behavior. Some others have argued that reason is not enough and that we have to reckon with what Aristotle called akrasia, weakness of will, that knowing is not the same as doing. The human spirit has become ‘helplessly cold’, hopelessly led astray by avarice, ill-will and evil. Self-absorbed on this long trail, we have forgotten that the Spirit or the Self in all is one, that we are a part not only of a colossal cosmic context but also of an unimaginably bigger process of creation — and that we have a role and responsibility in that adventure.

The root cause is that the physiological state of man has shifted from an abundant reliance on the sacred and the supernatural, and intuition (sometimes described as ‘spontaneous-cum-reflected judgment’ or as direct vision or pure perception of Truth), to an almost absolute obeisance to