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

href="#_bookmark374" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer">375 What is needed is a coalition of the concerned scientists, spiritualists, and anyone for that matter who cares for something beside himself and the shrinking circle of his near and dear. The fact is, Elaine Matthews writes, “Our DNA as it is now cannot help us survive the world we have created,” and that “it is our emotions which will determine whether or not we survive.”376 She says that human survival or extinction will not be a matter of a God sitting in heaven passing judgments against the evil ones and in favor of the good ones, but “will be a natural selection, a process built into our genes from the beginning of the human race.”377 But ‘natural selection’ and ‘Nature’ are not antithetical to each other, why must they be so to God? They could be His instruments like anything else in life. According to one hypothesis in Christianity, “evolution from primitive, cellular forms up to the level of hominid creatures may well have occurred by exclusively physical laws and processes; but these would have been incapable of producing the superior genetic make-up of a being physically apt for, and hence requiring, a rational soul. Hence, it is said, a last-minute supernatural intervention at the moment of Adam’s conception would have been necessary in order to give his embryonic body the genetic constitution and physical features of a true human being.”378 In effect, it means we alone are the direct creatures of God.

 

 

 

 

375 Ernest F. Pecci. In the Foreword to “Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness” by William A. Tiller. 1997. Pavior Publishers. USA. p.xviii.

376 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.108.

377 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.108.

378 Brian W. Harrison. Did the Human Body Evolve Naturally? A Forgotten Papal Declaration. Living Tradition: Organ of the Roman Theological Forum. No.73-74. January-March 1998. Accessed at: http://rtforum.org/lt/lt73.html

 

The scriptures say that God manifests himself in myriad ways in all living beings, more so in the human form of life, and that means we must act towards another person as if he is God. But the scriptures also say that in every human being, there are three forces at work: human, divine, and demonic, and our outward personality and our actions and reactions are the shifting strands of their struggle for supremacy. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says that “The divine properties are designed for liberation; the demonical for bondage.”379 While the struggle is eternal, it does seem like the demon inside is prevailing over the divine within. We can talk of unity in diversity and universal brotherhood and common destiny for another thousand years if we last that long, but they will remain just that, full of words and piety, signifying nothing. The bitter truth is that another man in our reckoning is a necessary nuisance, an opportunistic option, something you have to live with. We spend much of life trying to get along with, get away from, get over from and get back at other humans. The yawning gap between the desirable and the practical, knowing and doing, haunts human life. Unless man finds a way to bridge, or at least significantly narrow, the gap, and learn to look at life outside our bodies as no different from the one inside, there is not much that man can do to reverse the downhill slide. The problem, once again, is consciousness itself; or more precisely the mind-centric consciousness that man of this age or yuga has acquired or is fated to have. It is only through consciousness that man can attain transcendence. And nothing will change unless this changes. But then, if it is fated not to change, can it change? We will never know the answer unless we try. And if we have belief and faith and act selflessly in the larger interests and do God’s own work, we can change and/or God will help us change. It is the myriad small things of daily life that really matter, that make a difference to mankind. The tragedy of the contemporary human society is that more people appear to ‘die for God’ than to ‘live for God,’ which is more difficult and involves multiple choices and needs a new mindset.

 

Cleansing consciousness and cultivating love

For any spiritual progress, the imperative is to cleanse and elevate our consciousness. Through millenniums of struggle for survival and cultivating culture and creating a civilization, our consciousness is loaded with impurities, aggression, and avarice. They have distorted human personality and have become impediments to human progress. Everyone needs a ‘spiritual cleansing bath’ to rid ourselves of the toxins inherent in human life. Other traits like spontaneous compassion, kindness and love, while not altogether vanquished, have become mute and meek. The defining difference is that while to men and women of yore and yonder, making a moral choice came more naturally or without too much struggle, for us it requires a herculean, often debilitating, effort. If it was the ordinary then, being righteous, it is an exception now. They, the humans of the earlier yugas, did not have to wage an internal war every time they had to do the right thing or to suppress an evil thought; but that is not the case now. If human beings who lived say forty or fifty thousand years ago had to go through what we have to in our daily lives, the constant and corrosive struggle not to knowingly do wrong to someone else, they could not have lived the lives they led. In this tumultuous time and turbulent period, ill will has almost become irresistible. Few are satisfied with their own gratification of good; many want others to bite the dust. The result is to warp and corrupt the myriad often moral choices that our transient lives entail. It manifests in multiple forms ranging from broken homes to religious intolerance, from ethnic cleansing to virulent

 

 

 

 

379 Annie Besant. The Bhagavad-Gita. 2003. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.216.

 

nationalism. Man’s tool-making capacity, which helped him survive and prevail over other species and Nature, has turned out to be his nemesis; he is making weapons too terrible to be used, but too irresistible to be piled up. A weapon has a ‘life’ and momentum of its own. Our addiction to gadgets has made us so dependent and debilitated that we are now easy prey to every passing vulture and virus.

There is no virtue more valued, and no state of mind more wished for than love. We all want love in our lives, to love and be loved — there is little doubt about that — but love has come to mean or convey so many things that it may actually mean nothing at all, or nothing to do with ‘love’. Although we cannot neatly package love in a few crisp words, the fact is that no other emotion has inspired, enthralled, excited and exasperated more people, and has played a larger role in human relationships and in the destiny of the species. Alfred Tennyson wrote that it is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all. Emily Dickinson wrote, ‘Love in its essence is spiritual, and for a seeker the love of all life is to love God’. On one thing all spiritual teachings agree. Love, in its transformative effect, is alchemy. It can, as nothing else, enable us to be radically different from what we are born to be, or have turned out to be; to rise above ourselves; to overcome much of the malaise that afflicts us. It can turn the barren soil of our soul into a garden of flowers; it is the inexhaustible elixir. It is the poet’s life breath and a philosopher’s stone. Through love we  can forgive ourselves and forgive others. An act or even thought of true love can erase bad karma and open the gates of good karma. The simplest way to cultivate love is through sharing and generous giving, regardless of reward and reciprocity. Although universal love, and love of the divine, are extolled as true love, personal love, love of another person can be transformed to service universal or divine love. Any form of life, any sentient being is but a symbol, a spark, a microcosm — of the macrocosm, of the universe, and of the Supreme. Any love we send out returns in a regenerating spiral and radiates all around. The bedrock of all love is Self-love, which is the love of the Supreme whose earthly expression is all life on earth. One does not ‘fall’ in love; one rises in love of any kind, personal, interpersonal, intimate, or inconsequential. It is the cleanser of the consciousness. It is the best medicine for the malaise of man, the best antidote for fear and insecurity; and a single heart can swamp and suffuse the entire world. It is a kind of condition that is blind to the loved one’s flaws and sees only the virtues, not weaknesses but strengths, not what is wrong but what is right. Love may or may not cover a multitude of sins, as the Bible says, but it does cleanse our own soul. It is through unconditional love that one can exhibit cascading compassion. Love is to be free; one does not hold another with love; or ‘belong’ through love. Only in the state of love is it possible to experience what is best in ‘being human’.

The question then is: if, as the Beatles’ lyric goes, ‘all you need is love’, why is it so elusive, so slippery? A more troubling thought is: has our tumultuous passage through evolution, coupled with the corruption of our culture, transformed love to the extent that its place in our life is just that of another means, yet another gimmick, to get what we want of and from life, and from other humans? Could it be that we are really ‘in love’ with hate, and that on some layer of our consciousness we have come to believe that hate gets us more out of life than that fluffy, wooly love? Love seems to slip too easily into hatred, which is the intense, visceral dislike of another person, a dislike so consuming that it will stop at nothing to destroy that person. We do not only hate someone else for wrongs, real or perceived, done to us. There are many more people in the world who hate themselves, and so intensely that they destroy themselves. The wall between love and hate, sometimes called the two sides of the same coin, has become porous, and the acts done in the name of love, for the sake of an individual or a religion or a country or God, have come to be barely distinguishable from those done in hate. People feel good about themselves because such acts are done for ‘love’, no matter if the very object of ‘love’ gets destroyed. The American poet Henry Longfellow

 

wrote that the sweetest thing in the world is love, and the next sweetest is hate. Freud said that humans, unlike dogs, are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate. Now, scientists say that indeed the two — love and hate — are connected, and that “brain scans of people, shown images of individuals they hated, revealed a pattern of brain activity that partly occurs in areas also activated by romantic love.”380 It was also reported that the same sections of the brain that trigger intense love are also the ‘areas of addiction’, say, to cigarettes, drugs or alcohol, which means that we can not only hate but even feel good about hating, as we do when we are addicted to something or someone, and might even experience withdrawal symptoms if deprived of the