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

logic, reason, and the laws of science, which we have come to view as emancipators and liberators of mankind. What has been called by the 20th century Russian-American philosopher Ayn Rand ‘ethical egoism’ and ‘rational selfishness’ has not created the harmonious human, nor has it allowed the spiritual side to surface. We have developed a mindset that disconnects many things that need to be connected; for example, passion and compassion, prayer and piety, conscience and conduct, belief and behavior, power and forbearance. One of the greatest intellectual and moral crises of our age, one with

 

enormous practical implications, is the fact that most people simply do not believe that there are any universal principles of ethical conduct, or moral imperatives of right and wrong, or, if there are any such principles, that we can know them well enough to induce generic adherence. With growing skepticism about any ecumenical and theological basis to life, the only universal norm appears to be to contend and conspire against one another for ‘comparative advantage’ of the competitive crumbs of crass consumerism, for the remains of the ruins of a ‘good life’. We want liberty and love, freedom and fortune, health and happiness — all of them more than someone or everyone else. None of them has any value in isolation from the opposite and from that of another person. Everything abominable is now honorable under the given circumstances; no atrocity is beyond human depravity; all legitimacy is contextual; and nothing is ruled out for personal gain or to seek divine favor; there are no more any moral or ethical thresholds that one trembles to cross. Human self- righteousness is rivaled only by human fallibility; unrighteousness by condescension; insensitivity by intolerance. And may we pause for a moment to ponder — more horror has been committed throughout human history by self-righteous men, religious or otherwise, than by men we condemn as ‘evil’. Were there to be no more morrows for mankind and a monument erected in its melancholic memory, a large chunk of its dark side will be written dipped in the blood let loose by these men.

Unwilling or unable to own up our responsibility or face the consequences of our actions, we moan ‘Oh, God!’ and ask, ‘what does He truly want from us?’ And ‘why does He not do something?’ And then there are those like Winston Churchill, a man of war for much of his life, who, in the waning years of his eventful life, wondered, in his farewell speech to the House of Commons (1955), what would happen “if God wearied of mankind.”7 In the great Indian epic Mahabharata, its chronicler, the sage Vyasa, himself deemed a divine amsa or a spark, asks a haunting question that goes to the heart of the human malaise, which echoes unanswered down the ages. He laments that no one listens to him when he espouses the importance of dharma (moral conduct), and asks, when man can get virtually everything he aspires in life — artha (wealth) and kama (all worldly wants) and moksha (final liberation)

— through righteousness, “why then should any one fail to follow dharma?”8

It was not only sages like Vyasa who are not listened to. No one listens to anyone, and one of the crying needs of the hour is to be heard with sensitivity, not necessarily when one desperately needs help, but as a human soul yearning for attention. As the stoic Greek philosopher Epictetus said, ‘Nature has given us two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak’. We speak with multiple mouths while being seemingly devoid of ears. We end up doing things we do not want to, manipulated as if by a malevolent force.

Apostle Paul, one of the greatest and earliest Christian missionaries and the author of several epistles incorporated into the New Testament, spoke, as it were, for all of mankind: “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.”9 The two questions or laments, Churchill’s and Vyasa’s, reinforced by the wrenching ‘reflection’ of St. Paul, are the central points of reference — the deepening moral decadence, the gap between belief and behavior, and the potential divine displeasure — that frame this introspective inquest.

 

 

 

7        Winston Churchill. Never Despair. 1955. Speech to the House of Commons, UK. 1 March 1955.

8        Immortal Words: an Anthology. 1963. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Bombay, India. Moral Law. p.142.

9  The Apostle Paul. Romans 7:15. Accessed at: http://faculty.cua.edu/pennington/Canon%20Law/Romans7.htm

 

We may be barely cognizant of its contours but something utterly awesome, something seminal and seismic has happened — and is happening, even as we blink — at the very core of our being, and at the deepest depths of human consciousness. It relates to the most fundamental issues of birth, life, living, dying, and death. We can only surmise about the state of divine ‘weariness’ about man, but the fact is that man himself is getting weary of his own tenuous and tiresome existence, weary of the kind of things he has to do just to be counted among the living, weary of the pain, sorrow, and the loss of personal dignity that seem so irrevocably embedded in the ethos of contemporary life.

Perhaps we are already, without our knowing, in a state of collective ‘posthumous life’ as a prelude to a post-human future, a kind of ‘living dead’ trying to survive the materialistic apocalypse. We have ‘controlled’ birth to suit our convenience; we ‘love’ or hate life, without knowing what it means; we dread ‘living’ but still do everything possible to prolong that ‘dread’; we detest death, yet deep inside, long for its embrace to make up for what we seem to miss in life. And yet paradoxically nothing for the human is as unsettling as dying. The irony and tragedy is that while man craves for certainties in life, he wants to change the only certainty, death. And this despite what the Scriptures tell us that death is similar to the transition from the dream state to the waking state or, as described in Tibetan Buddhism, waking ‘from the dream state of having lived’. While we envy the gods for their immortality, the gods, it is said, envy our mortality. But we want to give up our only ‘comparative advantage’ and get prolonged misery in return.

But death, even after mastering man, is not ‘living on its laurels’. It too, for want of a better word, is ‘evolving’ inside our consciousness in a way that defies our capacity for comprehension, our ability to put that ‘development’ in the perspective of the overall balance and continuum of life on earth. We seem infected with some kind of a ‘death-wish disorder’, which is to wish our own death by taking other people’s lives and inviting a death sentence. We have no inkling if this urge is to escape from the agony and anguish of life or Nature’s way of getting back at man for all the insults he has heaped upon it. The irony is that while we do everything possible — and seemingly impossible — to ward off death, we are now turning to death itself as the panacea for all our life’s ills, to find redemption from the ‘inhuman’ world, to ‘lighten’ its crushing heaviness, and to settle earthly scores. It is through killing that we are trying to circumvent or overcome every human predicament: disappointment, disagreement, or unfulfilled demand.

Our mind has grasped that no one can touch us beyond death; that no human being, once dead, can do us any harm. Many are choosing to voluntarily leave the ranks of what Christopher Isherwood called ‘the marvelous minority — the Living’, and join the majority

— the Dead. So reflexive has this ‘disorder’ become that it is almost impossible to anticipate what one should not say or do to another person to ensure that it will not provoke suicide or homicide or, increasingly, a cocktail of the two. Death in that sense is not snuffing out a life; it is simply ‘problem-solving’. Human self-centeredness and malevolence have become so pervasive that self-destruction and suicide as a source of permanent settlement to life’s temporary problems seems to have attained ‘criticality’ in our lifetime, and suicide has become “nothing short of a pandemic of global proportions”10. It seems far deeper than a desperate cry for help or a fevered response to the growing, almost intolerable, stress and strain of modern life; it seems to have something to do with a still unknown, mysterious evolutionary imperative.

 

 

 

10 Mass Suicide. A Holology Special Report written by Freydis. Accessed at: http://www.holology.com/suicide.html

 

More and more people across the spectrum of gender, age, ethnicity and religion have come to believe that the only dignified way to cope with pain, grief, suffering, sorrow and even pedestrian disappointment is not by erasing the cause but by removing themselves from the very world that creates the ‘cause’. Murder is not lagging all that far behind; our reluctance to kill — for revenge, profit, release from stress, pleasure, fun, or gain — has dramatically faded and we are ever inventing new ‘rational reasons’ to eliminate each other. What is shocking is not the numbers of those who kill themselves and/or kill others, but the utter ordinariness of the triggers and casualness of causes; it seems as if everything and anything man is capable of thinking, feeling and doing can result in one of the two or even both. Fundamentally they are seen, rationally and emotionally, as an ‘honorable’ option in problem-solving and conflict-resolution. The boundaries between murder and martyrdom, suicide and salvation are blurring, leaving us with no yardstick for any moral judgment. Mass murder is getting justified as a ‘just war’ and mass suicide, which is what our assault on biodiversity amounts to, is legitimized as the ‘price of progress.’

While much attention is focused on the politically or religiously motivated ‘suicide terrorism’, the more important point that the human mind itself has become a tool of terror, whose epiphany is self-destruction, as a way to cope with the inanities and inequities of modern life, is largely lost sight of. While we tend to think of terror as a tool of the ‘terrorist’ or of the State or something like blowing up a bus or a plane, the fact of the matter is that it is much closer home; indeed we are the home; almost everyone is a perpetrator and a victim.

Terror is a weapon of the mind; the aim is dominance, power, and control, and there is hardly anyone who does not utilize them to the detriment of someone else. Someone or the other is terrified of us; and we are terrified of someone or the other. Our growing propensity to embrace death as a refuge from life’s indignities and insecurities signifies not only a profound and lethal transformation in the internal psychological balance of the human persona, it raises the chilling question if we, in so doing, are somehow furthering a mysterious cosmic cause, a divine purpose. Could it be a way to maintain a kind of life- balance on earth? Clearly something so basic and causal to life — and creation — cannot ‘just happen’ without evolutionary implications.

What we do know, though, is that the human personality, perhaps more than ever before, is now driven by what goes on inside its head. The human mind, with a dimension of depth matchless in the universe, is the predominant force in the human consciousness as well as the epicenter of all the torment and turmoil in the world. It is a temperate habitat for some of our most virulent and violent passions, our darkest desires. Worse, too often, what we desire, far from being autonomous, is in the context of what another person desires of the same object. If two persons want something, the third wants,