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

than human minds. We often say ‘heart-to-heart’, not ‘brain-to-brain’ or ‘mind-to-mind’.

Path-breaking research on heart intelligence, by the American Institute of HeartMath (IHM), has shown that the heart’s “intelligence” affects emotions and physical health — especially when it comes to handling stress — and specifically what you can do to balance heart rhythms, reduce stress hormones, and boost your immune system. The “intelligence” refers both to the heart’s “brain,” or the 40,000 neurons found in the heart (the same number in the brain itself), and the intuitive signals the heart sends, including feelings of love, happiness, care, and appreciation. When such positive emotions are felt, it is said that they not only change patterns of activity in the nervous system but also reduce the production of the stress hormone called cortisol. When there is less cortisol, there is more DHEA (dehydroepiandrosterone), the so-called fountain-of-youth hormone known to have anti-aging effects on many of the body’s systems. What is called the HeartMath Solution outlines ten steps for harnessing the power of the heart’s intelligence, including ways to manage one’s emotions and keep energy levels high. One of the most important is the ‘Freeze-Frame’ technique for calming the nervous system, improving clarity of thought and perception, and boosting productivity. The heart is said to communicate with the brain and body through four pathways: neurological (nervous system), biophysical (pulse waves), biochemical (hormones), and energetic (electromagnetic fields). At the dawn of civilization, heart intelligence manifested itself in ways that are now called intuition, instinct, the sixth sense, and extrasensory perception, to help man sense danger and look for safety. The prehistoric man, in truth the primal man, was genuinely more human than the ‘civilized’ man; he was less divided, more in harmony with Nature, and more synergistic in his behavior, perhaps violent by necessity but less malicious and more creative without the aid of technology. Man did not have a fully developed brain then, but had a fully functioning heart to provide the needed energy and momentum. In all probability, it was man’s heart that triggered the formation of his genius. It is the excessive intellectualization of the human condition that coarsened it and has brought man to the present pernicious pass. The way forward is perhaps a step backward. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher and Nobel Laureate argued that intuition was deeper than the intellect, and declared that the next human quality to develop is intuition. No fundamental change in the human psyche and condition is possible with the consciousness man has evolved. Heart transplantation, the life-saving medical procedure, is throwing new light on the heart as a source of cellular memory, stretching beyond the finality of death. New areas of research in cellular biology like energy cardiology, and cardio energetics suggest that the heart’s biophysical energy and information travel throughout the body and reach the surface of the skin, and the sounds generated by the beating heart too store energy and information, and traverse through the fluids and make their way to the outside of the skin and eventually go out into space. It is being said that someday science might well be able to develop some sort of a ‘heart print’, a kind of a road map to lay bare the world of emotions within, to destroy our negative emotions and empower us to experience the nobler emotions more spontaneously. And the prospect is dangled when “machines will

 

 

 

414 Immortal Words: an Anthology. 1963. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Bombay, India. p.194.

 

be able to partially fulfill the work of an introspective mind”, and “handheld gadgets will be able to take a complete heart print of an individual and point out the dark secrets of her heart”.415

While on the one hand, man is trying to realign the human condition with the heart as the fulcrum, on the other hand, mainstream research is focusing on ‘boosting brain power’ as the silver bullet to solve all human problems. Much hangs on which will win the race; it would be even better if we could harmonize both. Research is also indicating that there are several ‘silent areas’ or apparently inactive zones in the brain whose precise role is unclear, and it is being speculated that they may be the gateways to supra-sensory cognition that is not based on reality as we currently understand, nor on subject-object dichotomy. If science succeeds, minds may, we are being reassured, directly communicate with each other, babies can be custom-made, man will have X-ray vision with a terminator mind, and life can stretch so long that death becomes a mere theoretical possibility. But man could also become more of a mental being and his brain-guided behavior could be even more nihilistic. He would then become even more suicidal, murderous, fratricidal, and fractious. Life itself is now reduced to a mental construct, bereft of aliveness, awareness, a deadened abstraction or travesty of who we are. There are already more ‘mentally’ ill people, some declared and many undeclared, than the physically ill, and more people suffer from mental impairment than physical disorder. According to the World Health Organization, some 400 million people globally suffer from some kind of mental disorder, accounting for about 12 percent of all disease and half of all measurable handicaps (2001 figures).416 If the mind is the most powerful and dominant force, what is it about it that makes us so prone to be so sick as to be able to kill other humans so casually (or kill ourselves so banally) and not be even conscious that we are so afflicted? Is the kind of mind that we happen to have had, an evolutionary tool no longer appropriate to the human form of life? And frontier brain research is also trying to break into the citadel of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud theorized the unconscious to be a deep cavern of dark desires. Psychologist Abraham Maslow disputed it. The unconscious, he said, is not merely an undesirable evil; it “carries in it also the roots of creativeness, of joy, of happiness, of goodness, of its own human ethics and values.”417 To place this in mind-heart terms, the ‘bad unconscious’ is largely centered in the mind, and the ‘good unconscious’ is rooted in the heart. However, we must recognize that emotions and reasoning complement each other and help man to make reasonably sound decisions. But man must dislodge the mind from its pre- eminence in human culture. To borrow a political phrase, we need power-sharing, a compact of cohabitation between the mind and the heart. If a mix of experience and emotion, intelligence and intuition could be made to govern human behavior, it could profoundly change the phenomenal world, and make man a better being, and the species a more moral organism. The French philosopher and Nobel Laureate Henri Bergson had argued that intuition was deeper than the intellect and declared that the next human quality to develop is intuition. The intellect, he said, looks at the outward world. The intuition is a faculty belonging to the inner life, related more to instinct that emphasizes in the organism life-

 

 

 

 

415 Mani Shankar. The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 20 December 2009. p.II.

416 Kathryn S. Bennett. The Future of Mental Health Awareness: a Global Perspective. The Humanist Magazine. September/October 2001. Vol.61, no.5. Accessed at: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+Future+of+Mental+Health+Awareness:+A+Global+Perspective.- a078966505

417 Abraham H. Maslow. The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. 1993. Penguin. p.167.

 

preserving energies.418 Theosophist Annie Besant said that the intellect has to be “subordinated to the higher spiritual quality, which realizes the unity in diversity and therefore comes to realize the divine Self in man. That is the next step forward, looking at consciousness.”419 Mind and heart have to march in step as there is growing evidence that both play a critical role in controlling bodily functions and conditioning emotional responses.

Fortunately, even some among those who worship the god of mind and have delved deep into its magic and mystery have begun to acknowledge its limitations arising from its inherent character. They do not disown the mind but want to transcend it. Sri Aurobindo asserted that “It is only through a decisive transformation of the mind and an emergence into a higher stage of consciousness that man can come face to face with the realization of all that has remained his dream and his aspiration through the ages. Vedanta characterizes the mind as a storehouse of enormous energy, and yet utterly inadequate to probe into subjects such as the meaning of man and the foundation of the universe. The essence of all such ancient wisdom and increasingly nascent insights is that, although inadequate, the mind is everything; the mind can unravel many mysteries, but not really what we want to, and ought to, know.

William Tiller (Science and Human Transformation, 1997) believes that as we ride the ‘River of Life’, the great consciousness adventure, we perceive events around us, but, more often than not, we do not perceive the truth and the reality behind those events. Some wise men say that truth itself is reality, which is never fully comprehensible through our finite intellect.

Pearl Buck said that what she learnt in her life is that there is a kaleidoscope of truths, not the absolute truth. Theosophist G. de Purucker, for example, says that “Truth may be defined as that which is Reality; and present human intelligence can make but approximate advances or approaches to this Cosmic Real which is measureless in its profundity and in its infinite reaches, and therefore never fully comprehensible by any finite intellect”420 What we take as reality is actually a convolution between what is real on the one hand and our mindset or the belief structure on the other hand. It is said that “we can only comprehend truth to the extent to which it resonates with some portion of already perceived reality.”421 In the theosophical text Agni Yoga, from the teachings of one of the founders of theosophy, Master Morya, who was also the guru of Madame Blavatsy, it is written that, “To behold with the eyes of the heart; to listen with the ears of the heart of the roar of the world; to peer into the future with the comprehension of the heart; to remember the cumulations of the past through the heart; thus must one impetuously advance upon the path of ascent. Creativeness encompasses the fiery potentiality, and is impregnated with the sacred fire of the heart.”422 Blavatsky herself asserted that “even ignorance is better than head-learning with no soul-wisdom to illuminate

 

 

 

 

418 Cited in: Annie Besant. The Coming Race. Adyar Pamphlets. Lecture delivered at the Theosophical Conference held at Chittoor on 17 March 1916. Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. Accessed at: http://www.theosophical.ca/adyar_pamphlets/AdyarPamphlet_No76.pdf

419 Annie Besant. The Coming Race. Adyar Pamphlets. Lecture delivered at the Theosophical Conference held at Chittoor on 17 March 1916. Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. Accessed at: http://www.theosophical.ca/adyar_pamphlets/AdyarPamphlet_No76.pdf

420 G. de Purucker. The Esoteric Tradition. Theosophical University Press Online Edition. Pasadena, California, USA. Accessed at: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/et/et-intro.htm

421 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.xvii.

422 Signs of Agni Yoga. Heart. 1932. Agni Yoga Society. New York, USA. Accessed at: http://www.agniyoga.org /ay_heart.html

 

and guide it.”423 She compared the mind to a mirror and said, “it gathers dust while it reflects. It needs the gentle breezes of the soul-wisdom to brush away the dust of our illusions.”424 According to late Arnold Keyserling, the great 20th century European philosopher and author, our head-centered and ego-dominated consciousness operates at the lowest level, equivalent to the ground state of the atoms, where all electrons are in the lowest energy position.

The universality and unity of ‘consciousness’ is also illustrated through a famous episode in