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

survives, and that death is no different from a passage to another state of consciousness. What are called NDEs — near death experiences — and what are dubbed as ‘cross-correspondences’, over a span of thirty years, from the ‘dead’ psychic researcher F.W.H. Myers, induce even skeptics to give some credibility to the idea of life, death, and afterlife being altered states of consciousness. But whether or not any consciousness at any level survives death, there is little doubt that the future of the human race will hinge on the nature and level of consciousness that the succeeding generations of humans will possess. And what they will ‘possess’ will have much to do with how we lead our lives. That process is already underway; there is little doubt that everything human, including human consciousness, is in the throes of a profound transformation. The challenge is to take charge of this process, to bring to bear other subtle forces on it, other than the ones we currently rely upon like science and technology, forces such as spirituality and heart energy, and steer this process in the desirable direction.

The word consciousness itself is derived from the Latin conscientia, which primarily means ‘moral conscience’. In the literal sense, conscientia (or con scientia) means

 

 

 

465 Albert Einstein. ThinkExist.com. Consciousness Quotes. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/consciousness/

 

‘knowledge-with’, that is, shared knowledge. One of the abiding mysteries of life is not only what life is, but what constitutes the fullness of a person, an individual independent of another individual. Have we always been like this, a bunch of individuals whose world ends at the boundary of their bodies and the rest theoretical, at best a necessary nuisance? Not so, say many epics, cultures, and calendars. For example, from the Mayan perspective, it all began barely 26,000 years ago, a time that marked, according to psychologists Barry and Janae Weinhold, ‘the beginning of humanity’s psychological individuation’, which means moving from being unconsciously united with the Creator or Ground of Being, to choosing to become divided from the Creator and developing separate individual consciousness.466 In the current paradigm of existence, space, time, and matter constitute the primary ‘things’ of reality. They are the a priori assumptions, the premise for the paradigm. But within this framework, consciousness appears inexplicable. A paradigm shift will occur when we learn to experience consciousness as something fundamental and everything else as derivative. And it will materialize when we move towards the goal of collective global consciousness, through the stages of individual global consciousness and group global consciousness. At a generic level, consciousness is inherent in everything from an atom to a human; and all evolution and growth is to attain higher and higher levels of consciousness. The theosophist and great visionary Annie Besant said, “To begin with a definition of terms: consciousness and life are identical, two names for one thing as regarded from within and from without.

There is no life without consciousness; there is no consciousness without life”467. According to theosophy, the difference between life or ‘web of life’ as Annie Besant calls it, in different ‘kingdoms’ — the mineral, vegetable, animal, and human — is the level or plane of consciousness. British psychologist Stuart Sutherland once wrote: “Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written on it.”468 Hopefully things are a bit clearer today. Consciousness is the ‘awareness of awareness’; it is also sometimes compared to air, which can be compressed to varying degrees of density in containers of different shapes and sizes. Some New Age thinkers believe that it is by the bridge of consciousness that the age-old conflict between science and religion could be solved, possibly opening the way to the realization that “Consciousness” is God, and that we are the creators of our own universe. If we can actualize that realization, we can then become players in the ongoing evolution of consciousness and of our own transformation.

Complex and incomprehensible as consciousness might seem, it is still useful to lay bare a few comprehensible parameters. At the deepest level in every human there is an irreducible, irreplaceable, ‘content of consciousness’, unique to the individual and yet all encompassing. We give the appearance of being ‘stand-alone’; we are born separately, we live separately, and die separately. But multiplicity, the Upanishads have proclaimed, is only apparent — it is an appearance, if not illusion, the leela of maya. According to the American author Ken Wilber, consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular.

Indeed, in the words of the Indian Advaita philosopher Ramesh Balsekar, there is only consciousness; there is neither creation nor destruction, neither birth nor death, neither

 

 

 

466 Sol Luckman. Shift in Human Consciousness. 2007. Accessed at: http://www.2012warning.com/shift-in- human-consciousness-2012.htm

467 Annie Wood Besant. Study in Consciousness: a Contribution to the Science of Psychology. Chapter II: Consciousness. 1998. Kessinger Publishing. Montana, USA. p.32.

468 Stuart S. Sutherland. The International Dictionary of Psychology. 2nd edition.1995. Crossroad Publishing. New York, USA.

 

destiny nor free will, neither any path nor any achievement. David Shiang (God Does Not Play Dice, 2008) calls God a ‘gold mine of consciousness’. It is consciousness, not our sense organs, that either earns punya, the credit in the karmic ledger, arising from good deeds, words, and thoughts, or incurs papa, the debit entry in the same ledger due to our bad deeds. The fountainhead of desire is consciousness, and it is desire, as Krishna told Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, that makes us transgress against our own will. According to ancient Vedic insight, all matter is energy, and energy is nothing but consciousness. According to the Indian system of yoga, the key to attain a higher consciousness is the awakening or activation of the kundalini energy, located at the lower end of the spinal cord, which according to Ramana Maharshi, is ‘nothing but the natural energy of the Self, where Self is the universal consciousness (Paramatma) present in every being’, and that the ‘individual mind of thoughts cloaks this natural energy from unadulterated expression’. That subtle energy is the divine guiding force behind our continuing evolution towards higher dimensions of consciousness. At the individual level, consciousness manifests as our thoughts, feelings, articulations, and actions. Every action, every thought, every idle word creates waves and sets up reactions. According to the Universal Law, when one thinks a thought or feels an emotion, that thought or that emotion makes an impression on the Universal Consciousness. Nothing is lost or is in vain. Everything that happens is within the Universal Consciousness. Our reactions to past thoughts and actions become our fate, destiny, and karma. An individual’s fate is simply the rebounding effects of previous choices remembered by his soul. At the species level, fate is the fallout or hangover of our predecessors’ actions over millions of years of evolution. And yet the primary actions that keep us alive, such as breathing, seeing, hearing, touching, and even tasting, take place without our conscious participation or without us stopping to think about them. Even our automatic, purposeful behavior, such as solving most of our routine problems happens without the aid of our full consciousness.

Consciousness, like thin air, cannot be grasped or held on to. Consciousness is ageless, formless, colorless, and genderless. Just as air permeates the entire atmosphere, consciousness permeates the entire human body. While it can never be located, it is very real, as real as life itself. Consciousness is that which at once separates and connects — one human to another human, one generation to another generation, one yuga to another yuga, or age. Researchers are now saying that what separates our early childhood from our adulthood is the state of consciousness, and that a child is not simply a miniature adult; nor is an adult simply a blown-up baby. In short, in terms of consciousness, children and adults are, as described by Alison Gopnik (The Philosophical Baby, 2009), ‘different forms of Homo sapiens’. And yet, they are all reflections of the same universal consciousness, much like the reflections of the same sun in different forms of water on earth, be it the water of the Ganga or of the gutter. According to Advaita philosophy, the universe and everything in it are not God’s creation; they — and countless others we have no idea of — are all divine disclosures, forms through which He lets us see, touch, and relate with Him as a mark of His mercy.

To understand both the ‘why’ and the ‘why not’ of human behavior, and the slide down the moral hill, we must come to grips with the question of consciousness. It has many dimensions and depths. In one sense, consciousness is not different from what we think is the objective reality of the world. The world outside is us; it is our consciousness. The subject and the object are one. The words of the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (Space, Time and Gravitation, 1920) offer a useful analogy: ‘We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.’ In another sense, consciousness is always of something and lasts no more than a millisecond. Because these seconds succeed each other continuously it gives the impression that consciousness is permanent. At another level, consciousness is what both

 

unites and separates one living being from another. It was what made the humans of the earlier ages so different from us. In the epics, we read about the heroic deeds of great men and wonder ‘how could they do it?’ and ‘how could they be so utterly selfless?’ The answer is that the consciousness with which they functioned as a species was of a different genre, qualitatively different from the ones we have; as different as human from another animal.

Judging by the basics of our behavior, it does appear that the men of the past had a different and a more moral and dharmic consciousness than the men of this age. That is what the Hindu cyclical time and passage of yugas is all about. To do the right thing was not an epic struggle at that time. To be compassionate in one’s personal life did not require supreme sacrifice. Such a hypothesis is also shared by anthrophilosopher Owen Barfield. He argued that the perception of primitive man, what he called ‘original’ participation, was a kind of thinking, and in those primordial days, perceiving and thinking had not yet split apart, as they have for us. According to Owen, at first, humanity perceived itself as One with all things, which he called ‘pantheism’ (Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry, 1988). What he calls participation and others call intuition, is something that we share with animals. Over several millenniums, and as the brain grew bigger and bigger, our intuitive capacity got marginalized and our ‘intellectual’ capacity became the dominant force in human affairs.

That was the need of the hour, the wages of survival. But it also changed the balance and content of human consciousness, which, in turn, changed human personality and character, which again, in their turn, impacted on human behavior and conduct. Consciousness is the key, not merely conduct, to ‘being a better being’. Our sense of separateness stems from our sense that we alone have a ‘conscious’ consciousness and that we are therefore entitled to ride roughshod over everyone else. There is no such thing as ‘unconsciousness’; it is a question of different layers and kinds of consciousness. The Spanish novelist Miguel de Unamuno wrote that, “The only way to give finality to the world is to give it consciousness.”469 If we can do that, the world will cease to be a mere word that signifies very little for