Man's Fate and God's Choice - Bhimeswara Challa (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

we aspire for and what we want to be are a blend of many tenuous things; and the three dimensions that make us who we are — physical, mental and spiritual are out of sync. We long to shake off our shackles, lighten the load on our back, soar into the sky, dive into our soul and become a kind of ‘human angel’. We can only speculate on or surmise, to use the words of the biologist Robert Wright, the ‘logic of human destiny’; but what we do know is that the human lot seems pretty dismal. Whether or not, as the biologist Stephen Jay Gould puts it, we are here by the ‘luck of the draw’, or because God put us here as His pristine proxy, the fact is that we are alive in the ‘here and now’, and that ought to be the governing ground reality. Another such ‘reality’ is that we are the dominant form of life on this planet in terms of our plundering power, not in our enriching ability. We are also not the most numerous species; others far outnumber us and their relationship with the planet is more balanced; they give and take, although unconsciously, in equal measure. That is why their populations, which do fluctuate like the human, do not pose a threat to Nature. The irony is that we are unchallenged on earth, but we behave as if we are under attack and fear for our lives. Most of us might be ‘alive’ in the physical sense, but we are neither ‘awake’ nor ‘aware’ in the real and full sense. We take great pride in being human and yet we strive relentlessly to overcome the confines of human flesh and

The trouble is, we are not quite sure what we should ‘become’; whether we should choose the ‘ignorant innocence’ of an animal, or learn to live with the limits and limitations of our ‘knowledge’. We are not happy with what we are but we feel trapped in this body and in this life. We want to be many things, do many things, soar in the sky, save our soul, enjoy eternal bliss, but we do not know what to do with our body. Without it we do not exist. And if

 

we do not exist, we go nowhere, temporally or spiritually, and with it we become a prey to desire, disease, decay, and death. We cannot ‘undo’ our birth or embrace the life-after. Such is our dilemma and we seem fated to search, struggle, and suffer and die.

It is this deep disaffection with what Nature has assigned to the human lot that drives the destiny we want to make for ourselves. That is the bedrock and benchmark — of our age- old yearning for what we variously call alchemy, cathartic change, paradigm shift, transcendence, metamorphosis, and transformation. Our perspective on transformation, like much else, is riddled with paradoxes. We are transformed all the time; yet we struggle for transformation. The only constant, as the cliché goes, is change: but when it comes down to our own lives, we prefer the comfort of the status quo. The only change we want is ‘exchange’ on our own terms; that is, to keep what we like about ourselves, and exchange what we do not like with what we like in others. When we do want to alter our conditional existence, we do not want to leave that to the gods of fate or to the laws of Nature, or to chance or randomness. We want to control the process, prepackage the product. The most puzzling aspect of us as a species is our immense capacity for transformational change, individually and collectively. Equally puzzling is our inability to induce the right kind of change, to transcend the boundary of direct personal gain, to strive for anything that is not immediately useful. We confuse change of conditions, which is what we aspire for to better our lives, with the ‘change of condition’, which is transformation. What we need is change within; while we try to do to change the external circumstance. We need inner illumination; not searchlights into the sky.

In the final analysis, the current global crises are but a direct reflection of the level of consciousness evolution of the human spirit. All those tremors have the same epicenter: the consciousness. None of them can be resolved without a radical inner transformation and an elevation to a nobler plateau of consciousness. To put it differently, we must find a way out of the mental labyrinth of assumptions, beliefs, and paradigms that have governed human life so far. We have to imbibe path-breaking human values, spontaneous sensitivity to the suffering of others, acceptance and adoption of a simpler and less ostentatious lifestyle, and a heightened awareness of the ecological impact of our every action or inaction. Many thoughtful people have come to realize that a radical inner transformation, or  transformational evolution and rise to a nobler plateau of consciousness, are the only hope for the resolution of any of the grave problems the world faces. It means that we must be able to ‘experience’ experience differently; to transform our understanding of ourselves and of the world around us. And it means that a priori we have to rethink our concepts and ideas about things such as chance, luck, serendipity, or accident that underpin our sense of reality, and the difference between ‘fact’ and fantasy’. We have to rethink our conceptual comprehension of and relationship with Nature and God. We implicitly assume that what we cannot experience, cannot exist, that what we cannot know or predict even, Nature cannot do; and our idea of God is a reflection of our ultimate fantasy, an image of the best of what we want to become. And we presume that what we view as a ‘fact’ is the unassailable truth. We cannot reorder the world outside and make it peaceful, harmonious, and trouble-free if we harbor indifference, intolerance, malice, hatred, jealousy, and violence in our minds and hearts. If we cannot desist from deriving joy from the misery of others, how can the world be at peace with itself? The truth of the matter is that we simply do not have the wherewithal, the tools and the goods, inside us for what it takes to ‘fix’ things outside, or to know what is right and to do it effortlessly or even to be able to listen to our own ‘inner voice’, which Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey calls ‘still and quiet conscience’ (Henry VIII). Wolsey’s rueful lament that had he served his God with half the zeal he served his king, he would not at his age have left himself naked to his enemies, fits us like a shoe. Metaphorically speaking, the ‘king’ we are

 

servile to is the troika of pleasure, power, and profit, and the ‘enemies’ we are naked to are anger, greed, indifference, malice, and violence.

This means that the simple but seminal choice before mankind is either to completely and consciously modify and mutate himself (transformation, for short) practically leaving no trace behind — or to face a future that is so nightmarish that people might actually prefer death to life. We have to modify and transform while knowing that we are transforming ourselves. But the idea of ‘transformation’ itself gives us the jitters. That is because we somewhat facilely assume that to be ‘transformed’ is to undergo some exceptional, transcendental experience, or to go through something similar to the Buddha’s Night of Enlightenment, or to display exceptional heroism or altruism or to be personally touched by God. We do not have to be saints or supermen or possess supernatural powers to transform ourselves. But we must be clear about what we want to become, where we end up, and what we end up as. If we embark on a voyage without knowing the destination, we cannot choose the vessel appropriate for the journey, and as a result show up somewhere else or simply sink on the way.

At a very practical, almost automatic level, ‘transformation’ is what we want all the time. Every desire — for wealth, fame fortune, for good health, good looks, good job, and so on — is transformational. But these are at the outermost, superficial level. The ‘transformation’ we must strive towards to save ourselves and our soul is at the deepest level that we are capable of envisioning. Only then can we bring it to the level of choices we make for living. A Buddhist adage says “all know the way; but few actually walk it”. It is that ‘walking’ that we should do as the essence of transformation we seek. Our sense of self, our idea of identity of who we are in relation to other humans, other species, Nature and God, has to change. It is to train oneself to put the other person’s good ahead of our own good in every circumstance. To rephrase the thought, it is to look at every person as someone in need of God’s help through you. That might still fall far short of the famed Upanishadic axiom ‘Tatvamasi’ (thou art that), but it will be a big step forward. In other words, the focus has to be not so much or only on the content but on the context, and we must rid ourselves of the negatives like anger, pride, greed, vanity, and malice. It is like draining out vile water and discovering a spring of freshwater welling within. It means transformation of our character and personality, that is, to go beyond the hypnotic pursuit of money, sex, and power into a harmonious state of living at peace with life, Nature, and God. It means bringing about a new understanding of the things that dominate our thought processes. It is to realize that, as the American author Norman Brown puts it, the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness; that sex is an expression, not a substitute, of erotic love; and power that is of no benefit to others is tyranny. Transformation is not about hereafter, not about what happens when we are dead and gone; it is about here and now, while we are still alive and existent.

Any change that does not affect our ‘self-righteously self-destructive’ behavior, the signature of our ‘civilized’ life, for the better, is cosmetic, and the illusion of change is more destructive than the status quo. What we sow is what sprouts from the ground below; if the subsoil or the seed are of the wrong kind, the plant or the tree cannot be any different.

Transformation that could positively impact human behavior, although spiritual in its essence, need not entail any particular religious ritual or spiritual affiliation. But tireless practice and non-attachment to the fruits of practice (abhyyasa and vairagya in Sanskrit) are required for any spiritual or behavioral progress. These are the two composite core principles on which the entire Yoga system rests, and the ones that Lord Krishna told Arjuna (Bhagavad Gita, 6.35) are essential to control the wayward mind. We need to nurture an attitude of incessant effort to attain and maintain a state of stable equanimity; and we must learn to let go of the many attachments, aversions, fears, and false identities — even entitlements — that are clouding our vision of the world and thwarting our evolutionary destiny. At a superficial

 

level, persistent practice and unattached effort seem incompatible with and antagonistic to each other: we are required, at the same time, to ‘never give up’ and to ‘let go’, to ‘never cling’ and to ‘shed’. Practice requires the exercise of the will, while non-attachment seems more a matter of surrender. At a deeper level, practice and non-attachment work together and complement each other; they are like the two wings of a bird. The two are complementary parts of yoga, each requiring the other for its full expression. Abhyasa is sometimes described as a process of canalization and re-conditioning, and vairagya as a process of de- conditioning. Persistent practice and ceaseless