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

played out within the inexorable march of insentient time. Both our ignorance and arrogance are incorrigible.

 

 

 

508 H.P. Blavatsky. The Secret Doctrine: the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Vol. I. Cosmogenesis. Part III. Cyclic Evolution and Karma. 1978. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.643.

 

All this agoraphobia, all this thoughtful torment, all this wiggle and wriggle, is grounded in the rickety base that man is the master, that he matters most, and that his premature disappearance from this particular planet will make God a virtual orphan, a cosmic calamity so disastrous that earth itself may be left without a raison d’être. Although that is the general working hypothesis of modern life, the fact of the matter is that there is very little evidence to support this, save our exaggerated sense of our manifest destiny. While experts might differ on how long, given good behavior, human species might last on earth, the numbers range from a few hundreds to more than a million years. Although there is broad agreement that our behavior is not exactly exemplary and therefore we might not last the full stretch, surely we deserve to last longer than a century or two, or even another millennium.

But it depends, as never before, on us. While the genetic, biological, social, and psychological basis of behavior is a subject of scholarly discourse, the stark fact is that both individually and collectively we have no control over our conduct. That is more glaring when it comes to our conduct in company, in human interfacings that call for a tradeoff between giving and taking, sacrifice and sharing. In both ancient Greek and Hindu thought, rebirth is conditioned by behavior. And it is not only what we do to each other, it is also what we think of each other that forms the determinant. A pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles asked, ‘Do you not see that you are devouring each other in the thought processes of your mind?’ And in the Hindu Manusmriti it is said, “he whose flesh I eat in this life, will devour mine in the next”.509 Our bad behavior also has planetary implications. Fueled by human avarice and ambition, greed and gluttony, the economic growth machine has pushed our planet well beyond its ecological stamina. The inference is increasingly becoming irresistible that with the kind of consciousness we presently have, the driving force behind behavior, our generation just does not have the will, wit, and wisdom to arrest and reverse the course on the scale that is needed. And the date of reckoning, the time for the ‘end of the world’ kind of change, according to the Mayan calendar, for example, is not far; it could be as soon as 21 December 2012. It is said to be the start of the World of the Fifth Sun, “a new era resulting from and signified by the solar meridian crossing the galactic equator, and the earth aligning itself with the center of the galaxy.”510 According to the Mayans, this date indicates the beginning of what they termed, “The Prophecy of the Sun,” and denotes the dramatic transition from one major phase of our world into another era. It begins a new 26,000-year cycle through the next era, or the Age of Peace. The technological singularity concept (the dawn of superhuman intelligence and the end of the human era predicted by Vernor Vinge) parallels this, only at a date roughly three decades from 2000, in the year 2030. According to Carlos Barrios (The Book of Destiny, 2009), a famed Mayan ceremonial priest and spiritual guide, we are at the cusp of the era when peace begins, when people live in harmony with Mother Earth; we are no longer in the World of the Fourth Sun, but we are not yet in the World of the Fifth Sun. This is the time of transition, a period of passage, the threshold to a new era.

One does not have to be an all-seeing seer, a crystal gazer or a futurologist or a Nostradamus to say that while everything in life and in Nature constantly change, the present turmoil is clearly extraordinary, beyond the natural flux of Nature, beyond the flow of space and rhythm of Time, bound inextricably with human will and actions. Along with a sense of

 

 

 

509 Thomas McEvilley. The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. 2002. Allworth Press. New York, USA. p.99.

510 Carlos Barrios. The Mayan Calendar – The World Will Not End. Accessed at: http://www.mayamysteryschool.com/pdf%20files/Carlos_Barrios.pdf

 

fateful foreboding, the troubling thought also curls up: could all this sense of gloom and doom and hype and hyperbole turn out to be yet another false alarm? Will it soon be shattered by that magical thing — hope — that keeps most men alive, defying all reason and logic?

Described as pearly and white-winged, capable of healing all sorrows and bring peace, hope is the only thing, according to Greek mythology, that remained in the forbidden box that Pandora opened and later, to our eternal relief, let out. In the dynamic of ‘life’, imagination is more fruitful than knowledge, dreams more alluring than facts, and hope more ‘life-giving’ than experience. It is such fearless hope that inspired some mystics and philosophers to envision, despite modern man’s crass materialism, that man, within the circumstance of his own space and time, is capable of transforming himself into a nobler being, a god. The theosophist Annie Besant foresaw, far away in 1914, a wave of mysticism sweeping over the world and philosopher Hans Jonas saw a historical sequence of development that moves from ‘objectification’ to ‘interiorization’, from religious knowledge to its subjective application. A more recent report prepared for the Millennium Project (1992), under the auspices of the United Nations, addressed fundamental questions such as, “Is there a countervailing set of indicators that shows that we humans may be waking up to our predicament? Is there a set of trends that shows that we are beginning to consciously organize ourselves to respond to the ecological, social, and spiritual challenges we face? Is a new kind of experiential or first-hand spirituality emerging?”

The report concludes on a note of soaring optimism, “From this inquiry, we have concluded that a new global culture and consciousness have taken root and are beginning to grow in the world”. This assessment represents a huge hope for paradigm shift in consciousness, “as distinct and momentous as that which occurred in the transition from the agricultural era to the industrial era roughly three hundred years ago.”511 Further it makes an exciting but astonishing statement that, “the most distinctive feature of this emerging era is not technological change, but a change in human consciousness.” The report calls this consciousness, the ‘reflective/living-systems’ paradigm or perspective, which has two distinctive features: 1) an enhanced capacity to step aside and non-judgmentally look at ourselves and the world; and 2) to see the earth and the cosmos as interconnected, living systems.512 We have to take these findings with the import they deserve, but the world we outwardly see barely offers any hint. Even assuming that there is a wave of consciousness- change in the world, the question is: is there a ‘critical mass’ and is it strong enough to coalesce into an unstoppable movement for species-scale transformation? What such minimal ‘critical’ mass should be is hard to calculate, but we do know the true test of such a ‘wave of change’. It is the spontaneous, unlabored and almost ‘ordinary’ or ‘default’ ability to derive genuine happiness from the happiness of others or, at the very, very least, not being able to derive even a semblance of satisfaction at the misery of others. If any shift in human consciousness does not lead, at the least, to this development, then that change or transformation is labor lost, effort gone in vain.

Be that as it may, we have so far prepared ourselves for every threat and contingency by focusing on the external environment, by inventing new technologies to ‘fix’ problems, to

 

 

 

511 Duane Elgin and Coleen LeDrew. Summary: Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm. New Horizons for Learning: Perspectives on the Future. Accessed at: http://www.newhorizons.org/future/elgin1.htm

512 Duane Elgin and Coleen LeDrew. Summary: Global Consciousness Change: Indicators of an Emerging Paradigm. New Horizons for Learning: Perspectives on the Future. Accessed at: http://www.newhorizons.org/future/elgin1.htm

 

fill ‘gaps’ between what we want and what we cannot get. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer talked of getting rid of the ‘God of gaps’. One ‘gap’ we need to fill is between being and becoming, between what we are and what we should become; what we are is a gift of God and what we become is our way of showing gratitude to God. But we must overcome our hubris about what man, even more, ought to do, both as an individual and as a species. It is true that, whether it is divine design or human dexterity, humankind has managed to surmount seemingly hopeless odds. In our own lives we see that things can unrecognizably change any minute. Be that as it may, the problem is not with the human hand; it is with our mind. When our limited, conditioned mind finally opens up to the infinity of the mystery which has been repressed until then, a person often finds himself drowning in the ocean of limitless implausibility. For, when the mind is finally divorced from all its previous premises and understandings, it suddenly stands upon the brink of the limitless abyss. It is at this point where some sink, some swim, some fall off the cliff, and a few learn to fly. This is the ‘vertiginous uncertainty’ of life, of blinding incomprehension, of immense possibilities, few probabilities, and thus far two certainties.

Unlike ever before, the earth itself is the issue, at stake; Nature itself has a stupendous stake. And never before has the entire humanity been called upon to make a shared sacrifice. Never before were so many human beings of one generation required to make such changes in their ‘life style’. That is the difference between then and now. We tend to think that every ‘mind’ is specific and autonomous to each individual but, some great ‘minds’ like the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung have said, the subconscious of our minds are all somehow connected or are part of a universal source, which the Upanishads called the Universal Mind. The intriguing question is: can we re-establish and strengthen the connectivity that seems to surface from time to time through a mysterious process? That could be a big boost to the task ahead, which is that we must change everything between conception to action, the way we think, the way we take decisions, the way we analyze and assimilate knowledge, the way we prioritize and the way we relate to the universe. And for that we must go down, or ‘up’, to the deepest depths — or to the starry heights — of our consciousness. Tolstoy wrote: “All human history, from the earliest times to our own day, may be considered as a movement of the consciousness, both of individuals and of homogeneous groups, from lower ideas to higher ones.”513 The ‘higher idea’ now has to be, ‘conscious consciousness change’ as a means to make man a genuinely and naturally compassionate being. Gillian Ross (The Search for the Pearl, 1993) said that mysticism and compassion are inseparable and that “we are entering the most challenging decade of our history. To meet this challenge, the onus is upon each one of us to help shift human consciousness beyond the limitations of personal ego.”514

We must remember that consciousness itself is two-fold. The universal or cosmic is what pervades all physical bodies, inclusive of all animate and inanimate beings, and the specific is the same consciousness animating a particular body in the wakeful state, called jagritasthana in