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

Vedanta, the Atman or the soul in the individual body. Liberation, salvation, moksha or nirvana or true transformation, whichever way one wants to describe it, is the extinguishment of the divisive consciousness in the all-enveloping oneness of the divine. In the Hindu conception of the divine, the ‘human soul in the human body’ is the abode of the divine. To align our behavior with this realization, we need a new ‘conscious’ consciousness in which intellect is driven by intuition and intuition is directed by intellect. In the language

 

 

 

513 Leo Tolstoy. Patriotism and Government. Anarchy Archives. Accessed at: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/tolstoy/patriotismandgovt.html

514 Gillian Ross. The Future. Quotations. Accessed at: http://www.kindness.com.au/quotations.htm

 

of science fiction it has been called the ‘Captain Kirk principle’, named after the captain of the famous American television serial Star Trek, who harmonized the super rationality of Mr. Spock and the hyperemotional sensitivity of Dr. McCoy.515 We can take heart from the fact that science fiction has so often turned into scientific fact and that this too would fall into that category. But fictional fantasy can also become a real-life nightmare. While what is needed is a consciousness born of a blend of intuition and intellect, what modern man is attempting to do is to take control of his fate solely through the intellect and denying God His due. In so doing, he is destroying everything that joins one to another and lends dignity to life.

 

The phenomenon humans call God

If ‘transformation’ is complex, confusing, and riddled with contradictions, even more forbidding but fascinating is another phenomenon that we humans call God. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “Whether you say that God made the dog or the dog made God does not seem to matter; that is only one of the sterile disputations of the too subtle theologians”516. Whatever it is, that single syllable conveys more meaning and hope, and consecrates more awe, despair, and devotion than any other in human imagination. It is the one word, or the very thought of it, that is capable of the greatest ecstasy, akin to the thrill of passionate romantic love, strong enough to brave any odds and transcend any barriers. Equally, it could elicit derisive ridicule and scorn we rarely exhibit to another human. While pronouncing God’s ‘death’, as some philosophers, atheists and scientists have done, we do not even show the courtesy, decorum and mourning we bestow on a human acquaintance. While burying, we do not even leave a decent epitaph on his tomb — we are in too much of a hurry to go along to the next funeral of a human. We say He is almighty, all-knowing, all-seeing, but behave as if He cannot see through our brazen behavior or that he does not really mean what he says. All through our tempestuous tenure on earth, we have struggled with the God-factor, the extra factor in every equation that defies even the laws of Nature and blurs the boundary between the possible and the impossible, between the infinite and finite. While it is true that some are more passionate seekers than others, and some can brave the burden of life better than others, there is hardly anyone who has grown into adulthood without wondering and ruminating about God. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says that four kinds of people worship Him — or ‘seek the face of God’ — 1) those who are in distress or world-weary; 2) those who desire worldly things or earthly happiness; 3) those who seek jnana, knowledge; and 4) those who want to merge themselves into Him. He says that the last category are dearest to Him, for “he alone loves me because I am myself: the last and only goal of his devoted heart.” An enchanting description of divine love is expressed in the Hindu text called Mahimandala Gita by saint Arakkhita Das, “Therefore, O mind, listen to the grace of devotion; one who has an empty mind knows that, knows nothing apart from that, knows the world to be that, wanders alone and shuns company, has that for company, feels only that, has no fears and knows nothing apart from that, so that one knows only that and doing so meditates in that, sleeps in that, sings in that;”517 That that is God. But that one word has also been the greatest source of denial, derision, friction, fratricide, and bloodshed. Where God is a cause, blood never stops

 

 

 

515 Michael Shermer. Captain Kirk Principle. Scientific American Magazine. USA. December 2002. p.1.

516 G.K. Chesterton. The Everlasting Man. 2008. Wilder Publications. Virginia, USA. p.5.

517 Cited in: Sailen Routray. The Mahimandala Gita of Tantric Saint Arakkhita Das. Anuvada of Mahimandala Gita. Chapter 66. Accessed at: http://www.indiadivine.org/articles/269-mahimandala-gita-tantric-saint- arakkhita-das.html

 

flowing in the human world. We now have an incendiary mix: religious bloodthirst and global interdependence. In God’s mind that could be the greatest human betrayal — people killing each other to ‘protect’ Him, the one who is the cause and consequence, the sustainer and the destroyer, the source and salvation. The irony is that every religion prohibits killing save for a just cause. Buddhism, perhaps the one religion that elevates it to the deepest and highest level, says that “He should not kill a living being, nor cause it to be killed, nor should he incite another to kill. Do not injure any being, either strong or weak in the world.”

Still we use killing to settle scores with a fellow man and to ‘protect’ God. Since we do not know how to relate to Him, and because we do not know the nature of His true Being or Non-Being, our mind does the simplest of all: turn Him into a human, a close friend or a loving parent. The Upanishads proclaim that God is ‘that’ through which all things are born, and having been born, ‘that’ by which they live, and ‘that’ into which they enter while leaving. And they further say that, he who meditates on God (Brahman), as Non-Being, he himself will cease to exist and as a Being shall always exist; the attributes we identify God with, as a support, savior, almighty, we will become that.518 It means that which we deeply meditate upon as the embodiment of God and that which we seek from Him with a pure heart, we will be transformed into that. His dispositions, his apparent intentions, the aims of his kingship, we interpret in human terms. God is both immaculate but invisible, light and sublime and abysmal darkness: light because He alone can show the way; darkness because of the perception of his inscrutability and impenetrability to the human condition. As we have not been able to relate to that God, we have failed to absorb and assimilate the divine into our daily life. Though, the scriptures say that He is within each of us and embedded in every being, He is, in terms of actual experience, as remote as the stars and as inscrutable as the cosmos. Vedanta says that it is the mysterious Maya or grand illusion that obscures our vision and befuddles our mind, but Maya is also His creation. Does it mean that it is He who is keeping us away from Him? Some indeed speculate that God first arose as an illusion, and that the subsequent history of the idea of God is, in some sense, the evolution of an illusion.

Some others say that God became a primordial need once humans discovered that they were mortal. So many, so often have pronounced His demise, but those newscasters themselves are all dead or soon will be, but He remains the dominant force in human consciousness. There is no human emotion that someone or the other has not felt towards God, from love to hate, indifference to intense ecstasy, reverence to ridicule. For some, He is all there is. For some, He is a necessary nuisance, and for others, an opportunistic option. The scriptures are the principal source of our vision of God. The purpose of human life itself has been described as the seeking of the ‘companionship’ of God, or as Sri Adi Shankara had put it, ‘absorption in divinity’. Saints put God at the core of their consciousness; they love and live for Him, and some, like the Hindu mystical singer Mirabai were actually ‘in love’ with God (Krishna) and considered themselves ‘married’ to Him. Only prophets and mystics can really visualize Him, if not actually see and converse with Him; they are the people ‘from whom God hid nothing’. They are the ones who, attaining a higher state of consciousness, engage in a series of transcendent encounters with God, and through their contemplation, find a way to God.

The remarkable fact is, as the physicist Erwin Schrodinger put it, “the mystics of many centuries, independently, yet in perfect harmony with each other (somewhat like the particles in an ideal gas) have described, each of them, the unique experience of his or her life

 

 

 

 

518 R.D. Ranade. A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy. 1968. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chowpatty, Bombay, India. pp.92-93.

 

in terms that can be condensed in the phrase: Deus Factus Sum (I have become God).”519 Some of the majesty of God is captured in the song Everyday God: “Creator God we encounter you in the beauty of creation; Companion God we encounter you in the warmth of friendship; Loving God we encounter you in the embrace of a loved one; Merciful God we encounter you in the search for justice. Mysterious God in our restlessness we search for you, we desire you and we are confident in your assured presence, now and forever.” Another mystic, the sage Ramakrishna, was said to have been in routine communion with Kali, the Hindu Goddess. Quite simply, what separates a Ramakrishna from the rest is consciousness, what has been described as a kind of inner transformative consciousness of God. Meister Eckhart, a German mystic wrote in his sermon The Nearness of the Kingdom, “Our salvation depends upon our knowing and recognizing the Chief Good which is God Himself. I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and presence of God. He is also near things of wood and stone, but they know it not. If a piece of wood became as aware of the nearness of God as an archangel is, the piece of wood would be as happy as an archangel. For this reason man is happier than the inanimate wood, because he knows and understands how God is near him.”520 To realize God, one must walk the razor’s edge that both separates and straddles mysticism and madness.

Not only mystics and saints — the boundary between the two is really blurred — it was even said that our very early ancestors were able to directly mix, mingle, and match with the divine on earth; a devotee was reverential but not subservient or servile. Perhaps because we cultivated false values and turned to God, not to savor His Company but to seek competitive favors, and lived our lives in direct contradiction to His dictums, the Almighty might have chosen to become a symbol or a stone in a place of worship. Our consciousness and conscience got sullied with self-righteous selfishness, no longer fit for divine habitation. Although much of our life is a desperate cry for divine help, in the face of His stubborn silence, we really do not know what we should do. And as a result, we are left wondering, in the words of Nietzsche, if man is one of God’s blunders, or if God is one of man’s blunders. Whether one ‘believes’ in God or not is perhaps the most frequently