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

and if He did at some point, now that we know better, He should do what we do in such circumstances: wither away and vanish! We can only visualize God as utterly incomprehensible or wholly utilitarian, all-powerful or ineffective, an unsolvable mystery or the outpourings of what Henry Fielding and Edward Gibbon called ‘amiable weaknesses of human nature’. The real mystery is not God; it is the mind and its relationship to God: is God the creation of our mind, or is God the creator of the mind? And then the troubling thought: this ambiguity about God, does this have a divine purpose and if somehow, sometime, it finally ends, then what? How would that affect human behavior and mindset?

God does exist — even denial is a kind of effervescent existence. The real problem is that in either case — affirmation or absence — it does not seem to make any moral difference to our earthly behavior. In today’s world, a ‘believer’ can be as ruthless as a non-believer; and an intellectual denial of a Scriptural God of ‘rewards and punishments’ need not necessarily mean callousness. Our mind disconnects religious ritual and ethical conduct, devotion and behavior. It makes us ‘feel good’ about our faith in God but does not let us ‘be good’ in our relations with other humans. The problem is that the scriptures enjoin us to both love and fear God but that is a difficult mix. We are supposed to love Him for what He is, and fear Him for what we are. In the Quran, Allah repeatedly instructs and warns “fear only Allah”, or “those who fear Allah are the fortunate ones.” The Sikh scripture Guru Granth Sahib says that, without the fear of God everything, all that is fashioned is false. The Bible (Proverbs 1:7) says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: Fear is generally considered a negative emotion and, if that is so, why does God tell us to fear Him? The answer to that has less to do with God and more to do with men. First, we love God for what He is and fear Him for what we are. Second, fear is not always negative; indeed fear keeps us alive; we should not fear to fear. Third, what we fear most is not the action but its consequences; we fear God because He knows everything, even our darkest thoughts, and thoughts too have a consequence. Lastly, by fearing God, we are rid of the fear of everyone else and everything else. That is why fear of God has been called a transformative power. At the back of it all is the tacit assumption that God is a key player in human destiny, but the perception of how exactly God becomes involved in human history and what direction the ultimate course of humanity will take under His watchful eye, varies considerably from one religion to another. But even God must come through the gate of the human mind, and by the time he comes through, God Himself is transformed; the mind attaches to Him what it wants to see in Him. Like everything else in the human realm, the mind wants to ‘own’ God, and in

 

so doing, it disconnects devotion to God from behavior that God expressly forbids. We forget that what we make ourselves, what we become is what God cares and wants. If we are reverential to Him and scornful to fellow-men it pleases him not. The real mystery of God is not so much about his true identity or whether he is inherently comprehensible or incomprehensible, or even if he is with form (saguna) or without form (nirguna), but about His leelas, a Sanskrit term which means the play or ways of God. We might be desirous of knowing, in the words of Stephen Hawking the ‘mind of God’ or as Einstein described ‘His thoughts’; great saints and rishis have wrestled with this question. When they are face to face with Him, they do not ask questions or try to probe his mind; they surrender.

The scriptural vision of the inherent interplay between God and man has been a subject of many disquisitions and expositions. In summary, it could be broadly divided into three belief systems: 1) we are not God, but He is closer than the closest; 2) we are part of God, like the sparks flying from a hot iron rod, or the reflections of the same light on water in myriad pots; and 3) we are ‘God’, not ‘a god’; nothing added, nothing taken and nothing else.

In Vedantic terms, the first system is called Dualism, the second qualifies as Monism, and the third is Advaita. And then we have the two of the four Mahavakyas, great axioms, of the Upanishads: Aham brahmasmi (I am God); Tatvamasi (Thou art that), where ‘that’ refers to the Brahman, the Supreme all-encompassing Consciousness, the subtle Entity which forms the essence of all universe. This maxim comes from an Upanishadic story, in which the rishi Uddalaka asks his son Svetaketu to cut open a fruit plucked from a tree. When asked what he can see inside, Svetaketu replies, ‘I see small seeds’. Uddalaka then tells his son to break open one seed, and asks, ‘What do you see inside?’ Svetaketu obviously replies, ‘I see nothing’. Uddalaka then gives the explanation: ‘In that Nothing which you cannot see is the power of the whole of that tree, the whole of life comes from that nothing; the gross, which is visible, is the effect, the cause of which is the subtlest essence; at the heart of that hidden mystery is thou art that.’ When one is referring to oneself, one uses the first axiom and when referring to another person, the second. The essence, however, of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘they’, ‘the world’ is the same. The great Sri Adi Shankara, the principal exponent of the Advaitic school of thought of Hinduism wrote, ‘Brahma satyam jagat mithya, jivo brahmaiva naparah’ — Brahman is the only truth, the world is an illusion, and there is ultimately no difference between Brahman and the individual self. According to the Upanishads, the very purpose of human birth is God-realization, which is also called Self-realization and is tantamount to liberation from the cycle of birth and death. That possibility or privilege is allotted only to a human being, not to any other creature as per this scripture.

Ramana Maharshi, perhaps the greatest 20th century exponent of the Advaita philosophy, said, “I say the Self is not reached. You are the Self; you are already That.”524 In other words, Ramana erased the qualification ‘ultimately’ and conceptually merged the self with the Brahman. The claim that ‘I am nothing but God’ might appear as the ultimate arrogance but, on deeper reflection, it is the mark of ultimate humility. In any other self- identification such as ‘I am the servant of God’ or ‘I am a reflection of God’, two identities are assumed — the ‘I’ and the God, in that order. In the affirmation “I am God’, there is only one God; everything else, most of all, the ego, vanishes. With that disappearance, the only barrier between man and God crumbles. While God is always man, man becomes God once that barrier crumbles. It has also been said that everyone has the intrinsic knowledge of his divinity; it is overshadowed by the mind and by the act of its incessant thinking, through

 

 

 

524 Cited in: Tan Kheng Khoo. Ultimate State of Consciousness (Enlightenment). Accessed at: http://www.kktanhP.com/ultimate_state_.htm

 

which we have to identify ourselves. But to be able to ‘feel’ that way, to transcend the mind, one must ascend to a higher level of consciousness and a deeper plateau of awareness. ‘God’ is not a matter of discovery, something to be found hidden somewhere in a cave in the cosmos. It is not also a question of His existence or absence; that issue cannot be conclusively settled because we cannot, within the parameters of human intelligence, either demonstrate God as either a logical contradiction or a reasonable probability. It is one of awareness within. And it is how we apply that awareness to everyday existence. One of the commonly attributed characteristics of God is omniscience, also called sarvantaryami in Sanskrit. The Atharva Veda describes the all-seeing Lord Varuna, the god of the ‘celestial ocean’, on these lines: ‘the great guardian among these (gods) sees as if from anear. He that thinketh he is moving stealthily — all this the gods know. If a man stands, walks, or sneaks about, if he goes slinking away, if he goes into his hiding-place; if two persons sit together and scheme, king Varuna is there as a third, and knows it.’525 The Kathopanishad says that God regulates all souls during all states, of being awake, in a dream and in deep sleep, and even after death and liberation. The Vedas have described God, as quoted by Swami Vivekananda in his famous address to the World Parliament of Religions (1893), as the One “by whose command the wind blows, the fire burns, the clouds rain and death stalks upon the earth.”526 Tolstoy said that, “Man in order to be really a man must conceive the idea of God in himself.”527 In mystical terms, it is referred to as ‘to reduce oneself to Oneness’. It has often been said that not even a blade of grass moves without divine will. Emily Bronte wrote in her poem No Coward Soul is Mine, “O God within my breast. Almighty, ever-present Deity!”528 Sri Aurobindo wrote, “Thou who pervadest all the worlds below, Yet sitst above, Master of all who work and rule and know, Servant of Love! Thou who disdainest not the worm to be, Nor even the clod, Therefore we know by that humility, That thou art God.”529

With the level of consciousness few have to truly relate to maxims like ‘Thou art that’, the great majority of humans believe in something, some entity, some force, some higher and superior or supernatural or extraterrestrial phenomenon. The world has always had a spectrum of skeptics, agnostics and atheists, some of them of high intellect. Those who profess religious agnosticism argue that, ‘we know neither a Creator nor have knowledge about one. If there is a God, we know it not.’530 They say that the very idea of God contradicts the theories of Big Bang and evolution. Some have pronounced the death of God for a whole lot of reasons, from ineffectiveness to redundancy. They fault Him for sin and suffering on Earth, for the ‘triumph’ of evil and the vulnerability of virtue. The imminence of the death of God has also been predicted by the likes of Nietzsche — ‘God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him’ — to Thomas Altizer, a professor of religion, who

 

 

 

525 Maurice Bloomfield (tr.). Sacred Books of the East. Vol.42: Hymns of the Atharva-Veda. Internet Sacred Text Archive. Accessed at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/sbe42/av094.htm

526 Cited in: A. Rishi. Swami Vivekananda – The Importance of Being Indian. Life Positive. Accessed at: http://www.lifepositive.com/Spirit/masters/swami-vivekananda/chicago.asp

527 Cited in: The Eternal Wisdom: Central Sayings of Great Sages of All Times. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications. Pondicherry, India. p.66.

528 Emily Bronte. No Coward Soul is Mine. The Wondering Minstrels. Accessed at: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/262.html

529 Sri Aurobindo. The Poet Seers. Accessed at: http://www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/sri_aurobindo/selected_poems/god/

530 George C. Mynchenberg. And Man Created God. 2000. Writers Club Press. Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. p.iii.

 

wrote, “We must recognize that the death of God is a historical event: God has died in our time, in our history, in our existence.”531 In the same context in which Nietzsche’s Madman announced the divine death, he also wrote of ‘the noise of gravediggers burying God’ and