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

resides there, your heart intelligence — you will connect with its potent energy and begin to trust its power to create the life you are truly meant to live. You will know that your most reliant guide, your most loyal ally, and your truest source of wisdom and power reside, not in your mind alone, but deep within you — right in the very center of your being — in your heart.”600 The first step in that journey of discovery is to alter our understanding of the role of heart in life, not merely as an indefatigable muscular mechanism that pumps blood throughout the body, but as a kind of organic machine, an independent source of memory, energy, and intelligence, what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls the ‘fourth brain’. For long, the existence inside us of another heart — the spiritual heart — has been spoken about by the scriptures and by saints. Sri Adi Shankara described it as, “That being, of the size of a thumb, dwells deep within the heart. He is the lord of time, past and future.

Having attained him, one fears no more. He, verily, is the immortal Self.”601 Sometimes it is referred to as ‘the lotus of the heart’. Sri Chinmoy said that inside the ordinary human heart is

 

 

 

 

599 Rabindranath Tagore. Poetry. Acropolis. Accessed at: http://www.acropolis.org.au/poetry/Tagore.htm

600 Howard Martin. The Heart Math Method. Achievement Library. Accessed at: http://www.achievementlibrary.com/heartmath.htm

601 Cited in: Swami Nirmalananda Giri. The Dweller in the Heart. Katha Upanishad. Spiritual Writings. Atma Jyoti Ashram. Accessed at: http://www.atmajyoti.org/up_Katha_Upanishad_23.asp

 

the divine heart, and inside the divine heart is the soul. In his recent book The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of Spirit (2007), Pearce pleads that humanity must rise above its lower, instinctual ‘brain’ to allow ‘our newest brain’ — the ‘fourth brain’ — to blossom, which, he says, will bring about a higher stage in evolution that prizes love and altruism. Our culture and civilization have been the creations of the ‘third brain’, and in turn they have heavily conditioned our consciousness. They have fashioned a living context in which our image is more important than our ideas, our decisions are governed by desires, and our desires have no bearing on our stated, conscious goals of life. According to Pearce, the biggest impediments to this new order are religion and science, which together promote violence and arrogance. However troubling that thought might be, the fact is that what man is now is the product of organized religion and orthodox science, and unless their grip is loosened, humanity will continue to drift towards the abyss. Every religion must undergo a process of ‘winnowing’ and ‘weeding out’ and renounce its delusions of monopoly on divinity and Truth. We must, as Advaita and the doctrine of Perennial Philosophy exhort, recognize that the world of matter and individualistic consciousness are rooted in what Huxley called ‘Divine Ground’, and that to realize it we need ‘unitive knowledge’ and for that, again, we need to be pure in heart and pure in spirit. While God is Absolute, truth is not; and if truth indeed is Absolute, the fabric of our intelligence is not tailored to fit it. Pearl Buck wrote that truth is as people find it, and kaleidoscopic in its variety. But it is the power of the mind to make us think — and believe — that what we think is the truth, that it is the only truth. And the mind leads us to believe, inferentially, that the other side of the question is false; and that leads to intolerance. Science, in the words of Owen Barfield, needs ‘redemption’ and redirection. What we lack is not knowledge, spiritual or scientific; it is proper and integral application that is missing. Such a paradigm must enable us to harness our innate capacity for direct knowledge, for immediate insight, without observation or deductive reason, and without abandoning our unique ability to assemble, analyze, and decide; in short, make man worthy of the famous Hamlet dictum of Shakespeare: “in action how like an  angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!”602 Can science help? Researchers are saying that there could be a ‘God-center’ in the brain, by stimulating which, with repeated practice, one could attain a state of serenity, bliss, and ecstasy. What spiritualists call ‘realization’ could then be a neurochemical phenomenon and be ‘imaged and anatomically localized’. Happiness, the ‘scientific speculation’ continues, would then be independent of a cause, and could be triggered at will. So could be perhaps, the sense of the Advaitic oneness, the loosening of the grip of the ‘I-consciousnesses’.

Spirituality could then be codified and monitored and managed.

When our mind is attuned to our emotions, it is enriched and made more constructive; and when our emotions are illuminated by our mind, they become more practicable. With the heart and the mind working in harmony, we will cease to be a species feared both by man and beast. God willing, many conflicts that bedevil our lives will become more manageable — from suffocating self-righteousness, to our hopeless inability even to ever imagine that we could be wrong on any issue, to narrow nationalism, which Einstein called the measles of mankind, and rampant consumerism, which is the root cause of environmental degradation, to virulent religiosity whose twin brother is neo-secularism. Only then will the power of man cease to be the peril of the planet, and human presence be a positive proximity. We will then be able to resume our march on the evolutionary path and move on to what Elaine Matthews

 

 

 

602 Absolute Shakespeare. Shakespeare Quotes. Accessed at: http://www.absoluteshakespeare.com/trivia/quotes/quotes.htm

 

called the ‘higher dimension of awareness.’603 We might then even be able to understand, if not realize the Upanishadic exhortation to see ourselves as eternal beings presently dreaming the dream of evolution, a dream whose culmination is a different level of ‘awareness’ or ‘awakefulness’, towards which all of our attention and energy should be focused.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

603 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York. USA. p.87.

Chapter 8

Models and Metaphors for Human Transformation

 

Lessons from the living world

The terms ‘awareness’ and ‘wakefulness’ often occur in spiritual and religious writings. In such contexts, the ideas they embrace are far more profound, inclusive, and elevating than we normally associate them with: awareness implies watchfulness, and wakefulness brings to mind a state of alertness. We are ‘alive’ in different dimensions and ‘asleep’ in different degrees. One could be ‘aware’ without being ‘awake’ and ‘awake’ without being ‘aware’. In spiritual parlance, these notions refer to our state of ‘separateness’, that is, the way we view ourselves in relation to other humans, non-humans, and to Nature and God. While in our mundane world we are more ‘aware’ and ‘awake’ if we are more absorbed with our body and personal lives, it is the opposite in the spiritual sense: the more detached we are, the more ‘aware’ and ‘awake’ we become. It is a way to destroy the distance between two living beings, which, in turn, will destroy the distance between man and God. In different languages the meaning and import of the word ‘aware’ varies. For example, in Japanese the phrase ‘mono no aware’ is a comprehensive concept that embraces within its ambit attributes we cherish in life: beauty, harmony, sensitivity, empathy, and simplicity. When the Buddha was asked who he was, he replied that he was neither a god nor an angel, and then enigmatically added ‘I am awake’. Different scholars and pundits might interpret these three words differently, but they all agree that in ‘becoming’ a Buddha, Prince Gautama attained a higher, perhaps the ultimate, plateau of consciousness any living being can. The transition from Prince Siddhartha to Gautama Buddha, what H.P. Blavatsky (The Secret Doctrine) called ‘the mystery of Buddha’, was transformation at the highest and deepest levels through consciousness-change. In Buddhism, ‘transformation’ itself means awakening a deep awareness of our oneness with all others, even with the world of Nature. Such an awareness will allow caring, compassion, and love to replace indifference, intolerance and hatred as our primary reflexes. The path it prescribes is the path of consciousness change. That ought to be the aim, the goal and direction of transformation we should strive and seek.

Dissatisfied as we are with what we are, and subject as we are to a multitude of constraints, enticements, and temptations, we want to be, all at once and in one leap, a ‘saintly superman’, to enjoy all good things of life and still be ‘good’, to experiment with every conceivable or, if we could, even inconceivable experience and still be sinless, to be invulnerable to disease and death but be vulnerable enough to emotions like love. And then, if we must die, we want nothing else but to go to Heaven with our body intact. In Blavatsky’s words, used in a different context, it is like ‘trying to bottle up the primordial Chaos, to put a printed label on Eternity’. At a more mundane level, we have tried everything, scripturally and scientifically, intellectually and intuitively, and even summoned gods and gurus, to be simply ‘healthy and happy’, but to no avail. If anything, we are falling behind; things are worse than ever before, at least in the minds of millions. That is largely because that ‘health’ and ‘happiness’, like much of everything else in life, is comparative and competitive. But the quest continues. Some see hope in science, some in the innate nature of man; some expect an avatar to save us; some think that the best service we can do to the world of Nature is to quietly dissolve into the sunset. We always feel the need for something tangible; something

 

we can relate to. Where do we look for light and lucidity, metaphors and models? The answer lies in the living world of Nature. An avatar does not have to be a man — or a god. In fact, most of the avatars in Hinduism were neither. Maybe, having completed a full circle, from a fish to a perfect man to a poorna avatar (complete incarnation), the cycle is going to begin again. Not necessarily as God manifesting as a creepy creature or a winged bird, but with man being given the knowledge and wisdom to know what he needs to know to transform himself. But we must realize one basic fact in Nature: we cannot become what we already are not; transformation is to bring out what is implicit, hidden, and camouflaged. A species cannot become another species; and every species is at the same time empowered and conditioned depending on its assigned place on earth. And yet everything is always in a condition of continuous transformation.

Even a stone, for that matter. The nineteenth century Natural Theology tradition of seeking sermons in stones symbolizes the essence of man’s tendency to find the meaning of existence, his place in the universe, and his responsibility as an individual. Nature bristles with change, transformation, and metamorphosis. Growth, inherent in Nature, is a mysterious process independent of human will. The growth of a seed into a tree is transformation. Jesus used the parable of a mustard seed transforming into a tree with ‘great branches’ to explain the growth of the Kingdom of God on Earth. And through our lives, we are using what environmental historian Paul Josephson (Industrialized Nature, 2002) called brute-force technologies, which transform or rather traumatize the biosphere, the living world, and the earth, and which turn forests into ‘cellulose factories’, oceans into giant fish ponds, and prairies into bio-industrial landscape. When it comes to such exploitative transformation, all nations, all ‘isms’, all ideologies are united; the quarrel is over the question of how to share the spoils. Human creativity has transformed the biosphere through several ways such as the invention of fire, language, agriculture, culture, civilization, and