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

it, becomes the launch pad for understanding our true identity, which is inseparable from the greater identity. In its most elemental import, our sense of individual identity is dependent on our perception of who the rest of the humanity is, and on our perception of the one who is the only ‘knower’. Compounding the confusion about the essence of our identity, we are circumscribed in ‘real’ life by a web of often conflicting identities as a parent, a child, a relative, a friend, a citizen, a worker, etc., and much of life-energy is used up in reconciling the responsibilities of these identities. Hovering over them all, and connected to our search for meaning, is our divine identity, which, the scriptures say, is our inherent identity. But such is the sway of scientific technology today that our ‘digital’ identity is obscuring our ‘divine’ identity.

Whether it is ‘divine’ or ‘digital’, or ‘demonic’, whether we are human beings having a spiritual experience or spiritual beings having a physical experience, what or whom we call ‘Others’ and our connectivity with that phenomenon constitutes inter-subjectivity and objectivity in the human world. We are that which we are not, or appear to be not — ‘neti, neti’ (not this, not this) as the Upanishads pronounce in relation to the Atman, the soul. In short, we have to eliminate the limitation of ‘Others’ to define and give value to our own lives. It gives us an opportunity to go beyond our own selfish selves, to put others’ happiness ahead of our own. We are ‘double-faced’ about autonomy too. While most people cherish their autonomous living space, they have no qualms about appropriating or encroaching on the autonomy of others, and there are some who find comfort in the abdication of their own autonomy for survival or material gain. What Erich Fromm called ‘individualized man’ has

 

not found a way to foster a spontaneous sense of solidarity with the mass of mankind. In the human world, ‘each one of’ is made up of ‘parts’ of other humans, and the interplay of these parts contributes to personal identity. In practice, however, we do not care much about ‘other’ human beings if they are not connected through another intermediary like family, religion, race, and country, much less try to acquire objective knowledge of what they truly want and need. Indeed, we often show scant consideration, utmost callousness and morbid cruelty towards them, and the best of us show no guilt or remorse, or fear divine disapproval. And we feel morally justified because they are not one of ‘us’. The gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is at the root of many wars and atrocities throughout history. We do not find it morally offensive to torture ‘them’ to keep ourselves ‘safe’. The context in which a man who considers himself to be ‘upright’ and ‘honest’ will not commit or condone terrible things to other people is entirely debatable; it all depends on what is apparently at stake. As the famous Milgram Experiment’ showed, during the trial of German Nazi criminals of the Second World War, most people can — in the name of ‘obedience to authority’ — become agents in a terribly destructive program or process, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs; in reality, they were ‘saving their skins’ or ‘being plain patriotic’. The perpetrators were ‘human’ too and, as the 20th century Swiss-German philosopher Frithjof Schuon said “everything that is human is ours” — no exceptions, no ‘but’ or ‘if’ or ‘however’ or ‘nevertheless’. The litany of human cruelty is so timeless that the mention of any single instance — genocide, methodical torture, organized rape, maiming of children for begging, or extraction of internal organs from persons who are still alive for sale — as the ‘most horrific’ would, so to speak, be ‘unfair’ to the others. Somewhere along the evolutionary path, callousness and cruelty got ingrained in our consciousness, and there are some like Friedrich Nietzsche who think that it is irretrievably locked together with many admirable human attributes and achievements. In other words, ‘no cruelty, no creativity’— some sort of evolutionary ‘package deal’, the price humanity is paying for the transformation of man from a prey to a predator.

We have not found a way to appease our urge to ‘belong’ without eroding our essential identity, or to be socially ‘useful’ without chipping away at our innate integrity, the priceless ability to keep what is one’s own, untarnished by any alien intrusion. In the modern world, that is what is at great risk, one’s innate integrity. Integrity is more than honesty or even truthfulness; it is an inner sense of ‘wholeness’; to be able to behave according to our beliefs, values, and principles. Truthfulness is telling the truth to others; integrity is telling the truth to one’s own self. It has nothing to do with rules or law; it does not involve accountability to any external entity. It is the test of character. Too often our actions are expedient, necessary to avoid the consequences. Abraham Lincoln said that he had ‘no policy’; he just tried to do his best each and every day. That ‘best’ was determined by his inner being, or inner voice, as Mahatma Gandhi called it. As the world shrinks into a ‘global village’ (a metaphor for global electronic connectivity coined by Marshall McLuhan) that village has come to be neither global in its reach — vast areas and populations of over a billion are left out — nor endowed with the coherence of a classical village. The greater reality is global divide in multiple ways. And as cultures both converge and clash, identity in diversity is becoming at once fluid and fixed, narrow and multifaceted, increasingly a fractious fault-line in human affairs. Historians like Samuel Huntington have talked of the impending ‘clash of civilizations’, that the future global order — and conflict — will be defined, not by ideology or economic divide, but by subjective cultural identity, which includes factors like language, religion, history, traditions. There are others like the Indian Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who demur and posit that identity is too multifaceted to be defined by any single factor, and what Sen calls ‘choiceless singularity of human identity’ could make the world more explosive.

 

Quite apart from the debate about the probable flammable factors for future wars, there is also growing hunger for a ‘meaningful life’ without necessarily knowing the ‘meaning of life’. The mix of the two becomes a searing craving for a ‘meaningful identity’, which often becomes a monster of vitriolic nationalism, ravenous religiosity, or ethnic savagery. A growing number of people feel that if we cannot read the preface to birth and the postscript to death, why bother about what happens in between. Some predict that identity in its multiple manifests — personal, psychological, cultural, social and religious, ethnic — will be the defining issue of this century. That is because we do not harmonize; we negate the other identity. It means we will eliminate or emaciate each other in asserting one or the other of these identities.

 

Harmonizing personal and collective identity

Our perplexity about our personal primary allegiance is but a reflection of our confusion about our collective identity. From the perspective of the individual, the collective identity is a part of his or her personal identity. Sometimes, the sense of belonging to a particular group will be so strong that it will overwhelm other aspects of the person’s personal identity. At other times the individual interest dwarfs the collective identity. To harmonize the individual and collective identities, we should first come to terms with our existential identity as a species and the particular essential characteristics that every unit of the entity must possess. Are we simply a ‘special animal’ -- ‘made-over ape’, as some call him — with a complex biochemical mechanism and with some rather rare abilities, some remarkable ‘extras’, derived from harnessing bipedalism, longer life span, and a bigger brain better than that of any other being? Or are we a special being created or evolved for furthering an altogether different cosmic cause? If it is the latter, why is it shrouded in such mystery? If we too are animals, does it also include the mind, beside the body? The practical shape and setup of our angst for knowing who we are and what we should do is hard to visualize. As individuals, the challenge is even more daunting because some are able to fuse or harmonize the different ‘identities’ like nationality, ethnicity, religion, language with relative ease, while others are torn asunder and turn violent. Human personality cannot be understood unless we look at man in totality, which includes his drive to know the meaning of his very being. The meaning of mankind, the ‘proper study’ in Alexander Pope’s words, is Man, and the meaning of man is the measure of man, which is to discern the drives, forces and dialectics of human actions and reactions. And the meaning of man can only be measured in the milieu of the cosmos.

According to ancient Indian philosophy, both the individual and the universe are composed of panchabhutas, or the five primary elements — prithvi (earth), apa or jala (water), tejas or agni (fire), vayu (air), and akasha (ether). These elements are kept in a certain balance in the universe and in the body. Any radical variation in this balance results in natural disasters, and diseases in the body. In death, the five elements of the individual body unite with those of the cosmic body. The purpose of human birth is indeed to dissolve or merge or unite our identity as finite (and mortal) individuals with the infinity of the universe. The impediment is our ego, which manifests as our identity, and all spiritual practices are designed to overcome this obstacle.

 

Pleasure and pain

Man has been called everything, from a moron to a Mahatma, malicious to a meaning- seeking animal, but the connecting thread in modern life is a gnawing sense of meaninglessness, and to escape that abyss man plunges into the pursuit of what we casually call ‘pleasure’. In the pursuit of pleasure he often encounters ‘pain’ and to escape from pain he seeks more pleasure from more sources. So, what is the essential character of pleasure? Is

 

it yet another hangover from the cave days that, at best, should be ignored? Is it the ‘ultimate object of all endeavor’ or a Satanic temptation? Or a simple stimulation of the senses, something as simple as living, the creation of a neural miracle that makes life worthwhile?

Whatever it is, we somehow know it — we can smell it, taste it and feel it in our bones — and we want it in abundance, by hook or by crook, through drugs or through divine grace. And it has come to delineate what in the modern vocabulary is described as the ‘quality of life’, which really means plenty of everything and enjoyment, often at the expense of other people and Nature. And the pursuit of what we call ‘happiness’ in good measure hinges on it. The opposite or even the absence of pleasure, we presume, is pain, which is an unpleasant sensation that causes discomfort, distress, hurt, suffering, and agony. Pain is the central fact of life; the one thing we viscerally want to avoid and run away from. Elaine Scarry in her book The Body in Pain (1987), notes that pain is such a radically subjective, inexpressible, and incommunicable experience that it cannot be either denied or confirmed. Most people experience some kind of pain — physical, mental, and psychological — for much of their lives, and all life is a tireless attempt to avoid, escape, and alleviate pain. We instinctively identify sensuality and indulgence with pleasure, and deprivation or getting hurt or restraint, with pain. Our embrace of pleasure and abstinence from pain frames our daily struggle and earthly existence — not only ours but even that of animals; there is growing evidence that animals too can (and do) experience the same emotions, chipping