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

while, but love can turn into hate in a very short time. Love can turn into hate not only when it is unrequited but also by the coarseness of prolonged physical intimacy; indeed, one could even kill the one loved, not for any gross ‘betrayal’ but also because of the common pressures of cohabitation, as we read so often in the ‘news’. For love, we need respect. Because familiarity breeds condescension, if not contempt, man has not found a way to manage either intimacy or isolation; either of which can lead to suicide or homicide. The intensity of passion or the pain of isolation simply changes color and character. And hate could turn into love à la ‘the Stockholm Syndrome’.

Human social life is a whirling web of relationships, in each of which one is required to share living or emotional space with other humans, with all the attendant ego clashes and adjustments. The duties and responsibilities entailed in each relationship are not always consistent with those of others, and that creates discord and tension, and we do not have the wisdom to harmonize them. Our union here with wives, husbands, kith and kin, and friends is like that of travelers at a roadside inn. In fact, just as the universe is really multiverse, as astronomers proclaim, we are all multi-beings, each being specific to a relationship. Without the authenticity of a relationship, we remain virtual non-beings. Even in a single relationship, the dynamics can dramatically change, and the ‘balance of power’ can shift, and the connecting thread can oscillate from caring to cruelty, from harmony to hatred. Prolonged intimacy between two humans has a very ambivalent effect on the human condition. In intimate relationships, we have no cover of culture and we transgress boundaries, permissible and impermissible, those that normally contain and channel human passions. It could either fuse two souls or rob their respect. It is in the context of such relationships that both the individuals’ strengths and faults, and raw vulnerabilities and innate virtues can be highlighted, stripping them of the cover of civility and of the sanitization of culture. One of Dostoevsky’s characters in his novel The Brothers Karamazov exposes the paradoxical nature of the human condition and says “I love mankind but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons”. And then, he goes on to say “… I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for even two days”. It is that chasm that we should bridge, between the abstract and the actual, between the impersonal and the intimate. Human society may never resemble the mythical Tibetan kingdom of Shambhala, the perfect place of peace and tranquility and happiness, in which all citizens are able to transmute aggression into love. The fact is, as Dostoevsky says, “Until one has indeed become brother of all, there will be no brotherhood. No science or self-interest will ever enable people to share their property and their rights among themselves without offense. Each will always think his share too small, and they will keep murmuring, they will envy and destroy one another”. But what we can — and must —

 

 

 

81 Cited in: Osho. Love Completely to Wave Final God Bye. The Deccan Chronicle, Hyderabad, India. 7 July 2008. p.II.

 

do is to insure that hate does not become an all-embracing or all-consuming passion within and distort the core human personality.

 

Moral foundation of mankind

For most people, though, the relentless daily grind, the sheer wear and tear of worldly existence ebbs away all passion and sensitivity. ‘Life’ for them is more a scream of pain than a song of pleasure, more a test of endurance than of enjoyment. That makes us a ‘soft species’, and in the natural world, only the strong and the resilient survive. But we are also a species armed to the teeth with horrendous weapons. Our addiction to comfort, convenience, control, and technological quick-fixes has so enfeebled the human organism that it has become an easy prey today to every passing vulture or virus. With the dramatic discoveries in genetic technology, we are told that it is not improbable that a tyrant, a fanatic or a desperate man can create a ‘doomsday’ virus with 100 percent mortality. The human species has not, since its advent on earth, devised a way to manage and reconcile interpersonal interests without conflict and violence. Nor has it discovered or innovated the way to ‘god governance’. In fact, based on our track record, it does seem the human being is simply ungovernable. The successive modus operandi of governance have progressively made it worse, not better, raising the question if the human, with the kind of psychological personality he has developed, is simply ungovernable. The latest paradigm of human governance, the Nation-State, is perhaps the most ill-suited for conflict resolution, which has become the most pressing need of the hour. It is the worst form of governance because it is centralized; it is top down and distant. And ‘nationalism’, its ideological offspring, a sentiment or a form of culture, has been, for the past four centuries, the dominant political principle; and it has been responsible for more bloodshed than perhaps any other ideology in human history. Erich Fromm called it our form of incest, our idolatry, our insanity, and Einstein called it infantile disease, the measles of mankind. Along with the Nation-State and nationalism, another beguiling but corrosive concept has come into being, the ‘national interest’, which, it is implicitly accepted, overrides any universal principle or precept, and whose pursuance, whatever it entails, is the highest duty not only of the State but also its citizens. We judge all events, local to international, from a ‘national’ perspective, not a human or religious or moral perspective. A billion people deprived of the basic needs of daily food, drinking water, and stable shelter due to mass poverty is a failure of governance at all levels. So is the case with global warming and climate change, and the ‘once-in-a-generation’ natural disasters, which, it is said, devastate seven times more people than a war.82 In fact, archeologist David Keys posits that a global catastrophe was triggered by a single event, a volcanic eruption, in about 535 CE resulting in prolonged (up to three years) bad weather worldwide. The first calamity to follow the catastrophe was drought in some places, and massive floods, followed by famine worldwide and plague in certain parts of the world. That scenario looks eerily contemporary, if we replace the volcanic lava by melting glaciers and warming oceans. But we are paralyzed by doubt and passivity; we just hope such things will not reach us if it is really that bad. Constructed as we are, with the consciousness we have, the way things inside us churn, we are simply incapable of acting any other way.

Either as individuals or as communities or countries, we are just unable to put the larger interest ahead of the narrower interest. Our idea of moral imagination or indignation places no value or virtue in sacrificing a bit of the certain present for the uncertain future.

 

 

 

82 Brian Urquhart. The UN and the Race Against Death. 2008. The New York Review of Books. USA. 26 June 2008.

 

Deep inside, we feel that we owe as much or as little to those who are yet to be born as to those who are already dead. We are so smug in the cocoon of comfort and convenience that we are prepared to trade everything — even our future — for the perpetuation of that comfort and convenience. For, we simply cannot believe — indeed we are incapable of experiencing any such belief — that anything can really endanger the future, least of all the fruits of our (and our forefathers’) struggle: our lifestyle.

The primary reason why nationalism and national interest have been so devastating is because it is implied and intellectually assumed that they are outside the rigor of morality, and all values and principles we hold dear as individuals do not apply when nationalism and national interest are invoked. As human innovations that draw power from human beings and are meant for human benefit, they cannot be immune from the normal human moral discipline. For, as Einstein wrote, “the most important human endeavor is striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to our lives.”83 We cannot expect to bring back the moral imperative into our lives if we leave out our collective personality. Our moral duplicity with the State highlights a bigger problem. Our sense of morality, like our sense organs, is externally focused: we are moral and good; it is they who are not. Robert Stevenson captured our moral sophistry well when wrote that there is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the rest of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.

The real problem with ‘being bad’ is not totally being bad, that is bad enough; it is not feeling bad by being bad and doing bad things. Long after the provocation or temptation, we feel no remorse or regret, shame or guilt; we lack the courage to admit even to our own conscience that we were wrong. All this is not just a question of individual ethics or personal fate. It leaves an imprint on our collective consciousness. Just as humans are changing the environment, and that environment in turn is fuelling human evolution, we can, by cultivating a compassionate consciousness and by creating a more moral milieu of living, change the direction of human evolution. Again and again, the spiritual journey hits the same roadblock: the gap and disconnection between what we know and what we do, what we profess and what we practice, what we can and what we ought to.

Many ancient prophecies have become fulfilled now and make interesting reading. The Mayans, whose Central American civilization, reputed as the most advanced in relation to time-space knowledge, prophesied that beginning from the year 1999, we will have 13 years to realize the changes in our conscious attitude to stray from the path of self-destruction and instead move on to a path that opens our consciousness to integrate us with all that exists.84 The Mayans believed that, having known the end of their cycle, mankind would prepare for what is to come in the future and it is because of this that they would have preserved the dominant species; the human race. According to them, “coming changes will permit us to make a quantum leap forward in the evolution of our consciousness to create a new civilization that would manifest great harmony and compassion to all humankind.”85 And “seven years after the start of Katun, which is to say the year 1999, we would enter a time of darkness which would force us to confront our own conduct”. For the Mayans, “this

 

 

 

83 Working Minds. Quotations from Albert Einstein. Accessed at: http://www.working- minds.com/AEquotes.htm

84 Mayan Prophecy 2012: Entering Our Galactic Day. Accessed at: http://www.december212012.com/articles/mayan/7.shtml

 

is the time when mankind will enter ‘The Sacred Hall of Mirrors’, where we will look at ourselves and analyze our behaviors with ourselves, with others, with Nature and with the planet in which we live. A time in which all of humanity, by individual conscious decisions, decides to change and eliminate fear and lack of respect from all of our relationships.”86

The Mayans were dead right about the target and the direction; perhaps not about the date. We need to look at ourselves and analyze our behavior, eliminate fear and restore respect, and the goal ought to be a quantum leap in the evolution of our consciousness. The external manifestation of