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

Compassion will become our first impulse and response to every situation, provocation, and circumstance. And love will be reborn in the human world.

Even that kind of caring and compassionate consciousness change would not, and need not, make us all saints, mahatmas, or heroes, but it will empower and enable us to do differently the myriad things we do every day and all our lives, and, as American historian Howard Zinn said, “small acts, multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world”. That kind of human effort has to show up not as a bunch of spectacular scientific breakthroughs, but in the myriad choices we make in our lives over the next few decades — from where and how we live, to what we eat, buy, and use, from how we generate and use energy, to how we discard and recycle our waste. Those choices and acts will determine whether man will hasten his own extinction or reach the plateau of a nobler planetary civilization. If he has to achieve the latter, man must go beyond both scriptures and science; for, the scriptures are intelligible only to the initiated, and science, as it is put into effect, is no longer a search for truth but a travesty of truth. We must go beyond brainpower and mind control, beyond even a new way of thinking; because thinking too is mental, and scripture too is filtered through the mind. We have to shift our focus from mind control to cleansing of the consciousness.

In sum, transform, or turn terminal, that is the defining choice before mankind at the turn of this millennium. But transformation has to be radically different from what science and technology are attempting through technologies like cryonics, nanotechnology, cloning, etc. With the kind of consciousness that man has, that kind of ‘transformation’ could be catastrophic. Conscience cannot save us; we need a cathartic consciousness change. We need a new source of ‘intelligence’, a new mode of cognition, far removed from the dominance of the brain/mind. The mind cannot be ‘destroyed’; it cannot be ‘overcome’; it cannot be ‘controlled’, as we, the humans of this age, at least, are exorted to do by scriptures and sages. It needs to be outflanked. The only way is to bring back our heart to the center stage of conscious intelligence, from its present ‘fringe function’ of a life-sustaining pump.

Fortunately, new research is reinforcing the ancient wisdom that the heart is an autonomous source of energy, memory, and intelligence, quite distinct from the brain-mind. Indeed, some eminent psychologists like Julian Jaynes have posited that the dominance of the mind over man dates barely three thousand years, and before that, both mind and heart played independent but complementary roles in human affairs. Something went wrong or maybe our survival demanded it; the mind became the master and the heart was reduced to a mere powerful muscle that kept us ticking. Long after sheer survival ceased to be the primary challenge for man, the human mind, having tasted and enjoyed absolute power, refuses to yield. As a result, the very tools we have so far relied upon — our unique ability to think, to analyze, to comprehend, to plan and prepare, to at once look back and ahead — have brought us to the edge of the abyss. With mind in control, we have not been able to harmonize or manage our passions, predispositions, and priorities, nor our thoughts, emotions, and impulses. Our genetic, ethnic, and cultural diversity has become a drag, not an asset. And we have messed up our equation with Nature and God. As the Worldwatch Institute noted (State of the World 1997), “In just a few centuries we have gone from living off nature’s interest to depleting the natural capital that has accumulated over millions of years of evolution”.

Biologist Edward O. Wilson (The Future of Life, 2002) said that what humanity is inflicting on itself and on earth is “the result of a mistake in capital investment”. As for God, we have

 

turned Him into a superintendent of the supermarket whose only function is to ensure instant home delivery of what we order, and when there is any demur or delay, we threaten to create a new, ‘Tomorrow’s God’.

But much as we might squirm and quibble, we cannot cut ourselves loose from either God or Nature. The historic human tendency has been to abuse Nature and ignore God when things go right, and to turn to them for help when things go wrong. The time has come yet again to turn to Nature, a kind of the return of the Prodigal Son. The living world of insects and animals is rich with models and paradigms of transformation, like the anthill, the  beehive, and the butterfly. Even if it may seem an affront to our intelligence, imagination,  and creativity, we must draw upon their ‘experiences’ to shape our own path. And if we do not, the metaphor of the ‘lemming suicide’ will most likely catch up. While human transformation and consciousness change have been the elusive age-old spiritual goals, the promise now lies in the fact that science is capable of joining forces. Recent discoveries in fields like quantum physics are prompting scientists to talk of hitherto taboo ideas like a single unifying force in the universe, and of a seamless existence and a soul. There is an air of fragrant optimism that, at last, science and spirit together can achieve what neither could do alone, and catapult man to perhaps the ultimate level of evolution. This arguably could be the greatest challenge man has ever faced. It is nothing less than to reconfigure human ‘presence’ on earth. So monumental and momentous is the task, that to seize this uncommon opportunity it will not suffice to have a handful of ‘New Age’ spiritualists or evangelical environmentalists or disparate ‘civil society’ initiatives. We need a coalition of ‘critical mass’ agents of change. What that magical number is, crossing which the momentum for transformational change becomes unstoppable, we do not know, but each of us must believe and behave as if we are that one extra person — the hundredth monkey, if you will — whose addition will catalyze species-scale consciousness connectivity.

In sketching on such a huge kaleidoscopic canvas, and not to lose one’s way in the woods, it is imperative to have some clear points of reference. This book encompasses five principal ideas. One, it is a brutally candid and unflinching gaze at what ails the human condition; why we are such slaves of our senses, and why our behavior is so brazen and bizarre. It goes behind behavior and notes that behavior just does not burst out of nowhere; it incubates inside, nurtured by our thoughts. And thought, as the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi said, is the origin of sin. Two, it suggests that since we cannot alter the basic character of the mind, we should move to transform our mindset, that is, change the body of our assumptions, beliefs, and values that govern our lives. Three, it suggests that for any meaningful betterment of the human context of life on earth, what is needed is not simply a new way of understanding, but a change in the way we understand the way we understand, the way we think about the way we think, and that requires our finding a new source of cognition and intelligence, and that can only be the human heart. Four, only transformation through consciousness change could be the hope to avoid the sixth mass extinction that scientists are predicting, paving the way, in turn, to our premature posthumous existence. Five, and the most important idea, as the Bhagavad Gita exhorts, there is no greater dharma than swadharma. In life, every species, be it a plant or an ant or an animal, or even God, has a swadharma, and for the human, as the dominant form of life on earth, the swadharma must be to do God’s work on earth: to sustain, synergize, and harmonize all life, human and non- human alike. That should be the ultimate aim of human transformation.

With these parameters serving as the framework, the book addresses a plethora of questions: What is our swadharma on earth, and how close or how far are we in tune with it? Has human culture and conduct brought man to the edge of extinction or to the launch pad of his final evolution? Why does man, who prides himself as the sole rational and spiritual being on this planet, behave so irrationally when it comes to issues that impact on the survival of

 

his own species? Why is the human such a slave to his senses, and so prone to anger, malice, and violence, so addicted to sex, money, and power? Why is the human species at once so fratricidal and suicidal? Is evil endemic to the human condition or is it simply circumstantial? Is our goodness merely a matter of genes, just another form of selfishness? What should be done to make compassion and cooperation the reflexive response of the human condition, and take it away from the confines of kinship and friendship? What should we do to transform human diversity into an enriching asset, not a debilitating drag? If there is soon going to be a ‘robot in every home’, as Bill Gates predicts, what are the evolutionary implications? If medicine could cure the ‘disease of death’, as Richard Dawkins hopes it will, what kind of human society would that lead to? What should we do to break down, not build up, the barriers between people of race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality? What is so unique about the human species? Are we better than ‘bugs and bacteria’ simply because we have evolved a more complex neurobiology? What are the implications of the current thrust of scientific transformative effort to make man an ‘immortal superman’? Without a corresponding consciousness change, would man become an intolerable menace on earth? If so, how could such a consciousness change be induced? Is the way the human mind receives, comprehends, and analyzes the dynamics that drive the human way of life intrinsically capable of coping with the looming threats to human existence like nuclear war and climate change? How could the human loosen himself from the grip of his own mind on consciousness, and activate the latent energy of his heart to counterbalance his mind? If man needs a fundamental transformation of the very meaning of ‘being human’, what agenda should he subscribe to?

To adequately address these intertwined questions, the book breaks up into eight chapters.

Chapter 1 offers a preview, a bird’s-eye view of the book. It begins by setting the two basic parameters of this introspective inquiry at this turn of a millennium — why does man seem to be predisposed towards the immoral path, when being moral can give him all that he wants, and is God getting, in the Churchillian phrase, weary of mankind? The reality is that ‘something seismic has happened at the very core of our being’, which has changed our perceptions of the fundamentals and is blurring the boundaries between life and death. Man has become disillusioned, alienated, angry, at once narcissistic and nihilistic, and no longer lives in the ‘natural milieu’; and the mind has become the monarch of man. The human condition has gone from being a ‘paradoxical promise’ to a ‘perilous paradox’. We seem utterly — and fatefully — incapable of realizing that all humans share the same fate on a lone and crowded planet. The chapter goes on to discuss the dynamics of change and transformation, and notes that for the first time humanity confronts the kind of ‘existential’ risks it has never experienced before, and unlike the case with previous ‘risks’, it cannot learn from its mistakes. While change is inherent and constant, man is now ‘making it happen’, but in the wrong direction, focused on the body and driven solely by the power of technology.

Instead of consciousness change, he is attempting to become