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

who does not know himself does not know anything. In this world there exists one force, one freedom and one justice, and that force is that of ruling over oneself. In this world, there exists only one virtue, and that is the virtue of liking others as much as one likes oneself. In other words, we should look upon others as we look

upon ourselves. All other questions are imaginary and non-existing.”182 There are two things that are irrefutable in human existence: (1) what any human can do, good and bad, everyone else also can do; and (2) we can only offer what we have, and cannot see something in others that is not inside us. In other words, we cannot see evil in others if we do not have evil in our own selves. To the modern man, knowledge of the Self is no more than the knowledge of one’s body and biology. In the spiritual context, however, it is the quest to answer questions such as ‘who am I?’, ‘whence have I come?’, ‘where do I go after death?’, and ‘what is the true nature of reality?’ At this point in human evolution, we are in a state of “knowing the

world and forgetting oneself.”183 That is the fateful paradox that has become the hallmark of human intelligence.

Every species eventually becomes extinct, paving the way to the birth of another, either emanating from it or independent of it; in a way, in its extinction, it preserves that mysterious thing we call ‘Life’. Just as in the human, different species have different life spans. We could well have become extinct several times by now, and no one can predict for how long we would be around. We cannot even be sure — if we do not hasten our doom as we are determined to do now — how much more time we have as a species. Some say that man has been around for approximately two billion years and could well survive for billions of years more, if the logic of the advent and extinction of species were to apply to us. We must also remember that man came pretty close to extinction once, with the human population barely numbering 10,000, and the fact that we scraped through a crisis like that was probably due to what Stephen Hawking called the Mind of God, not due to a magic wand or serendipity. Purely based on record and rationale, we ought to have given way to a more ‘humane’ species long ago. We are not quite sure when. Within the next two hundred or two thousand years, the species Homo sapiens may undergo one more evolution. Natural selection is supposed to make organisms fit for their environment, but there could be some exceptions. The reason, scientists say, is that “the environment in which particular species live are

themselves changing, and relative to the organisms, are usually getting worse.”184 In other words, ‘the human organism is not able to cope with the human behavior, which is getting worse. We do not and cannot know if we would be able to evolve into the stage of final evolution, the highest life form on earth’. Or if, in the attempt to attain that state, we will violate the laws of Nature to such an extent that we would destroy ourselves. Are the tremors and rumblings we hear with ever-growing intensity and frequency the echoes of the death dance of a dying species? Or are they the inevitable tribulations of a chaotic passage into the next tier of evolution? The fact is that man cannot stay much longer as he is. He has the opportunity that comes perhaps once in the lifetime of a species to turn transition into transcendence. Man is not what he ‘thinks’ himself to be; and no man is what he projects

 

 

 

 

182 M.K. Gandhi. My Religion. (Bharatan Kumarappa, ed.). Navajivan Trust. Ahmedabad, India.

183 Cited in: Divine Wisdoms: Over the Horizon’s Limit. Human Knowledge. 20 August 2007. Accessed at: http://divinewisdoms.wordpress.com/2007/08/20/human-knowledge/

184 Richard Lewontin. The Wars Over Evolution. The New York Review of Books, USA. 20 October 2005. p.52.

 

himself to be. Man must and will change, sooner than we think, with his cooperation or against his will. Change could be straight or serpentine, incremental or cataclysmic.

Man is tampering with the equilibrium of Nature, poisoning the atmosphere, and triggering and compressing into the span of a single lifetime a change that normally takes place in a geological time-frame. Despite millenniums of intelligence and endeavor, man has not found a way to manage the constraints of conflict inherent in his condition. Even if we do not really know what the essence of life is, we must start to live, not linger in nothingness.

We have not found a way to being truly social beings, perpetrators as we are of endless conflicts involving individual aspirations, ethical demands, and social concerns. Given his obsession with minimizing if not eliminating effort, man has become the most dependent creature on earth. Without the prop of tools and technology, man is truly and totally helpless. It is slowly sinking into our psyche that war and violence, terror and torture are not malevolent aberrations or primitive irrational urges, but that they are “the near-inevitable

outcome of the dynamics of self-interested, rational social organisms.”185 We tend to think that violence is anti-social, illegal, the work of the mad, malevolent, and marginalized. The reality is that much of the violence in the world is ‘lawful’; indeed law sans violence is unthinkable as much as law only with violence, which becomes tyranny. In fact the State enjoys monopoly in the exercise of violence. Every institution created to manage human affairs, from the family to the sovereign State, has proved to be either inadequate or inappropriate. The human decision-making processes and capacities have singularly failed either to articulate or safeguard the irreducible human interests; what is good for the species is often not good for an individual. Above all, somewhere along the long path of evolution, we have lost our sense of a species, making man the only mortal enemy of man. And our defining difference, spirituality, is left behind with the scriptures. We are so much exposed to competition, conflict, aggression, and violence that the human condition and the mind itself are ‘militarized.’ At this moment in the history of life on earth, the grim reality is that what we call human culture, and the way man organizes his life and conducts himself in relation to ‘others’, have become a cause for grave cosmic concern.

The underlying premise is (1) that the human being is special and unique, and man’s fate is a ‘make or break’ matter for Nature; and (2) that any impending human extinction is a catastrophe to be avoided at all costs. Both reflect an exclusive human perspective. It never occurs to us that perhaps we are just like any other creature that walks or crawls on earth, a mix of mind and matter, dust and DNA, carbon and consciousness. We might well have some special attributes, though the meaning of ‘special’ to us is rather flexible, but that does not necessarily make us indispensable. But the prevailing mindset is that we are unique and blessed, and therefore we ought to be eternal, and anything less is a colossal cosmic calamity! We know not what awaits man in the womb of time and therefore we should do whatever we can in our allotted time to further the glory of creation. In Sanskrit, it is interesting that the word kaala means both Time and Death. In the great Indian epic Mahabharata, it is said that Time is cooking all living beings in the giant cauldron of cosmic delusion — with the sun as the fire, day and night as the fuel, and months and seasons as the ladle to stir the brew. In a similar vein, Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, “Time is a flood, an impetuous torrent which drags with it all that is born. A thing has scarcely appeared when it is carried

 

 

 

 

 

185 Steven Pinker. The Blank Slate: the Modern Denial of Human Nature. 2002. Penguin Books. New York, USA. p.329.

 

away; another has already passed; and this other will soon fall into the gulf.”186 The human species too gets cooked and falls into the ‘gulf’. The question is not how soon or far, but what imprints it will leave, on the sands of Time. And when the time comes, would man leave behind the earth and the universe in better shape or worse?

 

Lives of quiet desperation

Despite millions of years of evolution, millenniums of culture and centuries of civilization, we have failed the basic test of an enlightened, egalitarian community, namely, being able to interact with another human being without trying to denude his dignity and without trying to exploit him. And yet everyone in our present society, even the exploiter, the oppressor, or the tyrant, feels he is some kind of a ‘fortune’s fool’, a puppet, a cat’s paw, and feels others are taking unfair advantage of him. Human society has long agonized over where the ‘problem’ lay. Some have argued that the problem is with the innate human nature, and that once we ‘fix it’, all the problems of the world will wither away. And there have been others who posited that the crux of the matter is the structure of society and once that is set right — made more just, more egalitarian, less divided, fair — all problems that bother humanity would vanish. The English author John Wilmot, in his poem A Satire Against Reason and Mankind, called man “that vain animal who is so proud of being rational” and that “man differs more

from man than man from beast.”187 Man fears another man more than a man-eating tiger; the latter is somewhere in the jungles and it must find you, but man is everywhere. Once a tiger’s belly is full it is harmless; but a man’s avarice is limitless. The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that human nature emphasizes our animal nature, leaving each man to live independently of his fellow men, acting only in his own self-interest, without regard for others. This produces what Hobbes called the ‘state of war,’ a way of life that is certain to prove ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ According to him, human beings are physical objects, “sophisticated machines, all of whose functions and activities can be described and

explained in purely mechanistic terms”.188 Hobbes also said that, “Everything we choose to do is strictly determined by this natural inclination to relieve the physical pressures that impinge upon our bodies. Human volition is nothing but the determination of the will by the strongest present desire.”189 It is the satiation of desire of one kind or another that consumes much of life. We live through the body and die as the body. It is not the love of life but the

thought ‘what else is there?’ that keeps us going. Men are in a state, as the Spanish philosopher Ortega Gasset describes, of ‘existential shipwreck’, symbolized by a suicide note left behind by a 12-year-old Indian girl who begins with the agonized words: “I hate my life and so I do not want to live.”190 Clearly, there is something horrible at the very core of the human condition. That sense of despair about the tragedy of the human condition has been

 

 

 

186 The Eternal Wisdom: Central Sayings of Great Sages of All Times. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications. Pondicherry, India. p.483.

187 John Wilmot. PoemHunter.com. A Satyre Against Mankind. Accessed at: http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-satyre-against-mankind/

188 Cited in: Hobbes’s Leviathan. Philosophy Pages: Britannica, Internet Guide Selection. Accessed at: http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/3x.htm

189 Cited in: Hobbes’s Leviathan. Philosophy Pages: Britannica, Internet Guide Selection. Accessed at: http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/3x.htm

190 The