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

in satisfaction at his conclusion that he fares better. We constantly hear the words ‘animals

 

 

 

205 Immanuel Kant. Philosophy Paradise. Famous Philosophy Quotes. Accessed at: http://www.philosophyparadise.com/quotes/kant.html

206 Mark Twain. TwainQuotes.com. Directory of Mark Twain’s maxims, quotations, and various opinions.

Accessed at: http://www.twainquotes.com/Malice.html

207 Virginia Morell. Animal Minds: Minds of their Own. National Geographic Magazine. USA. March 2008. p.33.

 

cannot think’. Our mind is made up about the ‘obvious’: animals may think but they do not know that they think; they cannot feel pain; they do not have consciousness, which we do; animals simply live in the present, but we have a sense of the past and future, and so forth. Despite man’s belief in his innate or proximate divinity, animals have become man’s measure of his worth. If man cannot understand how his own brain functions, through psychology, autopsy or dissection, how can he decode what other species think or know what they do not know? For all we know, animals might be thinking that they are superior to humans!

Scientists like Temple Grandin, author of the book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005), tells us that humans and animals have the same neurons, but that we use them differently. The cells are the same. For example, it is reported that a mouse has 30,000 genes, with 99 percent of them having direct counterparts in humans. The author also argues that autism is a “kind of way station on the

road from animals to humans.”208 The sensory powers of animals evolved in a manner suited to that species and necessary for survival in a hostile environment. One or an other animal, as noted before, can see better, hear better, and smell better than man. Dogs, for example, are known to sense the death of their masters thousands of miles away; they have what humans call extrasensory perception (ESP). In fact, it has been said that, initially, humans too had the kind of sensory sharpness and ESP that many animals have, and perhaps we would have continued to have such capabilities, had we not developed the ability to make tools and technology. Animals may live at the level of survival and subsistence, but that also means, unlike man, their mode of existence is need-based, not want-based. They may not have a sense of past and future; at least, that is what we think, but their mode of living is more farsighted and in harmony with Nature than that of modern man. Maybe they are more spiritual in the true sense of the term.

Among the myriad modes that man adopts to separate himself from the other species is the claim that he is a ‘moral animal’, which, incidentally, is the title of Robert Wright’s book The Moral Animal (1994). Everything, from the scriptures to Darwin, asserts that it is morality that separates man from animals. Implicit in that belief is that we alone are ‘naturally’ capable of knowing what is moral and what is not. We like to believe it, but history does not bear it out. Even if we do have that ‘capability’, the fact that we so often fail to put it into effect makes us more culpable; which is worse than not having such capability at all. No animal, for instance, could have thought of mass extermination as the Final Solution; or massacre as a means of ethnic cleansing; or of ‘genocidal rape’, which is rape over extended periods to inflict intolerable shame and guilt, to traumatize and to forcibly impregnate the ‘enemy’ women. And how can we apply human standards of morality or evil to other species whose instincts, needs and rituals of life are different from those of man?

When a great white shark brutally forces a female into submission, it copulates with her, but it does not rape her. For animals, unlike humans, are not moral agents with moral duties to observe. Perhaps man was conceived and designed to be a moral animal, or perhaps morality grew out of survival or reproductive need, but we have by now lost that distinction by virtue of our conduct. Worse still, man has lost the moral discriminatory capacity to distinguish between the moral and the amoral. And if we do know what the moral choice is, we often feel helpless in going against it. For, we have come to believe that morality is a fool’s choice in the kind of world we have fashioned through our own choices.

 

 

 

 

208 Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson. Animals In Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior. 2005. Scribner. New York, USA. p.6.

 

Whether morality and, by extension, human behavior have genetic roots has been a subject of evolutionary psychology. Most people agree that being ‘moral’ is important not only for spiritual reasons but also for social reasons. But opinions, even among scholars, differ as to what ‘being moral’ means. To some, morality is not a simple choice between good and bad, white and black; one has to make choices between the shades and hues, and between different ‘cocktails’ of virtue and evil. It is true that there is no simple, single litmus test for morality; it is relative and subjective to time, place, and person. Factors like where, by whom, and when a certain action is performed determine whether that action is moral or not. If a soldier kills in a state of war, it is heroism; if the same person kills at home, even if in self-defense, it becomes a crime. We condone multiple sexual partners, but consider horizontal plurality (i.e., same-gender partners) both a sin and a crime. We cannot codify or shackle what ‘being moral’ means in the cauldron of samsara, the sensory world, in which so many colliding factors have to be balanced in deciding the right thing to do in a given context; in the end, it all boils down to a kind of an intuitive ‘gut feeling’. One has to nurture and develop an almost visceral capacity to weigh and choose the right over wrong.

Most of all, humans are bereft of a sense of affinity, bonding, and solidarity. Without some sort of a relationship, we might as well be another species. Hannah Arendt, author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958), wrote that “men, not Man, live on the Earth, and inhabit the world.”209 Man becomes ‘men’ through bonding, and in its absence, humankind remains a conglomeration of disparate individuals, not a

cohesive community with shared values and a common destiny. Albert Schweitzer, winner of the Nobel Peace prize (1952) said, “The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.”210 Our bonding increasingly appears to be a bondage; and our solidarity, that of slaves. The Indian mystic Meher Baba said that bondage is not a meaningless episode in the passage of life, and to experience freedom one must experience being caged, just as a fish must come out even momentarily to understand the value of water. The Argentinean writer Jorge Borges summarized a Plutonian hypothesis: “Individuals and things exist in so far as they participate in the species that includes them, which is their

permanent reality.”211 At this point, we are only human because we have in its essentials the same body; one has to take a long pause to think of anything else that connects humans selected randomly. The air is thick with talk of globalization, interconnectivity, brotherhood and so on, but in practice we are torn farther apart from each other as ever before. We must realize, as the French writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry put it, “It is another of the miraculous things about mankind that there is no pain nor passion that does not radiate to the ends of the earth. Let a man in a garret but burn with enough intensity and he will set fire to the

world.”212 At the same time, the tragedy of the human condition is that the only pain or passion we feel in our consciousness is our own. To act any differently, we need a consciousness change. For human behavior to be any different from what it has come to be,

 

 

 

209 Cited in: New World Encyclopedia. Hannah Arendt: Thought and Works. The Human Condition. Accessed at: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hannah_Arendt#The_Human_Condition

210 Albert Schweitzer. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/the_first_step_in_the_evolution_of_ethics_is_a/146835.html

211 Eliot Weinberger (ed.). Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions. 1999. Penguin Books. New York, USA. p.127.

212 Cited in: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Wikiquote. Wind, Sand and Stars (1939). Accessed at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Antoine_de_Saint_Exupéry

 

we need a brand new mindset. This is not a new revelation or discovery. Prophets and saints have said the same. Consciousness is both plural and singular. It is the divine force underlying the cosmos, which, in Sanskrit is called mahat-tattva, the first of seven cosmic transformations, the primordial Universal Mind or Infinite Intellect. But it is also specific — or appears to be — to every species and every individual. The attempt to merge the individual consciousness into the cosmic consciousness, the jivatma into the paramatma, as it is described in the Upanishads, is the spiritual journey every individual must embark upon.

Consciousness is itself a storehouse of impressions or vasanas, carried over from previous lives. And the karmic latencies of those impressions, in turn, influence and condition our behavior. Our consciousness therefore is not only what we happen to have, but what we have earned or acquired, a reward as well as a retribution. The outward extension of consciousness, its practical manifestation is conduct, and the process of this transformation is still a perplexing puzzle. It is clear that for rightful conduct we need the right kind of perception, and for that we need right consciousness. The scriptures emphasize this point.

Jainism, for example, places great importance on right perception and says that conduct devoid of right perception and right knowledge is meaningless ritualism, and in the present context, dangerous empiricism. It defines rightful conduct as the absence of skepticism, renunciation of all possessions and avoidance of all sinful and materialistic endeavors. That might be too high a standard for this age and world. The bare minimum ought to be what is called the Golden Rule or principle, which has been variously formulated but which really is something like ‘what you would not have done to yourself, do not do to another’ and ‘what you dislike, do not do to anyone’; and putting it more positively, ‘whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them’. But even that seems a far cry from the current ebb and flow of modern life whose metaphor is ‘I keep what I have and take what you have’.

Ironically, at the same time, as advances in technology have made it possible to undertake a detailed study of human genetic variation, humankind is moving towards intensive amalgamation through travel, trade, and immigration, and increasing inter-cultural and inter-race marriages and sexual unions. But the tragedy is that such coalition has not helped in building bridges across minds; nor has it fostered anything like a global culture.

The ‘globalized’ globe continues to be a fractured world. It may be electronically ‘flat’, but functionally it is full of potholes. The sorry state of our species is that man has lost the sense of participation in a common mission; his only ‘mission’ is to expand the frontiers of his personal ‘world’ regardless of the means; the only aim is never to stop ‘getting rich’. We do not see the need or virtue in coming together; indeed no cause worthy of interlinking energies, and no gain in that pain. Philosophers like Plato have argued that ‘love directs the bonds of human society.’ That still remains lofty and desirable but the state of human emotions belies that. Our expectations are at someone else’s expense; our desires are often injurious to fellow humans. Everyone yearns