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

nothing is impossible for human will, and he must surrender to God as if He alone can save and steer man. But for God to extend His hand, we must create the right context and conditions here on earth. That is the privilege and opportunity for this generation of men and women. Can we measure up? At first sight, things look grim and gloomy. But some see hopeful signs, a resurgence, albeit sparse, of spirituality, of mysticism, of the emergence of a new paradigm of global consciousness. And science is breaking new ground through discoveries like that of a possible ‘God-gene’, and, most of all, the techniques to re-energize heart intelligence as a counterbalance to that of the mind. Individuals do matter, but for a species-scale transformation, the book posits, we must marshal a ‘critical mass’ and a coalition of forces. That is the challenge — and the choice.

* * *

On a personal note, I have a confession to offer: this book is a mystery to myself. How it came about, I do not know or remember. Purely factually, it is but a part of a much larger length of prose, running to over thousand five hundred pages, which I hope, God willing, will see the light of day sometime in the future. Nothing in my life fits in with the profile of an author of this book; there is no ‘long foreground somewhere’ to borrow the words of Emerson in his famous letter to Walt Whitman. My professional experience at first glance appears far removed, if not antithetical, to what the book encompasses. And, I am one of those who are truly troubled by the gathering dirt, decay, and drift in the human way of life, and who not only see misery and ask ‘Why?’, but also see promise in the rainbow and ask ‘Why not? I have been a writer of sorts for much of my life, whether it was writing novels in my mother tongue (Telugu), writing for the United Nations, or publishing articles in reputed journals on a broad range of subjects. I have had the uncommon opportunity to live and work literally at every layer and level of human society, all the way from the grassroots

 

to the global. One of God’s gifts that I believe I possess is a natural ability to step aside and look at the different dimensions of the human condition, and discern what ails modern man, and offer some ideas on how to fix it. While living in the world, I can be an observer and a participant, an insider who can look from the outside, or an outsider who can cut through to the core. My association with the Indian Administrative Service (I.A.S.) and the International Civil Service (UN) gave me that rare chance to don those roles. But in the end, my real ‘qualification’ is that, to paraphrase Tennessee Williams, ‘having found life unsatisfactory, I wanted to do the only thing I know: brood and write’.

Samuel Johnson once said that to write one book a man ‘will turn over a half a library’. At least, judging by the voluminous notes and its kaleidoscopic coverage, this book came close to that. Disraeli said that the best way to get acquainted with a subject is to write about it, and, as E.M. Forster said, the only way to truly know what I think is to ‘see what I say’. As much as the book is a journey of ideas and options on human transformation, it is also a personal voyage of self-discovery, to ‘ascend’ to the deepest depths of my heart, to feel, in Wordsworth’s words, the ‘breathings of my heart’. It is a means to save myself from ‘tempered melancholy’, said to be the central theme of the works of Joseph Conrad, or ‘to withdraw myself from myself’, as Byron puts it, and offer an utterance to my solitary soul.

If ‘no one is a stranger’ on the voyage of life, any potential reader would be my soul- mate, those who yearn, as Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) said, to ‘make life come to life’. This book has been written in the spirit that ‘mana seve madhava seva’ (service to humanity is service to God), and if it triggers the tiniest tremor in the turbulent mindsets of a few of my fellow-men, then the long and exasperating travail behind this work would not go without leaving a trail behind. This book hopefully constitutes a humble offering to the Almighty, and any ripple effect it might cause in the ocean of global consciousness is a small service to make man a better being on earth. The opening to that offering is provided by Lord Krishna Himself, in the Bhagavad Gita: “Yat karoshi yad ashnasi; yaj juhoshi dadasi yat; yat tapas yasi kaunteya; tat kurushva mad-arpanam” (Chapter 9.27), which roughly translates as ‘Whatever you do, eat, sacrifice, offer as gift, perform as austerity, O Kaunteya — do all this as dedication to Me’.

So, if nothing is too trivial or temporal to be a divine dedication, why not then a book… why not from a mere me?

Finally, we know that a book does not just happen. Apart from the actual author and the publisher, there are always unseen forces and invisible actors that facilitate the process and the product. Being invisible should not deny the right to be remembered; death should not annihilate deserved gratitude. In my case, I would be guilty of ingratitude — one of the Panchamahapapams, the five great sins — if I did not mention my beloved parents and siblings who gave me boundless love, without which any urge for creativity would have long been smothered. In terms of its content, it has been a singularly solitary effort, from conception to conclusion. Any creative effort is greatly influenced by the immediacy of the ‘world’ around, where just one element, just one person, can make all the difference. In my case, that ‘one’ has been my wife Nirmala, without whose critical support this labor would not have come to fruit. Coming to those who were more directly involved, I wish to take this opportunity to thank the language editors Kranthi Buddhiraju and S. Vijay Ramchander for their contributions. I would specially like to gratefully acknowledge the extraordinary commitment, diligence, and dedication of the latter. My assistant S.P. Babu Aradhya was also helpful in the preparation of the manuscript.

 

Bhimeswara Challa

July, 2010 Hyderabad

Chapter 1 Man in Context

 

God gotten weary of Man!

The turn of any millennium is always a time for thoughtfulness, a rugged moment for intrepid introspection, a hinge of history for an honest audit of human conduct, for a moral inventory of our presence on earth, a juncture for a steadfast look at a nebulous — and numinous — stage in the life of our blessed (and baffling) species. Although it is but a twinkle in the cosmic calendar and a trifling stretch in the geological calculus, a thousand years is a huge hiatus in human history and deserves a moment to pause and ponder. In the long, tempestuous tale of man’s search for the substratum, his endeavors to understand the nature of the basic ‘reality’, the ‘meaning of his being’ and to bend fate, as it were, to his wanton whim and will, this is a period of pregnant profundity, the twilight of a dusky dawn. We are stranded between the crumbling past and a convulsive future, the ground underneath giving way, in our attempt to know why things are as they are. Whether we are simply the secular and stray descendants of a tiny cell of primordial protoplasm, or an arbitrary product guided by no objective value, or the special creation of an All-Wise and All-Merciful God and with a manifest mission that has somehow gone terribly awry, what the human presence has wrought on earth has come to a boil. We do not know what the future holds. Is it likely that a new species could evolve from Homo sapiens with improved or additional senses, with the ability to perceive and experience new dimensions, and with the capacity to develop a higher or different intelligence? Could it be that new species would manifest in a completely different form and shape with an entirely new life pattern?

In the ‘magical’ drama of the origin and evolution of life on earth, spread over a span of nearly four billion years, the present period is indeed a pivot without parallel when, as astronomer Martin Rees tells us, a lone species — the human, for now — has grasped the earth’s future in its hands, casting on it a responsibility never before borne by any other species. In his book, Our Final Century (2004), Rees argues that humankind, with the devices it has on hand, is potentially the maker of its own demise and the demise of the cosmos. He says that “what happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life, and one filled with nothing but base matter.” He adds that the odds are fewer than 50:50 that humans will survive till the end of this century; and brings the matter closer home — and heart — by reminding us that the decisions that man makes in the next few decades are possibly the most important that man has ever made.

Even if the time-frame is debatable, clearly we are poised at a pivotal point, and by the time this millennium passes and the year 3,000 CE arrives the human race would have either perished or would have become a radically different form of life on earth. Some astrobiologists calculate that the planet has already has begun the long process of devolving into a burned-out cinder, eventually to be swallowed by the sun. Whatever is the course of the future, it is becoming unmistakably obvious that we are in the middle of much more than a mere quantitative change in rates of growth, pace of application of technology, information explosion, or declining moral standards. While we talk of post-human as the next, perhaps the final, phase in evolution, the fact is that the base itself is eroded: we humans have already become other than only human for at least half a century, both in terms of our creative and

 

destructive potential. With the result, we need new tools to govern our own behavior and new yardsticks on what or who a ‘moral man’ is or ought to be. We must bring into clearer focus what Scottish historian Adam Ferguson called in his essay History of Civil Society (1767) ‘a principle for affection for mankind’ and the conviction that “an individual is no more than a part of the whole that demands his regard”1.

The Socratic axiom that “an unexamined life is not worth living” is even more germane to the life and loves of a species that prides itself as the most ‘intelligent’ on this planet and that now has turned to be the most menacing mammal. Man, having largely succeeded in his labor to extricate himself from the rigors and limits inherent in the laws of Nature, has now shifted his greedy gaze towards the natural (or divine) determinants of earthly life — disability, decay, disease, and finally death. The other ‘D’of human life is a congenital delusionary disorder. Deluded by his visions of anthropocentric grandeur, man is audaciously aiming at individual immortality, space colonization, and species-scale eternity, and has summoned science to his aid. For science, the defining driving force now on earth, has the primeval power to make things indistinguishably different from what they originally were, to transform their basic features, make them vanish and reappear as an altogether different substance — the attributes that hitherto God alone had. Man is now turning that ‘transformational’ power towards himself, trying to direct his own destiny. But unlike God’s power, the power of science is, although awesome, still finite. And it can,