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

relapse into our lives of negativity and nitpicking, of pleasure and ‘progress’. The fact is that their teachings could not pierce the impregnable shield of our mind-centered consciousness. That is because we try to ‘become’ a Buddhist or a Christian, not Buddha-like or Christ-like. We treat the scriptures and sayings of the prophets and sages as another source of empiricism and knowledge. But Truth, as the Upanishads proclaim, has to be realized, not merely known.

One has always wondered why man has paid such a terrible price for eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Does it have something to do with the nature of knowledge itself? Osho explains that the Biblical parable has immense insight. Why has man fallen from grace through knowledge? Because knowledge creates distance, because knowledge creates the ‘I’ and ‘Thou’, because knowledge creates subject and object, the knower and the known, the observer and the observed. Knowledge is basically schizophrenic; it creates a split. And then there is no way to bridge it. That is why the more man becomes knowledgeable, the less he is

 

religious. The more educated a man, the less is the possibility for him to approach God.352 Osho also says that “Knowledge is the curse, the calamity, the cancer. It is through knowledge that man becomes divided from the whole. Knowledge creates distance.”353 And that knowledge has to be negated. All that we have gathered is just rubbish. The ultimate remains beyond our grasp. As Osho further puts it, “What we have gathered are only facts, truth remains untouched by our efforts”.354 Here is a conundrum: if we know nothing, how can we blame knowledge for creating the distance and dividing man from the whole?

Knowledge, like truth has several depths. Every species has knowledge necessary for that form of life. Our knowledge is at the depth of shallow subsistence, and there are many deeper depths that are even beyond our imagination. So, at once we know nothing and know something. Our knowledge, derived from reason and intelligence, is sufficient to create the distance but not enough to know the whole, the Truth. Even if man develops the capability to ‘download’ the contents of the brain into a supercomputer and replicate consciousness very soon, as is being claimed, and evade ‘death’, some depths of knowledge will ever remain beyond our reach. Vedanta says that true knowledge is self-knowledge, higher than the knowledge of the Vedas itself, and by embarking on that journey man may attain both moksha (liberation) and jnana (knowledge). The Indian scripture Ashtavakra Samhita says that “the world appears from the ignorance of the Self and disappears with the knowledge of the Self, even as the snake appears from the non-recognition of the rope and disappears with its recognition.”355 But then, when man attains that state he will have transcended the bounds of being human.

American New Age author Gary Zukav, whose well-known works include The Seat of the Soul and The Dancing Wu Li Masters, says, “The logics and understandings of the five- sensory personality are in the mind. They are the products of the intellect. The higher order of logics and understandings that is capable of meaningfully reflecting the soul comes from the heart.”356 We must harvest, to borrow the phrase of American author Elaine Matthews, the heartbeat of intelligence (which is incidentally the title of her book). Man’s pillaging and poisoning of the earth, and the persistence of the pestilence of benumbing mass poverty on earth, spring from the same source: denial of living space and legitimacy of the ‘other’ of all sorts: other species, other sex, or other man. Disregard of the ‘total order’ has become our bane now.

Behind the denial of ‘others’ are our unending desires. Man is essentially a creature of desire of all hues. There is not a minute that he does not desire something. For him, desire is life and life is desire. The more we know the more we desire. Perhaps the oldest scripture of all, the Rig Veda simply says that ‘desire links non-being to being’. Throbbing, pulsating desire is the starting point of any achievement and the stepping stone to civilization. Often, we long for forbidden things, and desire denied is the springhead of frustration, unhappiness, and aggression. In fact, desire, deeply felt, has a life of its own. The American author

 

 

 

352 Cited in: Negation of Knowledge. Topic posted on 28 April 2006. Accessed at: http://astrotribe.tribe.net/thread/45406047-d687-470d-8372-c648467d4ca9

353 Cited in: Negation of Knowledge. Topic posted on 28 April 2006. Accessed at: http://astrotribe.tribe.net/thread/45406047-d687-470d-8372-c648467d4ca9

354 Osho. The Heart Sutra. Discourses on the Prajnaparamita Hridayam Sutra of Gautama the Buddha. 1978. Tao Publishing Pvt. Ltd. Pune, India. p.66.

355 Swami Nityaswarupananda (tr.). Ashtavakra Gita. 2001. Sri Ramanasramam. Tiruvannamalai, India. p.27.

356 Gary Zukav. The Seat of the Soul. 1995. MIT Press. London, UK. p.60.

 

Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937) wrote that, “when your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.”357 Every wish, Vedanta tells us, will be realized even if it takes a million births. The state of desirelessness, being devoid of tanha (desire or craving), is the state that Buddhism prescribes to rid oneself of dukkha (suffering or sorrow), and to attain nirvana, the final liberation. The forces of desire and hatred trap us in cyclic existence and consequential suffering. The paradox, however, is that the desire to be without desire is another kind of desire. But like right action and wrong action, there are right desires and wrong desires, the distinction being the nature of the effect of their fulfillment. To have the right desires is not easy, as it requires a totally new mindset. The composite of human thoughts and desires, perhaps more than human actions, is what shapes the human world, and because of their toxic and noxious nature, human future inevitably gets sullied. Our thoughts, as Thomas Hobbes noted, run over everything, holy, profane, chaste, ugly, obscene, without shame or blame — but they leave imprints on the cosmos. And we have no mode or mechanism or even the will to cleanse them. Religion, whose purpose was to accomplish this task, has itself gone awry. Of all the areas in which the human cognitive potential has failed human destiny, it is its inability to navigate the religious stream in the human consciousness. We seem to be adrift somewhere between the boundaries of religion, social ethics, morality and spirituality, which until rather recently were more or less in harmony, at least not openly antagonistic. For a human life to be wholesome, all the four have to be in tandem, if not integrated; alarmingly, as time passes, the gaps are widening and the distortions are lengthening. We need radical winnowing, shifting of gears and direction, and the tools to achieve that objective. Science must cease to be the handmaiden of technology, and has to become a tool in human transformation. Even to come close to that goal, the mind must be dethroned and de-fanged. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna: “The mind (manas) which follows the rambling senses, makes the Soul (buddhi) as helpless as the boat which the wind leads astray upon the waters.”358 Man has to become essentially a spiritual being, not a mental being; much less an immortal predatory physical being, which is precisely what science is trying to do through technologies like cryonics and genetic engineering, offering, as they say, a choice between a cold storage and a coffin (or a cemetery) to every man. Our idea of strength is physical, agility is mental and life’s goal is to make it perpetual. Nietzsche’s superman exercises power not over others, but over himself.

That, at its core, is spirituality.

According to Sri Aurobindo, for man to change from an “ignorant mental being misusing, or not effectively using, his knowledge, moved by ego and governed by vital desires and passions and the needs of the body, unspiritual and superficial in his outlook, ignorant of his own self and the forces that drive and use him,”359 to a spiritual being at peace with himself and with the world around, calls for nothing less than a consciousness change, which is to ascend to higher layers of consciousness. According to Tibetan Buddhism, there are eight different kinds of consciousnesses. Of them, the first four are called inconstant consciousnesses, the fifth is sensory, the sixth is mental. The seventh and eighth consciousnesses are ‘constant’; the seventh is called afflicted consciousness, in the sense that

 

 

 

 

357 Napoleon Hill. ThinkExist.com. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotations/desire/

358 Cited in: H.P. Blavatsky. The Voice of the Silence. 1998. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. pp.8-9.

359 Sri Aurobindo. The Future Evolution of Man. Chapter 5: The Development of the Spiritual Man. Accessed at: http://www.mountainman.com.au/auro_5.html

 

it refers to the most basic level of mental affliction or the root of kleshas; it is the basis for the ‘I’ and ‘mine’ fixations; the eighth consciousness is called the ‘ground consciousness’, the ground for the rise of all other consciousnesses. Every act of an individual has an imprint, which is stored in the eighth consciousness, and these latencies manifest later by entering the sixth consciousness, or the mental, which is the most important. The challenge is to create an environment that is conducive to elevate individual consciousness on a scale sufficient for a species-wide spiritual change.

Sri Aurobindo says, “Only a spiritual change, an evolution of his being from the superficial mental towards the deeper spiritual consciousness, can make a real and effective difference.” According to him, “A change of consciousness is the major fact of the next evolutionary transformation, and the consciousness itself, by its own mutation, will impose and effect any necessary mutation of the body.”360 Much would depend on what we truly wish for our own selves as, “you are never given a wish without also being given the power to make it true. You may have to work for it, however.”361 But to truly and wholly wish well of others we need wisdom and compassion. We may use the word consciousness a million times and think we know what we are talking about, but in the end, in the words of the American psychologist William James, consciousness remains ‘the most mysterious thing in the world’. But we do know or think we know that consciousness is the key, the root of all experience, the difference — or the continuum — between life and death. All evolution is to move from consciousness to consciousness. The very purpose of all life, some say, especially human life, is to evolve into a higher consciousness at each stage. Some like Jeremy Griffith postulate that it is this ‘glitch’ in human consciousness that blocks our final evolution to, what Griffith calls, ‘God-Man.’ Whether it is a ‘God-Man’ or, like in the advertisements of our consumer products, a ‘new and improved’ man, what man needs is a qualitative consciousness change. Only through that can we change the nature of the power of our knowing, or rather the power within us that determines what we know. We must continue to believe that man still has a fair chance to ‘rise above himself’. We are free to choose our future, and we do exactly that every minute of our lives. Maybe a better word would be ‘to make,’ not ‘to choose’. Future is not some magical thing on a dusky distant horizon, it is the morrow of every day. The next minute is as much the future as the next millennium. If, as Plato said, time is a moving image of eternity, and the future, as Jorge Luis Borges put it, is ‘a mere construction of our hopes,’ then our collective hope has to be that humanity could yet find its utterance and