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

the place of real knowing. A new branch of empirical and experimental knowledge, the ‘science of the heart’, is now solving some old mysteries and opening new doors to our understanding to what goes on inside us.

Heart intelligence, it is believed, arises from an actual, biological process that is just as real, and as important as the process involving the brain intelligence. Further, it is “only by evolving full heart intelligence will we become fully brain intelligent.”386 In fact, it is the disconnection between the heart and the brain intelligence and the resultant disharmony, that is said to be responsible for much of what is wrong with the human world. It has prevented us, the argument goes, from becoming whole, complete, and to function as spiritual beings living in harmony with Nature. By harmonizing the heart and head through love we can take our consciousness and intelligence to a higher plateau of existence. For several centuries, human character and conduct were deprived of any input other than the machinations of the mind. Mind reigned supreme over man. However, it was not a one-way street. Human environment and habits also affected the mind. Mind and man have been so intertwined that we forget that the mind did not always play the dominant role that it plays in modern life. The heart seems more ‘original’ than the brain. A fetus, we are told, develops the heart much sooner than the brain. The human brain took several thousands of years to grow to the present size and weight; the heart has been the same organically. For long, the heart guided and

 

 

 

386 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.102.

 

guarded man while the brain was still a ‘baby’ and growing. In the life of the prehistoric or primitive man, the heart held its place alongside the brain. After all, the heart was the only organ he could actually sense and hear. It manifested in myriad ways: intuition, instinct, sixth sense, extra sensory perception, etc., to help him anticipate danger and look for safety. He could only survive by raw instinct without the aid of fire and tools. As the brain grew bigger and tightened its hold on man, the heart went into enforced recess.

The subtler and spiritual heart has long been, perhaps for hundreds, if not thousands of years sidelined, smothered, and silenced. In the Voice of Silence (1889), Helena Blavatsky teaches us to separate the real from the false, the ever-fleeting from the everlasting and, above all, the head-learning from soul-wisdom, the ‘Eye’ from the ‘Heart’ doctrine. It will take extraordinary effort for the heart to once again come to the mainstream from the margins. The accent has always been on boosting brainpower, not harnessing heart energy.

Even if we can wipe the slate clean and rewrite the syntax of our living and reverse or change the mind and the mental modules, it could still be insufficient to put heart back on track. We have to cultivate mindfulness, a state of consciousness that Zen Buddhism advocates, without being mind-full or being filled with mind. The American poet Robert Frost wrote that half of our mistakes in life arise from thinking when we ought to feel, and feeling when we ought to think. The paradox is that man without a mind is a zombie, but with mind as his master, he could become a veritable monster. In any serious attempt to get to grips with our cognitive faculties of information processing, knowledge application, choice making, and perceptive powers, we must bear in mind five central factors: 1) Intentionally or accidentally, the mind has turned out to be the unchallenged monarch of man and of the universe; 2) As a result of this unmerited elevation of the mind, human personality has become a hostage to all its attributes and limitations; 3) Our quality of life reflects the quality of our decision making and problem solving, which, at present, are governed by distorted dynamics germinated in the mind; 4) To go out of the confining and corrupting clutches of the mind, we need to find another countervailing power; and 5) That spiritual power — the human heart — is also within us, but for a variety of reasons has been somnambulant and dormant and therefore needs to be reawakened and renewed.

 

Man — a ‘mental case’

Much of our misery and sorrow, pain and suffering in life spring from an imbalance among the forces, impulses, instincts, and emotions that control and condition our behavior; in short, the imbalance between mind and heart. The links between man and the mind, on the one side, and the mind and consciousness, on the other, have been issues of deep reflection and study from time immemorial. A nascent field of inquiry, for long only spiritual but of late scientific too, is the nexus between mind and heart, in other words, the role of the heart in human consciousness. Above everything else, man is, not necessarily in a pejorative sense but increasingly accurately, a ‘mental case’, mentally manipulated in varying degrees and ways. Not only that, we are also held in a ‘mental cage’, and it increasingly seems that the kind of future we will have, will depend on how we stand in relation to that cage. Man has always been driven around by the mind, but now, either the mind itself has lost its moorings or it seems to have acquired a sinister agenda. One of the most challenging and incredibly complex and difficult areas of research is the attempt to quantify a mental state that causes a particular behavior. It is far more difficult to study internal stimuli than external ones.

Although the research is currently focused on ‘negatives’ like drug use, alcoholics, and chronic sex offenders, hope lingers that any breakthrough there can have wider and elevating applications. The mind has become the dominating, if not deterministic, force in the human world to the extent that the two are indistinguishable. Albert Einstein once said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a

 

society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”387 What Einstein called ‘intuitive mind’ others call heart intelligence. It is the same rational mind that induces some of us to believe that it is acceptable if two-thirds of humanity perishes in an all-out nuclear war. It is the same intelligence that impelled man to commit countless atrocities and horrendous acts in the name of religion and national honor. And it is this rational mind that justifies biocide and genocide for a ‘pleasant’ life on earth. Dumping everything from human and toxic wastes to radioactive ‘spent fuel’ on earth is the preferred ‘solution’ to the problems created by human civilization. The earth has “become ‘harlot earth,’ in the words of Francis Bacon, whose secrets were to be wrung from it and its substance made totally available for human use on any scale one wanted to operate.”388 We have ceased to take care of creation in a ‘shepherdly manner;’ as a trustee or as a custodian, much less as God’s regent on earth. Much of human endeavor has been directed not at how man should fit into the natural world, but at how the wealth of the world should be made to quench the human thirst for material prosperity. The question is: did something go terribly awry in human evolution that changed the human personality and brought about the present pass? Was the dominance of the mind an evolutionary need or a byproduct? And what is ‘mind’? Is mind purely physical or is it paranormal? Is it another name for the brain or a different entity? Is it an alien implant or innate and integral to the human? Do the other non-human animals, particularly primates like our closest cousin, the chimpanzee, have a mind? What is its place and role in the human consciousness? Is it a boon or a bane or a blend of both?

The answers to such questions cover a broad spectrum of human inquiry, and there are no clear answers. The very word ‘mind’ is used in a variety of meanings in English as well as in other languages. But the striking fact is that with all its power and hold over the human condition, no one really has a good word to say about the mind except perhaps tyrants, paranoid cult leaders and ‘Secret Services’ of various countries, to whom coercive ‘mind control’ is a favorite tool to bend the human will. The mind has been called a smokescreen, a monkey, one that is mischievous, malicious, feeble, fickle, dualistic, divisive, devious etc.

Also the mind is congenitally constrained in its capacity. It cannot cope with the formless, the no-thing; it cannot know what is going on at a level deeper than that of thought. True knowledge is deeper than thought. What we actually detect at a mental level is just a small amount of what is actually happening — the tip of the iceberg. We only get to see the objectified part, not the holistic whole. The mind operates in pairs of opposites and therefore it cannot ‘grasp’ the non-dual. The Buddhist Dhammapada compares the mind to a fluttering fish drawn from its watery abode and thrown on land. It has also been compared to a lake.

Just as one can see one’s reflection on the water, or the stone at the bottom, when the lake is calm and clear, not muddy and ruffled, similarly, if we can keep the mind pure and still, we can have a vision of our true self. In practical terms, the mind lets us get away with selective, inconsistent, and insensitive behavior, and endlessly offers explanations and excuses. By its inherent attribute of self-justification, the mind robs man of the ability for self-inquiry and it blurs our moral vision. The Jyotirbindu Upanishad says that there is a world so long as there is a mind, and that the world ceases to exist as a separate entity when the mind is annihilated. In the Mahabharata (Santi parva, section XXXVIII), it is said that there are two causes for all

 

 

 

 

387 Cited in: Steve Cady. Selecting Methods: the Art of Mastery. The Change Handbook (Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, and Steven Cady, eds.). 2007. Berret-Koehler Publishers. California, USA. p.28.

388 James Berry. The Universe Story, as told by Brain Swimme and Thomas Berry. The Trumpeter (10)2. Accessed at: http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/viewFile/386/615

 

mental sorrow: delusion of the mind and the accession of distress. Distress comes from unfulfilled desires and desire incubates in the mind.

A Sikh scripture says, “The conscious mind is engrossed in sexual desire, anger, and Maya. The conscious mind is awake only to falsehood, corruption, and attachment. It gathers in the assets of sin and greed.”389 Milton, reflecting the same spirit, wrote, “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.”390 And Rene Descartes said, “The greatest minds are capable of the greatest vices as well as of the greatest virtues.”391 For The Buddha, “All wrong-doing arises because of mind. If mind is transformed can wrong-doing remain?”392 The great Adi Shankara, the celebrated exponent of the Advaita school of philosophy in Hinduism, compared the mind to a tiger prowling in the forest of the senses. Arjuna, in the Bhagavad Gita, drew the analogy of the wind to allude to the waywardness of the mind. But one wonders if it is the mind that is really the monkey, or if it has made a monkey of man and is enjoying a laugh. The Gita says, “manojaya eva mahajayah”, the conquest of the mind is the greatest victory. The paradox here is that in one breath we talk of man and mind as indistinguishable, and and the next moment, we talk of the control, conquest