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

the ultimate weapon of terror, the favorite tool of totalitarian regimes, has now gained legitimacy and is often assumed as necessary for ‘orderly governance.’ Shorn of scientific jargon, what is being attempted is the alteration of the historic human condition, and perhaps nature’s design, through control of the human mind by penetrating the barrier of the brain. Roger Penrose, whose pioneering work has helped us understand the working of the mind, wrote in his Shadows of the Mind (1994), that “though we believe ourselves to represent the pinnacle of intelligence in the animal kingdom, this intelligence seems sadly inadequate to handle many of the problems that our society continues to confront us with.”401

Feelings like love and compassion, sympathy and sacrifice, adoration and altruism are not individual-specific, but that is not the case with thoughts. You may feel like another person, but you can never think like him. The mind exists as memory and expresses itself as desire. Buddhism says that desire leads to suffering, and Vedanta holds that the desireless state is the ultimate spirituality. It is desire that rules our lives. Many people’s secret desires fostered by the mind have little to do with themselves or what they need, even want; they are ‘negative emotions’ about other people. Too often, people measure their happiness on the scale of other’s misery. Somewhere deep inside our consciousness lurk desires that we would not like to acknowledge even to our own selves. One whole chapter in the Bhagavad Gita

(XVI) deals with the war that rages within every human — indeed in every living being — between the asura (demonic) and the daiva (divine) tendencies. The demonic trait manifests in daily life in multiple ways from a wounding word and a deliberate slight, to calculated callousness and sadistic cruelty. The headwater of the ‘victim syndrome’, which has besmirched human behavior more than anything else, is the mind. It is through this prism that we look at every event, individual and life itself. The feeling that we are wronged, that we got a raw deal, that everyone is ‘out to get you’, that fate has been cruel, that God has forsaken you (even Jesus felt that way on the Cross), prevents us from leading fruitful lives and to contribute to the common good. Such is the dexterity of the mind that it makes even an oppressor think he is oppressed; it can make a sadist think he is sinless, a monster think that he is a martyr; and make a despot think that that is his manifest destiny. But maybe, not wholly without reason! Such is the genius of the mind that it obfuscates the difference, and by constantly shifting and shuffling, it does not let us know who we are. Every man becomes at once a victim and an oppressor, sometimes at the same time and sometimes at different times; sometimes towards the same person and sometimes towards different persons. The one

 

 

 

401 Roger Penrose. Shadows of the Mind: a Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness. 1994. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. p.9.

 

who does not oppress is the one who does not have the capacity to oppress; those who do not exploit are those who do not have the ability to exploit; the one who does not seek to control is the one who is powerless to control. When we do sometimes manage to recognize or realize that we have indeed wronged or hurt another person, the mind immediately proffers an explanation and an excuse, it mitigates, to condone, if not justify the act — ‘it is not your fault’; ‘you could not help it’; ‘what else can you do’, etc. By aborting every attempt to see ourselves as we really are, it deadens our discriminating capacity and leads us to choose the path of pleasure and gratification. It is the mind that transformed money from a means to a monarch, from a facility for easier exchange of services to an intoxicating, all-powerful and all-encompassing factor in human life. The mind values everything from its value or benefit to someone else. Someone quipped that we would not mind losing a fortune if only we are assured that no one will pick it up. Peter Ouspensky (The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, 1950) makes the rather disconcerting claim that “the strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them.”402 People would prefer the suffering engendered by the unholy emotions to the enjoyment promised by the pleasures of positive thoughts. Most people hug negative emotions tight, since, if they are taken away, “they would simply collapse and go up in smoke”, for, they have nothing else inside them!403

But in most of us, the mind — feeble and frail, or mischievous and malicious it may be — proves to be stronger than the heart. Most actions and words germinate as thoughts. We have more control over our actions than on our words, and more control over our words than on our thoughts. It is said that thought is as much a thing like a ‘yonder piece of stone’. It has weight, color, size, shape, and form. It is a force like gravitation, cohesion, or repulsion.

Thought can travel, move, and even heal. A pure thought, the Upanishad says, is sharper than the edge of a razor. Everyone is surrounded by and floating in an ocean of thought. Thinking is divided into four kinds: symbolic (through words); instinctive (fear of death); impulsive (lust, greed, fear); and habitual (of body, food, bathing). Thought affects the thinker as well as the outside world through what are called ‘radiating vibrations’. The human mind is a beehive of negativity which judges others, not itself. We see the flaws in others, but not in ourselves. Even more insidious, it does not allow us to be even conscious of that. Often, the fault we see in others is the one we refuse to acknowledge in ourselves. Indeed, if we do not have it, we cannot even notice it in others. By judging another person, you define yourself.

There is nothing negative about using every opportunity to our advantage; what is reprehensible is to work overtime to deny just opportunities to others. At its core, negativity is a state of being, a state of mind, which sees life as a zero-sum game; it cannot conceive of a state where everyone can win; it is a state in which if someone wins, another has to lose; if you prosper, another must be prostrate. It is the arrogant exercise of power over the weak and the vulnerable, the defenseless and the deprived. Negativity is the lurking monster in all of us. Noxious thoughts damage not only one’s own body and being, but spread outwards seeping into other bodies and beings.

The toxic seeds of indifference, intolerance, and injustice germinate in the fertile soil of the mind. They are the fountainhead of most of our problems, from failed marriages to social strife and religious bigotry. Many of us think that we just have to live with these abominable traits in us. But in reality, we have much more power over negative emotions

 

 

 

402 P.D. Ouspensky. The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. 1974. Vintage Books. [Random House]. New York, USA. p.86.

403 P.D. Ouspensky. The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. 1974. Vintage Books. [Random House]. New York, USA. p.88.

 

than we think, particularly when we already know how dangerous they are, and how urgent the struggle is. But to rid oneself of negative thoughts calls for uncommon will, effort and training, that only a few can summon. Negativity clogs up our consciousness, just as cholesterol does our arteries. We need powerful cleansers, what are called antarkarana suddhi and samskara suddhi in Sanskrit, cleaning of the consciousness, and cleansing of the accumulated karmic imprints, the leftovers of past lives. Mind and heart, reason and intuition, intellect and emotion have to be in concert in a wholesome human being. But to put this into practice, “the culture of the mind,” as Gandhi said, “must be subservient to the culture of the heart.”404 One compassionate heart can induce a far greater ripple effect than the combined intellect of a hundred minds. Intuition has been described as the ‘inner voice’ or the ‘murmur within’; the ‘whisperings of the cosmic spirit’ or the ‘channel to our better self’. It is in the heart — called anahata in Sanskrit — that love manifests and gives us a sense of responsibility and pure behavior towards others. It can take us to a place of deep reflection, love, universal compassion, and detachment and can contribute more to connectivity and oneness than the intellectualization of the human condition. What man needs is the temperance and tenderness of his heart as well as the cold and calculating calculus of his mind. The mind is needed to outsmart other species. The heart, on the other hand, is required to build bridges with other humans, to bring out the best in oneself and in others. It is the access point for experiencing God, the route to the divine dimension of man. We are all wise to our physical heart, but we are yet to realize fully that we have also an emotional heart, a psychological heart, and a spiritual heart. The theosophist Gottfried de Purucker described the heart as: “…the organ of the god within us, of the divine-spiritual: here in the physical heart considered now as a spiritual organ — and not merely as a vital pump, which it is also — is the god within; not in person, but its ray touches the heart and fills it as it were with its auric presence — a holy of holies. Out of the heart come all the great issues of life. Here is where conscience abides, and love and peace and perfect self-confidence, and hope, and divine wisdom. Their seat is in the mystic heart of which the physical organ is the physical vital instrument”405 The love that emanates from the heart alone can transform and elevate the human condition. As Mother Teresa said, “in this life we cannot do great things; we can do only small things with great love.”406 Mahatma Gandhi used to say that true love is to put another person’s welfare ahead of yours; anything else is business, just give-and-take. It is the love-laced heart that can be spontaneous, instinctive, and intuitive. It is only through love of others, and love of God that man can fulfill his promise and potential.

 

Harboring holistic heart

Any study of human behavior, any attempt to ameliorate the human condition that ignores the heart is fated to fail, as feelings and emotions are as integral as reason, thought, and intelligence, if not more. Feeling is more spontaneous than thought. Nietzsche said that thoughts are the shadows of feelings — always darker, emptier, and simpler. And Thoreau said that to see things correctly one must have felt them. Thoughts come from the mind, and

 

 

 

 

404 Immortal Words: an Anthology. 1963. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Chaupatty, Bombay, India. p.71.

405 G. de Purucker. Man in Evolution. Chapter 16: The Pineal and Pituitary Glands. 1977. Second and Revised Edition. Grace F. Knoche (ed.). Theosophical University Press. Pasadena, California, USA. Accessed at: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/man-evol/mie-16.htm

406 Mother Teresa. BrainyQuote.com. Mother Teresa Quotes. Accessed at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/m/mothertere158106.html

 

feelings from the heart. Our inability to synergize the heart and mind has prevented us from realizing our full potential. While other organs have more or less operationally complemented one another, the disharmony between these two has remained a road-block on our evolutionary path. Much of the turbulence and turmoil in the human condition comes from a reversal of roles: mind becoming the controller of consciousness, and man turning into its vassal. To attain the state of final evolution, man needs to reach out and dive deep into his heart. Man must be able to