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

the life of Adi Shankara. On his way to the temple of Viswanatha in Varanasi, Shri Adi Shankaracharya encounters a sweeper (a low-caste chandala) and asks him to step aside and give way. The sweeper (none other than Lord Siva, the main deity of the temple that Shankaracharya was going to pray to) asks who should move away from whom — whether one body made of food from another made of food, or one consciousness from another consciousness. The sweeper then says ‘Is there any difference between the reflection of the sun in the waters of the Ganga and its reflection in the water in a ditch in the quarters of the outcastes? Or between the very space in a gold pot and in a mud pot?’ Shankaracharya realizes the profound truth in the question, and prostrates himself in front of the sweeper (who, in reality, is Shiva Himself). It is consciousness that unifies as well as differentiates one man from another man; indeed one living being from another. It provides the common thread as well as the individual identity.

 

Restoring equilibrium in human consciousness

Our current consciousness, in one sense, is the ‘abnormal’ or ‘unnatural,’ not the ‘normal’ or natural consciousness. The American philosopher and scientist Norman Livergood says, “The conspiracy to reduce consciousness to intellectual awareness of the physical world has been in evidence for at least five thousand years.” He says that “over the centuries the mental and psychic powers that only mystics and seers now possess have been filtered out of most people”425 and our current intellect-based awareness is highly abnormal and unnatural. It is this conspiracy that has brought humanity to the brink of the abyss. Our ‘normal’ but really ‘abnormal’ consciousness lost some of its ‘normal’ powers like intuition, inspiration, and a range of perceptions we call extrasensory since, as theorized by occultists like Colin Wilson, we no longer ‘need’ them. Or, to put it more accurately, that is because these powers have been rendered redundant by our materialistic civilization. One could even argue that it was the loss of those ‘powers’ that brought about the imbalance in the human condition and led to the total dominance of the human consciousness by the brain-mind. But those ‘powers’ are essential attributes of the human condition and are still needed for human betterment, and perhaps for survival. And that will be possible only if the human heart comes out of the shadows and margins. Elaine Matthews puts it across aptly: “We can only move into a higher dimension of awareness when we have full heart intelligence, which implies that our triune (three-in-one) brain will have become one brain, functioning perfectly as a seamless whole.

When this happens we will live our lives as unique individuals with full intelligence, aware at all times that we are also a part of the whole, The One.”426 It would then be possible to

 

 

 

423 Winifred A. Parley. A Blavatsky Quotation Book. 2000. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.27.

424 Winifred A. Parley. A Blavatsky Quotation Book. 2000. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.50.

425 Cited in: Andreas Ohrt. Dormant Powers of the Human Brain. Norman D. Livergood. Mind Power News. Saturday, 26 June 2004. Issue 49. Accessed at: http://www.mindpowernews.com/049.htm

426 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.87.

 

awaken the ‘Buddha’ within each human being, who, Osho said, has been put to deep sleep. But it is a delusion to think that simply wishing, writing, and reading or even praying will bring about the ‘Buddha’. It will stay as a ‘pious’ wish and a desirable state. The biggest bottleneck to human betterment since the time of the ‘first humans’ to the ‘modern man’ is the disconnect between the ‘devotedly desired’ and the ‘practical actuality;’ the gap, as noted earlier, between knowing and doing, belief and behavior, precept and practice. We must put together a ‘tool box’ for that purpose, drawn from both scriptures and science. William Tiller says that the heart chakra should open first in the human transformation to a significantly higher level of both consciousness and energy flow.427 How to activate heart chakra energy has to be on the frontline of both science and spirituality. But first we must learn or relearn to ‘live-- and learn --in our hearts’ what it is to be humanely human as a way to restore balance between intellectual intelligence and intuitive intelligence. As Elaine Matthews puts it, “Only by evolving full heart intelligence will we become fully brain intelligent.”428 She asserts that if we could mobilize what she calls the ‘heartbeat of intelligence,’ begin turning things around in a generation or less, and with wisdom, we could take over our own biological evolution and become, at least in spirit ‘spiritual beings,’ and restore our bond with the rest of the cosmos.

The mind brooks no rival or even a parallel. It is the perennial source of ego. We have come to identify ego with the whole of our being. Sogyal Rinpoche, the Tibetan Dzogchen Lama and scholar (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, 1992) says, “In Tibetan, ego is called dak dzin, which means ‘grasping to a self.’ Ego is then defined as incessant movements of grasping at a delusory notion of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, self and other, and all the concepts, ideas, desires, and activity that will sustain that false construction. The thought that we might ever become egoless terrifies us. To be egoless, ego whispers to us, is to lose all the rich romance of being human, to be reduced to a colorless robot or a brain-dead vegetable.” Sogyal Rinpoche goes on to say, “to end the bizarre tyranny of ego is why we take the spiritual path, but the resourcefulness of ego is almost infinite, and it can at every stage sabotage and prevent our desire to be free of it.”429 The Kathopanishad clearly rules out the mind’s capability to lead us to the summit of consciousness. But the mind, like the ego, cannot be gotten rid of easily. The Bhagavad Gita says that a man’s own self could be a friend or a foe. If he stays a captive of his mind, the mind could be the foe; if he awakens his heart and lets it lead him, it would be a friend. Meher Baba emphasizes the paramount need for the emancipation of consciousness from the limitations of the mind and says that “to throw off the limiting mind is no easy thing. The chief difficulty lies in the fact that the mind has to be annihilated through the mind itself.”430 History has shown that it is not possible to overcome or surmount the mind through mind control. We have to outflank and work around it and strengthen an alternative source.

It means restoring the lost balance of our consciousness. What is needed is a counterforce, a force that induces equilibrium in the human consciousness. For this, there has to be a seminal shift in the human effort from controlling the mind to complementing it. The

 

 

 

427 William A. Tiller. Science and Human Transformation: Subtle Energies, Intentionality and Consciousness. 1997. Pavior Publishers. USA. p.278.

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

429 Cited in: HPS.Online.com. Mental health, a Tibetan Buddhist Perspective. Introduction: The Natural Bardo. The Wisdom of Egolessness. Accessed at: http://www.hps-online.com/sogyal.htm

430 Discourses of Meher Baba. Vol. III. 1954. Adi K Irani Meher Publications. Mumbai, India. p.95.

 

focus of human evolution has to be on the restoration of the balance and harmony within the processes that turn human thought into human behavior. Ancient cultures intuitively recognized the existence of an independent source of intelligence, wisdom, and subtle energy to balance or reinforce the mind, but the mind-dominated modern civilization has hardly paid any attention to it. To counterweigh mind-power we have to empower the heart. The heart is the repository of love, tenderness, compassion, mercy, and sacrifice. Cynthia Kneen, a Buddhist scholar and the author of the book Awake Mind, Open Heart (2002), says that ‘having a heart’ is the willingness to be exposed, to be touched nakedly by the world, not being weak or sentimental. It is the seat of the soul and the abode of God in man. A Persian Sufi mystic Mansur Al-Hallaj who had attained communion with God by diving deep into the innermost recesses of his being, said “you can break a temple; you can break a mosque; but you must never break the human heart, because the heart is the very dwelling place of the Lord.”431 It is through this heart that one can overcome the limitations and fragilities of sense perceptions. While the physical heart needs constant blood supply, the spiritual heart can be nurtured through nutrients like solitude, meditation, and prayer. If the mind is a gift of God, the heart is God’s abode. If the mind is the wall between God and man, the heart is the bridge. We need to break walls and build bridges, and foremost among them is the wall of the mind and the bridge of the heart. Psychologists like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Alan Watts argue that the human brain has a natural, evolution-based negativity. That negativity might have been necessary for sheer survival, but it has remained entrenched and has come to occupy the entire inner space of man and has become the ‘natural’ disposition of the human organism. If kept under check and tempered with morality, that ‘negativity’ could become a cautionary restraint. A dose of negativity is necessary for self-preservation, but often it hijacks the whole consciousness. When that happens, it makes man a menace. If the brain is innately ‘negative’, the heart is naturally ‘positive’. If the first impulse of the brain is to see the shades and the shadows, the instinct of the heart is to see the light and the sunshine.

Even if we are not fully cognizant of the larger-than-pump role of the heart, we all know that emotions play a profound role in life and that the heart has some vague connection to them. One of the most popular words and the cause of many ‘modern’ maladies goes by the ubiquitous word ‘stress’, which really is the destructive dichotomy between the head and the heart. The fact is that the mind will not quit or quietly disappear into the sunset, with man waving an affectionate adieu from the shore. But it is not necessary or even desirable for the mind to vanish. Without mind, man is dead meat; he cannot survive without it, and if he does, other species, so long under its yoke, will seize the chance to settle their deadly scores. Man needs the energy and crafty intelligence of the mind, but he needs the energy and compassionate intelligence of the heart even more. The great French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had some insight into this phenomenon when he wrote in The Little Prince (1943), “…And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”432 Theosophist de Purucker said, “The Buddha within you is watching you. Your own inner Buddha has his eye, mystically speaking, on you. His hand is reached compassionately downward towards you, so to speak, but you must reach up and clasp that hand by your own unaided will and

 

 

 

 

431 Anup Taneja. There is Nothing Inside the Cloak but God. The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 18 January 2009. p.10.

432 Antoine de Saint Exupéry. Katherine Woods (tr.). The Little Prince. 1962. Penguin Books. London, UK. p.84.

 

aspiration.”433 It is our feelings, not thoughts, that let us clasp that hand. As Swami Vivekananda said, the ‘power of the prophets’ lay, not in intellect, but in their feelings.