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

In his words, “Feel like a Christ, and you will be a Christ; feel like a Buddha, and you will be a Buddha.”434 That is what separates a sage or a seer from the multitude of human beings. It is the feeling that is the life, the strength, and the vitality, without which any amount of intellectual activity cannot reach God. Intellect is like the limbs without the power of locomotion.435 Swami Vivekananda also said that “if you do (feel) you are growing in oneness. If you do not feel for others, you may be the most intellectual giant ever lived, but you will be nothing, you are but dry intellect and you will remain so.”436

The insights that modern science with powerful penetrating tools is gathering, is what the rishis of ancient India were able to discern through their intuitive insight into the depths of the human soul by summoning the spiritual energy of their hearts. The heart, unlike the mind, is inherently pure. The Maha Narayana Upanishad speaks of a “small, sinless and pure lotus of the heart which is the residence of the Supreme.”437 The Isha Upanishad says that in the heart of all things, of whatever there is in the universe, dwells the Lord. And the Katha Upanishad says that the Supreme Person, of the size of a thumb dwells forever in the heart of all beings. The Bible says, “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God” (Matthew, 5:8). Not only does the brain dominate our body, it has now devised extensions of itself in the form of electromagnetic energy embodied in devices like cell phones and computers. The human intellect has had things its way for the last several hundreds of years, and the result is the hapless but hazardous human being that man is today and the warped mental world he sees around. The mind is essentially a factory that manufactures thoughts, a factory in a perpetual production mode. The French philosopher René Descartes famously said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ What is forgotten is ‘You can be what you feel’ too. Just as every thought, positive or negative, is a force in nature and affects everyone else, so is every feeling and emotion. If a thought outlives a life, an emotion can transform a life. Just as thought can be sharpened and trained, so can feeling be nourished and nurtured. It is the interplay and tension between thinking and feeling, thought and emotion, that straddle the human consciousness and create what one might call pendulum personalities, often oscillating between apparent opposites. No one can deny the power of thought but one should not decry the power of feeling or emotion. Blaise Pascal wrote, “There is internal war in man between reason and the passions…. because he has both, he must be at war; since he cannot have peace with one without being at war with the other. Thus he is always divided and in opposition to himself.”438 That would be tantamount to a ‘house divided against itself’, which has been the malaise of mankind for several centuries, if not millenniums. Tibetan Lama

 

 

 

433 G. de Purucker. The Buddhas of Compassion and the Pratyeka Buddhas. Extracts from Golden Precepts. Eclectic Theosophist. No.56. Accessed at: http://theosophy.katinkahesselink.net/purucker/buddha- compassion.html

434 Dave De Luca (ed.). Pathways to Joy: The Master Vivekananda on the Four Yoga Paths to God. 2003. Inner Occan Publishing. Makawao, Hawaii, USA. p.135.

435  Vedanta Kesari. Ramakrishna Math. Hyderabad, India. September 2004. p.9.

436  Vedanta Kesari. Ramakrishna Math. Hyderabad, India. September 2004. p.8.

437 Cited in: The Divine Lotus Flower, Kein Java, Manarayana Upanishad XII-16, Accessed at: http://www.harekrsna.de/Lotus-FLower.htm

438 Cited in: The Eternal Wisdom: Central Sayings of Great Sages of All Times. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications. Pondicherry, India. p.427.

 

Sogyal Rinpoche said, “We are so addicted to looking outside ourselves that we have lost access to our inner being almost completely. We are terrified to look inward, because our culture has given us no idea of what we will find. We may even think that if we do, we will be in danger of madness. This is one of the last and most resourceful ploys of ego to prevent us from discovering our real nature.”439 Intelligence and intuition have to act in unison. If intelligence is our reasoning faculty, intuition is ‘taught from within,’ a spontaneous perception, an impulsive knowledge that is outside the realm of reasoning. Intelligence we cultivate and acquire; intuition, already germinated, has to be incubated.

‘Be a master of mind rather than mastered by mind’ says a Zen maxim. The fact, however, is that the mind’s hold over the body is total and lethal. What we call ‘human civilization,’ ‘scientific temper’ and ‘progress’ are all built on the foundation of intellectual excellence, a product of the mind. How does an ordinary human being, battling with his body, mind and the senses, drowning in the sea of samsara, the phenomenal world, cleanse and control the mind, the force that controls him? Persistent practice, non-attachment, meditation and prayer, are the remedies suggested by the scriptures, though they are clearly not sufficient in the way that they are put into effect. Prayer, it is said, is how we speak to God and meditation is when God speaks to us. Prayer and its power have not changed; it is the one who prays who has changed; it is what we want from God that has changed. We have put prayer outside the realm of our overall behavior; even from our sense of morality, right and wrong. Prayer has become a petition, instead of a conversation with or contemplation of the divine; meditation is identified with mental concentration instead of, in the Buddha’s words, a means for witnessing or watching one’s own mind; and non-attachment to the fruits of our efforts. We pride ourselves on our capacity for logic, reason, and rationality. We worship intellect, intelligence, and intellectuals, and view intellectualization as strength, and scoff and snigger at feelings, emotions, and tenderness, and consider them weaknesses.

Intelligence has become the sole measure of human worth, and intelligence quotient (IQ), the primary passport to social esteem. It is intelligence that is common to experts, scientists, specialists, scholars, and pundits of all hues and persuasions. Without ‘intelligence’ we cannot live. We need to move away from the monopoly of brain/mind germinated intelligence and towards a blend of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual intelligence.

 

Mastering the mind and harnessing the heart

A radical change in the context and content of the human condition could be attempted through two routes. One way could be to stay the course, try to cleanse, control and calm the mind, and try to go on to a higher but still mental consciousness. The other path could be to continue to cleanse and control the mind, but develop another source of internal energy as a means to neutralize the negativity of the mind and to change the energy balance in human consciousness. In either case, the question that arises is whether an individual man alone or a group of like-minded men could reach those levels, or must it or does it have to be be a species-spread process? Adopting the first route, some men could become extraordinary beings with exceptional mental and spiritual abilities, while the rest will be what they are pretty much now. Even if it were not to be a species-scale consortium that embraces the spectrum of humanity, which clearly is impossible, we would certainly need a ‘critical mass’ of kindred souls for a species-wide lift-off. A single man does make a difference — no selfless effort is in vain — but for a whole species to reach a higher plateau of evolution, a

 

 

 

439 Cited in: Power of Your Thoughts/Mind. SortLifeOut.co.uk. Discover Your True Purpose. Accessed at: http://www.meaningoflife.i12.com/Mind.htm

 

broader base is required. We need a global community of men and women who see themselves as citizens of the world, who care about what happens to people beyond their immediate families, and who weigh their actions keeping in mind the quality of life of generations to come and above all, who are in a state of harmony within their selves.

Many great souls have tirelessly told us that it is the absence of harmony and equilibrium in our lives as well as inside us that makes us so brittle and ambivalent. The Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said that he who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe. What prevents inner harmony is the ego, which really is the ‘sense of separateness’ that often tends to become a ‘sense of superiority’. Everyone has an ego as part of the instinct of self-preservation, the aham, but it should not lead to ahamkara (arrogance) and agraha (anger). The three ‘A’s combined — aham, ahamkara, and agraha, or oversized ego, arrogance, and uncontrolled anger — become a toxic triad, a menacing mélange, and make the mindset intolerant, vain, prone to praise and flattery and self-righteousness. The ego blinds us to our faults and magnifies the faults of others; it makes the person incapable of even a passing thought that he or she could be wrong on any matter. In western psychotherapy, the ego is part of a triumvirate, the mediator between the other two parts, ‘id’, the primitive power of the senses and the ‘super-ego’, the moral conscience. In Vedantic philosophy, ego is compared to a stick that seems to divide the water into two, which makes you feel that you are one and I am another. And that when the ego disappears, one realizes Brahman as one’s own inner consciousness. All scriptures are unanimous that the human ego is the chief impediment to human enlightenment and they prescribe ways to overcome it. Scriptures like the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita identify the ego as the chief obstacle to Self-realization. And the ego not only enslaves us to the mind but also cuts us off from the heart. The poet Khalil Gibran says, “The world that moves with you is your heart, which is the world itself.”440 The formidable power of science and psychology are directed towards enhancing the efficiency of the mind. As if we are not quarrelsome enough, learned professors even teach us how to hone our argumentative skills! The byline is ‘Never mind the truth, be smart! Be competitive, be aggressive! Winning is all that matters, be a killjoy! If you are not happy or prosperous, see to it that others too are not.’ The Buddhist Dhammapada exhorts man to make haste in doing good and to check our mind from evil. The paradox is that to check the mind we need the mind, and mind cannot at once be the problem and the solution, and mind control, even if it is the remedy, is not within the reach of ordinary folks. The path of the mind is the one that man followed in recorded history. And we know the outcome; we see the outcome; we are the outcome. The world is mind’s handiwork; the jarring voices of suffering are its music; the evil that is strident and triumphant is its legacy.

Some spiritual thinkers like Swami Vivekananda were of the view that just like an animal, man with the help of instinct matured into a rational man. And by the process of conscious effort, rational man also can mature into an intuitive, super-rational man. There is tremendous spiritual energy in every person but it is latent, often stifled. It is the outpouring and unleashing of this energy that gave mankind a Buddha, a Christ, a Muhammad and a Ramakrishna. As Napoleon, of all persons, remarked on his death bed in St. Helena, the power of the spirit is mightier than the power of the sword. It is once again the same spiritual energy that can show the