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

The philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote, “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason.”451 Khalil Gibran wrote “the world that walks with you is your heart, and the heart is all that you think the world.” Jalal ad-Din Rumi, the thirteenth century Sufi saint said that

448 Cited in: Flux64. Three Minds Into One. Adapted from ‘Cosmic Healing I’ by Matt Gluck. Accessed at: http://flux64.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html

449 Cited in: Message of Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda College (autonomous). Mylapore, Chennai, India. Accessed at: http://rkmvc.ac.in/mission/ramakrishna.html

450 Pravrajika Vrajaprana. Living Wisdom. 1995. Ramakrishna Math. p.215.

451 Cited in: Quotations by Blaise Pascal [Pensées 1670]. Accessed at: http://www-history.mcs.st- andrews.ac.uk/Quotations/Pascal.html

“the light that shines in the eye is really the light of the heart, and the light that fills the heart is the light of God, which is pure and separate from the light of intellect and senses.”452 Gandhi said that morality is rooted in the purity of one’s heart, and that moral goodness comes from the primacy of the heart in human consciousness. Prophet Muhammad was often referred to as an ‘unlettered prophet’ which, Rumi clarified, was not because he was unable to write or learn, but because his knowledge and wisdom were innate, not acquired. That innateness was the intuition of the heart, not intelligence of the mind. No truly great problem was ever solved solely through the rational approach. Nor any great work got done purely through diligent deductive application. The intellectual commodity might be the most overrated article in the efforts of man to find his true utterance. Most great men, at great moments when they had to take momentous decisions, turned to their intuition rather than to intellect to guide them towards the right thing. Wolfgang Mozart, whose musical genius was unquestioned, said: “Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination, nor both together, go to the making of a genius. Love, love, that is the soul of genius.”453 That love comes from the heart. Helen Keller, although blind was still able to say that “the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” And Kahlil Gibran wrote that beauty is not in the face; it is a ‘light in the heart’. Shakespeare summed it up “Go to your bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know”.

The genius of Mozart or Rembrandt, or the spiritual virtuosity of St. Francis or Ramakrishna was not intellectual; it was inspiration, intuition, and divine grace. It is not the intellectual strength that propels a prophet or unites a bhakta (a devotee) with God or, for that matter, brings solace to so many troubled souls. The Buddha’s reaction to seeing an emaciated old man or a corpse was not mental; if it was, he would have at once turned back the chariot to the palace and to the soft bosom of his lovely wife. Jesus’ anguished prayer on the cross ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do,’ was not a cry of reason or of desperation; had it been so he would have asked God to exterminate his tormentors. It was not knowledge or learning that enabled great men to alter the course of human history for the better. It was their spiritual energy arising from their hearts. The ‘inner voice’ of Gandhi and the ‘voice within’ of Tolstoy, the ‘voices’ that Joan of Arc heard, all came from deep within their hearts. When asked who he was, the Buddha replied, ‘I am the Awakened One’. That awakened state and the Buddha’s infinite compassion were of the heart, not born of his reasoning capacity. If the Buddha turned to his mind for answers to what he saw — old age, debility, disease, and death — he would have been deluged with explanations and he would have remained happily married to Yasodhara and become a ‘king of kings’. And humanity would have lost by far one of its greatest creations. Of course, it is another matter that men made the Buddha a ‘God’, and after paying ritual obeisance violated every one of his teachings. For that matter, that is true also of Jesus, Muhammad, and every other religious or spiritual source. In the human mind, belief and behavior are disconnected. What man needs is a blend of the robust reasoning and calculation of the mind, and the love and emotions of the heart; he needs a mind in a state of ‘awareness’ and a heart that is in the throes of ‘tenderness.’ Osho said that “heart has no logic, but sensitivity, and perceptivity”. He also said that the “truth is not known by the mind; truth is felt by the heart; by your totality, by you, not by your mind; by you as an organic entity.”454 Man must rein in the mind and

452 Cited in: Rumi’s Mathnawi. Daylight. Accessed at: http://chippit.tripod.com/daylight.html

453 The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 12 September 2004. p.15.

454 Cited in: Mind is Creation of Society; Heart Has No Logic. The Deccan Chronicle. Hyderabad, India. 22 June 2008. p.II.

rekindle the inner heart as a source of energy, memory, and spirituality. The mind must be trained to listen to the heart, and the heart has to be tempered by the discriminative ability of the mind.

The human species must learn how to listen to the spiritual, but still, voice of the heart. To save the human race from the fury of Nature or the folly of man, or the wrath of God, we must quicken and energize the heart and temper the mind. It is only then, as the American Indian Chief Seattle reminds us, that man can hear “the rustle of an insect’s wings” and “the soft sound of the wind darting over the face of the pond.”455 It is by the restoration of a reverential relationship with Nature that we can halt the coarsening of the human spirit. We feel right, but think and do wrong, on so many issues. Feeling is of the heart, thinking is of the mind, and action is of the body. Too often do we comfort ourselves by saying, ‘but I couldn’t help it.’ It is because the voice of feeling is drowned in the noise of the thought. By energizing the heart we can enhance the influence of emotions and feelings in molding the human personality. Morality and ethics, piety and prayer, that do not translate into character and behavior, into the nuts and bolts of daily life, are shallow self-deceptions. Whether or not prayer is a direct dialogue with God, it cannot be a free pass to ride roughshod over other human beings. What ought to be a matter of concern for the future of mankind is that more and more people are able to separate what we might call their ‘sacred’ side from their ‘operational’ side.

That ‘separation’ is wider when we are part of a ‘mob’, with the anonymity that group participation affords. Something happens to the human psyche when it finds itself unknown and unrecognized by fellow humans, and the darkest of desires, unknown even to one’s own ‘conscious consciousness’, erupt like lava from a suddenly active volcano. And it then manifests in man’s rawest persona. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the antagonist and interrogator O’Brien chillingly tells the protagonist and the victim-cum-hero Winston Smith that, “by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now... The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” The instrument for that end is mind control. External mind control is bad but easy; internal control is good but difficult.

But in human society, implicit obedience to another human being can be destructive because no one is worthy of that kind of surrender. And yet, that is what the human mind wants and is naturally inclined towards power, control, obedience; but once it clashes with a stringer or a more powerful mind, and when it knows that resistance entails a higher cost, it meekly capitulates. The mind then makes the bully a coward, who is asked to bend and crawl. So few, if any, know how to wield power wisely and be able, as God does, to put the interest of the surrendered above his own interest. Aldous Huxley visualized such a society and wrote: “And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing... a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”456 Another ‘vision’ is that of O’Brien, in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, who tells

455 Cited in: Speech Commonly Attributed To Chief Seattle. Accessed at: http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/seattle2.html

456 Cited in: The International Endowment for Democracy. Democracy Quotes. Accessed at: http://www.iefd.org/articles/democracy_quotes.php

Winston, while torturing him, that his crime was not to “make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.”457 Once one makes the absolute surrender, it hardly matters what one gets called, sane or insane. Is there anything in us that is proximate to that possibility?

And is there anything in our construct that can help us to go on the path of the heart?

In his book The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes (2004), American geneticist Dean Hamer says that human spirituality has an innate genetic component to it, and claims to have discovered precisely such a gene (VMAT2) which is capable of what he calls self-transcendence. Recent research on how to harness heart energy and intelligence might be able to help alter the dynamics and balance of human consciousness. If there could be a gene for selfishness, why should not there be a ‘spiritual gene’? After all, everything in Nature is dual or dwanda as it is called in Sanskrit! Can genes play a significant role in faith and spirituality? Pioneering research is also being undertaken in fields like linking “the weirdness of the quantum world to mysteries of the macro world (such as consciousness) and on quantum consciousness.”458

While science tries to probe into the mysteries of the mind to further the human cause, spirituality harks back to harnessing the primordial power of the heart to better the human condition. Phrases such as ‘another heart’, ‘heart of heart’, ‘heart in heart’, ‘inner heart’, ‘right heart’, ‘spiritual heart’, and ‘holistic heart’ are used to describe this phenomenon. All these seek to convey the same message: that there is far, far more to the heart than its ceaseless beat and exquisite rhythm and awesome pumping power, and that for the good of man we must learn to tap the boundless spirituality and love inherent but dormant in the human heart. It is through this heart, the ‘inner sanctum’ as the sage Ramakrishna used to call it, that man can reach a higher state of consciousness and make himself a more harmonious being. The Indian mystic Meher Baba said that “the heart, which in its own way feels the unity of life, finds fulfillment in love, sacrifice and service.”459 The route to human transformation is through the heart. But it does not mean abandoning the mind or exorcising the brain and turning our back on logic, reason or research. Meher Baba further says that “The mind ought to work in tandem with the heart, subordinating factual