Man's Fate and God's Choice by Bhimeswara Challa (feel good fiction books .txt) 📕

Transform or turn terminal — that is the defining human choice of this century. But in one sense, it is not a ‘choice’ at all; because, that which is constant and continuous is not something we can choose. The question really is about its direction. Transformation or ‘transcendence’, as some like to call it, has been at once the clarion call of the mystics and the mavericks, the ‘New Age’ buzzword, the meeting point of the sacred and the secular, a heady mix of myth and the mundane, the boundary between the absolute and the absurd. Many have spoken about human transformation in myriad ways: as a conversion, as a discovery of the sacred, as rebirth, regeneration, and so on. One of the innumerable claims we make of our uniqueness is that the humans alone are capable of self-transcendence and conscious evolution.We cannot be transformed into something we are not innately, or something that  we do not have within. In essence, it is to actualize a latent potentiality through an internal process emerging from the deepest depths of the psyche. In fact, even alchemy, which was practiced by scientists like Newton, was not, as noted by Carl Jung, merely a conversion of base metals into gold, but was far deeper; it was the mixing of chemicals using a symbolic form of reasoning to discern the ultimate truth. But transformation, above all of consciousness, externally or internally induced, is not an end by itself, only a means to better the human condition and conduct. That means, it has to be progressive, not regressive.

Progressive transformation implies that which leads from darkness to light, from fragmentation to wholeness, from separateness to oneness, and above all from a mind-driven to a heart-centered consciousness. It is also to change our perspective of our presence in the cosmos. It is to realize that we live, in the words of astronaut Edgar Mitchell, in a “little civilization on this planet, in this little solar system, in this rather average galaxy, which is only one of billions of galaxies”502. What we want is transformation on our own terms, to selectively take everything without giving up anything that needs to be relinquished. Yet the paradox is that transformation, or generically ceaseless change, takes place all the time in life and in Nature. Every subatomic particle interaction comprises of the annihilation of the original particle and the creation of new subatomic particles, a continual dance of transformation, of mass changing into energy and energy into mass. Indeed, creation is transformation, evolution is transformation, a fetus becoming a baby is transformation, the process of dying is transformation, art is transformation, music is transformation, and an idea is transformation. In today’s ‘visual’ and ‘virtual’ world, the effect of television is transformation, the Internet is transformation, the transition from ape to man was transformation, and now, man into ‘something’ else will be transformation. What that ‘something’ is, will be the question and challenge for us to explore.

502 Cited in: Russell DiCarlo. Explorations in Consciousness. [Interview with Edgar Mitchell. Excerpted from ‘Towards a New World View: Conversations at the Leading Edge’ by Russell DiCarlo. 1996. Epic Publishing. USA]. Accessed at: http://www.healthy.net/scr/interview.asp?Id=208

Although we call it change, not transformation, we all want to change many things in our lives: job, partner, fortune, house, gadget, etc. We want continuity in some and change in others with a view to bettering our lives. Furthermore, powered by science, the human condition is dramatically transforming more than ever before in human history, making man almost a new species. As if this is not unsettling enough, recent reports proclaim that scientists have created artificial life in the laboratory, avowedly opening the door to making and manipulating ‘life’, a development that could possibly prove, according to The Economist magazine “mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb”503, calling into question much of the very basis of creation. That is, in a very real sense, transformation of the highest, if not the deepest, order. What is more transformative than creating life? By any rationale we should be relieved, elated, and excited. But whether it is that or making man ‘immortal’, which science says will soon become a real possibility, we are far from happy; so few are in a celebratory mood. So, why are we so apprehensive of our future when we have it so good? Why are we so fearful of our own power, so concerned about our creativity? Everyone is for transformation so long as someone else pays the price and goes through the grind. No one wants to be transformed except on one’s own terms. And we want reality to be more real than the world we live in, we want to be insulated from the fruits of our own failings, to be a lotus in a toxic pool poisoned by our own mind. In a world where so much consciousness is concentrated on physical phenomena, almost any effort to abstract from the phenomenal world and divert it to the spiritual world is a herculean task. How does one reconcile to this confusion and move forward? The answer is, we need to ‘transform’ transformation from the temporal to the transcendental, from the pursuit of personal growth to species-upliftment. The American writer Joseph Campbell said that when we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness, which is what mankind needs. While there is a broad consensus that mankind is poised for a major ‘transformation’, the actual ‘jump’ will imply far more than a cosmetic change, some ‘fixing’ and ‘plumbing’ or even course correction of the existing order of things. The irreducible imperative is a new perspective on reality through cathartic change, to overturn assumptions of our imagination, to purge the bowels of our basic being of bitterness and bile accumulated over millenniums of evolution and centuries of ‘civilized’ life. In short, it translates into evolution from the physical to the spiritual dimension.

If the meaningful survival of the human species hinges on that kind of transformation, how do we incubate, induce, and guide that complex process? Will it all be a wholly human affair, so to speak, all in the ‘family’ and none of the business of anyone else? As autonomous individuals with bodies and brains that cannot be shared, will it all be a matter between ‘me’, ‘my God’, and nothing in between, and the rest, in a manner of speaking, can well ‘go to hell’? If destiny, as someone wryly wrote, is a tyrant’s mandate for crime and a fool’s excuse for failure, where does human effort begin and end? Is every man, in the words of Helena Blavatsky “weaving thread by thread around himself, as a spider does his cobweb; and this destiny is guided either by the heavenly voice of the invisible prototype outside of us, or by our more intimate astral, or inner man, who is but too often the evil genius of the embodied entity called man”504. What we need to ‘overcome’, to transcend, for therapeutic

503 The Economist. Synthetic Biology: And Man Made Life. 20 May 2010.

504 H.P. Blavatsky. The Secret Doctrine: the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy. Vol. I. Cosmogenesis. Part III. Cyclic Evolution and Karma. 1978. The Theosophical Publishing House. Adyar, Chennai, India. p.639.

human transformation, is the stranglehold of the mind over our consciousness. Although visions vary and desires differ, men have always dreamt of a kind of transcendence that goes beyond the processes of life and death. As Sri Aurobindo puts it, man should strive to become more than himself. In becoming more than himself, man becomes true to himself. In becoming true to himself, he fulfils God’s premise in his creation. Everyone, at some point or the other, feels that he is not living up to his full potential, that much of his life is spent wandering in the wasteland, that all of life’s labor is directed towards simply staying alive and keeping death at bay. But simply ‘staying alive’ consumes so much energy that man has little left to know ‘what it feels to be alive’. The kind of transformation that excites modern man is that of an immortal superman, with the capacity, so to speak, to reorder the stars to fit his good fortune, to live long, if not eternally, with the vigor of youth, to eat once again the ‘fruit of the tree of knowledge’, this time not of the good and evil mentioned in the Bible, but of pleasure and power. It is grounded on the perception that life is both dualistic and linear.

Our identity and destiny, so we convinced ourselves, lay in being separately successful — from Nature, God and above all, from each other; to prevail not only at work but in every relationship, and that creates a lot of negative energy. The dreaded ‘L’ word is ‘loser’, who really is anyone who refuses to walk over another prostrate man. All this is part of our ‘culture’, the theater of life, the scene of action. True transformation of the human condition must come from within, but it will be stillborn or distorted without the transformation of the human context of life. If everything is left as it is and our yardsticks of success and social esteem, values and worth, risk and reward, remain untransformed, then the human species will have to be content with the current paradigms of transformation. Any genuine human transformation has to be holistic, aimed at our inner being that takes us to a higher level of existence. The Bible offers one such vision: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Romans 12:2). What remains hazy is the probable end product: whether we should strive towards Man plus or Man minus, or a brand new being or something even more than that. Put differently, do we aspire to become an altogether new form of life on earth, or an improved and substantially reinforced life but with our basic capacities radically altered?

While science is trying to make man a whole by himself, a creature of pure physicality, the spiritual path exhorts him to become a critical part of something larger or something altogether different from his phenomenal existence. And while science is trying to make the body impregnable and the individual the pivot of the universe, the scriptural path, although there are significant variations within, is body-dissolution and ego-annihilation, and making God central to life, seeking ‘eternal life’, which is, as the Chandogya Upanishad puts it, to be ‘lifted to the region of the deity’505 or in the words of the great Sri Adi Shankara, ‘absorption in divinity’506.

Through the scriptures, God promises to remake man if we keep faith in him. The Hebrew Scriptures refer to prophets who look forward to the future because God promises new things. “I am about to do a new thing” says God in Isaiah 43:19. The Bible closes in Revelation 21:5 with God saying, “See, I am making all things new”. The Bhagavad Gita is nothing but a treatise of transformation, a catalyst that transforms the ‘battle of life’ into a

505 R.D. Ranade. A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy. 1968. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chowpatty, Bombay, India. p.118.

506 R.D. Ranade. A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy. 1968. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Chowpatty, Bombay, India. p.118.

‘battle of truth’, a blueprint for the birth of a better man. It offers a menu of choices to help us remake our raw existence, and