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

Only in the human condition does a single person, or at most a handful, can make a difference between clinging to life and embracing death. The Bible gives a good deal of attention to the reality of suffering. It does not regard it as an illusion as some religions and sects do, nor deal with it superficially. One of its larger books, the Book of Job, is given solely to this question. In orthodox Christianity, there is no salvation sans suffering. While all religions deal with suffering, it is the Hindu and Buddhist karma theory that, on the face of it, appears to be the most plausible explanation for all that seems so incomprehensible, unfair, and unjust in life. It is also the one that ‘explains’ why our fates and fortunes fluctuate so widely. In the karmic perspective, it is through suffering that one transforms oneself — the more intense the suffering, the faster the transformation, a kind of fast-track penance or payback for previous papas or sins. In the Mahabharata (Anushasana Parva), it is said that as light and shadow are related to each other, so are men related to karma through their own actions. And every action could be a springboard for suffering. Maybe, it is because of that

40 Kali Yuga. The Mahabharata. Vana Parva, Section CLXXXIX. Translated by Sri Kisari Mohan Ganguli. Accessed at: http://www.hinduism.co.za/kaliyuga.htm

41 Cited in: Joyce Carol Oates. The Treasure of Comanche County. The New York Review of Books, USA. 20 October 2005.

that we seem to be almost unconsciously, or at a deeper level of consciousness, in search of suffering and are afraid to ‘sacrifice’ suffering. But that does not allow us to let off God from our troubles, frustrations, and failures of life.

Invoking divine ‘callousness’ as the cause, some revolutionary ‘thinkers’ like Neale Donald Walsch assert that “the God in whom you believe isn’t real. The God in whom you believe is made up. It is a God you created out of thin air, having nothing to do with Ultimate Reality” and that, in any case God was, “never able to create a just society or a joyful harmonious civilization, to say nothing of a peaceful world.”42 If God were to do all that, what is man supposed to do — exploit and kill, and find fault with God for not stopping us from doing that! According to this line of logic, God is not only the Creator but also a ‘Capricious Director’ of the world and we are all hopeless puppets dancing to his whimsical tunes. The basic premise that prompted the doctrine of the ineffectiveness or indifference of God is reflected in the comment of Arthur Koestler, the author of works like Darkness at Noon (1840): “God seems to have let the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.”43 Or maybe He is calling, and man has left the receiver off the hook, or maybe the phone is ringing but the strident sounds, the maddening echoes of our civilization do not let us hear Him! In any case, how can we be sure that a ‘New God’ will fare any better? In fact, what we must worry about is not ‘tomorrow’s God’ but about ‘tomorrow’s man’ and what that means to the world.

Narcissism and nihilism

If ‘today’s man’ is a harbinger, if he is a sign of things to come, then the world will become a more perilous place. Modern or post-modern man is constantly drawn towards two conflicting determinants, two extreme responses to reality: he is in love with himself; and he is compulsively self-destructive. We love and loath ourselves at the same time; suffused with both self-absorption and low self-esteem. Our narcissist personality is so precariously poised that we cannot tolerate even a hint of criticism and disagreement. Most narcissists are paranoid and view themselves as ‘victims’. Narcissism, someone said, is ‘conspicuous nihilism’. If man continues along the same behavioral path, tomorrow’s man will be a more paradoxical and perilous being, putting both the species and the earth at greater risk.

Although we can feel the tremors in our bones and watch the birds flying in haste and beasts running in panic sensing mortal danger, we ignore the ominous signs of where man seems headed. We choose to turn the Nelson’s Eye and pretend not to see the darkening clouds of what man has wrought on earth, what he has done to his own innate integrity. Like Janus, the Roman God of gates and doorways, we present two faces, one to look at ourselves and the other for the ‘others’, one face that shows our noble profile, and the other our meanness and cruelty. We seem to have lost our moorings and are not quite sure if life is inherently amoral and absurd and not worth all this bluster and bother.

The very instinct for ‘survival’, supposedly hardwired into all living beings, that is supposed to predispose us to fear death and abhor annihilation, the primary force behind evolutionary adaptation and conditioning, is no longer so sacrosanct or sharp. We still retain the cave man’s survival reflexes, but it is not an absolute; other things, sometimes seemingly trivial and trite, can now override that instinct. As a result, man has become narcissistic and

42 Neale D. Walsch. Tomorrow’s God: Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge. 2004. Hodder Mobius. London, UK. pp.3-4.

43 Arthur Koestler. Accessed at: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Arthur_Koestler

nihilistic, at once self-absorbed and self-destructive, a toxic brew that scalds everything it touches. In the garb of faith and passion, religion and revenge, life and death have become seamless; one can no longer easily identify which is the dominant passion at any given time and situation. We long for peace of mind but our lives are broken into a plurality of pieces; we dream of becoming better but we are bitter at our deepest core. We have, amongst us, many pious people who fervently believe that the shortest route to Paradise is through a bomb blast, no matter who happens to be its victim, even one’s own mother. Wrath and revenge dominate the human mind. An ancient proverb, sometimes attributed to the Roman philosopher Euripides, says that those whom the gods want to destroy, they first make mad.

That state comes ominously close to the current state of the human mind. ‘Madness’ comes uppermost to the mind when one looks at the contemporary scene.

If all this angst is the view through an earthly microscope, how would the vision be through a telescope from the skies? The first thing that any ET (extraterrestrial) out there will notice is our chronic or congenital inability, at some tangible level of our self-awareness, to recognize that we share a common fate on a crowded planet that is losing its life-supporting potential, consequent to human behavior. Indeed researchers like John Mack, the Pulitzer Prize winning author who investigated alien encounters and human abductions, say that the principal reason why aliens visit earth is to warn us that our cavalier tree-cutting, water- polluting, trash-dumping habits will have dire consequences if we do not change our ways.44 But we behave as if we are under some kind of a spell and refuse to hear or heed such warnings. The world’s fundamental misfortune, according to Soren Kierkegaard “is the fact that with each great discovery... the human race is enveloped... in a miasma of thoughts, emotions, moods, even conclusions and intentions, which are nobody’s, which belong to none and yet to all.”45

We proclaim ourselves as ‘rational’ beings, capable of reasoned analysis and thinking through, but we behave in the most irrational and irresponsible way, even when it comes to issues pertaining to life and death. We have not learnt how to make ‘rational decisions’ that involve extreme risks, how to reach a ‘common good’ based on ‘shared sacrifice’. Every act

— even an impulse — is tantamount to making a decision, an outcome of mental processes leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Which means that for us to make any radical shift in the way we make choices and decisions, we must alter the dynamic and direction of our ‘rational capacity’, the principal faculty with which we navigate through life. We have to change what we consider as the desirable outcome of any event, situation or crisis. ‘Rational’ man may be, but that has not helped him to make sense of his own life. In the Hindu scripture Janaka Gita, this practical point is rammed home through rhetorical questions: ‘In whatever objects faith was placed and the heart was set with love, all those have perished even while being seen. What then is good here on earth?’ and ‘In childhood, one is under the sway of ignorance. In youth, he is overpowered by women. The rest of his life is absorbed by worries of the family. What can this fool do at any time?’46 Not

44 Cited in: Editorial Reviews. Publishers Weekly. John E. Mack. Passport to the Cosmos: Human Transformation and Alien Encounters. 1999. Accessed at: http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Cosmos- Human-Transformation-Encounters/dp/0517705680

45 Cited in: Brian T. Prosser and Andrew Ward. University of Aberdeen. 2007. Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age. Accessed at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/philosophy/endsandmeans/vol5no2/prosser_ward.shtml

46 Swami Sivananda. Sarva Gita Sara. 1999. The Divine Life Society Publications. P.O. Shivanandanagar, Himalayas, Uttar Pradesh, India. p.108.

much or nothing, in so far as his life is concerned. But in relation to life in general, man counts a great deal. But the root of the matter is, as Alexis Carrel puts it, “Most of the questions put to themselves by those who study human beings remain without answer. Immense regions of our inner world are still unknown.”47

Vedanta says that the external world — the universe, the stars, the galaxies as well as our physical body — is mortal, and the inner world is immortal. The journey towards immortality has to be within; it is not to become a cyborg, with nanobots replacing internal organs, as scientists predict will be the wave or ‘way’ of the future, but to become primarily a spiritual being. When the shackled programmed consciousness finally opens up to the infinity of the mystery that has been hushed up until then, ‘a person often finds himself drowning in limitless implausibility’, to borrow the words of Jack Haas (The Way of Wonder: A Return to the Mystery of Ourselves, 2002). For, when the consciousness is finally distanced from all its previous assumptions, associations, ideas, and beliefs, it suddenly stands upon the brink of the chilling chasm. It is at this edge that some sink, some swim, some fall to perdition, and some learn to fly, not to the skies, but within. Barred from access to the universe within, most men meander aimlessly till death delivers deliverance.

The way forward — the way inward

‘The way inward’ — that is the greatest mystery, the tantalizing secret. Why is the meaning of our being so hidden? What divine purpose does it serve to keep us away from our own core? Why are we hypnotized into thinking that we are what we are not? We are supposed to be the only creatures who can imagine, but that has not helped us much in imaging who we are and what is the life-force that propels us. Some say that man is yet to be; as of now a possibility, a potentiality. Some others say that man is a relic, that he is living a posthumous existence. He daily discovers new planets like the earth, new galaxies and nascent stars, but cannot cross the frontier of his own skin. In a spiritual sense, both — the external and internal

— are replicas of each other but we are somehow blinded in our vision of the inner world. The outer world is the phenomenal world,