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

even holy, cleansing and even necessary for a moral world, a dharma yudh, as it is called in Hinduism, and jihad in Islam. From time immemorial, from the Neolithic Age to the Modern Age, man has dreamed of peace, peace within and peace without; peace for the self and peace in the world. “War is peace” was one of the slogans on the façade of the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue) in George Orwell’s dystopian book Nineteen Eighty-Four. A quarter-century after Orwell’s imagined future has passed, the phrase sums up the state of the world and the mind of man in a number of ways. One does not really know which is the lesser or the greater evil: the charade of perpetual pseudo-peace, or the formal state of war. Every individual craves for ‘peace of mind’. As long as man has been a conscious being, the battle cry for peace has been the constant refrain. Increasingly, that agonizing ‘cry’, that longing, is leading to suicide.

Many mantras in the Vedas end with a prayer for universal peace, rendered by the chant Om shanti, shanti, shanti. Some scholars say that the very word ‘Islam’ means peace. The often- used expression ‘salaam’ is ‘peace be upon you’. Yet, we are living in a world that enjoys little, if any, peace. Everything human is soaked in violence; it has crept into every crevice of our consciousness. It has become virtually impossible to live without violence. Everyone is scarred by it, either as the perpetrator or as the victim, mostly a mix of both. Our heroes, our mythology, our epics, even many of our gods are examples of nonviolence and peace. Hatred, hostility, violence, and wars have become the dominant forces in shaping human history. As Huxley said in his essay Ends and Means, every road towards a better state of society is blocked, sooner or later — by war, by threats of war, by preparations for war. Opinions vary on the question whether war-making is purely a human passion, or if it has a solid base in Nature. One can argue from both ends, and it depends on what ‘war’ is in non-human terms. But one thing is incontrovertible: that man is unique, as Huxley says, in ‘organizing the mass murder of his own species’, particularly of its young and strong. And as pleasure-seeking creatures, we must admit that there is pleasure in destructiveness. Why do humans, of many affiliations, want or think that they are better off with war? This too has been much debated, and the causes and drives vary from giving a purpose to life, to enjoying the goodies from the lawlessness of war, to being an escape from boredom, the bitter fruit of nationalism, the interests of the military-industrial complex, political ambition of the ‘new class’, religious righteousness, etc. In Huxley’s opinion, the only way to eliminate war is to abolish the arms industry. But these are all symptoms; the root of the trouble is the mind, and its offspring, human culture.

Not only men but even the gods have used violence to achieve the ‘good’ end. Down the ages, all rakshasas (demons) have been destroyed by the gods through violence, not through inducing repentance or submission or conversion. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna proclaims that God will come down to earth from time to time to ‘destroy’ evil-doers and to protect the righteous. That is because killing in that context is liberation. Like death being considered as the end of life, killing as a ‘bad’ action is also a human cultural attribute. There is a double standard we adopt about killing. We are trained to think that any death other than by disease or debilitation is ‘killing’, and that any human intervention in the ‘process’ of death is sinful and unethical. Yet, we do try desperately to ward death off, for example, when someone dear to us is in a critical medical condition, and we plead with the doctors to prolong the patient’s life at any cost and by any means; but, since doctors too are human, this is tantamount to human intercession. In this line of thought, the right to bring to a closure the agony and ecstasy of life is not of the ‘owner’ of that life, but of the disease and the divine

 

will. That ‘right’ is given by Nature to the bacteria, virus, fungus, or parasite, or to an out-of- control automobile, but not to the one who suffers the consequence. The logic is that, we have no hand in where and how and when we are born, and death should be regarded in similar terms. But we do not adopt the same logic in between; we do not wish to let Nature have much to do with how we live. It is relative peace, not perfect bliss, that man craves for, even if he himself is violent within. The real problem is three-fold: As the Buddha said, while peace comes from within, we seek it without. Instead of learning to cope with conflict, we try to eliminate it altogether. We methodically, and even painstakingly, create a culture of violence, and hope and expect that we — in particular, our young — remain untarnished.

As a result, every aspect of human life: personal, social, economic, political and religious, is marked by anger, acrimony, aggression, coercion, callousness and cruelty in thought, word, and deed. It manifests both in interpersonal interactions, and in international affairs — and in our attitude towards Nature. Whether it is climate change or a shattered marriage, the source is the same. The theater of terror is the mind. We cannot solve any problem unless we are able to tame, contain, and channel the rage within. The trouble comes when we try to exorcize it from the face of the earth, as if it is some kind of extraterrestrial force. On the contrary, it might well be only an earthly phenomenon. And like inequality, it would be futile to aim at the opposite, that of absolute nonviolence, perfect peace and a human world devoid of aggression. That would be a wasted effort, and can again do more harm than good. It does not mean that we should condone, encourage or abet the killers and rapists, and follow the adage ‘if we cannot stop it, join the party’. Even if it is ‘natural’ and ‘rational’, it is not inevitable or universal; we can, as human beings, have the innate ability to go beyond biology and even Nature. What we need to do is to shift our focus from conflict elimination to conflict management or resolution, and transform our instinct for aggression into a force to fight for equity and justice. Nowadays, most adversarial groups seem incapable of negotiating peaceful consensus solutions to problems, especially with those that are perceived as even more stubbornly doctrinal than they really are. And we have to look at the scenario from a broader perspective of the species, not of aberrant individuals afflicted with a variety of psychological syndromes, or of even deviant ethnic and religious zealotry. For violence is not, as we instinctively assume, only murder or bodily injury; it can be ‘body language; it could be gross insensitivity to the feelings of others.’ We condemn violence as if it is some kind of an alien implant. On the other hand, it is innate and built into the very fabric of Nature. Violence also depends on the cause and the purpose behind it. What is the goal? What is the choice? What is the cost of nonviolence? These are some of the questions that need to be addressed. And then, there is what is called ‘structural violence’, which arises when essential social resources are unfairly distributed, forcing some to lead subhuman lives, in conditions of extreme poverty and disentitlement. Violence has always been the weapon of the oppressor or the conqueror, a means to impose will, and inflict physical or mental injury on another person. It resides in every individual like a volcano, dormant for much of life.

Why, when, and how the lava surfaces in some (and not in others) remains unclear. But violence is now the preferred choice of the oppressed and the disadvantaged too; they feel that it is the only way their voice can be heard, the only way to assert their rights and to get their due. Often, we refrain from violence only when we fear the greater violence of the ‘other’ party.

Although the contemporary human being might appear to be the most violent, the ancestry of human violence goes far back into antiquity. Alongside evolution, man has turned from a prey to a predator, the hunted to a hunter. What he had tried to fight, he has now become. With time, this transformation has only become more pervasive and lethal than ever before, because the tools available to man have become far more deadly. Today, no place or dimension of life is sacrosanct, be it a school or a street, home or workplace, dormitory or a

 

dungeon, sexual or social, urban or rural. Violence is deemed as the short-cut to success, to be ‘rich and famous’; no quarrel is too trivial, no cause too lofty. The scriptures are ambivalent about it: while they expressly sanction righteous violence, they leave key questions unanswered — who judges and determines which violence is righteous and which is not? As a result, religion and revenge are merging; one’s own life is offered as a wager, as a worthy price for someone else’s. The maxim that everything is fair in love and war is truer than ever before. And the common thread is violence, to ‘violate’ the dignity, integrity and self-respect of an individual or a country. In love, it is merely ‘if I can’t have you, no one else should’; in war, it is distilled violence. In love, it is the fear of loss of control, and in war, it is absolute control and conquest. While violence is integral to Nature and all species exhibit it in varying ways, human violence is clearly more vicious because it is often laced with loads of malice. And while physical violence is transparent and ugly, the wounding words of verbal violence leave more lasting scars and terribly wrenched souls. While gruesome killings get bigger headlines, it is the subtler and more insidious and incestuous forms of killing that tarnish every life. The wellspring of violence has been the subject of long-standing reflection

— does violence have its root in biology or ecology? is it genetic or environmental? what combination of factors lead to aggressive behavior? The British historian Arnold Toynbee wrote: “There is a persistent vein of violence and cruelty in human nature. All human beings are responsible for man’s inhumanity to man and we all need forgiveness because we know

that we are sinning against the light.”255 Some say the villain is the male hormone testosterone, which is present even in women; others say that violence happens simply on the spur of the moment. There are some evolutionary psychologists like Randy Thornhill (A Natural History of Rape, 2000), who say that some of the things we abhor most, such as rape, might actually be adaptations from the Stone Age and which are now encoded in our genes. In other words, there could be a ‘rape gene’ lurking in some dark corner of the consciousness of many men!

Although many scientists disagree on the roots of rape, the fact is that sexual violence now occupies a huge chunk of human violence, and it seems to reveal both an act of violence and an act of lust. Most human relationships have a streak of subtle violence, and this is responsible in no small measure to the coarsening of human life. Our darkest side often erupts in close relationships. It is a clash of egos, each trying to fulfill a desire at the expense of the other, each trying to take more from the other and give, if any, far less. There is probably no such