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

can never walk again.”277 With ‘perfect evil walking the world’, man has lost his innocence as well as his integrity. In the process, he has crossed perhaps the most fateful of thresholds that allowed the species to survive thus far: love of life and fear of taking another life. The most virulent epidemics in the world are now almost ‘senseless’ suicides and mass murders, often fused into one. It is becoming increasingly difficult to anticipate how an apparently ‘normal’ person would react to a ‘routine reprimand’ or to a ‘trivial dispute’ or to a ‘stressful situation’; it could easily lead to one of the two or even both. Nothing is too trivial for suicide and nothing is too sacred for murder. The epithet ‘banal’ used by Hannah Arendt to describe human evil applies equally now to killing. It is increasingly becoming a serious option to calm nerves, or to settle scores, be it with a spouse or with society, the preferred choice to cope with frustrations and tragedies of life and the pressures and stresses of competitive life. And ‘collateral killing,’ a euphemism for killing innocent people, is no longer only a deadly tool of terrorism; it has now gained legitimacy as an essential instrument of State policy, avowedly to protect ‘national interest;’ the doctrine is that to ‘get’ one ‘wanted man,’ it is okay if hundreds of innocents are butchered. Man is on a killing spree, killing of fellow men, of other species, of the environment. Wanton violence, the adoption of coercive tactics to control the will, the intellect, and the limbs of another, has become almost our primary response to weather the storm of life. And it is soaked in malice, which is what distinguishes human violence from other animals. It is invasion of a person’s soul. We have come to accept many horrible things as ‘necessary evils’. And war, death on the streets brought about by motorized contraptions, subhuman poverty, discrimination, exploitation, injustice and insensitivity as the price of ‘progress’ and the wages of individualism. And the sophistication of our butchery never stops. Even if we already have enough weaponry to kill every human being on earth ten times over, we will never stop making more weapons with even more murderous power. Because, even if we do not directly handle that power, we still feel vicariously ‘powerful’, and ‘the military industrial complex,’ the famous phrase of the American president Dwight Eisenhower, provides the framework for our lives. But all this is an anthropocentric perspective, as if our choice controls every event. It is an outlandish thought but maybe, just maybe, we are, by killing each other so effortlessly, compulsively and methodically, in a twisted way, doing Nature’s work, namely containing the predatory and parasitic human way of life.

Dialectics of dharma and karma

277 Cited in: Matthew Price. Sinner Take All: Graham Greene’s Damned Redemption. BookForum. Oct/Nov 2004. Accessed at: http://www.bookforum.com/archive/Oct_04/price_oct.html

The human impulse for self-righteous self-destruction is both a symptom and a malaise. It comes primarily from our inability to codify our primary duty in a world of contrasts and contradictions, dwandas and dualities. Much of what we do is enjoined upon us by religion or society, by custom or culture, but buried deep in the human psyche is an abiding conviction that inexorable fate and evil forces, powerful and complex beyond our comprehension, pervade the human world. These forces now seem to have reached commanding heights of human life and have taken possession of all our faculties. The most horrendous things happen nonchalantly and in the name of ‘necessary evil’. And we accept them all as ‘just part of life’! Poised on a precipice, we are a flawed species languorously longing for its own early extinction, even secretly, if not sadistically, relishing that thought.

So many things seem so wrong, so many things seem so unfair, so many things seem so inexplicable, and so few real choices in actual life; it all seems so senseless and ruthlessly random. And the much-touted free will and freedom seem illusory. We grope for answers and just when we think there are plausible possibilities we suddenly realize that even more intractable questions are raising their head. Then we ask ourselves: what good is knowledge? Clearly what we actually see and experience in the world and in our lives we cannot accept or even condone, and yet we seem utterly ill-equipped within our own selves to redress any of the incongruities and inequities. If we completely confine the relationship between cause and effect to this world and to this life, it all seems so inept, so amateurish, so pointless and purposeless, so unintelligent and such a waste of energy. And yet we know that nothing in Nature conforms to any such adjectives. How does one reconcile to this dichotomy? Then a flash of lightning hits us. Perhaps the very premise is the real illusion. Why should life be limiting in time and space? What evidence do we have that it is so, that ‘death’ ends it all?

Can something as beautiful and self-generating as life come to a finality of complete closure? Such a line of thought directly leads us to the two of the most sophisticated theological and philosophical doctrines: of karma and dharma. As words they are ancient, but as ideas their life is even of timeless lineage. If one were to scan history from the mystical or occult point of view, one would trace the curve of cycles according to the rise and fall of the real understanding of karma and dharma. If we can truly understand their intent and essence and in particular their interplay, many questions that haunt our lives would melt away. If they are rightly interpreted and rightly applied, they can unlock many of life’s secrets; a wrong comprehension and misapplication can lead to a person falling from the heaven of Spirit into the hell of matter.

Karma as a major doctrine that offers a rationale of life and death, originated in the Vedic system of thought, later expanded in the early Upanishads and in the Bhagavad Gita. In its elemental sense, karma is the physical, mental, and supramental system of neutral rebound, a kind of cosmic causality. Essentially, what it means is that the very being which one experiences on (as a human being in our case) is “governed by an immutable

preservation of energy, vibe, and action.”278 It implies that thoughts, words, and deeds in past lives inexorably affect one’s current situation. Every individual is thus responsible for the tragedies and triumphs, bad luck and good luck, which are experienced in his current earthly life. It is vital to note that karma is not an instrument of the gods, or of a single God; it is rather the physical and spiritual ‘physics’ of being. Just as gravity “governs the motions of heavenly bodies and objects on the surface of the earth, karma governs the motions and happenings of life, both inanimate and animate, unconscious and conscious, in the cosmic

278 Karma. Haryana-Online.com. Accessed at: http://www.haryana-online.com/Culture/karma.htm

realm.”279 What is true of the individual is also true of societies. Though the words and concepts of karma and dharma are often used separately and each is a full-fledged doctrine, they make better sense if viewed in juxtaposition. Simply put, dharma is the subjective dimension of karma. The key to karma is dharma. Dharma is action, and action results in karma. By simply performing our various dharmas properly we can chip away at karma. Any dharmic activity cleanses bad karma and creates good karma. And through dharmic behavior one can get everything life has to offer, wealth and prosperity, and attain the final goal of life: not to be born again. Then we come to the ultimate dharmic question: why does anyone resort to adharmic actions? (that is, actions that are against dharma). Is it because adharma is man’s ‘natural’ disposition? Or is it because of our lack of discriminating knowledge of dharma and adharma in the melting pot of life?

It is not that we lack scriptural guidance. Dharma is not only the connecting thread of all Hindu and Buddhist religious texts. There are, in addition, specific texts, dharma-sutras in Hinduism and Dhammapada in Buddhism. Among the texts inspired by the Vedas are the dharma-sutras, or the “manuals on dharma,” which contain codes of conduct and rites as they were practiced in various Vedic schools. Their principal contents address the duties of people at different stages of life, or ashramas (student life, household life, retired life, and renounced life); dietary regulations; offenses and expiations; and the rights and duties of kings. They also discuss purification rites, funeral rituals, forms of hospitality, and daily oblations, and they even mention juridical matters. The Buddhist scripture Dhammapada consists of 423 verses in Pali uttered by the Buddha on hundreds of occasions for the benefit of a wide range of human beings. Together — dharma and karma — offer a structure of coherent thought, a practical platform for life, an explanation on why things are what they are and a way to live life fruitfully. What is true of the individual is also true of the species.

Karma is the causal context of life and after-life; and dharma is the cosmic order that underlies and underpins the universe.

The relationship and ratio between work and reward, effort and result is a much- debated question. The two are never simultaneous and that makes it impossible to ensure the outcome. The Bhagavad Gita says that without karma or action there is no life, but action and effort have to be for the right cause. Along with Nishkama karma (action without attachment to its fruits), one is also forbidden from performing three kinds of actions: Nishidha karma (prohibited actions), Kamya karma (desire-driven actions), and Abhichara karma (black magic). Since life is impossible without actions, human behavior must be circumscribed and circumspect, in accordance with a moral code of conduct, the centerpiece of which is this: do no harm to any living creature by thought, speech or deed, and dedicate all human effort to the divine. It is the sum and substance of spirituality that the Bhagavad Gita (2.47) preaches and touches the heart of human behavior. In the famous verse, “Karmanyeva adhikaraste ma phalesu kadachana”, which many believe is the best practical scriptural maxim, Lord Krishna tells Arjuna — and through him tells all of humanity — “Seek to perform your duty; but lay not claim to its fruits”. For a ‘rational’ mind it sounds unfair; why should someone else get the credit for what we have done or struggled for, and expended our effort and energy toward? Lord Krishna puts in perspective the question why so often, despite the best effort, the result is not what we desire and someone else benefits. It means that we are only given  the chance to act, but not in framing the consequence. Some other time it may work the other way around — then we do not complain or even acknowledge that another person deserved

279 Karma. Haryana-Online.com. Karma, Accessed at: http://www.haryana-online.com/Culture/karma.htm

better. Actions that are of a binding nature lose that nature when we do them with equanimity or evenness of mind through the help of pure reason. This principle, indeed, is one of the important tenets of Marxism: namely, from each according to his ability and to each according to the need. In the scriptural sense, the fruits belong to God, and in the economic sense the fruits belong to society, but in fact they are not different. And both — Marxism and the karmic message from God — have proved elusive because to put them into practice runs against the nature of