Man's Fate and God's Choice, Bhimeswara Challa [best free ereader .TXT] 📗

and the fourth, and so on; it then spreads like an infection. In that sense, desire is an imitation, an infection. It is a triangular equation — the subject, the object, and the desire to be. As René Girard noted, ‘all desire is a desire to be’. That leads to conflict and confrontation, unleashing other desires.

While we talk of a multitude of freedoms and liberations, we ignore the most basic of them all: emancipation of the mind or rather, of consciousness from the grip of the mind. We talk of change but sidestep the most fundamental of all changes: that of consciousness. The expression ‘sick and tired of life’ is far more commonplace than being ‘in love with life’, regardless of age, race, religion, gender or culture. Human ambition has long struggled to make some objective sense of the human subject, not merely the sensory or thinking subject, but the feeling, living human persona. That struggle only deepened as man fashioned a culture, a society, and a way of life distinct from his fellow animals, a self-professed distinctness that has become a moral cover for inflicting soul-stirring cruelty on animals. As Chesterton said, the more we look at man as an animal, the less he will look like one. It is so ingrained now, that life as we know it is almost unthinkable if that distinction is erased. It is a

 

reckoning that, some day, will come, for all mankind. At its deepest depth, the malaise of man stems from, in the words of the philosopher Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, 1965), our “inveterate habit of experiencing matter devoid of spirit, and consequently of conceiving spirit as less real, and finally as altogether unreal.”11 Bewildered by the ‘real of the real’ and the ‘unreal of the unreal’, that ‘habit’ has turned into a tumor of hate.

Stanford professor and author of Science and Human Transformation (1997), William Tiller wrote: “we have to recognize that there is a metastasized cancer in the body of man. If humankind is to survive, we have to deal with that metastasized cancer. We have to cut out the parts that need to be cut out, in a surgical way. We have to heal the parts that can’t be cut out.”12 We cannot harbor hatred in our hearts and expect the world to exist in rhythmic harmony. As for our nexus with Nature, to paraphrase the Scottish poet Robert Burns (To A Mouse, 1786), man’s dominion has broken Nature’s social union, severely testing Nature’s renowned resilience. We have forgotten that to be ‘controlled’, Nature must be obeyed, as pointed out by Francis Bacon, acclaimed as the ‘father of science’. The price of ‘defiant control’ can be exacting. We cannot make crooked choices and hope that baneful consequences will pass us by in innocence. We cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again and just hope that the next time things will be different.

Topping the inventory of our angst is the problem of — and with — God. Our relationship with God, by far the most important of all, and the only one that is not inherently constrictive, is dysfunctional; all the things we do in the ‘name of God’ just do not add up; if any, they negate each other; a kind of a zero-sum game. He is on everyone’s lips but in no one’s heart; His utility, a perpetual parachute; our devotion, a cry of desperation.

Globalization, it has been said, is good for the gods and there are more places of worship, for example in India, than schools or hospitals. Yet, most people feel ‘let down’ or ‘forsaken’ by God as if He is beholden and bound to us. Adding a new dimension to our search for God, science is looking for a ‘God gene’ (VMAT2) that predisposes us to believe in God, and a ‘particle’ in physics — what physicist Leon Lederman called the ‘God particle’ — which, so they tell us, transforms the intangible into the tangible and makes life possible.

While some are worried about the experiment going horribly awry, the more important question is how it might influence the great battle between good and evil. Not simply with the divine, our relationship with fellow humans too is in tatters. With all our ‘culture’ and structures of cohabitation we do not ‘relate’ to each other in any sense of synergy. We ‘interpret’ each other, not always by or of the person directly affected. Someone ‘interprets’ something — scripture, statute, law, language, word, even behavior — and someone else loses liberty and life, indicted and incarcerated, and is subjected to pain and suffering. Indeed much of the interpersonal strife and social and religious violence stems from intermediation and interpretation, from being ‘processed’ and ‘packaged’, made suitable for our ingestion and intelligence.

Our breathtaking diversity, the tapestry of our plurality, has become an orchestra out of tune, a debilitating drag on human ripening. We are unable to preserve specificity and at the same time, subordinate it to overriding unity. In the event, the fulfillment of every individual aspiration is chipping away at generic good, and the interests of the smaller unit —

 

 

 

11 Owen Barfield. Introducing Rudolf Steiner. Accessed at: http://www.rsarchive.org/RelAuthors/BarfieldOwen/introducing_rudolf_steiner.php

12 Cited in: The Conscious Creation of a New Paradigm. Interview with Dr. William A. Tiller. The Spirit of Ma’at. Vol.2, No.8. Accessed at: http://spiritofmaat.com/archive/mar2/tiller1.htm

 

individual, family, community, nation — has come to overshadow that of the larger and bigger unit of humankind. Starved of any sense of significance, many people deem their lives as drudgery devoid of delight, feel abandoned and not wanted. Deep in their hearts they believe that, in the words of the Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, their lot is a ‘diabolical trap set by destiny’. Maybe we too are like the mythical Greek King Sisyphus, condemned to an eternity of labor and turmoil for our unspecified but ubiquitous crimes against the gods! And it will possibly end only when we cleanse and transform ourselves inside out.

Almost everyone is discontented and disenchanted; as a reflex and rebound, everyone wants more of everything beyond what one can either use or consume; or even discard because, we fear, someone else might use it! Bitten by the bug of ‘ownership’ all the way from another person to another planet, possessing more than he needs, acquiring more than he can keep, coveting what another person has or might want, such are the symptoms of modern man’s malaise. Even death is no cure; we want to leave behind memories, memorials and property for progeny. Everyone wants to grab the ‘good things of life’ without doing any good to anyone. Dangling between nihilism and narcissism, between the fluid and the fixed, between free will and fate, between the longing for certainties and the inevitability of change, man today is meandering, caught in the web of what Goethe called the ‘maddening maze’.

As Oscar Wilde quipped, the only temptation we cannot resist is temptation. We want to be rescued without getting lost, liberated without surrendering and sharing without sacrifice. Muddled in our mind, we stand in our own shadow and wail why it is dark. We seem overpowered by our ravenous maw and restless groin, and nothing gives greater pleasure than satiating the two. In our confusion about our real identity and irreplaceable essence, unable to transcend from the plateau of the individual to the platform of the universal, we try to label all that we cannot conceive as ‘mystic’ and in so doing, as the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard noted, we negate ourselves.

In the scriptural context, individual identity is a beguiling chimera and the only authenticity is divinity within every being and in everything. To borrow the words from a George Harrison lyric, we hide behind a wall of illusion; never glimpse the Truth; then it is far too late (Within you, without you, The Beatles, 1967). But we behave as if the only truth is physical, and divinity, at best, is effervescent but external, to be envisioned, not experienced. And ‘culture’, which includes the sacred, the secular and the profane in human thought, the signature of our social identity, some pundits predict, will soon replace ideology and economics as the new battlefield of barbarity and bloodletting. But that, truthfully, should not be too upsetting; for, to paraphrase Anna Akhmatova ‘it loves blood; the human appetite’.

That ‘appetite’ will forever be a part of our lust for life and we do not have within us what it takes to quench it. But what is already clear is that the compass and coordinates that man has so far relied upon to navigate the ocean of earthly life — family, religion, country, tradition, and values — are no longer apt for the human condition to find its full utterance. The line between religious and sacrilegious is thinning and we seem to be, even against our will, sliding down the moral slope. But we, as individuals, behave as if we have nothing to do with what awaits the species, that we owe nothing because we got nothing; and in any case, we mutter to ourselves, ‘what can we do?’

That nonchalance and insensitivity comes from another paradox of human life. Man is, in the idiom of the French Nobel writer Alexis Carrel, both ‘unity’ and ‘multiplicity’ and the apparent tension between the two dimensions torments life. While multiplicity, diversity, and duality are the order in the cosmos, the principles of uniformity and linear continuity have been the dominant human intellectual aspirations. While our mission on earth is to harmonize dwanda or dualism, we strive to eliminate one of the two. That creates all our problems, for, as the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad points out, it is only through duality that we can relate to or understand each other. We can live with turmoil and terror, mayhem, and

 

massacres in the world, but not any convulsion that disturbs the tenor and temper of our daily lives, much less any radical revisions in the style and substance, the content and character of our prosaic existence. What matters to us is not eternity or the fate of the world; it is the time and place of our daily presence. While the nature of Nature is turbulence and creative chaos, we crave for the stability of a stone, a life without worry or work, a ripple-less river, a wave- less ocean. While conflict is endemic to life, instead of turning it into creative force, we try to erase it. Yet chance and happenstance, fate and fortune — not choice and calibration — envelop our daily lives. It is the inherent unpredictability of individual lives that mocks at us. Roman philosopher and poet Horace (Odes, I.9.13) wrote, Quid sit futurum cras, fuge quaerere — do not ask what tomorrow brings. Indeed much as we might like it, knowing the future could be terrible; if it is rosy we will be complacent and stop striving, and if it is bleak we will go to pieces and even stop working, thinking it is of no use in any case. We lead such charmed lives that if even a few of the myriad things that happened in our lives had not happened or happened differently, we would almost be a different people. We crave for comprehensive predictability and uneventful gradualism, and smooth progression through life, but we do know that everything can crumble by an unexpected event, an illness, a death, an accident. The best one can do, as another Roman philosopher, Cicero, advised, is to hope for the best, plan for the worst, and endure whatever shall be.

The problem is not only the fickleness of the future. It is also that we really do not know how a particular human personality develops, or predict how any one of us will react to a particular circumstance, provocation or seduction. Random happenings far removed from the immediacy of our lives — wars, famines, climatic changes, accidents — could turn