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

‘only words’, not the knowledge of the Self, and because of that, he is afflicted with sorrow. It must be borne in mind that the ‘Self’ referred to here is different from the self in selfishness and self- righteousness. The Self in the present context is the Self of Self-realization or God- realization, at once the Atman and the Paramatman, the individual soul and the Supreme Soul. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, the sage Yajnavalkya explains the ambit and the nature of the Self, to his wife Maitreyi. He tells her that the body is the abode of the Self, but that the Self itself is immortal, and that the Self is everything (the Infinite). In a famous passage, he says that it is only for the sake of that Self that everyone and everything in the world is dear and loved — husband, wife, children, wealth, etc; the Self, in its true nature, is one with the Supreme Self. Yajnavalkya further clarifies: “Verily, my dear Maitreyi, it is the Self that should be realized — should be heard, reflected on, and meditated upon. By the realization of the Self, my dear, through hearing, reflection and meditation, all this is known”. According to this line of thought, the Self is the totality, the sum and substance of everything, the sole source, the origin and destination of the universe, the point of convergence of all reality. And the knowledge of the Self is the highest spiritual knowledge. The way to God and the quest for the Self is the purpose of human life; the highest state of consciousness. In practical life, we identify ourselves with the abode, not the indweller, and that, the scriptures say, is the root of the suffering and misery of life.

That ignorance, or illusion that obscures our vision, Vedanta calls avidya or maya (both are similar but not identical), which is again a part of the play of the divine. Vedanta states that maya shields the Truth or Brahman from the Self or Atman. The doctrine of maya, commonly attributed to Adi Shankara, but which actually has its roots in the Upanishads, is an important theological and metaphysical explanation to many baffling things in life, such as the source of suffering and why we are so incapable of comprehending, and remain oblivious of our true divine identity. It is a profound, subtle, almost mystical concept. The Shvetashvatara Upanishad clarifies: “Know Nature to be Maya and the great God to be the Lord of Maya”. It cannot be comprehended through ordinary intellect or linear thinking. To understand, one must rise above that which we are trying to understand. Swami Vivekananda said “in maya we are born, in maya we exist and in maya we die”. Maya, which literally means ‘that which is not’, proposes that the world of experience is merely an appearance in the background of the Brahman. It is maya that holds us captive to dwanda or duality; it is maya that obscures and obfuscates divinity. It is maya that distorts our inherent essence and also the one that mediates the relationship of the phenomenal world and the Supreme Force. Although it is now accepted as a key element of the Advaita philosophy, it was not unchallenged. Another great acharya or teacher, Ramanuja, who advocated the theory of Vishishtadvaita, raised questions such as: Is maya real or unreal? If real, how can it be only an appearance? If unreal, how can it be an upadhi or limitation on the indefinable and illimitable Brahman? If maya is another manifestation of the Brahman, what is the purpose in making the veil of ignorance so impenetrable? It would be highly erroneous to look at such questions as contradictions. They constitute an evolution of the basic idiom of Shankara, which, as we noted, emanates from the Upanishads. The real confusion comes from the assumption that maya means that the world itself is an illusion. What is implied, is that the

 

world we see and live in is only ‘relatively’ real, not absolutely real; the illusion is the appearance, filtered through the mind, of it being distinct and separate from the Brahman. The underlying idea and the basic message is that the creator and the creation, the living world and the Almighty are not different, if not one and the same. Such understanding is supposed to lead to view all life as sanctified by a divine presence, as sacred, and should be treated no differently from God.

Just as there are different kinds of knowledge, there are also different kinds of ignorance. One way of categorization is ordinary ignorance (for example, not knowing tomorrow’s weather), willful ignorance (knowing which creates more problems, and we therefore avoid that knowledge), and lastly, what some experts call ‘higher ignorance’ (the more we try to know about a particular matter, the more we realize how ‘we can never know enough about it’).92 The third kind of ignorance is what impels us to ponder over and fathom if we are just another species on earth or the exalted one; whatever, we are still bound by the boundary of an earthly life and by the state or level of our consciousness. Another related issue is the nexus between ignorance, knowledge, striving, craving and belief. Ignorance, as the adage goes, may be bliss because then you do not have to make choices. Knowledge, unless it is of the right kind, can become a burden and distort the choices. Striving is necessary just to live and the quality of that striving, carnal or spiritual, can make a difference to the content of life. It is craving that the scriptures condemn and that increases suffering, a maxim that is at the core of Buddhism. Craving is obsessive desire, the more you get the more you want. As for ‘belief’, everyone has to believe in something or the other; believing is not the same as ‘believing in belief’. Belief is a structure, a system and is presumed to be without ‘proof’, and in the modern mind, proof is ‘truth’. At the same time, there are many sworn ‘rationalists’ and scientists who admit that they believe in things beyond proof. The human mind confuses belief with belonging, and belonging with bonding; when you ‘belong’ to someone or something — religion, ideology, nation — exclusivity and monopoly come to the fore. The way to make religion more ‘humane’ is to rid it of its exclusivist monopoly, that if one owes allegiance to one religion, he or she is automatically excluded from the faith of another religion. We have not learnt how to bond with fellow humans without belonging.

Belief coupled with belonging becomes a dogma, a creed, and breeds a mindset of intolerance and ‘otherness’. Bonding is solidarity, a sense of sharedness. Non-belonging is detachment, the central message given in scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita. Detachment enables you to do your personal righteous duty to fulfill your innate potential.

We must acknowledge that, although we are an integral part of Nature, we live not in the natural world, but in a man-made (or more accurately, brain-made) world. The tool of the brain is technology. The advent or onslaught of the ‘Information Revolution’ powered by miniaturized computerization, has dramatically altered the boundaries of life and liberated us from the bounds of the body. We can virtually be anywhere and experience every experience without actually being there, or being a subject of that sensation. The world is now called ‘flat’, and technologies like the Internet have drastically altered the rules and norms that have governed and circumscribed human interfacing for centuries. Information is exploding at such blinding pace that we face a huge problem of how to adjust our lives in this new landscape. Some see it as an opening to a Utopia, the human race finally functioning as interconnected parts of a ‘superorganism’. Such a scenario seems to ignore that which truly separates us from other creatures, and the fact also is that information technology itself is not

 

 

 

92 Cited in: Pico Iyer. Holy Restlessness. [Review of the book “The Religious Case Against Belief” by James P.Carse]. The New York Review of Books. USA. 26 June 2008. p.37.

 

nascent but ancient. As Robert Darnton, the American cultural historian puts it, we have had “four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak”: The first was learning to write around 4,000 BCE, which has been described as “the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity.”93 It opened the way to the advent of books as a force in human affairs. The second was when the scroll was replaced by the codex, books with pages that one turned, and the page emerged as a unit of perception.

The third was when the invention of printing with movable type transformed the codex in the 1450s. The fourth was the great change brought about, sometime in the 1980s, by electronic communication through technologies like the Internet and the Web. Much of what was deemed, in fact, is now considered as inaccurate. The latest fundamental change is still unfolding, which is being called the dawn of the Information Age and so forth. The now- ubiquitous Blog, a contraction of the term Web Log, is a website through which individuals can ‘stay in touch, with like-minded people’. More than a million blogs, according to one estimate, have cropped up in the last few years. While telephone, as someone said, took ‘the voice out of the flesh’, the cell phone has destroyed distance and reordered the dynamics of human relationships. For the first time in history, the relations between intimate partners lack clear guidelines, supportive family networks, a religious context, and a compelling social meaning. Technology has changed the dynamics of human equations. It has become the main mediator between human beings. What was once considered to be appropriate in human interfacing and as a way of showing affection and love, is now substituted by the sound of voice emanating from a machine. A mother’s hug is replaced by cell-phonic talk. All this goes by the name of communications revolution, but as Soren Kierkegaard pointed out, all true communication is personal. In the very impersonal character of technological communications, some find virtue and validity. In the face-to-face interfacing, one is revealed by uncontrolled immediacy, and how we are and what we are becomes more important than what we have to say. But in mediums like the Internet, one can communicate what one wants to regardless of appearances and atmospherics. There are concerns about the emergence of one more divide — the digital one, and about its effects on human health. “Each change in technology has transformed the information landscape, and the speed-up has continued at such a rate as to seem both unstoppable and incomprehensible.”94

‘Being knowledgeable’ was long considered as being intelligent. And the source of intelligence is the brain. Whatever the nuances are, the question is how all the information- cum-knowledge that we have impacts the human personality. As the American management ‘guru’ Peter Drucker puts it “So far, for 50 years, the information revolution has centered on data — their collection, storage, transmission, analysis, and presentation. It has focused on the ‘T’ in IT. The next information revolution asks: What is the meaning of information, and what is its purpose ?”95 The main existential problem of man has long been how to interact with another man, and that necessity is rapidly diminishing. When it comes to seeking answers to the fundamentals of life, the scriptures say that intellect or knowledge is of little use. But it is intellect and knowledge that we worship even as a way of life, and as a means to ‘happiness’, the mind-molded knowledge is of little use. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his

 

 

 

93 Robert Darnton. The Library in the New Age. 2008. The New York Review of Books, USA. 12 June 2008. p.72.

94 Robert Darnton. The Library in the New Age. 2008.