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

sword, he will exterminate tens of millions of evil men and restore dharma and usher in a new yuga. Some say that the next divine incarnation, the savior of the world, would be a female. In the book The Mystery of the Ages (1887) by Marie, Countess of Caithness, the following prediction appears: “It was generally considered, at the turn of the next century, that the next Divine incarnation was about to come to earth and would be female, the advent of divine wisdom, or Theo-Sophia, and that the present age would be the age of making

known all that which has been kept secret from the beginning.”173 Whether it is to be a masculine or a feminine avatar, his or her descent, it was foretold, will herald the beginning of another Krita or Satya Yuga, the Golden Age. As the great physicist Niels Bohr quipped: predictions are hard to make, especially about the future! But since, in Nature, change is the only constant and since everything comes back to where it begins, it would be ‘logical’ to hope that things, after getting worse, will become better and better till they become the best. For now, we must reckon with the present.

At the root of the turbulence and turmoil in the world is our choice to ignore the fact that in the grand scheme of Nature, the mighty man too is a biological being tightly dependent on the natural world, and he cannot be immune to the havoc he is afflicting on the natural ecosystems. As the American author Henry Thoreau of the classic Walden (1854), reminded us, “Nature is full of genius, full of divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its

fashioning hand.”174 That ‘hand’ can also take care of any human vagaries and vanities too. Bolstered, as it were, by Biblical and Quranic imprimatur, inebriated by the power and virtuosity of technology and seduced by visions of a ‘good life’, and perpetual ‘progress’, man is waging an undeclared ‘war’ on Nature, putting at peril the very biosphere that makes life possible on earth. Human activity is literally exterminating hundreds of species every day, which is euphemistically called loss of biodiversity. Eminent scientist E.O. Wilson says, “When we debase the global environment and extinguish the variety of life, we are dismantling a support system that is too complex to understand, let alone replace, in the

foreseeable future.”175 Such a hypothesis is hotly and viciously denied by many other scientists. Those whose mantra is economic growth — prescribing it as a panacea for all human ills — characterize environmentalism as ‘anti-human’, based on the ‘fear of change’ and on the “fear of the outcome of human action.”176 They offer as proof the environmentalists’ “stand for animal rights and their opposition to animal use in medical research.”177 In their extreme anthropocentric view, animals are solely meant to be hunted or eaten, and any cruelty, banal or bloodcurdling, is morally permissible if it is intended for human benefit. The anti-environmentalists even contend that laws such as the Endangered Species Act have proven to be a great hindrance to economic growth, and that the Kyoto Protocol, a UN treaty that seeks to impose limits on greenhouse emissions, is ‘tantamount to

173 Cited in: Mayan End Age 12-21-2012. Predictions about the Spiritual Mother. Accessed at: http://www.adishakti.org/mayan_end_times_prophecy_12-21-2012.htm

174 Cited in: Odell Shepard (ed.). The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals. 1961. Dover Publications. New York, USA. p.149.

175 Edward O. Wilson, In Search of Nature. Nature’s Abundance: Is Humanity Suicidal? 1996. Island Press. USA. p.190.

176 Cited in: Wikipedia. Anti-environmentalism. Accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti- environmentalism.

177 David Holcberg. The Environmental Evil. Capitalism Magazine. USA. 18 July 2000.

murder’.178 A ‘concerned citizen’ is completely confounded when he hears and reads such conflicting statements coming from ‘eminent’ people and ‘reputed’ scientists.

Strangely and sadly, those who claim that Earth and Nature come first, and those who contend that man comes first, claim that their findings come from the same ‘facts’. Indeed, the sterile ‘debate’ about environmentalism is symptomatic of what afflicts the human condition. It shows that human intellect and intelligence can believe in anything it wants to, and is quite capable of finding the ‘facts’ that are necessary to substantiate its ‘belief’. All this only goes to show that both ‘beliefs’ and ‘facts’ are subjective and contextual, and that the human mind is quite capable of creating them at will. We must remember that there are always inevitable subjective aspects to objective information; even the most ‘proved’ facts do not necessarily exist, neither in the external world nor in our minds. One of the qualities that humans do not have is consistency; we are selective in everything we think, say, and do. We are selectively compassionate and callous, kind and cruel, pious and profane, and we find no irony or inconsistency in that. And it highlights the perils of human reasoning, and analytical and deductive capacities. In such matters, science can be of little help; we have to decide by our ‘gut feeling’ and ‘good sense.’ Whether one subscribes to ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘environmentalism’, it is foolish and suicidal to ignore the implications of human conduct on earth. Really, the core issue that is hardly debated is the rightful place of man in the natural order, his rights and responsibilities commensurate with the package of faculties that Nature has bestowed upon him.

Man may or may not be “the culmination of this grand experiment of Nature that we call life”,179 or, as Vivekananda said, “man alone reaches the perfection of which gods themselves are ignorant”.180 But what we do know is that human society has been unable to fashion a way to live our individual lives as members of a larger community of humanity, and to manage inequality (which is inherent in Nature and more pronounced in the human species) with equality. Our society has not been able to permit the privileged to retain their

power while allowing the handicapped to grow out of their handicap. Nor has it been able to

let the strong remain strong while helping the weak retain their dignity. Man cannot be trusted to be left in his natural milieu, to simply live unhindered and not become a ‘risk factor’ to another person. Mahatma Gandhi, with his usual directness and simplicity of expression, captured the essence of human governance when he said that ‘it is man’s privilege to be independent, it is equally his duty to be interdependent’. The bridge between dependence and interdependence is governance. To ensure the larger and longer good in human society we need governance; to modulate and manage individual ambitions in the context of the collective good, we need governance. There is one idea that has inspired generation after generation of humans but which has always remained, save perhaps in mythical times, a step-ahead of its realization: justness. Justness is more than justice, more than ‘law and order’, and more than security and stability. While justice is a function of the law, justness is beyond the law; one can be lawful and yet be unjust. One could dispense justice and yet deny justness. Justness, in short, is a state of harmony, of synergy.

178 Alan Curuba. State of Fear by Michael Crichton: Exposing the Global Warming Sham. Capitalism Magazine. USA. 15 February 2005.

179 Jeremy Griffith. Beyond the Human Condition. 1991. Introduction. The World Transformation Movement, Sydney, Australia.

180 Cited in: The Eternal Wisdom: Central Sayings of Great Sages of All Times. 1993. Sri Aurobindo Ashram Publications. Pondicherry, India. p.80.

Man has self-awareness but lacks self-knowledge. He has become knowledgeable without knowing; he believes without belief. Other species may lack both knowledge and belief, but they intuitively perform their assigned tasks on earth, and in their very existence, they serve the cause of creation. It is only in the case of man, admittedly the most exalted of all life on earth, that the purpose is unknown to him. By any reckoning, we are living in an extraordinary moment in the history of human knowledge, and entrenched ideas about man, matter and Nature have been overturned with breathtaking virtuosity and velocity. But what the human intelligence will never know, what man is intended not to know, and what he knows or is allowed to know, is still the ‘tip of the iceberg’. There are certain things that are ‘known unknowns’ like death, and ‘unknown unknowns’ like God, and the difference between the two is immense. Let us not forget that in the Bible it was man’s attempt to know more than he was allowed to that led to his fall from Paradise. Through science, man is attempting to cross that cosmic barrier once again, and how Nature/God will react one can only surmise. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss and knowledge a burden. In life, some barriers are not to be crossed and some battles ought not to be won, and some answers are best left unearthed. On the other hand, it is man’s ignorance of his true essence that is at the root of his malaise. That has been the centerpiece of all scriptural and spiritual quests, and increasingly, of late, the area of scientific pursuit too. The tangential question is as follows: if everything in Nature, even ignorance, is need-based, what role does human ignorance play in furthering Nature’s agenda? Perhaps Nature knows something about us that we do not. It is man’s non- comprehension of his meaning and essence that has made him such a suicidal and a destructive being.

Just as the death of one species gives birth to another species, new knowledge — while it solves or appears to solve some issues — brings in new mysteries. For example, our knowledge of our place in the cosmos itself is ever changing, chipping away at our insularity and claims of cosmic singularity. Scientists now say that the ordinary matter and energy that we know of constitute only 5 percent of the universe’s total mass and energy, while ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’ make up the unknown remainder. ‘Advanced civilizations’ in our galaxy are estimated to number 10,000 to nearly one million. Everything comes from and is a part of everything else. Even for a plant, soil and seed are needed. What baffles our intelligence is dubbed as an accident, a coincidence or synchronicity, or the way of fickle fate. Our intelligence is immense but also limited; we are not even aware, or we simply pretend to be unaware, that there are boundaries for everything in Nature. Astrophysicist Jayant Narlikar zeros in on the crux of the matter when he refers to the “inadequacy of the

human mind to understand the universe in its entirety.”181 We have lost one of the essential requisites for spiritual growth, what is called upasana in Sanskrit, roughly translated as meditative contemplation. The irony is that, with all its inherent limitations, we have more knowledge of the beehive than of the dynamics of human behavior. We know more about the starry skies than of our own selves, despite repeated scriptural and Delphic exhortations ‘to know thyself’. It has been said that ‘He who knows himself knows God’, and the Qu’ran says, ‘We will show them our signs in the world and in themselves, that the truth may be manifest to them.’ The Upanishads say that the knowledge of the Self is the highest knowledge, higher than the knowledge of the Vedas. Gandhi (My Religion, 1959) said, “There exists only one truth in the world and that is the knowledge of self. He, who knows

181 Jayant V. Narlikar. Man, Nature and the Universe. Prakrti: the Integral Vision, Vol. 5 (Man in Nature, edited by Baidyanath Saraswati). 1995. Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, New Delhi, India. Accessed at: http://ignca.nic.in/ps_05003.htm

himself, knows God and all others. He