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

‘ecstasy of hate’. That might be why we see so little remorse or regret in hurting or humiliating someone whom we are supposed to love; when the boundary is blurred, it makes little difference how we react. Maybe hate is not only addictive but contagious too; that is why we see so many copycat ‘hate crimes’, and why they often snowball into mob frenzy. Much as we would like to ostracize hate from the human world, we must bear in mind that the law of Nature is that something can come from nothing; that if we exhibit any emotion, whether it is love or hate, it can only come from within; if it is not already there, whatever is the occasion or provocation, it cannot be directed towards another person. In other words, we cannot hate anyone without having already provided a haven for hate inside us. We germinate hate; we incubate hate; therefore we show hatred. The enemy, if one were to look for a villain, is not an external malevolent force bent on destroying humankind; the enemy is ensconced within.

It is a truism, but it is not good enough to say that the way to conquer hate is love; far too many people think that hate gets them more out of life than love. Loving must become non-obligatory, non-reciprocal, a reflexive ‘habit’, no longer at the mercy of the mind. The first step towards making ‘love a habit’ is ‘acceptance’; of ourselves and of other people. As the ‘success guru’ Chris Widener, puts it, “we become aware of love whenever we choose to accept people without judging them, commence the gentle effort of giving without any thought of getting something in return. And we should ‘practice’ acceptance, not tolerance, which is not being negative. True love is a completely pure and unencumbered form of giving. It is not bestowed on a perfect person but in seeing perfectly the imperfections. The word ‘love’, as we generally use it, means something quite different from true love. It is conditional love — giving in order to get; it is a bargain, a trade agreement.” Widener adds “in order to love we must recognize what is the same within us and in all living beings. The love in us can unite with the love in others but two bodies can never become one.”381 According to psychologist James Hillman, “when love moves the heart, something else is perceived in the idolized object, which poetic language tries to capture. The meeting between lover and beloved is heart to heart, like that between sculptor and model, between hand and stone.” Hillman adds, “a heart’s image lies within each person. It is what we truly reveal when we fall helplessly in love, for then we are opened to display who we most truly are, giving a glimpse of our soul’s genius.” It was heart’s image, Hillman says, which “Michelangelo called, immagni cuor, that he tried to capture when he sculpted the portraits of the figures of religion or myth.”382 Jack Kornfield, one of the leading Buddhist teachers of America, says that, “what type of universe we create, what we choose to plant, what we bring

 

 

 

380 The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 31 October 2008. p.18.

381 The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 7 December 2003. p.13.

382 James Hillman. The Soul’s Code: in Search of Character and Calling. 1997. Warner Books. A Time Warner Company, USA. p.146-147.

 

forth in the garden of our heart will create our future. It is through our intentions that we can shape or direct the patterns of our heart and mind.”383 While the natural state of Nature is a harmony of opposites, human intelligence has not found a way to reconcile the pairs of opposites that Vedanta calls dwanda, (duality): identity and interdependence, intimacy and isolation, competition and cooperation, pain and pleasure, personal gain and common good. Bereft of the knowledge of his true nature and the reason for his being, much of man’s life is spent battling the three ‘B’s: burden of the body, brittleness of life, and, in the famous phrase of Hannah Arendt, the banality of evil. Swami Vivekananda with his usual unforgiving candor wrote, “We have seen how the greater portion of our life must of necessity be filled with evils, however we may resist, and that this mass of evil is practically almost infinite for us. We have been struggling to remedy this since the beginning of time, yet everything remains very much the same. The more we discover remedies, the more we find ourselves beset by subtler evils.”384 Our falling easy prey to evil is a direct consequence of our inability to roll back the tide of rampant materialism, to rise to our full ‘sacred’ potential, which some thoughtful people say has directly brought us to the “greatest dilemma in human history: the possibility of our own extinction as well as the possible destruction of our planet.”385

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

383 Jack Kornfield. Reincarnation: the Karmic Cycle Karma. The Heart is our Garden. 2000. Chinmaya Publications. Chinmaya Mission West Publications Division. Piercy, USA. pp.85-86.

384 Swami Vivekananda. God in Everything. Chapter VII. Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Vol.2. Jnana-Yoga. Accessed at: http://www.firehead.org/~pturing/occult/vivekananda/volume_2/jnana- yoga/god_in_everything.htm

385 Elaine Matthews. The Heartbeat of Intelligence. 2002. Writer’s Showcase. New York, USA. p.vii.

 

 

Chapter 5

From Mind to Heart — the Odyssey Within

 

Harmonizing the head and heart

The one attribute that distinguishes man from other living creatures on earth, it is commonly believed, is his intelligence; the ability to gather data and information, assemble and analyze it, and arrive at a conclusion fundamentally different from any of the original facts and incipient inputs. In other words, ‘transform’ a particular ‘fact’ into an altogether dissimilar and distinct entity. At this turbulent time in human history, we must face up to the central ‘fact’ without which no problem we face, personal or collective, can be solved. It is that what makes our lives so noxious is nothing but our ‘intelligence’, the force that drives everything external but germinates internally. Unless we set this right, nothing will work as we wish; our problems will mount, and their sheer weight will lead to an implosion. And the only way to set it right is to change the nature of the ‘intelligence’ that we bring to bear in our everyday lives. And the only way to change its ‘nature’ is to change that which is the source of supply, which has been for a long while the mind. Although we have come to accept the preeminence of the mind as a given reality, there has long been also a search for an alternative source and fountain of intelligence that lets us be a variant from a vassal of the mind. But we have not made much headway, because that very search is controlled and directed by the very force we want to change — the mind. We have been living in this state of logjam, impasse, and paralysis for almost all recorded history. That search has now acquired added importance and urgency as we gather speed in our slide towards catastrophe. Many thoughtful people are coming to realize that somehow we must wriggle out of the suffocating grip of the mind if we were to survive as an ‘intelligent’ species on earth beyond a ‘century or two’. And that ‘search’ takes us to the heart of human transformation — the human heart.

The scriptures have tirelessly told us that besides being an individual with a personal, social, and political legitimacy, man has a higher calling, a loftier mission, and a deeper dimension. But we are not very clear how we can reach that ‘higher’, ‘loftier’ and ‘deeper’ level, not only as individuals, but also as a ‘chosen’ species. But we do know that that dimension can only be spiritual. We also know that that dimension is within; it is in the ‘inner space’ from which we operate as individuals and as a species. And we also know that only that can take us to a paradigm shift in our awareness, comprehension, and prioritization, which is what is needed at this pivot in history of human endeavor. It is this dimension that promises us to lead an integrated life, combining work and worship, the sacred and the secular, and help us to disconnect ‘doing’ and the sense of doership. It is this dimension that allows us to go deep inside and cleanse ourselves of the toxins, vermin, and venom from our consciousness. There is an emerging school of thought which posits that during our long and tortuous evolution, the nature of the intelligence that governs our lives underwent a profound change, a development that led to our straying from the path intended by Nature. And that straying was to marginalize, if not eliminate, the intelligence of the heart and to rely exclusively on the brain as our source of intelligence. Man today — good, bad, ugly — is preeminently the handiwork of the mind, more precisely the ‘ego-mind’, which really is the villain, as explained in Vedanta, the one that causes all our travails and troubles, the stumbling block to our salvation. In the ancient Sanatana dharma that is Hinduism, it is believed that the soul reincarnates over and over again because of the unfulfilled desires of the ego-mind, until the ultimate desire to merge with God is fulfilled. Then all individuality,

 

including the separate self, gets dissolved into the cosmic consciousness. Our mind, it would seem, messes up not only this life, but also our liberation from the wheel of incarnation and reincarnation, cycle of birth and birth, death and death. It is the one that stands not just between man and man but also between man and God. And we seem haplessly and hopelessly trapped in the web of our mind, with no help seemingly in sight. The Upanishads say that the cause of bondage and the source of liberation are in the mind. The Advaita philosophy holds that mistaking the transitory things for real constitutes bondage. It also says that it is the mind that makes us make that mistake. This is the dilemma: how can we transform the cause of bondage into a springboard for liberation, to turn shackles into silken threads that bind us together. It is this conundrum that has tied us into knots, that has frustrated and paralyzed all human endeavor to set man free, and that has denied the dream of man to become a nobler living being. The scriptural and traditional methods of ‘mind control’ practiced by saints and rishis — scriptural sadhanas like japa (repetition of mantras), and tapas (yogic meditation) — are too difficult for an ordinary person. As a result, it seemed, until very recently, that we are doomed to drift towards destruction. Now science is discovering that human behavior need not be at the total mercy of our mind, and that the way forward is the ‘way of the heart’. Harnessing the full potential of the heart has emerged as one of the few areas where science and spirituality meet.

Today, we know that the physical heart not only keeps us alive but is also the locus of many important human qualities that allow the human organism to function holistically. Our perceptions, mental and emotional attitudes, immune system, reaction times, and decision- making capabilities are all directly related to the realm of our heart. All education, all growing up is mind-centered. Children are taught to use their head in school, to direct it towards analytical thought, but not to calm it down or balance it with heart intelligence. The idiom and idea of ‘heart intelligence’ is at once ancient and post-modern. Poets, philosophers, bards, sages, shamans, rishis and mystics have spoken plainly about the intelligence of the heart throughout the reaches of time. The teachings of the world’s religions and prophets all hint that the heart is at the epicenter of Eternal Knowledge or