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

of the mind by man. In ancient Vedic thought, the mind is described as one of the ashta-prakritis: earth, air, water, fire, ether, mind, reason, and egoism. The Gita further says that the mind or manas controls the sense organs or indriyas. The mind is compared to the horses of a chariot, whose leash is held by buddhi, the discriminatory intellect and the charioteer. The chariot will move in the right direction only if the horses are controlled and directed by the charioteer through the leash. The mind cannot be allowed to be the decision maker; it has to be only the implementer. The sacred Sikh scripture Adi Granth says, “The restless mind is not fixed on one spot”. Both scriptures and psychologists closely identify the mind with the many things that afflict mankind. Foremost among them is malice, which the French renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne called the ‘tart-sweet titillation of malicious pleasure.’

The very foundation of contemporary culture and modern civilization has been the rational, thinking mind. What do the head and the heart have in common? According to Kathy Hurley and Theodorre Donson, pioneers in the development of the Enneagram model of personality types, “Nothing, if we are satisfied within our lives the way they are.

Everything, if we are searching for personal truth and the meaning of our lives.”393 They blame contemporary culture for having “caused the human heart to be placed on the endangered species list”, and remark that “at this point in time the overdevelopment of the mind and the underdevelopment of the heart are at such extremes as to endanger the existence of humanity itself.”394 Many great souls like the theosophist George Gurdjieff believe that

 

 

 

389 Raag Gauree. Shri Guru Granth Sahib. Section 07, Part 003. Internet Sacred Text Archive: Sikhism. Accessed at: http://www.sacred-texts.com/skh/granth/gr07.htm

390 Cited in: MegaEssays.com. The Mind is Its Own Place. Accessed at: http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/97915.html

391 Cited in: Adventus. A Method of the Discourse. 26 September 2008. Accessed at: http://rmadisonj.blogspot.com/2008/09/method-of-discourse.html

392 The Buddha. ThinkExist.com. Mind Quotes. Accessed at: http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/mind/

393 Kathy Hurley and Theodorre Donson. The Enneagram: Key to Opening the Heart. The Enneagram in the Healing Tradition. Accessed at: http://www.hurleydonson.com/opening_heart.htm

394 Kathy Hurley and Theodorre Donson. The Enneagram: Key to Opening the Heart. The Enneagram in the Healing Tradition. Accessed at: http://www.hurleydonson.com/opening_heart.htm

 

harmonizing the head and the heart, along with the hands, the three centers of our intellectual, emotional, and locomotive life, is necessary to become a genuine person.395 To bring about a better balance in the human decision making and behavior, we must go beyond the conceptual boundaries of the traditional — and sterile — body-brain-mind prototype, which has been a staple for much of the philosophical, scholarly and scientific discourse for several centuries. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “What is troubling is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within”.396 The broad scriptural view is that the mind is useful and even indispensable; for the ultimate spiritual pursuit like God- realization one must transcend the medium of the mind. Some saints even say that man minus mind is God. Although there are some who hold the view that the brain-mind relationship is not fully decodable by finite procedures, the broad scientific assumption being our mental states are clearly connected to the physical states of the brain, and that physical laws apply equally to the brain. It is expected that progress in neurobiology will soon be able to explain the brain-mind relationship fully. Recent insights into brain research involving consciousness are inducing many scientists to believe that they will soon crack the ‘mystery of the mind’.

Maybe, but can that alter the makeup of the mind and make it a benevolent force? The bigger, larger-than-life question that humanity faces is the paradigm of ‘heart to heart’ communication, seena ba seena, as it is called in Sufism. Is it possible in today’s world that is at once militarized and mechanized?

Whether it is a born blank slate or a soiled white sheet, or a ghost-in-the-machine or a god-gone-awry, the mind is much of what we are and will be, if we stay the course, and will determine what becomes of the human species. We have a far better neurological and biochemical understanding of the way the brain works, than of the origin, locus, and the functioning of the mind; and even less of how the mind influences our consciousness. We now know fairly clearly the basic structure of the human brain. It consists of three parts — neocortex, limbic system, and brain stem — which is why it is sometimes called the triune brain. We also know that there are two sides in the neocortex, left and right, that control the two ‘modes’ of thinking. The left is logical, rational, and objective; and the right is intuitive, holistic, and subjective. It is also generally believed that inadequate coordination and mutually complementary interfacing in the triune brain and the two hemispheres might be responsible for the erratic, often, bizarre, behavior of humans, and for their highly individualistic personalities. Our knowledge of the origin, locus, and function of the mind is far hazier. Science simply equates it with the brain. But we do know that the human mind has been indispensible to human survival.

Prince Arjuna, the great archer-hero of the epic Mahabharata, compared the mind to the wind and asked Lord Krishna how he could bring it under control. In answer, Lord Krishna prescribed abhyasa (constant practice) and vairagya (renunciation). The Mandukya Upanishad, in fact, recognizes this, and says that the mind can be brought under control only by an unrelenting effort like that which would be required to empty an ocean, drop by drop, with the help of a blade of grass. One can read it either as a measure of the effort involved, or as an impossibility. Swami Vivekananda called the mind a ‘mad monkey.’ Ramana Maharshi said, “The thought ‘I’ is the first thought of the mind; and that is egoity. It is from that whence egoity originates that breath also originates. Therefore, when the mind becomes quiescent, the breath is controlled, and when the breath is controlled the mind becomes

 

 

 

395 Cited in: Robert Fripp. From Crimson King to Crafty Master. Chapter Seven: Sabbatical. Progressive Ears. Accessed at: http://www.progressiveears.com/frippbook/ch07.htm

396 The Times of India. Hyderabad, India. 6 July 2008. p.17.

 

quiescent.”397 And again, the mind cannot know the self, for how can it know that which is beyond mind? So it is impossible even for a Jnani to explain his state in words, “which is only of the mind”. To know it is to be it. There is no other way.398 Meher Baba, another Indian mystic, said that a fast mind is sick, a slow mind is sound, and a still mind is divine.399 All these are words of wisdom, but to pursue these paths it requires spiritual qualities lacking in most humans. And the mind is not going to play dead when its dominance is threatened.

Rabindranath Tagore, the great humanist, said that man lives in a cage built by himself and is confined within his limitations. That cage is a mental cage, and the limitations are his blind faith in the intellect incubated in the mind. Sri Aurobindo’s disciple Satprem said, “This physical mind is precisely what suffocates us insidiously, multifariously, and quite implacably. It is our cage. The very wall of our human bowl.” He then adds: “And perhaps our species is indeed reaching the time of suffocation.”400 No one seems to have a good word to say about the mind, and yet that is what we are and have. So, how do we go forward?

Above all, the mind is a metaphor for power, control, and conquest. Since the beginning of recorded history, humans have lusted after power and control over their fellow humans, and until about a century ago, the means were brute force, religion, or propaganda. Mind control is the principal tool to prevail and it could be so subtle that the perpetrator is not even conscious of it. The mind itself is a tool, the process of control is mental, and the controller is also a mind. It is the battle of minds. While according to the scriptures, the control of the mind is a spiritual tool, in today’s world it has become a tool of conquest. In the Hindu scripture Padma Purana, it is said that if you are able to control your mind, then you need not go visiting holy places; wherever you are, that place would be holy. The premise is that, through mind control we can control our senses, and that removes all obstacles to spiritual growth. Although it is now an essential weapon in the armor of every State, the urge to induce others to do what we wish, not what they want, is in-built in the human personality and implicit in human relationships. In different degrees and ways we all try to do that in our daily lives. All life is mind control, and no one is immune or invulnerable. On the contrary, everything we think, say, and do, is an amalgam of influences and impressions. George Eliot aptly captured the human vulnerability in her book Middlemarch: “for there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it”. It does not mean that our behavior is entirely externally conditioned; it means that our internal defences are not impregnable. Beginning with the 20th century, invasive techniques and technologies have been developed that tinker with our heads and command and control us. In the hands of the State, these techniques and technologies become immeasurably more powerful and menacing, especially if they are directed to produce ‘programmed humans’, or ‘human robots’ for particular missions. There has also been another strand in human affairs. It is to use the versatility and power of the mind as the solution for much of what afflicts mankind and as the sublime path to individual salvation.

Both are grounded on the same basic premise, namely that an individual’s very way of

 

 

 

397 Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sri Ramana Maharshi on Self-Enquiry. Self-Enquiry -- Self-Enquiry vs. Other Means of Quieting the Mind. Accessed at: http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/diction/ramana.html

398 Sri Ramana Maharshi. Sri Ramana Maharshi on Self-Enquiry. Self-Enquiry -- Self-Enquiry vs. Other Means of Quieting the Mind. Accessed at: http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/diction/ramana.html

399 J.P. Vaswani. Peace or Perish. Holistic Hong Kong. Accessed at: http://www.holistichongkong.com/Articles/Peace-or-Perish.html

400 Satprem. The Mind of the Cells or Willed Mutation of Our Species. 1982. The Institute for Evolutionary Research. New York, USA. p.77.

 

thinking, behavior and dynamics of decision making can be fundamentally altered through control and proper channeling of mind power. The premise is unquestionable and many great men have achieved great results. But it has to be seen as a spiritual tool; not social, political, or of the State. Ramana Maharshi used to talk about having a thorn in your palm — so you break off another thorn and dig out the first one, then throw both of them away. The use of the mind is like that. Without a spiritual basis, mind control becomes ‘coercive persuasion’, ‘brainwashing’, ‘mind-manipulation’, not for the individual’s benefit, but to induce the person to obey someone else’s will without overt use of physical force. The acronym BITE is sometimes used to describe destructive mind control: behavior control; information control; thought control; and emotional control. The often-cited description of such control is contained in the classic work of George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is now a favorite weapon in the hands of every State. The aim is to enforce compliance and conformity, and to silence dissent and opposition. Mind control, also called