Man's Fate and God's Choice: An Agenda for Human Transformation
Bhimeswara Challa
Trafford Publishing, 2011 - 608 pages
The world today is facing a bewildering array of problems where human behavior is both brazen and bizarre. Those who are searching for a way out are daring to ask fundamental questions: What is man's rightful place? Are we a doomed species? Is God becoming weary of mankind? In Man's Fate and God's Choice, Bhimeswara Challa shares his comprehensive study of human behavior that suggests that the very paradigm of our thinking is inappropriate for the current challenges we face. In a thoughtful, innovative presentation of ideas, Challa posits that any betterment in human behavior needs a cathartic change at the deepest level, ultimately reawakening the intelligence of the human heart. He begins by examining the greatest challenge of this generation of human beings and continues by placing the multiple identities of man in perspective, reviewing our growing insensitivity to human suffering. Finally, he looks to the living world for inspiration, metaphors, and models for human transformation. Man's Fate and God's Choice incisively covers an array of issues and proposes an agenda for action as it challenges those who see misery and ask "Why?" to also see the promise in the rainbow and then ask "Why not?"
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Chapter 8. Models and Metaphors for Human Transformation
Page 455. Human Effort and Divine Dispensation
Our choice, among other things, stems from the state and nature of knowledge.
In the scheme of scriptures, knowledge of one's self and of the universe (called ...atmajnana and shrishtijnana in Hinduism), along with divine grace (or will) constitute the two agents of change and two triggers of transformation
Page 458.
God's relationship with His creation is dynamic, not deterministic.
Human effort and divine dispensation
Our choice, among other things, stems from the state and nature of our knowledge. In the scheme of the Scriptures, knowledge of one’s self and of the universe (called anfus and aafaaq in Islam; atmanjnana and shristijnana in Hinduism), along with divine grace (or will) constitute the two agents of change and the two triggers of transformation.
The Upanishads say that all come in will, consist of will, abide in will, and exhorts man to meditate on Will, and such a person indeed is Brahman.
While God hoped that the combination of reason and Revelation would enable man to be a wise viceroy on earth, man has found a way through the mind to subvert both.
The Hindu scripture Yagnavalkya smruti says that effort is what you do in this life, and destiny is the expression of efforts made in previous lives; the self-effort of the present life determines the future destiny of our soul.
In other words, the fruits in the form of debits (unrighteous acts) and credits (righteous acts) created by the self-effort of this birth will be reaped in future lives. Upon the death of this body, the only thing that goes with the soul is our karmic actions.
Then again, we are bewildered how, as the Bhagavad Gita exhorts, one can be detached from the fruits of action in the midst of ceaseless action, and how one can annihilate avarice while living in a world suffused with sensory pleasure.
Whether human effort can be corrected solely through human will has been a subject of intense theological debate for long. It perhaps depends on the timeframe and our understanding — or interpretation — of the words and concepts: will, effort and grace, and of how they interface.
Knowing has not helped us much in doing the right thing; our will has not made us any wiser. And love today has no soft feathers, only sharp teeth. The Buddha said ‘only when you reject all help you are freed’. And one might add, ‘only when you do not want to cling to something can you truly enjoy having it’. Life is inextricably tied to action and, as a Sikh scripture says, ‘without self-effort or exertion one cannot even jump over the footprint of an animal’.
Hannah Arendt wrote that pain and effort are so ingrained in the human condition that we cannot remove them without changing life itself, and that an effortless life would be a lifeless life. Sustained effort, nishkamakarma, can make the ‘moment of the miracle’ not so miraculous; it can make the supernatural natural, the extraordinary ordinary. But making it possible is not the same as making it happen.
Since every effort is a question of ‘choice’, what impels us to choose a particular path? Is that entirely an exercise of free will and our analytical capacity? Is it all self-induced and self-devised or self-inflicted? Is it something that gets done by us or through us?
The question is why and how we ‘choose’ something over another alternative? The fact is that we really do not know what happens inside us before a thought, a feeling, or an emotion germinates and then becomes behavior. Is it confined to our own personality, parentage, and predilections, or to other factors and forces — divine will, fate or karma — that become deterministic?
The key is the mind. Whether the effect is positive or negative, it is caused by our own mind; the mind is the conduit for karma as well as its consequence. And the outcome can be many times more expansive than the original karmic action. According to the Buddhist scholar Nagarjuna, if we cheat one person, we will be cheated by other persons in one thousand lifetimes.
There is a Sanskrit proverb that says ‘Buddhi karmanusaray’, meaning the mind works according to karma. It means that effort, even if it is intentional, is not wholly of the human will, and the choices we make are a function of the outcome we are destined to cause or trigger. Put differently, it means that the nature of the effort we make is programmed to fit the predetermined result. That ‘program’ is nothing but the actions and efforts of countless lives. Nothing happens to us that we did not cause ourselves. A Buddhist teaching says that through endless time we have all done everything any human — and non human — can do. We have all been murderers, molesters, mothers, fathers, brothers, doctors, and every possible thing. All these actions have sown seeds that come to fruition through future lives.
They come to fruition not only through what we do, but also through what others do to us. The pain caused by someone else’s actions might be the ‘harvest’ of a seed sown long ago by us.
But what about that mighty force, the human will or will power, in the shaping of our destiny? The debate between, in the words of Rumi, ‘necessitations and the partisans of free will’ is timeless, and is at the root of morality and religion. Whether the two are really independent of each other or really complementary, and where one ends and the other begins, and how the two could be harmonized, are age-old questions.
If our actions are devoid of will then we are blameless, and if we are wholly empowered by our actions, then the divine becomes ornamental. Such is the degree of ambivalence and ambiguity that even within the same religion, if not the same scripture, different passages appear to give different messages.
If God is the sole source of knowledge and power in the universe, and is everything, everywhere, inside and outside, as the Upanishads proclaim, then how could the human will be any different? On the other hand, another Hindu scripture Yoga Vasishta, seems to offer another message; it extols human will as the paramount force.
Learned commentators try to reconcile and bring out the nuances, but for the uninitiated and the ordinary, it all aggravates their state of confusion about the true nature of their identity, essence, and empowerment.
In the end, it all comes down to that one word: ‘choice’. For what we call ‘will’ is really the faculty of choice, the immediate cause of action. And choice means the refusal of one alternative and the assent to another. Every choice has a consequence and every consequence calls for another choice. And choice can be volitional or involuntary, and it also brings up the question of levels of consciousness.
Who controls the consciousness, controls choice.
What we have to ponder over is this. Of the millions or billions of choices we make in
a lifetime, how many, if any, are truly free, unfettered, and volitional? We think we have the
‘freedom of choice’, but in actuality we are managed and manipulated to make the choices
someone else wishes us to make. We actually have less freedom and little choice. We may
have been free in exercising our will, but not in choosing what we willed. The daily reality is
that there is hardly anything that we can truly and wholly do but not out of necessity, and we
should perhaps thank God for that; for, had it not been so, the consequences would have been
catastrophic. Will becomes wish and wish turns into a want, and then the mind goes berserk.
For the sake of what man believes to be ‘freedom’ — political, economic — he seems
prepared to surrender his free will. To fulfill his wants, his sensual desires, man is prepared to
sell his soul and sup with the devil. That is no longer a fictional scenario or a theoretical
possibility. Scientists are predicting that soon behavioral engineers and neuroscientists will be
able to so condition our brains that every choice we think we are making is really what the
State or someone else wants us to think we are making, the concretization of the scenarios of
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931) and B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948). In one
sense, free will in the human context is an oxymoron; it is really an attribute of God; and so is
unfettered sovereignty. As the Creator of the world, God is sovereign in the true sense of the
term. He has chosen to bring into existence a world of substantially free agents. God’s
relationship with His creation is dynamic, not deterministic. He has foreknowledge of
everything that will ever occur as a direct result of the future free will choices, without
Himself being the free agent that causes them. Still, we must acknowledge the fact that the
human intellect is either unsuitable or insufficient to definitively settle the equation between
human effort and divine devotion in shaping human destiny. On the one hand, the scriptures
maintain that no amount of self-effort can be enough to intuitively perceive divinity, and on
the other, they proclaim that Divine help cannot come without utmost effort and spiritual
discipline. The Bhagavad Gita simultaneously advocates the two apparently adversarial
practices of abhyasa, ceaseless effort, and vairagya, renunciation of the fruits of that very
effort; to strive as if effort is everything and to surrender to God as if anything else is useless.
The Indian scripture almost dismisses the divine role in human affairs and extols human will
and effort. Perhaps the debate in one way exemplifies the limits of human intelligence. After
all, what we choose to call human will is but a divine manifest.
One could say that karma is God’s law of perfect justice, through which He makes
sure that a good or a bad thought, word or deed is rewarded or punished, partially or wholly,
on this earth. Logically, it means that He can change anything He wants. The story of
Markandeya in the Hindu scriptures, in which Lord Shiva intervenes and saves a boy from
predetermined death, a part of his karma, illustrates this point. In another story, coincidentally
narrated by the same sage Markandeya to King Yudhisthira in the Mahabharata (Vana
parva), Yama, the king of death restores Satyavan to life as a boon to his virtuous wife
Savitri. One of the names of Lord Vishnu in Hinduism, Dharmadhyaksha, according to Sri
Adi Shankara’s interpretation, means the One who directly sees the merits (dharma) and
demerits (adharma) of beings by bestowing their due rewards on them. What we do not know
is what should we do and what we ought not to do to make Him bestow his grace or mercy.
But even if God wants to do something, the actual ‘doer’ is man himself. As German
theologian and writer Dorothea Soelle puts it, “God has no other hands than ours. If the sick
are to be healed, it is our hands that will heal them. If the lonely and the frightened are to be
comforted, it is our embrace, not God’s, that will comfort them.”624 All creation and all
creatures are ‘God’s own hands’ and He deploys them as he deems necessary and suitable.
The architecture of life itself is divine. Life on earth is based on such superhuman fine-tuning
and extraordinary combination of forces and factors, that all of it cannot simply be dismissed
as cosmic randomness or fortuitous coincidence. Some scientists say that but for a certain
‘tweaking’ of some ‘cosmological constraints’, the universe would have been filled only with
huge black holes or would have been totally devoid of stars. Hugh Ross in his paper Limits
for the Universe lists 47 items in the universe like gravitation, oxygen and ozone levels in the
atmosphere, magnetic field and nuclear force and their precise presence as evidence for
design in the universe. Others like Stephen Gould and James Wilson turn the ‘evidence’
around and say if the world were designed by God, things would be more perfect —
inferentially, our lives would be better.
We might know the precise ‘mix and match’, but clearly both human will and divine
disposition will have much to do with human future. Whether we go off the cliff like the
lemmings, unable to bear the burden of ‘civilized’ life, or develop a ‘human pupa’ to become
a ‘human butterfly’, or emulate the ant or the bee and reorder human society with a perfect
‘division of labor’, or just implode from the pandemics of suicide and homicide, would
depend, in the final reckoning, on the content and balance in our consciousness between the
two intelligences of mind and heart. For, without a catharsis of consciousness there cannot
be, as all human history shows, any comprehensive change in human behavior. It is only then
that man can achieve, in Sri Aurobindo’s words, “the change from a mental being to a spiritual being.”626 For us, to make any advance towards a consciousness that we are not
isolated bodies adrift in a sea of matter but are connected souls in an ocean of spirit, we need
a consciousness change. We must induce congruence between three parallel processes:
evolutionary imperatives, technological change, and spiritual transcendence, similar to what
French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called ‘Omega point’, the maximum
level of complexity and consciousness towards which the universe appears to be evolving.
The journey of our healing, reclaiming, re-unifying all that is separate in us and our spiritual
evolution are one and the same — evolution in consciousness. There is nothing else going on
— regardless of what anything that appears to be, or looks like, or is believed to be. There is
nothing but the ongoing process of liberation, the evolution of consciousness. To change the
internal image of reality, we need a consciousness change. For us to overcome the twin drags
of attachment and separateness and cultivate what is called ‘holy indifference’ or nonattachment to the fruits of one’s labor and the Oneness of all Life, we need consciousness
change. In the Chinese Consciousness-Only school of Buddhism, Buddhahood is not a goal
to be attained through the acquisition of new knowledge or new conceptual understanding,
but it is the end product of a fundamental internal transformation, which is the transformation
of consciousness. And which means that, we need to go ‘behind behavior’ and the façade of
‘social civility’, and change what transpires inside us before it comes out and impacts the
world: consciousness. Man could then be still a man, but cease to be a threat to life on earth,
and acquire a compassionate consciousness. For real consciousness change we need to bring
the heart to the epicenter of human consciousness. Acquiring the skills and techniques to tap
the boundless positive energy of the heart ought to be on top of the human agenda —
scientific as well as spiritual. The foreword to Paul Pearsall’s book The Heart’s Code,
suggests that if the 20th century had been the Century of the Brain, the 21st should be made
the ‘Century of the Heart.’
Some others say that the challenge of the 21st century is to
trigger what they call the ‘Silent Revolution of the Heart’, an inner revolution that would help
us move from hatred and fear to compassion and love, from darkness to light, and from
separatism to wholeness. That would mean concretizing the maxim of the Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad: Tamasoma jyotir gamaya; lead us from darkness of the mind to the light of the
heart. That would mean shifting the focus of intellectual and scientific spotlight towards
finding ways to design the tools required to unleash the intuitive intelligence and energy of
the heart. The heart can then be a powerful force for spiritual transformation of the human
species.
