REAL MAN = REAL GOD

One of the fascinating features of modern living is that everyone is intent on solving the material problems of life and hardly anyone cares to go to their spiritual roots whence spring the problems. This superficiality of approach to life's problems is the signature of the surface man and the bane of his terrestrial living. Few dare to face truth headlong, fewer still go after it in their bid to seeking freedom from the shackles of space-time-causality. Most avoid asking fundamental questions about life for paucity of the discriminative faculty or to avoid the discomfort of the breakdown of illusions which are the substance of their fantasies about life. Sufferance is the result of such escape into the unreal, unending misery the constant companion of man.

And yet the dream does not break, the nightmare continues. Causes unresolved, effects follow. Thus had the Buddha raised fundamental questions on life and its maladies. He had in his meditations diagnosed the disease of the world (bhava vyadhi), identified desire (vaasanaa) / thirst (trishnaa) as its causal virus and had pronounced his prescription of elimination of desires as the medicine to cure this malady.

But desires are multiplying by the day as in a growing materialistic civilisation they are expected to do, covering up consciousness and sending man careering into surface-living and depth-dying. This depth is not profundity but an abyss for it is in the convoluted scheme of things and not along the royal avenue to Truth. Such is the hypnotism of sense-pleasure and its concomitant pain that suffering man seeks not to cast it aside but clings to it as his life-belt when all it does is to drag him into death, that yawning chasm across the icy chill of the Arctic waters that awaits him at his earthly end.

Notions of heaven and hell hardly help matters here on earth for all their ardent and acid assumptions. They more hide facts than reveal and are in effect largely counter-productive in dispelling the sensory illusions of life for they weave the myth of their continuance beyond death and awaken dormant hopes of death-defying heightened sense-pleasure in heaven or strike terror into the hearts of unsuspecting simple folks with damnation in a horrid hell. Archaic absolutism of prophet or messiah helps not the earthly cause nor does the promise of paradise provide adequate recompense for the damage done by irrational ideologues. The solution lies in depth-viewing life and reducing sensory impressions to their roots whence comes liberation from the earthly predicament.

Vedanta affords man with age-old wisdom hidden amidst heaps of historic gibberish masquerading as messianic marvel or prophetic profundity where reason is obscured by arbitrary assertion, unique suppositions and more unique revelations which the generality of humankind are not privy to, yet must follow as gospel truth for fear of violent retribution here on earth and in the hereafter. A malevolent God and his more malevolent messenger can hardly do justice to the essential divinity which shines in all irrespective of them and which must triumph over all evil in the tide of times.

When doomsday comes, the Vedantist will rejoice at the folly of it all for what may you destroy that has never ever been? And with what will you destroy the being which is all that has ever been? The universe will vanish and so will its God with all His attributes that did plague the believing world with amnesia. The rational man, the man of character and courage to face the brute of this world, the truly spiritual man with not an iota of material contamination in his personality save the trace organic element to sustain his earthly attire, these will delight that day when God will be dethroned and man emerge triumphant in his march to freedom.

Who cares for your heaven, who fears your hell? You who breed such vice on earth through self-deception and delight in your ignorance to deceive others of your ilk, or worse still, force it down the bloodstream of your captive in war, your booty, your day is done, your doomsday is at hand. The sun of knowledge has begun to shine. Soon it will be mid-way, high up in the heavens shedding its lustre on all without a trace of medieval shadow. It will be noonshine for all and the shadows looming large since centuries will be gone in a trice as man, the only God that matters, will be resurrected from primeval ignorance into the ascending spirit of freedom. Thus far has he been crucified, now no more. The three days of ordeal, the past, the present and the future, will resolve into the moment that is the eternal Presence with neither shrinking nor dilation as relativity dictates. It is Existence that is eternity, Consciousness transcending thought, Bliss beyond bounds. This is the Real Man, what need He of God who is but His pale shadow? Let things take a turnaround for once and let God vanish into the Real Man and may the Real Man emerge as the Real God!