SPEAKING FROM THE HEART ... 15

SPEAKING FROM THE HEART ... 15

To glorify God the Muslim does not build His stone image for he considers it to be blasphemous to give the Infinite a finite form. The Puranic Hindu, on the other hand, following and evolving a Buddhist inititation of the practice, attempts to infuse life into dead matter called 'Pranapratishthha' whereupon he worships the Infinite in its finite form which he attempts to behold as the Infinite, nonetheless.

The idea of glorification of God in whichever way is to get beyond one's own finiteness by immersing oneself in the thought of the Infinite. Constant memory of the imagined Divinity helps reduce one's preoccupation with oneself. This is in common the spiritual path. The idea is to forget oneself and be one with the universe and the transcendent beyond thereafter. Thus, humility, glorification of God, charity, humanity, continence, self-control, control of the palate and the sublimation of desire -- all these are so stressed upon in religion. Politics and gain, either of territory or numbers, form the peripheral aberration of the essential impulse of religion, although, in historical terms, owing to low evolution of the species, man has emphasised more on its political aspect than on its spiritual.

The saviour is the brain. It is a unique instrument that can be constantly modelled, fashioned, refashioned, adjusted, evolved, made more pervious to external and to internal influence of which no limits have been found as yet. The brain is the greatest mystery of biology whose future solutions hold the key to understanding more about our organic selves and of our surroundings.

But the brain is the devil, too. It is the repository of all superstition, prior impressions and irrational indoctrination that have caused untold damage to human civilisation historically. The brain being plastic, it is possible to alter its responses to the environment by indoctrinating it with specific data. Religion and politics both do it with devastating effect. It is possible to indoctrinate a child from birth with a specific cultural orientation whereby its entire future personality gets coloured in a certain hue making it a slave to certain fed-in principles. Liberty is lost in childhood itself to rationally think and the individual is enslaved by the religious or political or cultural principles fed into his hypersusceptible brain. This taking away the power to rationally think by feeding irrational assumptions into the child-brain retards human evolution and in enslaving the individual to an extracosmic arbitrary authority whose dictates he must implicitly obey, it aborts the potential birth of the creative artist in man who could have otherwise painted a brighter picture of the universe and a more luminous self-portrait as well. On the more dangerous side  though, is the propensity to vicious violence which doctrinaire teaching leads man to and we have a whole history of wars and genocides that have deluged the world in blood down the ages. 

The European Enlightenment, therefore, took away power from an assumed God to a more perceptible Reason and ushered in the Modern Age where Man has decidedly come into his own and has started governing his own destiny, although, not altogether with a wholesome effect at that. Technology, the product of human ingenuity, has posed unforeseen challenges that threaten human extinction in multiple ways today.

The tussle of terrestrial forces of the mind is on as different cultures clash causing chaos in human society so much so that the new concept of multi-culturism is gaining ground in several western societies that are way more advanced than societies dominated by medieval religious practices. But the uneven state of human evolution among its different races despite global communications and data dispersal maintains for the while cultural divergences of a conflicting kind. However, through the present turmoil one hopes human society en masse is moving towards a better world order where greed, lust for power, and political deception shall be replaced by mutual help, cooperation and understanding. The lowest common denominator must be discovered whereby everybody will get the maximum support from the social system to individually flourish, where authority will not wield its power to persecute people but will do so to preserve them, where different cultures, amended and modified, will coexist harmoniously for the maximum fruition of the individual and the collective.

Harmony is the key to a flourishing coexistence. Incongriities at the epidermal level among the different elements that make up the fabric of society cause a disruption of this underlying harmony and therein conflict issues. All of life is a lost balance of the elements and all of life tends to regaining the lost equilibrium. Raging waves on the bosom of the ocean in tempestuous weather do not make for cosy voyage. So does man suffer the lashes of huge potential differences between different segments of human society. Harmony is an oft-uttered word merely and bears no significance beyond table talk. Beyond the board room policies are defined in national interest and in group interest that keep fuelling the fire of disintegration. The tears of the tormented make no dent in the hardened heart that has ceased to love in its bid to dominate the different on account of their 'low culture' that needs a lift if even by force.

But evolution goes on unimpeded by even apparently insurmountable obstacles. The story of man is his evolution from the ape unto his present state. No environmental inclemency could inhibit it for long nor thwart its forward march. 'Charaiveti !' (Onward !), the Vedic Rishi said, and 'Charaiveti' it has ever been. The advancing march of events who can prevent? Who can retard its accelerating course? Humanity has thus far proceeded from animal beginnings and the sunlit summit of divinity beckons it. The present problems have occurred in the past and they have resolved through the dialectical process leading to fresh contradictions in an advancing series of evolutionary clashes. So must it be and so shall it be in the near and the distant future as well as humanity wends its way to a deeper synthesis. It shall never be, perhaps, a perfected society with problems nullified, for that would be an order unto extinction, but it shall be ever a circuiting course in this evolving discourse, for society may not be travelling always along an ascending path in a linear manner but in all probability is moving through a meandering maze of light and shade where there is, perhaps, a net forward displacement, a gradual upward spiral movement as in a mountainous detour. To expect easy solutions in that case of present problems would be puerile and persistent though must be our efforts, failures are bound to beset our best endeavours so often for, after all, the fabric of society is so deeply diverse even in its surface self. Time and patience must play, therefore, their parental parts in this progressive maturity of our collective self which we call society. May Man triumph through it all !

Written by Sugata Bose