The Valmiki Ramayana presents this significant episode: Rama, Sita and Lakshmana were the guests of a great sage, Suteekhna, when several batches of Rishis met Rama with appeals to put an end to the torments the demons caused them in the forest. Each time an emotionally moved Rama looked at his bow and the quiver and assured the visitors that he will eliminate the menace.
Once the three resumed their journey Sita, unexpectedly indeed, narrated an anecdote to Rama: There was a young sage absorbed in penance. Once a friendly god left with him a glittering sword for its safe keep. One day the curious sage applied it on a nearby creeper. Its effectiveness gladdened him. He applied it on a tree and soon thereafter on a passing deer. Fascinating indeed was the result. Before long he was seen applying the weapon on all and sundry. After his death he had a smooth plunge into hell.
“I hope, unlike that failed sage, you are not under the spell of your bow and quiver.” Sita then advised her husband not to wear the weapon always on his person lest they possess him. The truth of this profound psychological insight of Sita (contrast it with the popular impression of her being a merely docile wife) is yet to be appreciated by mankind. During the 20th century our concept of matter had no doubt undergone a radical change. At least, putting it simplistically, we know the apparently lifeless matter to be repository of immense energy. The anecdote Sita narrated implied that matter, shaped for a certain purpose, could radiate an occult power that could influence human consciousness. By itself that power may not have a character of its own; it would work in a manner depending on the character of its user.
Bertrand Russell could not be expected to bring into his concern any element of occultism, but he asserted that the accumulation itself of the nuclear destructives would one day make its possessors impatient and at the boiling point of that impatience they would innovate arguments to justify their use. In such a situation the difference between Sita’s occultist observation and Russell’s pragmatism disappears.
What is the quality of consciousness that controls the use of matter? Yes, intelligence and ingenuity, apart from gross transitory national interest and ego-drive, individual or collective. Even if intellect, the best condition of intelligence, were to control matter, we cannot ignore Einstein’s warning: Don’t trust intellect; it has muscle, but no conscience. The warning assumes ominous air with the latest manipulations of matter by science and technology, inspiring children to use their intelligence to drive them to death!
Suicide was the prerogative of the frustrated grown-up. Children are choosing suicide! Preoccupied as we are with our mostly hollow exercises, do we realise what it indicates? It is a pronouncement on the futility of our technology sans the right consciousness. No device of a game projected objectively in front of a young mind can induce him to commit suicide unless there is a terribly evil power subjectively using the contrivance.
What can check this “devil’s gluttony”? It must be fought at the occult plane—by which I do not mean any supernatural abracadabra. Before I name our weapon, I draw your attention to a path-breaking recent research led by Dean Radin and Nancy Lund of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, California, and Takashige Kizu of IHM General Institute, Tokyo. Speaking very briefly, they made 1,900 people focus intense feelings of love or prayer or the opposite emotions on containers filled with water. Ice drops formed of these samples were photographed and “each image was assessed for aesthetic beauty by over 2,500 independent judges.” While crystals of water that received positive attention resulted in beautiful floral images, those receiving negative thoughts—including a projection of a Hitler photograph—showed bizarre formations.
This is how matter is impacted by qualities of our consciousness. The hostile attack on the child’s mind can be thwarted only by the weapon of our love. Some 25 centuries ago Socrates said if he could climb to the highest spot in Athens, he would raise his voice to the highest and proclaim: “Fellow citizens, why do you turn and scrape every stone to go on gathering more and more wealth and take so little care of your children to whom one day you must relinquish it all?” By then the children could prove unworthy of it because of their unguarded upbringing.
No authority could cry a halt to the technological development which is the external sign of evolution. But it will play havoc with our today and tomorrow if we do not respond to evolution’s demand for our inner development matching it.
Let us pay heed to this revelation: “At present mankind is undergoing an evolutionary crisis in which is concealed a choice of its destiny; for a stage has been reached in which the human mind has achieved in certain directions an enormous development while in others it stands arrested and bewildered and can no longer find its way. ... Man has created a system of civilisation which has become too big for his limited mental capacity and understanding and his still more limited spiritual and moral capacity to utilise and manage, a too dangerous servant of his blundering ego and its appetites. For no greater seeing mind, no intuitive soul of knowledge has yet come to his surface of consciousness which could make this basic fullness of life a condition for the free growth of something that exceeded it.” (Sri Aurobindo)
Today’s child has to grow up to face this crisis and try transcend it. By no means should it be sacrificed to the Blue Whale and similar symbols of the anti-evolutionary forces.
Manoj Das
Eminent author and recipient of several awards including the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship
Email: prof.manojdas@gmail.com