Editorial
: Human Ability and Responsibility
Only till recently many people held
the fallacious belief that humans and
not animals, reptiles, birds and others
forms of life, were endowed with mind. Such
false beliefs running unchecked caused humankind
to irreparably destroy many life forms as well
as irrationally exploit the environment. Humans
now find that their actions are actually destroying
themselves, directly and indirectly. Science came
as a saviour by showing that Homo sapiens and
lowly chimpanzees are almost genetically identical
and that all life in its myriad forms has arisen
from the same seed. If human bodies and minds
have risen from chromosomes, every organism
with chromosomes will manifest a mind, and the
boasted claim for exclusivity is wrong.
The Indian belief that wherever life exists
mind must also manifest, in however basic
form, is today being vindicated. Moreover, another
erroneous belief that mind needs brain
to manifest or that brain is equal to mind has
been shattered. Humankind is no doubt special,
but not in the old crude sense.Swami Vivekananda
says: ‘Although the Chitta [mind-stuff ]
is in every animal, from the lowest to the highest,
it is only in the human form that we find it
as the intellect. … Immediate salvation is impossible
for the cow or the dog, although they
have mind, because their Chitta cannot as yet
take that form which we call intellect.’ Modern
human knowledge coupled with ancient
wisdom is changing the way humanity looks at
itself and the world around, and the feeling of
being exalted and eminent in creation is marked
by humility and a sense of oneness. This perception
has also given humanity a sense of belongingness,
responsibility, and purpose, resulting
in efforts to protect, nurture, and enhance life
forms and the environment.
Nature, internal and external, is a continuum.
Through billions of years the basic building
codes of life, the dna, has produced the astounding
variety of life. But the dna and all that
is in the cell has risen from nature’s materials!
This great growth and movement of universal
life called evolution, through complex molecular
structures, has modified, adapted, and recreated
nature; but mostly modified, adapted, and recreated
itself by building better organized physical
systems that can work on nature. The entire
evolutionary process goes through tremendous
struggles showing awesome intelligence. Even
microscopic life modifies the world, and in turn
the world modifies life. For instance, oxygen, so
vital to most life forms, is produced and pumped
into the atmosphere by innumerable algae.
In a laboratory one can study the amazing
life of cells, how they divide and proliferate in
a nutrient rich liquid. The same processes are
repeated all over nature. On the macro scale,
another crucial factor called nurture exerts its
influence through living organisms. Nurture is
important to all life forms in order to compete,
survive, and propagate in a harsh world. But in
humans, endowed with the urge to learn, nurture
has taken a higher place than mere survival
and propagation. Learning and education have
been made the basic building blocks of society.
Education organizes information according to
logical structures and relationships that are acquired
by systematic exposure, teaching, and
study. In this process all information becomes
knowledge and results in expertise, more analytic
skills, and insights. Wisdom constitutes the final
maturing of these processes. Learning is a lifelong
nurturing process, as Sri Ramakrishna says:
‘As long as I live so long do I learn.’ This ability
to nurture the desire to learn and use learning for
better nurture has opened immense possibilities.
Today, the secrets of life are unravelling, and humankind
can even tinker with genes to produce
variations in plants and animals as well as create
beneficial medicines and materials.
One of the remarkable things in the universe
is the creation of a subjective world of tastes,
desires, fears, ambitions, love, and knowledge,
which emphasizes primacy of the individual.
Individuality is found everywhere in all species
that are composed of universal materials such
as genes, mind, nurture, and environment. In
humans the additional factors of race, sex, culture,
religion, language, wealth, education, and
profession are also crucial. Society provides an
unlimited amount of information, a small part
of which is used to generate additional information
and is projected out. In this vortex of information an inner world is forged through
dynamic universal materials and social factors.
Generally, people mistake their subjectivity as
absolute and consequently suffer, because in this
whirlpool of information the inner world is constantly
remodelled.
The dna is a molecular structure encoded
with information. Modern science speaks of
even atoms, sub-atoms, and energy as having information.
Matter or energy cannot be created
or destroyed, and that makes information indestructible
too. Information may be ordered
in some places, like a computer, that can be
deciphered and retrieved, and in other places information
is scrambled as in an atomic blast. But
what is scrambled can be unscrambled in time,
and what is ordered can become disordered and
scrambled. This process is continuous. Whatever
is consciously or subconsciously experienced is
information. It permeates everything: the gross,
subtle, inner, and outer worlds. Mind, so long
held as unique and mysterious, is made of matter,
not spirit, according to Indian philosophy
and science.
If we reverse the common sense view of this
profound truth and look at it metaphysically,
we will discover that information has created all
energy, matter, dna—all sentient and insentient
things. Some religious people would be happy
to conclude that creation has issued from the
mind of God. However, the ancient Sankhya
philosophers, thousands of years before Charles
Darwin and today’s scientists, taught that the
first evolute of Prakriti, nature, is mahat, universal
mind; from mahat evolves asmita, universal
‘I’ consciousness. Next, from asmita evolves
all matter, sense organs, mind, and matter in all
forms—in short, the universe. The universal
mind is the root of the universe, not the genetic
seed, and one finds distinct individuality even
in individual cells and the lowest forms of life.
Unlike the scientific belief of creation coming
out of randomness and chance, the ancient philosophers
taught that evolution is a well-ordered
system, because the Purusha, Self, is behind the
process, lending consciousness to it. The work
of Prakriti, or the purpose of evolution, is for
the bhoga, experience, and apavarga, liberation,
of the Purusha.
By evolving the chitta to take the form of intelligence,
Prakriti has conferred on humankind
a special ability along with the responsibility to
properly understand the universal mind spread
out as the universe and become free.
