No one can quite explain why certain people make huge efforts to help others, exercise their compassion and even offer their lives in what we would call heroic manifestations of humanity.
My view is that such endeavours are attempts, part instinctive but also perhaps part conscious, to escape from the fatalism which surrounds life. A human is born, lives, usually in some kind of servitude, breeds and dies. Not much free will is exercised during the majority of lives in this world. There is nothing one can do about his fate but accept it. The wild people are no less imprisoned by their environment and the conformity experience.
Yet people, occasionally, perform extraordinary feats of courage, through a brave heart; sometimes with what we can only call a moral objective.
There are many well-documented instances of altruism that are against the self preservation instincts that humans are supposed to possess and, even more important, appear to be fighting against fate, to achieve a kind of freedom of the will — over events, and over their own frail bodies. This is quite different from, and superior to, the freedom to roam — much closer to what St Paul meant when he wrote of the freedom we find in Christ.
The idea that people may be imbued with an idea of freedom which leads them to fight against blind, meaningless fate is a striking one. People fight so that they can overcome fate not to survive but really to live for ever even if they die. This seeming contradiction has given us the Archbishop Romeros of this world and the father Chencos and so many other unsung contemporary heroes of mine whom I miss sorely every time I think about self renunciation.
I am studying the resistance we offer to fate, and the freedom we secure by our efforts — the internal freedom which is the only true kind — we can learn lessons about the spiritual evolution of man. For he and she were once prisoners of a blind, purposeless and seemingly implacable fate, described in all ancient religious tracts or great cultural books such as the Vedas, Torah, Bible, Quran, Mahayana, Ramayana etc. Why did they not remain so? It was undoubtedly because in the early development humans studied the operations of nature, both frightening and benevolent, over long periods and with great attention, and came to the conclusion that nature was ruled by beings of great powers, who could be somewhat prayed and asked for things of natural powers.
The efforts of supplication, whether by sacrifices or prayer, might not succeed, but at least humans had a fighting chance. or so they thought. A comforting thought indeed. There was something they could do to alter or improve their lives. They did not have to submit without protest or struggle with events over which they had no control whatsoever. This self-importation of the notion of God in human brains, the discovery of religion and a consciously practised morality as a means to elevate the human condition was the origin of all progress. With it came the notion of freedom to struggle against adversity in all its forms, for if humans could improve their lot in some directions, they could do it in many others.
Thus human beings ceased to be wholly fatalistic and some of them became Promethean. Without this development I should think it highly unlikely that the race would exist today. As it is, our future appears limitless, if we retain our freedom of will and our refusal to accept material domination. But will we? Fatalism is deeply rooted in many people; it is a subjective propensity rather than an objective fact, and its expression takes many forms. In the ancient world it survived the discovery of gods. It grafted itself on to the new concept, so the fates came into existence as new forms of deity, themselves to be appeased, but to no purpose since they had no ultimate aim themselves and anyway were unappeasable. With the exception of the Aristotelian thought and the Greek revolution of Reason; It was fatalism which held back the world of antiquity from progress, and was in the process of destroying it when Judaeo-Christianity came to the rescue.
Two Millenia forward, fatalism is on the march again, in its new form of militant atheism. It has made big strides, particularly in the past decade, especially in higher education, and has captured key universities and education departments.
Modern materialist fatalism takes two particular forms. In science, especially in the current fashion- able subject, biology, it has produced Darwinian Fundamentalism. This is now taught as the explanation of everything by the process usually called the survival of the fittest, but might equally be called the destruction of the unfit. In academic philosophy, which has become a mere slave of Darwinism, it is called Naturalism, though there is nothing in human nature about it. It teaches that any phenomena not capable of a materialist or scientific investigation are outside the reach of philosophy.
This combined attempt by two of the leading academic ‘disciplines’ to banish not only metaphysics and religion but any form of spirituality or psychological truth from human activities will ultimately destroy all progress. It teaches that human beings are not essentially different from the lowest form of life, nor from a puff of dust or a lump of rock. The only thing which exists is matter, in various forms, subject to irresistible laws which determine existence or extinction. But existence has no purpose and extinction no significance.
Since the 16th and way into the early 20th century the Jesuit teachers said that if belief in God disappeared so that even its memory was lost from human hearts and minds; our race would become no more than a race of very clever animals. But in the future……our ultimate fate would be too horrible to imagine.
Yet Guru Rinpoche in the 8th century said: “I am optimistic for our growth and wisdom. My father is the intrinsic awareness. My mother is the ultimate sphere of reality. I belong to the caste of non-duality of the sphere and awareness. My name is the Glorious Lotus Born. I am from the unborn sphere of all phenomena. I consume concepts of duality as my diet. I act in the way of the Buddha.” Carrying a message and teaching for 55 years in Tibet, he firmly established the tradition of study, contemplation and meditation, there. Guru Rinpoche walked upon the entire land of Tibet and blessed all the mountains, lakes and caves as places for accomplishment. legend and religious belief has it that he concealed varieties of learning and spiritual treasures including texts, teachings, revelations, and he made prophesies regarding the future. Most notably that when the people were ready the knowledge will be revealed to them….
In essense Guru Rinposhe said that humans need to educate themselves, discover their inner and outer truths and be free through the revelation of wisdom. Pretty radical knowledge of Metaphysics for a man teaching and living in the East during the time of the great Darkness of Europe and the Western world. At that time the ultimate scientific achievment in Western Europe was the use of the horse collar for draft animals. Good agriculture….is important but let’s realize the debt we owe to the Tibetan traditions escaping to the West and the pain that today’s Tibet is feeling can be shared and lifted through our own acts of generociy of spirit and compassion.
I used to think the Jesuits were too pessimistic. But if it is true that modern atheism is just another form of fatalism, capable in the long run of destroying all progress, then we will become just ingenious brutes, though not so clever as even the child responding to St Augustine by the seaside of Carthage.
