Inevitability

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Death is an inevitable component of life for  without it life is incomplete. But is birth inevitable? This question is a pastime of a polemicist. He will argue till he goes blue in the face that this earth is meant for life meant for all forms of birth. The amoeba to the Homo Sapien, the grass blade to the beautiful rose, the thorn bush to the snake all are born on this earth inevitably. The earth's ecology balances the sweet and bitter, the calm and the violent, the meek and the wild, the ambrosiac and the poisonous in her display of the creative system. 

Like the full moon and the new moon, light and dark birth and death are inevitable. if this balancing of life and death is an inevitable process of nature we can well understand why we have joy and sorrow, youth and old age , love and separation, laughter and tear etc, binaries of contrastive irresolution, which perpetually engage us with our reality. Man has busied himself right from the first flush of life to fight the contrarian dialectics without finding an acceptable solution. For this reason only arguments never cease, debates are never resolved, sorrow never ends. He fights hunger, disease and death: And how? He launches a never ending war  against all these life denying elements which are inevitably present in the human condition. The fight against death too seems to be an inevitable component of life . Is this also an inevitable built in factor of the entire process of inevitability?

This is the original sin of all our problems : We have to fight this inevitability. who created this inevitability of infructuous fight? Man thought it was God who for his own sadistic pleasure has made nature the vast and beautiful stage for our inevitable acrobatics of all varieties. Restlessly we fight to win our battles against the elements which every moment change the dynamic of our logic. If I love a woman and cannot have her I must elope with her only to cause a Trozan War. If  I cannot muster courage to forcibly take away what I love most for my soul's solace I may have to spend the rest of my life on a hilltop in meditation on futility thereby wasting a  life inevitably. If I desire another's territory I attack, unsure of victory, but attack I must to conquer my inevitable and unseen enemies. If I die people will call me  hero , if I return in one piece garlands will weigh me down while my jealous internal enemies will plot for my fall. Caesar would die saying 'et tu Brute'.  Destiny of man is determined by this inevitability of man's dream to conquer his 'enemies'. The dream is also inevitably born with man for he who does not dream is no man. This dream gives him the energy to fight, at times his own instincts.

Inevitability is recognised by the human intellect as divine determinism. Man is born, some people argue and rightly so, with a pre-determined destiny. This leads often to fatalism and consequent inaction and surrender to forces above. Man's mythic imagination structuralizes a post-mortem world which regulates man's dream and his fighting instinct. He simply atones for his unremembered sins of a previous birth, a life lived somewhere of which he has no memory. He runs to astrologers to know in advance the morrow. Astronomy stems from fatalism and it studies the luminosities  above and their effect on man on earth. Those who believe in fate   believe in a pre scripted life. And this belief reduces the strength of mind to fight against the 'enemies' and dismisses dreams. Man becomes an instrument on which  unseen fingers play a tune. He does not become an agent in the earth which is a theatre of becoming. But the world today has dispelled all kinds of determinism ( except in the world of physics where theories of the Super String are now raising doubts) although the religions still maintain their strange hold on man's free will, the will that denies inevitability.

Nothing in the world is inevitable, except death which completes life. We make things, ask questions dream of absurd things and pursue them with all our energies. If we fail our efforts are to blame. If we succeed our efforts, intellect, tenacity of purpose should be lauded. Man is the cause of all happenings in the life on earth. His fight to defeat death is on, death in all its manifestations. One day the Homosapien will be Homodeus. Man should fight inevitability by his will to make things happen for He is the Maker of Everything.