Fate in the Chromosome

(6th January 2005)

Some recent discoveries by the scientists engaged in decoding and sequencing human genes may persuade us to reevaluate our traditional shibboleths concerningfate, predestination, freewill and the law of karma.Some genes, we are told, determine our mood swings,some inform us about the fatal diseases we will suffer from in future, some tell us whether we will be faithful or unfaithful to our respective spouses, some tell us whether we will be morbid, religious, rational or irrational and a couple of genes decide for us how many cigarettes we would smoke in a day. All these genes regulate our emotional, biological and spiritual activities and habits. If it has been genetically predetermined that a person will be so and so, can she be any different if she wants to? If she cannot, we have reasons to believe that our karmic destiny is encoded in our genes; that our destiny and our genes are in collusion with each other; that our genes act as the fifth columnists of our destiny.In this sense, each one of us is a more advanced form of automaton whose activities, preferences and abilities have already been programmed through millions of subatomic, inbuilt chips that ceaselessly replicate themselves like old compact discs “burning”their data into new compact discs. Then what about our free choice? Are we supposed to drift away to oblivion as flotsam on a stream without ever changing the course of our life? Mr. Dean H. Hamer, Director of the Gene Structure and Regulation Unit at National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, USA, who is working on spirituality genes, opines that we may be able to change the nature or quality of our genes by exercising our freewill and by putting in a amount of effort in a particular direction consistently. Through our effort, he avers, we can also activate our dormant genes. Say for example, Creativity gene can lie dormant till a person is past her middle age. She might have felt an inner yearning to be an artist, but her unfavourable surroundings and her preoccupation with some other activities might have diverted her attention from her inner calling. At a late stage, she might have found time and suitable circumstances to mobilize her whole effort to activate her dormant Creativity gene. Similar is the case with spirituality gene, known also as VMAT2 or God Gene. It may lie in a state of suspended animation for an unspecified period of time till a person feels his inner need for religion, for God and devotes himself whole-heartedly to spiritual pursuits, thereby activating his dormant Spirituality gene.If a certain gene containing a particular attribute is present in our genetic make-up, we are spontaneously attracted to that attribute. An “opportune” incident or occasion only makes us conscious of that possibility which our genetic system already contains.When young Vivekananda requested Sri Ramakrishna to persuade goddess Kali to give him some wealth, the old sage advised him to stand before the goddess and beg for wealth directly. When Vivekananda stood facing the goddess, he, instead of asking for wealth, asked for wisdom and enlightenment. What on earth could have prompted an impoverished young man to spurn wealth and desire for enlightenment? In the light of the Genomic findings, we may say that he spontaneously responded to his Spirituality potential that was in an advanced stage of growth. The biographies and autobiographies of great scientists, artists, spiritual masters,writers and philosophers corroborate this claim that they were spontaneously driven to their respective fields of activity in spite of many obstacles and persistent discouragement of their parents and peers.In the Chapter Six of The Bhagbad gita, Arjuna asks Lord Krishna whether all the good deeds performed, all the spiritual distance covered by a seeker of excellence are annulled for ever and irretrievable lost if his attention is diverted by world’sdistractions. Lord Krishna assures Arjuna that the deeds of a person are never annulled even when they are discontinued; that in his next birth the negligent seeker of excellence recollects his unfinished project and resumes where exactly he had left off; that he is given birth in such households as would be congenial to his inclinations in keeping with his attachment, indifference, to material things.It may be assumed that the level of achievement in the chosen areas is retained in its exact form in the genes of each individual; that our freewill and dedicated efforts are more or less guided by the presence of those chosen areas in our genetic codes,known in religious parlance as “latencies”. The scientists are revealing to us what we privately fee land what our religious scriptures repeatedly state. The genetic arrangement of the infant in the womb, as we now know, is not an extension of the genetic system of its mother; even the child’s blood group is most often different from its parents’ blood groups. If we proceed in this line of thinking, we may believe that the soul implanted in the womb by the invisible hands fashions forth the body in which it would have to inhabit in keeping with its level of attainment in the great chain of births; in which it would be able to carry forward its unfinished works and to actualize its long-nurtured aspirations; in which it would experience the required amount of pleasure and suffering on the strength of its past actions.Therefore, it may be said that the soul sculpts its coded destiny in the chromosomes, in the genetic hieroglyphs, in those cellular building blocks of its outer form, the body. We do not know the exact causes for which a particular soul incarnates in a particular body. The Vedantic theory of karma is only an attempt to make sense of the mysterious; to systematize the randomness of happenings and to give a sense of purpose to life. Now our insights into the structure and functions of genes have brought us nearer to this theory. According to the Vedantic karmic theory, the good deeds and bad deeds a person performs in one life by making use of her power of choice as a free agent determine the body her soul would inhabit and the family in which she would be born in her next life. In other words, she will be given according to what she deserves:suffering for evil deeds, relative comfort for good deeds and a mixture of both for the mixed deeds. Our ideas of heaven and hell will make perfect sense if we situate them not in an imaginary elsewhere but here on this concrete earth. We see people living in such conditions as match, even surpass our idea of hell; likewise, we find people living in such conditions as match, even surpass our idea of heaven.In most cases, it is not poverty or wealth, disease or good health, old age or youth and external circumstances alone which give people hell or heaven,but our in-built tendencies, such as, our proneness to envy and anger, our propensity for evil, our weakness for an extra ounce of pleasure heedless of consequences, our endless appetite for power, money and fame, and our desire to possess what rightfully belongs to others by neglecting what we possess, give us real hell sooner or later. On the other hand, there are people endowed with an ability to transform adversities into advantages, to cope with all fluctuations of fortune with stoic calm.Interestingly, the scientists decoding and sequencing the human Genome tell us that all these peculiarly human traits, which give us hell or heaven, are genetically grafted onto our mental make-up.