Ravana,powerful king of Lanka and a great warrior,caused his own downfall owing to his extreme arrogance.Duryodhana,another mighty king of Hastinapur,ultimately had to perish in the battlefield of Kurukshetra as a result of greed and jealousy.King Bali was exiled to the netherworld by Vishnu in his avatar as a dwarf,Vamana,all because of the kings untrammelled charity.
The characters mentioned above were no ordinary people,still they were overwhelmed by the captivating passion of their respective characters so much so that they failed to retract themselves even on repeated good advice.It is surprising that though charity is not known to be a negative quality,its excessive practice perhaps begets a suppressed ego in the mind,which is responsible for ones downfall.
Why do we let ourselves get lured by the negative If we look at the physical world,we find that negativity is present ordered things have shown the natural tendency to become disordered sooner or later.For example,a delectable snowcapped mountain melts spontaneously to bare its black rocky surface.A beautiful palace in course of time gets reduced to a heap of rubble.Theres entropy;theres chaos in the universe.
According to scientists,even the elegantly ordered universe will some time or other die,though it is likely to happen only in the distant future.The entire workable energy of the universe is gradually but decisively being wasted to a degraded form of energy or negative energy,a thermodynamic consequence.Thus,the very system of nature is so programmed that it is invariably destined to follow the path of negativity that is,towards total chaos in course of time.
It is interesting to see that the human mind which is considered to be the most ordered and conscious system in the world is not left untouched by the negative effect of nature.Negativity is all-pervasive,it seems.
In the Bhagavad Gita,Lord Krishna says that there are trigunas or three primordial qualities of nature,namely,sattva,rajo and tama gunas,and the human mind is greatly influenced by their effect.However,the impact of these gunas on mind is altogether different.Of the three,greed,anger and ego are the direct fallout of rajoguna which is also mentioned as ragatmaka.According to Shankaracharya,the connotation of ragatmaka is that rajoguna,unlike the other two,is prone to colour everything that it comes in contact with.Then it becomes virtually impossible for the doer to detach himself from the mirage-like negativity.Because of the entropy factor,the destiny of the material world is perhaps fixed as the latter has no inherent power to resist the destruction,whereas this can not be predicted with certainty in the case of human mind vis-a-vis rajoguna.The uncertainty marks the difference between the two worlds indicating that there is still hope for human beings to continue to evolve to higher states of consciousness.This is made possible because of the combined presence of will power and divinity within all human beings.And this is cultivated with sadhana or meditation with the guidance of an enlightened guru.