The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

becomes immortal. These are the highest
truths taught in the scriptures. The very two things which we are summoned
to overcome—desire and ignorance—are the very two things we are hostage to.
Our feverish pursuit of scientific, not spiritual, immortality throws up another
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huge downside. It is siphoning off vital intellectual and financial resources at the
expense of more worthy and socially imperative priorities that can lift the lives of
billions of people from subhuman misery.
In any case, immortality, in its literal strict sense, is impossible, pie in
the sky. Even if one lives for thousand, or ten thousand, or a million years, he
will still not be immortal. One day, he too will ‘die’. In the Mahabharata, the
great Bhishma was given the boon to choose the time of his death (Ishtartha
mruthyu), not deathlessness. Although his mother was a goddess, River Ganga,
he was nevertheless born a human, and could not wriggle out of reach of death.
Even if the current limit to human life extends from 120 years to 1,000 years
or more, a person can still be killed or die from disease or from an accident. We
tend to think that it is simply a radical reflection of what is already happening:
humans have been living longer and longer all the time incrementally, much
more in recent times. But it is not that simple. Although some zealots say that
there is no biological limit, new research suggests that humans can only live so
long, and we are reaching the natural biological limit. For other researchers,
“If a human life span was extended beyond 125 years, it would require other
scientific interventions beyond improving someone’s health”.3 It means that
any significant extension, let alone immortality, can only happen through nonbiological
ways. It is then nonhuman life, not human. As we now define it to be.
And the children of these ‘immortals’ will not be born ‘immortal’, unlike gods
or angels; they will have to start all over again or else we will have the perverse
situation of ‘immortals’ having to bury their own children and grandchildren.
The other important question is if some humans acquire superhuman abilities—
and live like the biblical Methuselah for 969 years, or like Lazarus Long of
Robert Heinlein’s science fiction novels, live up to 2,000 years—how would they
behave? How would it affect their mindset and consciousness? Would they be
more responsible, kind, and compassionate, or more reckless, predatory, and
cruel? Would the climate crisis, for example, be abated and or get aggravated?
Will inequity, indifference, intolerance and injustice and selfishness become less
or more? If they cannot ‘die’ but get bored to death, would such humans seek out
and check into ‘killer clinics’ to end their lives? Already, even with our current
life span, some apparently healthy people are seeking help to end their lives, out
of sheer fatigue or revulsion with what the human condition has come to stand
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for. A good way to look at it is to see what happened since 1900 to now: average
life expectancy has doubled but human behavior is no better; if any, it is far
worse. There is no reason to believe it will be any different if some of us live up
to a thousand years. The bottom line is this: without consciousness-change that
involves a radical reduction in the leverage of our mind, a de facto immortal man
is likely to be far more mean, malicious, and malevolent. That, in turn, could
provoke a more violent and vengeful reaction. As a species which prides itself
to be the only one capable of reflection, reasoning, and rationality, we should
carefully contemplate and cogitate on how we are trying to transit through the
human condition.
In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, there is a famous mantra called the
Pavamana mantra: Om, asato ma sad gamaya; tamaso ma jyotir gamaya; mrtyor
ma amritam gamaya. It is loosely translated as, “Om, from falsehood lead me to
truth; from darkness lead me to the light; from death lead me to immortality”.
Some scholars substitute the word ‘through’ for ‘from’ and say that we cannot get
away from illusion, darkness or death. This mantra captures the essence of the
human spiritual journey. Although they look different, many interpret that all
three portions of the mantra have the same meaning, and complement each other.
Death here symbolizes not only the end of a life, but also darkness, delusion,
untruth, and the unreal. Immortality signifies truth, light, self-realization, and
eternal life of the Atman or soul. The mantra is not just talking about physical
death, but also the ones in our minds. Man might yet ‘conquer’ death, but could
still lose his soul; and what earthly good would that do? The fact of the matter is
that we cannot comprehend death unless we comprehend life. Death becomes a
‘problem’ if life is viewed as a problem, and life becomes a problem if it is viewed
as inane, or as one might like to call it, an insane interlude from birth to death.
The Mystery of Mortality
We might not know what is worth living or dying for, but death has been so
traumatic for so long that we know not if there was a time when, as Thomas
Hardy tells in his classic poem Before Life and After (1909), “If something ceased,
no tongues bewailed; if something winced and waned, no heart was wrung; if
brightness dimmed, and dark prevailed, no sense was strung”. But the ‘mystery of
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mortality’ has always fascinated and frustrated man. Deep within, we know that
we too will follow, but we scarcely glance at those who have gone before. Human
culture itself is ultimately an orchestrated, symbolic defense mechanism against
the awareness of our inevitable mortality, which in turn acts as the emotional and
intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism. The level at which human
consciousness functions in most people has never allowed us to accept death with
a certain measure of equanimity. The Buddha said, “Death is only the temporary
end of a temporary phenomenon” For Tagore, ‘death is not extinguishing a light
but putting off a lamp because dawn has come’. We wish we could adopt and
maintain such an attitude, but when death does strike and snatches a loved one,
all our restraint goes up in smoke. Even great people and avatars are not immune.
In the Ramayana, when Kumbhakarna (brother of the ‘evil’ Ravana and of the
virtuous Vibhishana) dies on the battlefield and Vibhishana is grief-stricken,
Rama consoles him and says that death is inescapable for everyone born. But when
his brother Lakshmana is mortally wounded later, Rama becomes inconsolable
and even says he will take his own life. In the Mahabharata, Lord Krishna teaches
the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna. One of the main messages he offers is to treat death
with equanimity, as it is just another passage. But when Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu
is killed, Arjuna becomes distraught with grief and vows vengeance. All teachings
of Krishna seem to have simply gone out of the window, as though Arjuna never
heard them—that death is but another phase of life, no different than discarding
of worn-out clothes; that only the body ‘dies’, not the soul; that we should not
grieve over that which is inescapable. However much one gets prepared, we are
never prepared enough when the creepy shadow of death comes close. What
baffles and beguiles us is not only death’s invincible inevitability—that someday
we will turn ice-cold—but also the unsettling uncertainty about when and where
death will lay its icy hand on our brow. There have always been masters like
Swami Vivekananda and Adi Sankara, who just knew. Vivekananda had not only
said that he would not cross forty years, but also that he ‘knew the time and place’
of his death. The point is that knowing made a difference to their life, not to their
death. The fact is that there is not much room in death but a lot in life, and
that is the difference between life and death. Then again, as Socrates said, after
being sentenced to death and minutes before the hemlock took effect, “Which
of these two (life and death) is better God only knows”. One of the ‘sacred cows’
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of human thought, for which there is no evidence, is that animal consciousness
cannot comprehend death. Ernest Becker, in The Denial of Death (1973), reflects
this view. “The animals don’t know that death is happening and continue grazing
placidly while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective
and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the
same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is
over. But to live a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting one’s dreams and
even the most sun-filled days—that’s something else”.4 The ‘animal’ we associate
with a lower form of life, but it is also said that ‘what we here feel as ‘animal’ in
quality and nature is the basic element in which the dead live. The kingdom in
which the dead live can easily be changed when it enters into us; what is higher
life in yonder world can become lower when it is within us on earth’.
The Moral Purpose of Mortality
Mortality has failed its practical purpose: to give us a ‘moral’ meaning to life.
Instead of inducing himself to look at the ‘finiteness’ of life as an incentive to
spend ‘quality time’ on earth, and to make his temporary presence of permanent
value, man has turned that ‘perspective’ to make life itself finite-less, a license for
profligacy. Instead of spending the ‘limited’ time to prepare ourselves to ‘meet
our maker’, we are doing our best to postpone permanently such a tryst. Emily
Dickinson wrote, “Because I did not stop for death; he kindly stopped for me”.
Now we do not want any such ‘stops’; we want sops to live forever. It all comes
down to ‘perspective’ and ‘practice’. ‘Perspective’, either as a means for harmony
in life, or to make life itself everlasting, or so long that death ceases to be a
factor in life. ‘Practice’, or abhyasa in Sanskrit, is needed to achieve anything
in life, or even to ‘die’ with dignity. Plato wrote, “True philosophers are always
occupied in the practice of dying”. Human response to the inexorability of death
has, over the ages, ranged widely, from outright denial to defiance, from ‘accept
and make merry’ to outright combat and conquest. And we tend to look at an
other’s death from our perspective. Confronted by conflicts and contradictions
all around, man’s mind has found an ingenious way to outflank them: it is to
acknowledge its inevitability, at least in the immediate future, but to indefinitely
defer its applicability to his own life. In other words, death cannot be wished
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away; but shut the ‘doors of your mind’ to your own death. But, at another level
of consciousness, man continues to wonder: Is this life all that there is? What
happens to me when I ‘die’ and where will I be in the hereafter? Is death the
enemy of life and who ordained it that way? The state of the mind of man is
well captured by William James in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1901–1902), when he wrote that “the fact that we can die, that we can be ill at
all is what perplexes us; the fact that we now for a moment live and are well is
irrelevant to that perplexity”.
Along with the evolution of the human brain and dramatic changes in
the modes of living, human perceptions of death in life also changed. In his
book The Hour of Our Death, Philippe Ariès emphasizes “the relationship
between man’s attitude towards death and his awareness of self, of his degree
of existence or simply of his individuality”. According to him, the concept of
death as a familiar, anonymous event was replaced by suppression of death. In
the very early human communities, the motif was ‘death-in-life’, and death was
marked by a simple, public ritual largely controlled by the dying person, which
continued till the Middle Ages. With increasing individualism and weakening
of traditional communities, an individual life was no longer subsumed in the
collective destiny of a group, and that led to a shift in the focus of redemption
from group ritual to personal conscience. With the early advent of science, death
came to be perceived, not as part of a continuum, but as a rupture or a break
of life, something very unpleasant, a matter better put out of the mind. With
industrialization acquiring a firm hold over human culture, the focus of death
shifted from the ‘dying individual to the death of one’s significant others’ and
‘death