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

and inducing ‘good’ habits
might be possible. It is hard to imagine, much less anticipate, how and where this
brain-body-machine triangle will lead us.
The other road to ‘immortality’ is spiritual and scriptural, the emphasis
being on the ‘spirit’ rather than the body, not on overcoming death but on
eliminating birth. The Chandogya Upanishad says, “He who knows both the
transcendent and the immanent; With the immanent overcomes death; And with
the transcendent reaches immortality”. A distinction is made between ‘overcoming’
death in the immanent state of innateness, and reaching ‘immortality’ in the state
of being beyond. Prayers in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad sum up the spiritual
goals of human life to attain which a person seeks divine guidance. According to
the purifying chant, Pavamana-Abhyaroha mantra,31 what we call death is itself
the unreal; and what is other than death is the immortal, it is the Real. We
seek divine help to go beyond the unreal to the Real, which is the same as to
transcend from death to immortality. These words have special meanings with
highly philosophical connotations, and great rishis and sages have internalized
and expounded on them. In this light, it means that the world in which we are
living, the world of appearances, the phenomenal world, is the world of death,
Mrutyuloka, the realm of the dying, the world of unreality. The prayer is for one
to be transformed or transmuted, from the confused state of consciousness that
sees the unreal world as real, to the realm of Reality. That which appears to be
real, and yet, is not real—that is the Asat. The difficulty most people have is that
they cannot relate to something that is so real and tangible, the world we live in,
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the joy, the love, the pain, the suffering, all being called unreal. But what asat
or unreal does not mean is that the world is unreal; it is the way we see it, the
appearance that is unreal, because it is our senses, controlled by the mind, that
filter our comprehension and conception of the world, not our real Self. Unreal
is not non-existence; it is the colored and corrupted perception of existence. It
is this kind of existence or non-existence that drives our lives and incubates and
generates the plethora of desires.
As for the intergenerational dimension, the underlying idea of the words
mrtyor ma amritam gamaya, is that the world of ‘life’ is really a world of ‘death’
and seeks divine mercy to take us to the world of the Immortal, beyond the cycle
of birth and death. Socrates said, either intuitively or inspired by Upanishadic
thought, something quite remarkable, “All men’s souls are immortal, but the souls
of the righteous are both immortal and divine”. The Upanishads say, “When all
the desires that surge in the heart are renounced, the mortal becomes immortal”.
Without desires there is no more birth, and without birth we cannot die, and that
is immortality. The Kathopanishad elaborates, “The mortal in whose heart desire
is dead becomes immortal. The mortal in whose heart the knots of ignorance are
untied becomes immortal. These are the highest truths taught in the scriptures”.
When desire dies, when ignorance drops away, immortality is revealed, not
attained. The reason is that we are inherently, and always have been, immortal
and divine, but out vision is clouded and murky. The Indian mystic-guru Sri
Chinmay explains: “The outer life is humanity. The inner life is immortality. The
life around is reality. The life above is divinity. The life below is obscurity. When
divinity descends into humanity, the soul of humanity becomes hopeful. When
divinity descends into immortality, the soul of immortality becomes meaningful.
When divinity enters into reality, the soul of reality becomes fruitful. When
divinity enters into obscurity, the soul of obscurity becomes prayerful”.
Cornered, our ‘conscience’, or rather what little of it still remains, tells
us that we should rid ourselves of desire and ignorance, but how can we achieve
such a state of consciousness, especially since we have been in the vice-like grip
of these very two ogres for a very long time? Since the spiritual effort seems
too Sisyphean, and we cannot attain that state, we opt for other, easier, ways.
In fact, all our life, all effort—the ultimate desire—is to attain ‘immortality’ of
some kind or the other. We want to be remembered; ‘live’ forever, if not in our
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bodies, at least in other bodies or in others’ memories and minds. We want to
have children for immortality; we want to acquire property for immortality; we
want fame—or infamy—for immortality; our creativity—or destructiveness—is
for immortality. But it is far, far from what scriptures have alluded to. It is to
transit from one state of consciousness, death, to another, immortality, through
the eternity of creation. The Upanishadic prayer is for assistance in realizing the
truth that “I was never born, nor can ever die, as I am not the body, mind, and
intellect, but the eternal, blissful consciousness that serves as the substratum of
all creation”. What science is trying to do is to equate the body with the Self,
and present life with eternal life. That, coupled with the growing ascendancy
of avarice and malice in human affairs, raises a crucial question: How will the
possibility, let alone the probability of ‘immoral immortality’, of even tripling
or quadrupling of life expectancy, affect and influence human behavior? Which
of the two sides innate in the human—the deva or the asura, the god or the
demon—will come to the fore and dominate our personality? Without the fear
of hell or evil, will all those hidden and thus far hesitant desires burst out, and
make man truly and properly the ‘King of Beasts’? Or would man, freed at last
from the fear of death and knowing that he has all the time in the world to do the
things he wants to do, attain the goal of Self-realization, the Upanishadic goal of
human life? Or could it be that, as Billy Graham said, “We cannot truly face life
until we face the fact that it will be taken away from us”, leaving us to wonder
about what will happen if we know that ‘it will not be taken away’?
The awesome act of whacking out another’s life is not as fearsome or
forbidding as before. Is it just another symbol of violence in the world, as
foretold in Hindu scriptures (in the description of Kali Yuga), or is there some
far deeper message from nature? Suicide was never confined to the terminally ill,
weak-minded, mentally feeble, clinically or manically depressed people, or to
those weighed down by failed marriages, crippling debts, or crushing problems.
Hundreds of celebrities, stars, writers, and philosophers have at some point found
no ‘rationale’ to continue to live. Sometimes, it is not even a sudden or impulsive
decision. Virginia Woolf, who took her own life in 1941 at the age of fifty-nine,
wrote way back in her dairy in 1925, chillingly and almost casually: “I do not any
longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death… no leave-takings, no submission,
but someone stepping out into the darkness”.32 Another case is that of the actor
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Robin Williams (who committed suicide in August 2014), who brought such joy
and laughter to so many millions. Some successful and sane people are simply
concluding ‘life, that is not for me’, a kind of repudiation of one of our most
embedded beliefs: survival instinct. It seems that nothing is too trivial or terrible
to end a life. Benumbed as we are, trying to come to terms with this terrible
truth, we hear and read about the strides being made to realize man’s immortal
quest for immortality. There has always been, at least for an untrained mind, a fog
of ambivalence and ambiguity around mortality and immortality in both sacred
and secular thought. On the one hand, scriptures tell us that it is just another
phase in life akin to the passage from infancy to adolescence to youth to old age.
At the same time, the most common blessing in all cultures and the one that
saints bestow is ‘may you live long’—no one blesses and says ‘may you die soon’.
Imposing death—capital punishment—is deemed the highest punishment and
a deterrent. If death is not such a big deal, then why is any killing by the State
or society or even individual such a horrendous thing? Has the time come when
we should treat death—any death—as a ‘good’ thing for the individual as well
as for the world? It is not mortality that is a threat to mankind, but immortality.
Whether it is ‘making’ life in a lab, or seeking immortality, or destroying the
biosphere or global warming, human predation is now the most destabilizing
activity on earth. When God made man his regent on earth, and when nature
allowed him to lord over other forms of life on earth, the deal was that man will
be moral and remain mortal. Man is now reneging on that premise and promise.
These are testing times not only for man but also for God and nature. Such is the
baneful impact of human activity on earth that they cannot dismissively brush it
aside with, as Shakespeare (Puck; Midsummer Night’s Dream) puts it, ‘Lord, what
fools these mortals be!’ That ‘foolhardiness’ coupled with hauteur has become a
mortal threat and now carries cosmic consequences. No longer can morality be
left confined and defined by the present parameters. Even if we set aside potential
divine displeasure or the danger of crossing the line between the formidable
forbearance of nature and provoking nature’s vengeful fury, the fact is that unless
we reach some kind of a new conceptual and operational understanding on what
‘being moral’ has to be in the modern age, and whether mortality is simply a
personal matter or if it has social—and spiritual—implications, we will not be
able to make any headway in making human society peaceable and harmonious.
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We have never been sure how to face death: whether to look forward to it,
like Socrates did, or just await with resignation, or even, as Dylan Thomas (1951)
implored us, “Do not go gentle into that good night; Old age should burn and
rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Scriptures enjoin
upon us to turn the inevitability of death as a spur to be good, do good and
leave behind good imprints which, they tell us, will help us to go to heaven or
reap the dividends in another life. In other words, to be moral and to ensure a
better after-life. But the truth is that it has not worked; we behave as if we are
immortal and we spend much of life in grabbing, acquiring, and accumulating
goods and possessions regardless of morality or means. In short, death has not
dimmed or diluted greed, aggression, and hate, and we have remained captives
of anger, violence and malice. That paradox threatens to become a mortal peril
with science promising bodily eternity and man sliding inexorably into evil. And
that is a ‘deadly mix’ and how that will affect human nature is hard to predict
because we have no precedents to go by. In fact, it is the ‘fear of punishment—
by society or God—and ‘hope of reward’, here or hereafter, that keeps most
men ‘moral’. If that is taken away, what kind of a social—and spiritual—being
would man become? In fact, mortality might be the only ‘comparative cosmic
advantage’ we have over the angels. Socrates said that death is the greatest of
all human blessings. With so much pain and suffering in life, even a life
span close to that of a mini-Methuselah could become intolerable. We might
then long for death as we are longing for deathlessness. As Norman Cousins
said, the greatest loss in life is not death but what dies inside us while we are alive.
What dies inside is true morality. We still debate if morality—to be ‘naturally’
altruistic—is built-in or built-up, innate or inspired, a ‘social’ necessity or a
divine imperative.
Immortality of the Soul
Mythical tales of immortals are found everywhere, from Greek myths and
alchemists’ notebooks to modern movies and futuristic science-fiction books.
Ever since humans first saw ‘death’, our mortality has been front and center
in our long list of woes, the most enduring of the challenges. In every culture,
in every age, many people have attempted to cheat death. Qin Shi Huang,
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Emperor of China in the 3rd century BCE, feared death and desperately
sought the fabled elixir of life that would allow him to live forever. The biblical
Adam and Eve lost it. Alchemists have long tried to brew magic potions for
immortality. To live forever while keeping well and retaining the glow and
vigor