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

contributor to the global burden of disease and injury by
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2020.36 According to the Commission for Road Safety, fatalities on the road are
estimated to go up to 19 million from the current level.
The core of the problem is that man chases the mirages of permanence
and perfection, which are the attributes of the divine. What Bernard Shaw said
about love applies to all life: perfect love is possible only via correspondence.
Death is the most frequently happening ‘happening’ in the world. In the year
2012, an estimated 56 million such ‘happenings’ happened. But we behave as
if it is someone else’s ‘happening’, another person’s sorrow. It has been said that
‘the classical man’s worst fear was inglorious death; the modern man’s worst fear
is just death’.37 The paths towards that end have to be four-fold. One is to freeze
the status quo: to simply go on ‘living’ in this body and on this earth. Two, to
‘rise again and/or ‘live’ in different bodies with some sort of continuity like a
soul, atman, spirit etc., which is the essence of religious ‘immortality’. Three,
to live forever through some sort of ‘legacy’: biological, through children and
blood-ties, cultural, like art, literature, and so on. The fourth is a modification
or ‘improvement’ over the first, in fact of all the above, which is what science is
trying to do. It has convinced itself that bridging the gap between life and death
is the only true measure of success; everything else is a detail. It is to make ‘death’
not final but temporary, restore the dead to life after a period of deep slumber
through technologies like cryonics.38 The curious question is: If someone who
has been ‘dead’ for a century or two comes to ‘life’, what kind of person will he
be? Will he carry and retain all his characteristics, say stammering or alcoholism,
or say spouse-bashing? Or will he be a different personality? If he is ‘different’,
how can he be the same person? And if he is the ‘same’, mentally, psychologically,
and habitually, then what is the point? For the whole idea of immortality is to
overcome the state “in which they strive to devour each other”, to borrow the
words of the 19th-century thinker Nikolai Fyodorov, or overcome their ‘state
of cannibalism’. If human consciousness remains frozen along with the body,
then any such ‘immortality’ would be the grossest monstrosity. We want to give
‘death’ to death and substantially shrink old age. Woody Allen simplified how we
want to deal with death: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work;
I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live in the
hearts of my countrymen; I want to live in my apartment”. As of now people do
die in abodes and ‘apartments’, and dying still means a physical process. We live
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and die in the ‘world of mortality’, live in the world of physical reality to which
the laws of ‘Increasing Entropy’ apply, and a world which ends at the moment
of death. When that ‘moment’ arrives, only the good we do helps. In Engaging
in Bodhisattva Behavior, a Tibetan Buddhist scholar writes, “So, for the sake of
this impermanent life, I’ve caused so much negative karmic force to build up…
When seized by the messengers of the Lord of Death, What help are relatives?
What help are friends? Only my positive karmic force will provide me a safe
direction then”.39
While seeking and searching for immortality to the species, what modern
man has done is to turn ‘death’ itself into the ultimate weapon against another
man. ‘Killing’, in essence, induced or enforced ‘deliberate death’, is fast becoming
a preferred choice for dispute settlement, a fevered finale to personal frustrations
and inadequacies in the human world. What we forget is that, as Bernard Rieux
says, ‘the order of the world is shaped by death’. For some kind of ‘killing’ takes
place all the time, in nature, inside our own bodies. Doctors ‘kill’ pathogens,
bacteria, and viruses to cure a disease. We terminate and exterminate ‘life’ in our
life every day in the guise of self-preservation, but actually for supremacy. We
can ‘kill’ without actually killing; and it does not have to be one lethal blow. We
can ‘kill’ with a withering glance, a curt dismissal, a cutting word, even brusque
body-language; each time anything makes us ‘feel small’, makes us say ‘I wish I
were dead’, something does ‘die’ inside. We can ‘kill’, not necessarily by ‘taking
a life’, but by taking away one’s dignity and self-respect. And we can ‘die’ drip
by drip, until actual ‘killing’, or death in any other way, becomes a breather. All
‘killing’ is of course not the same. Killing a mosquito is not the same as killing
a man; although the mosquito might think otherwise. It might think, ‘I am
just acting according to my nature and I will die if I don’t’. Man has no such
alibi. The human is the only one responsible for unnecessary, unwarranted, and
unnatural killing in nature, particularly in relation to other species. But man
alone is capable of turning ‘killing’ into an act of mercy, like in euthanasia. Man
alone also kills for profit, pleasure, and for fun and for control. Other animals
more routinely kill, but often no more than needed for filling their stomachs.
After his famous ‘anaconda and earl’ experiment, Mark Twain said, “The fact
stood proven that the difference between an earl and an anaconda is that the
earl is cruel and the anaconda isn’t; and that the earl wantonly destroys what
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he has no use for, but the anaconda doesn’t. This seemed to suggest that the
anaconda was not descended from the earl. It also seemed to suggest that the earl
was descended from the anaconda, and had lost a good deal in the transition”.
Indeed, there are few, if any, causes or reasons, for which man does not kill
anyone who is deemed an obstacle or inconvenience, not even his own children
or parents. It is the ‘circumstance’, the context, which determines, to a large
extent, any act’s moral standing. But ‘circumstance’ is so circumscribed, so elastic
that, without right intent, it can become a cover. And in the English language,
at least, ironically, as a kind of Freudian slip, ‘killing’ also means a ‘great success’;
we say ‘we made a killing’ when we hit the jackpot.
We are ‘killers’ in an other way. We bemoan how short-lived humans are but
what we do is to ‘kill’ that precious time in worthless viewing and doing. The real
danger, the terrifying prospect is that while for much of human history ‘survival’
was the default mode in human cognition, what neuroscience calls default mode
network, ‘death’ seems to be fast replacing it. One of many paradoxes that dot
the modern human mindset is that despite his growing self-love and selfishness,
his survival instinct is faltering, like to some extent the maternal instinct.
Perhaps it is the price we are paying for crossing the ‘Lakshmana rekha’, or the
forbidden line, in our ceaseless endeavor to become ‘immortal’ and to enhance
our brain-led ‘intelligence’, more particularly by merging or integrating human
and machine intelligence. What Adam Smith said about division of labor in a
mechanized factory, in which most workers perform ‘simple operations’, applies
even more to our increasing reliance on machine intelligence; that it would make
workers “as stupid and ignorant as possible for a human creature to be”.40 In the
case of division of labor, it is because they lose the ‘habit of exertion’; in regard
to excessive reliance on machines to do much of our work, it will be because
much of our related faculties atrophy. If we believe that the earth is a living
organism, as the Gaia hypothesis posits, and that nature has some immutable
laws that govern and keep harmony in the cosmos, then it could be that in so
doing, human ‘intelligence’ has become an intolerable threat to nature. In the
natural world, ‘intelligence’ above that which is necessary but not necessarily
sufficient for sheer survival is programmed to extinguish itself. ‘Being too clever’
is too much of a peril to the exquisite balance in the world. What could be more
ironic that a species supposedly acquiring the know-how to cure the ‘disease
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of death’ is turning death into a default-mode of that very ‘intelligence’. Our
‘intelligence’, the one which we prize most, the one with which we differentiate
and discriminate and look down upon some and venerate some others, the one
with which to conquer the stars and make man an immortal superman, is the
issue, the problem and obstacle. It is this intelligence that has paved the way for
the much-talked about ‘Sixth Extinction’, for turning the human into the most
feared life-form on earth and into what Edward Wilson called, an ‘environmental
abnormality’. Nature’s answer is what we ourselves are doing with our brain.
While we are trying to enhance its power and reach, nature is ‘fixing’ it so that
every time we face a ‘problem’, an unwelcome or irksome or painful situation, we
turn to self-extinction as a way of solving it, if not salvation.
Pandemics of Suicide and Homicide, and the ‘War’
Whatever are the contributory causes, the reality is that it is leading a growing
number of people to become, in the words of Barbara Gowdy, “enraptured by
the idea of no longer existing”.41 At a time when many also believe, as Sartre said,
that ‘existence precedes essence’, that good living is more important than good
life, such an ‘entrapment’ is a telling testament to how adrift, anchorless, and
empty human life has come to be. In the phenomenal world, which is the world
as it appears to be, mystery and misery coexist: the mystery of ‘life’ and the
misery of living. The question that we have never been able to answer is: Are we
for ‘real’? Or are we an ‘act’? The tension between the two has always held sway
over man’s mind, but some kind of delicate détente has prevailed for much of
human history. However, that has virtually come apart in modern times, leading
to an almost irresistible cupio dissolvi, a ‘desire to be dissolved’, a desire to go
‘anywhere outside this world’. In the final reckoning, it is ‘desire’ that is destiny.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad eloquently cautions: “You are what your deep,
driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny”. If ‘dissolution’ is our collective desire, so will
it be. Desire becomes, after a length of time, involuntary and indistinguishable
from thought and belief. What we believe we will become, we become. It is
possible that, although death is not a matter of perception but physical, we all
die, because for over a million years we made up our minds that we all die,
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and therefore we die, actually die. That ‘belief ’ or that ‘thought’ is not only
mental; it is embedded in every cell in our body and at the deepest layers of
our consciousness. That is what those living in the Immortality Commune of
Gavdos, a tiny island off the coast of Greece, believed in. The causal question is:
Why is the contemporary human, who thinks he has mastered nature and who
now wants to master mortality itself, thus far the sole sanctuary of ‘gods,’ so
disillusioned, distraught, discontented, and in such despair about his lot, and in
such a state of restless rebellion against the present? At this pivotal and perilous
point in human evolution and history, the truth of the matter is that whatever
constitutes the human essence, whether we are a mere mortal body or an infinite
immortal soul, modern man is battling several crippling contradictions—selfcenteredness
and self-destruction, narcissism and nihilism, fear of ‘imminent
implosion’, and aspiration for a ‘god-like’ existence, ugly affluence, and abysmal
poverty. And this battle or ‘war’ is taking a heavy toll on the human psyche,
personality, and inner harmony.
What we witness in the world outside by way of restlessness, angst,
insensitivity, intolerance, meanness, and senseless assault on nature, are the byproducts
of this war. Even without our being fully conscious, the silent pandemics
of suicide and homicide are sweeping across the globe, and while the thresholds
of restraint become lower with every passing day, the triggers are also getting
more and more trivial.42 It is contemporary, but foreseen long ago. In fact, one of
the characteristics of the current Kali Yuga, as it was written in Hindu epics and
scriptures, is that “people will have thoughts of murder for no justification, and
they will see nothing wrong with that mindset. Family murders will also occur.
People will see