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

satanic plot,
or is it part of evolutionary dynamism gone astray? ‘Being like Him’, as the Bible
says, or, ‘For is He not all but thou’, as Tennyson says (The Higher Pantheism),
or, ‘Aham brahmasmi—I am God’, as the Upanishads say, has always been man’s
spiritual aspiration. Or, in the words of Aldous Huxley, “All is in all—that All is
actually each” (The Doors of Perception, 1954). The theory of evolution, in saying
that we all came from the same original source, rose from molecule to man, is
saying the same. The fundamental difference between that ‘aspiration’ and what
science is aspiring to do, is that the first one was a ‘to be’—a state, a condition,
something which continues unchanged through time, whereas the second is
‘to become’—an event, a transformation, a metanoia, a change of state. ‘Being
like Him’ is like ‘being’ a tiger, which is very different from becoming a tiger. In
seeking divine status, it is really the perks that matter, not the position. What is
ironic is that those very people who deny divine existence or say that He is dated,
if not dead, are those who want to make man a god. Mystics, saints, rishis, and
shamans throughout our troubled history have named our struggle as humans
in different ways—but they all pointed to the need for us to consciously grow
into our divine potential. As God within, it is, in reality He who is experiencing
through them what they experience in life, both pleasure and pain, good and
bad. What modern man is truly seeking is not the goodness of god, but His
divine powers and perks.
God or no god, the fact is that man has always felt shackled and humiliated
by his animal roots—Descartes called animals ‘soulless automata’—and by his
innate impermanence and imperfections. ‘Being a god’ is shorthand to become
free from these two limitations. Some, like the great Indian yogi Sri Aurobindo,
say that perfection and imperfection are the same truth seen from two sides.
Some say that we are, in a sense, a species with ‘perfection pending’, which
includes moral perfection. There could be a sinless man but not a perfect man,
save perhaps a full and direct divine incarnation. Even Jesus, as perfect a man
as could possibly be, before his crucifixion, said “… on the third day I shall
be perfected”.53 What we want is physical permanence and bodily perfection.
Many people, particularly the young, are suffering and dying under the thrall
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and torture of the phantasmic self they’re failing to become. Our obsession
with body-perfection is a travesty of the spiritual path. In fact, the Advaita
Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy says that there is no need to try to attain
anything, even perfection; each of us already is God. The famous Upanishadic
aphorisms, Aham brahmasmi (I am God) and Tat tvam asi (You are God), are
clear indications of how, at the highest level, we have viewed ourselves in our
earthly existence. The Bible too has several passages that humans can become like
gods. Some Christians (Latter-Day Saints) believe that our earthly experience is
to progress towards perfection and ultimately realize our divine destiny. Yoga, or
union or oneness with God, is in spirit the effect of attaining the loftiest layer of
consciousness. Hailed as the oldest scripture, the Rig Veda proclaims, Prajnanam
brahma—‘consciousness is God’. God himself, in Hinduism, has been called
Sat-chit-ananda, or ‘existence-consciousness-bliss’. Each one of us, as souls, are
individualized Sat-chit-ananda, according to Paramahansa Yogananda. The word
chit is also interpreted as sentience, and Atman as sentient life energy.
Contrary to what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, men have not forgotten
God. On the other hand, in a weird way, God is all there is in the human mind.
For the devout, He is the only hope, the only one that stands between them
and despair and death, the only balm for their wounded hearts. For the secular
and scientific, their aspiration and ambition is to erase the boundary between
man and god. It is not only godly powers that we now covet; we have come
to conclude that only by becoming a god can we solve all our problems. In
fact, some say it is inevitable and irreversible and, even more, that it is the only
way the human can reach his full potential. In short, they say divinity is our
destiny, and fulfilling it is not defiance of nature but a service to its intent. But
divinity is in each of us. There is nothing wrong with man wanting to actualize,
or realize, God as Sat-chit-ananda, that is, ‘truth-existence-consciousness-bliss’.
What is wrong is acquiring such powers without ‘becoming the being’, without
consciousness-change, or some kind of a rebooting, if you will. What science is
tempting us with, some say, is what Satan told Adam and Eve: if they would just
follow the ‘promise’ that Satan offered they could be ‘like gods.’
To be fair, we are not that ‘bad’; we don’t mean to sit on his heavenly
throne; ‘god’ is really a nickname, or code-word for want of something more
accurate, for something we want to be. We don’t want to be a god that appears and
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disappears, makes lightning or triggers typhoons, answers prayers or gives boons.
We don’t want to attain, much less maintain, a state of godly bliss, sanctity, and
purity. For we might say, and even believe that man is a spiritual being having
a human experience, but we cannot live without sin! For long we have had an
idiomatic expression for those who hold our fate in their hands, gods, and that
is now who we yearn to become. For instance, the ancient Hermetic discourse
called The Key says, “We must dare to say that the human on earth is a mortal
god, but that god in heaven is an immortal human”. What we have set out to
do is to bend fate and mend man into an immortal earthly god. Not only that,
like the ‘heavenly’ gods, we too don’t want to be accountable for our actions and
misdeeds! But the ‘being’ we want to turn into, let us be clear, thank God, is not
God; not the all-pervasive, all-knowing Supreme Being, the Paramatman, as He
is called in Hinduism, or Allah in Islam or Jehovah in Judaism. But then, when
scriptures and saints and mystics strive towards dissolving into divinity or union
with God, they precisely mean that very Supreme Being. Furthermore, it is a
state of consciousness when one loses all sense of the personal self, when there
is no longer any aham or ego. It is the aham that leads to ahamkara (arrogance)
and to agraham (anger). That is why, it has been said by yogis that ‘God equals
man minus ego’. Vedanta says that ego is the main culprit responsible for endless
self-centered thoughts, and the root cause of pain and suffering.
Ego, or ego-consciousness, is that which drives our material life and
makes us opaque to each other. It is both a necessity for survival and a barrier to
moksha, liberation. It is the core of our identity. Spiritual sadhana, what Vedic
rishis of India and Christian mystics and Sufi saints have strived to, is to dissolve
the limiting human self into the infinite divine Self. True to our times, we have
both trivialized and technicized this spiritual process. What science is planning
to do is to replace the divine by blending man and machine—which some call a
satanical machine, and some others, a spiritual machine—to attain the attributes
of gods or angels. Essentially it means that having, as we falsely think, transcended
the natural world we now aim to transcend the biological world and become
a kind of transhuman-‘god’, somewhat similar to what Dante experienced as
he entered into the sphere of the heaven, called ‘transhuman-change’. Another
analogy that comes to mind is Goethe’s Faust, who feeling like a ‘wretched fool’
and no ‘wiser than before’ tried to transcend human knowledge in order to gain
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divine knowledge. Transhumanists expect that artificial intelligence, the advent
of cyborgs, and uploading people’s minds into software will converge to make
the transition. Then, what do we ‘become’ and what will be our faith? The new
‘religion’ rooted in artificial intelligence is called the Way of the Future (WOTF),
whose aim is ‘the realization, acceptance, and worship of a godhead based on
artificial intelligence’. And yet not cease to be man. Avaricious that we are, we
don’t want to give up anything we have, including all that is distasteful about us.
We want to be ‘smart’ but still, when we choose, we stay stupid; we want to be
super strong but still feel the prick. We don’t mind becoming a ‘silicon body’, but
not hold back on sex.
The model that roughly resembles what we seek is that of the Greek gods,
or of the devas of Hinduism. What attracts us is that not only do they live forever
but also suffer from some of the same flaws and desires as humans, like anger,
avarice, favoritism, and jealousy, and are even able to have sex, licit and illicit.
‘Gods’, like us, regularly fight amongst each other and engage in petty bickering
and senseless quarrels. But it is not all that novel or inventive. In fact, in our
prehistoric times, the chasm between man and gods was narrow; they used to
routinely talk and walk with gods. Indeed we want to do better; to acquire their
traits, but with a twist. Gods are immortal; they, whether they like it or not,
cannot die. We want to keep death as a choice and be able to bring the ‘dead’ back
to life, or perhaps become the ‘walking dead’. It is driven by greed, our penchant
to always ‘have-it-all’. We must remember that what we think we lack or view as
limitations are parts of the cosmic puzzle. Different species have different lengths
of life for reasons we may not know. If one species alters its life span artificially or
unilaterally, then the finely tuned balance in creation and nature’s design strategy
that optimizes life support while minimizing the expenditure of energy, will go
horribly wrong. Even imagine if dogs have the same life span as humans. Perhaps
the world would be a better place but that is not possible! So is it not possible
for man to literally ‘become’ a god or any other species. What we should aim
to do is to be a ‘humane-human’, not transhuman. We should strive to become
more whole, more holy. We must also bear in mind that every species, however
minuscule or mighty, has a niche in nature. That this is particularly true in regard
to biodiversity is brought home by the new finding that the world’s lowly insects
are hurtling down the path of extinction which, in turn, ‘threatens the collapse
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of nature’, and that to arrest it, we will need to change our ways of producing
food. Furthermore, even if science has its way and Homo sapiens does become
Homo Deus, it still does not mean that we will all, one fine morning, wake up as
gods or that everyone born hereafter, in the lab or from the womb, will be born
with the body of a god. Scientific godhood, like safaris in space, will benefit only
a fraction of humanity. We are poised at a critical moment when, once again,
science is unleashing its prodigious creativity without adequate engagement and
careful thought. And even if we become ‘gods’, many may still look up to the
only ‘God’ they are accustomed to worshipping. In the human mind, there is no
contradiction between becoming a god and believing in God. As Albert Camus
said, “Nothing can discourage the appetite for divinity in the heart of man”. But
it is also good to remember that, as Emanuel Swedenborg reminded us, “a life
of kindness is the primary meaning of divine worship” (New Jerusalem and Its
Heavenly Doctrine, 1758). In other words, we can become ‘god’ by being good
to fellow-humans. This is what is implied in the Hindu aphorism ‘Maanava seve
madhava seva’, meaning service to man is service to God. It means, ‘you will use
your life in service; you will be in service to life’.
In the Melting Pot of Life and Death
Science is trying to hijack God, render Him redundant by taking control of
the two things He had absolute hold over and we had none: birth and death.
It has been, from the very beginning, that ‘giving birth’ is tantamount to being
‘given to death’. That is what modern man is intent on changing. We might, we
are told, soon be able to make life from scratch, even dispense with the male
to make a baby, and eventually even bring the dead back to life, at the least,
keep death