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

that man
could well conquer, or cure, the ‘disease of death’, that mortality need not be
our destiny. The ultimate test of morality is how man handles mortality. It has
long been a subject of much comment and commentary. Most humans are too
‘busy’ to have any time to ‘think’ about such irksome matters. They live, as has
been said, as if they will never die, and die as if they never lived. Some are
so terrified that, as Henry Van Dyke said, ‘they never begin to live’. Goethe
said, “As long as you are not aware of the continual law of Die and Be Again,
you are merely a vague guest on a dark Earth”. An Italian proverb perhaps best
sums up how to expend the interlude between birth and death: “When you were
born, you cried and the world rejoiced. Live your life so that when you die, the
world cries and you rejoice”. We now have money as a new factor. With enough
money, we might soon be able to buy ‘immortality’. The question, according to
science, is not, ‘if ’ but ‘when’ man will achieve technological singularity, and
be able to cheat death by merging with the machine. We read predictions like,
‘If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to
download your mind into a machine, so when you die it is not a major career
problem.’59 Another says, “The human race will achieve immortality within
25 years as a result of minds being transferred into computers, and that robot
bodies capable of housing human brains could even be available by 2025”. By
that year, “Dying bodies could be replaced by robot vassals housing human
brains. By 2035, human minds will be transferred into computers, eliminating
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the need for a body altogether. By 2045, artificial brains will control hologram
entities”.60 Another probability, we are told is that in 30 or 40 years, we’ll have
microscopic machines traveling through our bodies, repairing damaged cells and
organs, effectively wiping out diseases. But we are also warned that, “In a mature
form, molecular nanotechnology will enable the construction of bacterium-scale
self-replicating mechanical robots that can feed on dirt or other organic matter.
Such replicators could eat up the biosphere or destroy it by other means such
as by poisoning it, burning it, or blocking out sunlight. A person of malicious
intent in possession of this technology might cause the extinction of intelligent
life on Earth by releasing such nanobots into the environment”.61 The
nanotechnology will also be used to back up our memories and personalities.
Craig Venter says that, “We now have the ability to transmit life at the speed
of light, just sending it through the computer. When we colonize Mars we
could [transmit] a new organism to the colony in Mars”.62 We read about other
real probabilities, such as ‘teleporting’,63 the ‘capability to design and create life
from scratch’.
These are all exciting, or, for some, paralyzing predictions. The lay
public is left wondering what to make of them, whether the awesome risks are
warranted and what kind of ‘humans’ their grandchildren are likely to be, and
what kind of ‘life’ they are likely to live. But we must get some clarity of what
‘biological immortality’ means. For example, would man survive and ‘live on’
despite a direct hit by a rocket or collision with a truck? Does ‘immortality’ mean
an impregnable and indestructible body? And suppose we get bored with the
‘tedium of immortality’, can we give it up and become ‘mortal’ again? In other
words, can immortality be temporary but reversible, a kind of default condition?
Would it assure us of perpetual physical health and unimpaired mental agility?
But then we cannot, at the most basic level, address any such issues without
knowing what it means to be ‘dead’. How can we choose life itself, let alone
endless life, without any inkling of what the alternative is tantamount to? Since
that knowledge is denied, at least, while being alive, we have no ‘logical’ reason
to change the status quo of life coming to close at a certain but unknowable time.
For a species that takes pride in its ability to make informed and ‘intelligent’
choices, our timeless desire to transit from a time-bound life to endless life is
perhaps the most ‘irrational’ of all our choices.
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Assuming that death is ‘bad’, undesirable, to be evaded in every way, the
big question then is this: would physical ‘immortality’ or unending existence
make man a better being, at peace with himself and with the world, and help him
to evolve in the right direction? Or would it, in the words of Bernard Williams,
mean ‘endless life [that] would eventually collapse into infinite boredom’64—and
possibly unhinge the psychic balance that makes us ‘human’? Put differently,
would ‘endless existence’, or a life span so long that ‘forever’ is pointless, transfer
the human into a humane being or, freed from the fear of being killed, turn him
into a demon? Can man be both moral and immortal? The implied assumption
about immortality is that we will live as the same person with the same body.
We will not be wasted by the daily dribble of death nor do we have to ruminate,
in Philip Larkin’s words, “Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making
all thought impossible but how, And where and when I shall myself die”.65 We
are not interested in ‘anonymous’ or ‘indirect’ immortality, which is inherent
in nature. All of us are ‘immortal’ through remembrance, memory, progeny,
writing, art, music, anything creative. Modern man is not interested in that kind
of ‘immortality’. He wants permanence of the physical status quo. He wants to
be immortal by just being alive without an end, and even if he has no idea what
to do with the present life, let alone eternal life. He is not interested in ideals or
artistic excellence or questions of morality, or even of ‘the Fate of the Earth’.66 We
have long convinced ourselves that, whatever death might or might not mean,
however dreary and distasteful life might be, the ultimate test of our creativity
is to destroy death. Tagore says, “We have come to look upon life as a conflict
with death—the intruding enemy, not the neutral ending—in impotent quarrel
with which we spend every stage of it”.67 Someone said, “We do not believe in
immortality because we can prove it, but we try to prove it because we cannot
help believing it”. Whichever way, the idea of ‘immortality’, which the serpent in
the Garden of Eden claimed was the word invented by it for ‘eternal life’, has long
been the stuff of epics, mythology, science fiction, and science. Some argue that
the continued existence of humanity far into the future is important not only
for the future but also for the present, and that “we are not individualists; we are
dependent for much of what we value in our lives on the survival of humanity
into the future”,68 and that, “even the present value of much that makes up our
lives depends on its continuation and development long after we are gone”.69 It
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means that if we seriously entertain any thought about ‘early extinction’ of the
human species, that by itself has a direct and immediate bearing on our lives.
No one really knows who the first human was, who, seeing someone
dead, wondered what happens hereafter, but that question has haunted mankind
down the ages. The mystic and mystery of death has always transfixed the human
mind, and although there has been remarkable unity about the nature of death
at the esoteric core of religious faith, there has been an equally striking diversity
of cultural beliefs at the exoteric level. At the behavior level, dying or killing have
always had something to do with human aggression, cruelty, and barbarism,
and even honor and heroism. Death, for the classical hero, was a ‘masked figure,
willing to struggle, face to face, one to one, for trophy or dust’.70 In the Katha
Upanishad, the young Nachiketa asked none other than the god of death, Yama,
“There is this doubt about a man when he is dead. Some say that he exists; others
say that he doesn’t. What is it?”
Put more personally, the question is, “Will I be there, and where will I be,
and what might happen to me, when it all ends down here?” There has been no
direct ‘satisfactory’ answer to that simple question since then, not even from the
god of death. We are left hanging in doubt. The result is that we meander and
muddle through ‘life’, not knowing what to do, or not do, to insure ourselves for
an uncertain and unknown future. ‘Surviving death’ has been viewed by men of
all times and cultures and civilizations as the final frontier, the ultimate challenge
to ‘being human’. What has maddened man is his realization that life really is
not ‘living’ but, in the words of Schopenhauer, at best ‘delayed dying’. But what
is ‘profoundly problematic’ is the pace of dying which varies from person to
person. Or, in the words of Tolstoy, the ‘dragon of death’ waiting to tear us apart.
Whatever the scriptures and sages might tell us, our practical experience tells us
that every breath we take delays that sinister shadow hovering over us. It plays
with us and ultimately triumphs, for, by being born, we already became its prey.
We do not mind being played with so long as we can prolong it, in the words of
Schopenhauer, “just as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible,
although with the perfect certainty that will burst”. Unlike other experiences, our
awareness of death is by analogy and observation of people dying. Other animals,
we are told, ‘know’ death only when they die, and that in fact enables them to
lead fuller lives, freed from the fear that the very next minute they might be dead.
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The fact is that no other aspect of earthly existence is as impenetrable
and impervious to human insight and imagination as the mortal triad of why,
when, and how ‘life’ ends, and what happens thence. The question is one of
‘absoluteness’. Is birth an ‘absolute’ beginning and ‘death an ‘absolute’ end? Are
we ‘born’ or ‘reborn’, and if it is the latter, what remains after ‘death’ and what
is the continuum between ‘birth’ and ‘birth’, and what moves on into the new
body? If the body is mortal, and the soul, as the Gita says, is birth-less, deathless,
immortal, and eternal, pure, then who is the ‘dweller in the body’ that
sheds off one body and assumes another? Is that ‘jivatma’? But it is a part of
the ‘paramatma’ and how can it be subject to birth, death and rebirth? Then
again, how does one put it all in the context of the Upanishadic mahavakya
Aham brahmasmi (I am God)? If the body disintegrates and gets absorbed into
the panchabhutas—earth, water, fire, air and space—, if the Atman or soul is
eternal and cannot be corrupted and sinless, if we are inherently divine, the
question is who or what is ‘reborn’, and who pays for past sins and pays back?
In other words, when we say we want to be ‘immortal’, whose immortality is
it anyway? All this spiritualism and sophistry apart, whatever the Gita or some
scripture might have meant, when modern man talks of ‘immortality’ he means,
as brutally laid bare by the student Thrasymachos to the philosopher Philalethes:
“Don’t you see that my individuality, be it what it may, is my very self? To me it
is the most important thing in the world. ‘For God is God, and I am I’. I want
to exist, I, I. That’s the main thing. I don’t care about existence which has to be
proved to be mine before I can believe it”.71 To which Philalethes replies: “It is
the cry [for immortality], not of the individual, but of existence itself. It’s the
intrinsic element in everything that exists”. Schopenhauer adds, “The effect of
this is to make the individual careful to maintain his own existence; and if this
were not so, there would be no guarantee for the preservation of the species”. So,
it could be that our love of our body, love of life, craving for sheer existence isn’t
all that selfish and could be turned around for common good.
When we look around nature, we are also befuddled about the ‘normal’
length of life spans. No one can tell why different species have different ‘normal’
life spans. For example, why do turtles and parrots live so much longer, ten times
than dogs, and why even within a species, is the length of life so indeterminate
and whimsical? We