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

the jailor explained, was slowly rising up from the legs and had reached up
to his waist when he said those words. He was to die when it reached his heart,
and so, when he said those words, both his heart and brain were ‘normal’. He
was not dying of any disease, nor was he mentally impaired. And so, if he was
saying what he wanted to say and if there was no reason for him to make it up, it
means the great man could not think of anything else to say or he did not want
to say anything profound or philosophical. Buddha’s last spoken words were
translated as, “Be a lamp or light unto thyself ”, or “Work hard to gain your own
salvation”.
Nostradamus reportedly remarked, “Tomorrow I shall no longer be
here”. Voltaire, when asked by a priest to renounce Satan, said, “Now, now, my
good man, this is no time for making enemies”. Thomas Carlyle’s last words
were: “So, this is death. Well!” Salvador Dali said, “I do not believe in my death”.
Emily Dickinson’s were: “I must go in, the fog is rising”. The famous dancer
Isadora Duncan apparently said, “Adieu, mes amis. Je vais à la gloire!” (Farewell,
my friends. I go to glory!). Although some say that anyone shot directly in the
chest will not be able to utter a single word, it is popularly believed that Gandhi’s
last words were “Hey, Ram!”, the name of one of the avatars of Lord Vishnu. At
least, that was his ‘last wish’. Some great men ‘know’ that death is at hand, and
express a wish how they want to go. Shortly before his death, Gandhi wrote, “I
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have expressed my wish at prayer that, should someone kill me, I should have no
anger in my heart against the killer, and that I should die with Rama Nama on
my lips”. Some are able to look their killer in the eye and show no fear. Ernesto
Che Guevara, the iconic Marxist Cuban revolutionary leader, moments before
his death and facing his assassin, Mario Teran, a Bolivian soldier, when asked if
he was thinking about his immortality, replied that he was thinking about ‘the
immortality of the revolution’ and said, “I know you have come to kill me. Shoot
coward, you are only going to kill a man”.82
Death, it is said, is a great leveler. It has intrigued and inspired the greatest
of our minds, and poets like Keats and Emily Dickinson and philosophers like
Carl Jung and Tagore. It is not a coincidence that they all had what we call
‘near death experiences’. Direct and intimate exposure to death does deepen and
heighten one’s sensitivity of death, almost in a mystical way. Keats, who nursed
his mother and brother as they succumbed to tuberculosis, himself died of the
same illness at the ridiculously young age of 25. But it was such suffering that
flowered his genius and yielded masterpieces like Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on
Melancholy and Ode to Autumn. The pivot of his poems is the thought that ‘one’s
sense of mortality deepens one’s appreciation of beauty and that life accrues value
precisely to the extent that one intensely experiences its fragility and transience’.83
And, “by embracing mortality—not just passively accepting or stoically resigning
himself to it—Keats discovers that autumn has its own music”.84 Through his
life-long brushes with death, Keats came to the realization that death is the
‘mother of beauty’ and that the music of mortality can only be heard when one
not only accepts death but embraces it. Keats’ work can be seen as an attempt
“to alter the very paradigm of what constitutes the spiritual, just as Einstein
would later redefine space”.85 Themes of death including her own, after death
and immortality, run through much of the work of Emily Dickinson, such as
“Because I could not stop for death”; “I Heard A Fly Buzz-When I Died”; “After
a Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes”; and “I Felt A Funeral In My Brain”. Her
best works were written after the death of a close friend or family member. In
her vision, immortality is a state of continuous birth, death, and rebirth, and as a
state of existing in the hereafter, or in Heaven. Rabindranath Tagore’s fascination
with death, which was a constant theme in his meditations, had its roots in the
suicide of his sister-in-law and the muse of his life, Kadambari Devi, when she
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was 25 years old (and Tagore was 23), and in the sixty-hour period when he was
hovering between life and death in Shantiniketan in Bengal, India. Carl Jung
too experienced another such ‘brush’, came ‘to the edge of death’, which made
him realize that death is a change of consciousness, not the absolute termination
of life, and that “a practical continuation of life of a sort of psychical existence
beyond time and space”86 is possible after death. He also held the view that
communication and contact between the living and the dead in some special way
is possible in the immediate aftermath of death.87
When we feel life is unfair, and that some have all the luck and enjoy good
health and good fortune while we are stricken with ill-health and misfortune, it
gives some deviant delight to remember that all that will be of little avail when
death comes calling. Yet again no two are all equal in death too. Some deaths, and
the way some die, can change or chart the course of history. Often how a ‘great’
man dies has much to do with his legacy of greatness. Had they died ‘normally’
they might have been quietly consigned to oblivion. In many instances, the way
they died or were killed for a cause, we remember as much, or even more, as what
they accomplished in their lives. Abraham Lincoln, JF Kennedy, Martin Luther
King, and Mahatma Gandhi spring to mind. Martyrdom is integral to their
greatness. It raises the question: Should one die violently to be acknowledged
as a great man? Some have even yearned to be killed. Gandhi said, on the night
of 29 January 1948, less than twenty hours before he was shot, “If I die of a
lingering illness, nay even by as much as a boil or a pimple, it will be your duty
to proclaim to the world, even at the risk of making people angry with you, that I
was not the man of God that I claimed to be. If you do that it will give my spirit
peace. Note down this also, that if someone were to end my life by putting a
bullet through me, as someone tried to do with a bomb the other day, and I met
his bullet without a groan, and breathed my last taking God’s name, then alone
would I have made good my claim”.88 In the end Gandhi’s wish was fulfilled and
he was pierced by a bullet, whether or not with Rama’s name on his lips, as he
wanted. One wonders, what would have happened, and how history would have
treated him, if, as he once said, he had lived up to the age of 125 years. Gandhi
was 78 years old when he died, and if he had lived up to 125 he would have died
in 1995. He would have survived all his disciples like Nehru, Nehru’s daughter
and grandson, and all his children. He would have been ignored, possibly lost his
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charisma and imprisoned for ‘anti-national’ activities. Nathuram Godse, in this
sense, saved Gandhi, and by killing him, fulfilled Gandhi’s wish and made him
forever a Mahatma! Death does strange things to mortal men.
Climbing Heaven’s Hill With Mortal Skin
Contemplation on death and impermanence of life are regarded as very
important in Buddhism for two reasons: it is only by recognizing how precious
and how short life is that we are most likely to make it meaningful and to live it
fully; and by understanding the death process and familiarizing ourselves with
it, we can mitigate our fear at the time of death and ensure a good rebirth.
Paramahansa Yogananda, in his essay Where There Is Light, described death: “The
consciousness of the dying person finds itself suddenly relieved of the weight of
the body, of the necessity to breathe, and of any physical pain. A sense of soaring
through a tunnel of very peaceful, hazy, dim light is experienced in the physical
body”.89 However ‘irrational’ it might appear to be, what unites most people is
the wrenching terror of death, which cuts across all cultures irrespective of which
religion one swears adherence to. A Hindu fears death as much as a Christian.
Whether it is the Law of Karma or the accounting on the Day of Judgment, it
makes little difference to the dread of death. The favorite blessing in all cultures,
despite what their scriptures say about the ‘naturalness’ of death, is ‘may you live
long!’ Despite belief in multiple rebirths, some possibly better than the misery
of the current one, prolonging the present life is the most longed-for desire even
for Hindus. Despite the angels, damsels and allures of Heaven, few Christians or
Muslims want to die. As someone quipped, many want to go to heaven but none
want to die, or like Yudhishthira, in the Mahabharata, all of us want to climb up
heaven’s hill with a mortal skin. There are still exceptions. For instance, Niccolo
Machiavelli (The Prince, 1513), supposedly said, “I desire to go to Hell and not
to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes,
while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles”.90
While Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance, advocate a ‘desire-less’
state as the transparent path to moksha or nirvana, neither religion tries to curb
the strongest of all desires: the desire for eternal life. They castigate attachment
as the source of sorrow, but not the most addictive attachment: to life itself.
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Perhaps it is in the very nature of life itself to hold all living beings in its hypnotic
thrall. Not only humans but also the lowliest of creatures, even a worm in a dung
heap, cling to life, and want to prolong their miserable existence even if a better
life after death is dangled before them. The human mind clings to the seeming
certainty of the present package to the apparent uncertainty of the future.
Reassuring statements like “Nothing changes with death, it is only a change of
the state of consciousness”, and à la Oscar Wilde, “To have no yesterday, and no
tomorrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace”, make no difference to
our state of consciousness. What we fear most in life is ‘definitiveness’, because it
robs us of hope; and death is nothing but definitiveness. Death has been, since
time immemorial, the primary obsession and the biggest business in the world.
Someone estimated that every day about 150,000 humans ‘die’ but when the day
begins no one knows who they will be and who will see the next sunrise. Anyone
could be, any one need not be, no one can tell.
We do not how the dead feel, but the living mourn the dead and presume
to be sorry for them. Even for those whom we hardly know, when death strikes,
we feel ‘sad and sorry’, though for what and for whom is not quite clear. Maybe
the dead, if they could compare their ‘dead lives’ to ours, feel sorry for the ‘living
dead’, which most people are. Death and dying are deemed so horrendous that
even a dying person is left in a cloud of deception, in a you-are-going-to-be-okay
syndrome, rather than being told that he or she is dying, which we say is allnatural
and inevitable in any case. Even the talk of death is called inauspicious,
harmful, and impolite. We shun death; even the thought of it is considered
morbid. The body that we hugged just the other day, we fear even to touch it.
The loved one becomes the feared one. The warm body becomes ice cold and
decays before our very eyes. If one touches a ‘dead body’, the very one we hugged
and loved before, we are told to take a cleansing bath. No one understands and
tries to help a dying person’s state of mind. No one helps him to face the fact
of death or to prepare for what inevitably follows. Even doctors are afraid to tell
the truth, and those that do are often called insensitive. Since we don’t know
what happens after death, all this doom and gloom seems downright silly. Those
who know they are going to die within a certain time are the luckier ones. In
the