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

Srimad Bhagavatam, when King Parikshit is cursed to die on the seventh
day of a snake bite, and is paralyzed with fear, the sage Suka tells him what a
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lucky man he was, to know how much time—seven full days—he has unlike
others who could die any minute. It is widely believed in many cultures that
the dying moments are precious and that the state of mind at that time has
a bearing on the nature of after-life. Vedanta advocates limiting or restraining
passions, obligations, relationships, and transactions. Such a state of mind, it
says, leads one to obtain Nitya mukti, liberation as you are, where you are, right
now, without waiting for any future event, or for death, or going to heaven, etc.
According to medieval Christian belief, the last moments of life were the most
critical, for demons lurked around the deathbed ready to seize the unprepared
soul as it emerged with the last breath. ‘The last moments of life’ also, according
to Hindu scriptures, determine the nature of next life. In the Bhagavad Gita, it
is said that whatever state of being one remembers during the dying process, he
will attain that state, being absorbed in its thought. In India, even today, people
go to Kasi (Varanasi) to die, because it is a holy place. It may sound simple and
a bit unfair that one last moment of thought or remembrance or utterance can
outweigh a lifetime of work, good or bad. The fact is that when the moment of
death comes, it takes something to be aware enough to say what you want to
say. Most people die in unawareness but we really do not know their state of
consciousness. But to come to a certain kind of awareness in that moment, you
must practice such awareness for a lifetime.
Death and ‘Worn-out Clothes’
But then, if death is simply shedding of ‘worn-out’ clothes, one could argue,
why should not the wearer himself decide or choose when to discard the old
clothes, instead of waiting for the clothes themselves to ‘naturally’ drop off? And
why do we say that life is a gift of God, a precious gift, and one should not ‘take
life’? Why do we wish each other ‘long life’? Does that mean we must keep the
worn- or torn-out clothes long after they no longer give us cover or dignity?
Such questions bother but few. What most people want is ‘permanence’ of the
present through maintenance and medicine, that is, keep sewing, stitching, and
mending the same garment till it becomes too torn to be tended. Dylan Thomas
forcefully expresses this view: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage,
rage against the dying of the light” (Lament). Miguel de Unamuno expresses
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a similar sense: “If it is nothingness that awaits us, let us make an injustice of
it; let us fight against destiny, even though without hope of victory”. Bertrand
Russell comes to a different conclusion: “I should scorn to shiver with terror at
the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it
must not come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they
are not everlasting”. We may all have mixed feelings about death in abstract but
when confronted by the death of someone close to us, or contemplating our
own inevitable death, we are not comforted by such words of wisdom or by
what scriptures say, such as what Lord Krishna declared in the Bhagavad Gita:
“Never, at any time, have I been not; neither you nor these rulers of men. And
never shall we all cease to be hereafter”. That kind of ‘immortality’ has never
been good enough for the inebriated human mind. We want everything, even
eternity, ‘here and now’, as is, where is. Nor are we lured by the possibility that,
“When each of us dies, there will always exist elsewhere an infinite number of
copies of ourselves, possessing all the same memories and experiences of our past
lives but who will live on to the future”.91 It means that we could well live with
the same ‘persona’ in the cosmos, besides the one we have on earth. That too
is not good enough. The bottom line is the body; and it is this miserable mass
of flesh, bone, and blood that we want to exist forever. We want to feel thirsty,
hungry, we want to experience the ‘good things of life’; we do not mind sickness
and debility even bereavement if the trade-off is bodily infinity. We want the
present to be eternal; today to be timeless, the moment to be momentous. That
is the ‘meaning’ we want from ‘life’. We wouldn’t be enthused by any ‘doubles’.
We want to colonize space and go and even ‘live’ on other planets, but if we
do find a ‘double’ or duplicate we will probably kill him or her! Or, as another
science fiction author Larry Niven implies in his short story All the Myriad
Ways (1971), we will probably kill ourselves and kill others once we realize
that the parallel ‘I’ might be making other choices different from others here
on earth. We want everything ‘personal’; we seek everything here and now; we
want our individuality on earth to be eternal. Although the body changes all
through life and gives us much pain,92 we want to ‘keep’ it going for all time, free
from ‘pain’.
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Conclusion
So, then, what do we do with death? It has been like a bone in the throat. We can’t
spit it out, nor can we swallow it. Why do we despise death? Do we really know
what we want from immortality? Is it glory or greed, a trophy in the showcase,
very little to do with death itself? Heaven forbid, have we got it all wrong? Is
our unquenchable longing for immortality the ignorance of life’s meaning, of
death’s purpose, and of the state of after-death? As Milan Kundera (Immortality,
1990) says, “Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t
even know how to be dead”. In this light, which Achilles should we trust: alive
(gods envy our mortality), or dead (rather be a paid servant on earth than the
king of kings in the land of the dead)? Is our almost obsessive desire to be not
floating but walking gods, completely self-defeating? Is immortality the ultimate
immorality? If we have to measure up to our claim to be a moral, let alone a
spiritual being, what must we do about our mortal fate?
First, let us have some clarity on what our mind conjures as immortality,
and what science is trying to achieve, what is possible and probable, and what the
likely implications and consequences are. Immortality means a state of absolute,
total deathlessness; we continue to live indefinitely for millions of years, whatever
happens to earth. That is simply impossible, and we should eliminate such an
expectation from any serious consideration. For, even if we do achieve ‘biological
immortality’, we can still die by other means like injury and disease, and we can
get killed. We must understand that our quest for life forever makes sense only as
a quest for eternal youth. This too is practically impossible. We cannot freeze our
age at a certain point (whatever that might be, twenty or forty) and live ever after
at that age. It means that the three things that appalled Prince Siddhartha and
transformed him into the Buddha—sickness, old age, and death—will continue
in some form or degree or the other. Even if we merge with a machine, that will
be inescapable. Machines also age, break down and finally ‘die’ or get discarded.
The human body, through techniques like organ-augmentation and periodic
repair and renewal, can go on only up to a ‘point’. The irony is that we replace
a machine at the first sign of trouble, but we want the human machine to last
forever. We replace models almost every year, but we want this particular ‘model’
of earthly existence to be permanent. For science, the bottom line is the body. It
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wants to keep the shell of the body as much as possible intact, and ‘mechanize’
every organ therein to not only overcome a disability or disease but to enhance
or ‘improve’ its power and performance. As for the brain, the tactic here is to do
what is called ‘mind’ uploading, uploading mental contents to computers or to
the ‘Cloud’, as a way of preserving the ‘software’ even as the hard drive ‘dies’. For,
the Cloud too is not a metaphysical structure, but rather a complex network of
servers, and is therefore not itself indestructible or infallible.
What will probably happen, even if science finds the elixir of eternal life,
is that we will still fall sick and get old and die, albeit some of us will live much
longer and be more fit, and be more of a machine than a man or a god. The only
question is how much longer. It is generally believed (even the Bible is supposed
to have said it) that the age limit for the human is 125 years. It is unlikely that
the maximum will rise much higher, but more of us might cross the century
mark. It also depends on who we are referring to: a wholly human superhuman
or humanoid or cyborg. Indeed, the future world might well be inhabited by
a conglomerate. Humanity will probably be divided into a few who will be de
facto ‘superhumans’, and the rest pretty much as we are now, and that could very
well turn out to be the last straw on the broken backs of the non-rich. The allimportant
question is what kind of consciousness such a ‘being’ will have. The
more powerful it or he is, the more the need for a compassionate consciousness.
We have to ask ourselves: Will physical immortality or inexorable death be a
better catalyst for human beings to move to a higher plateau of consciousness?
The answer is that immortality, which is just to ‘keep this body’ going on and
on, is stagnation and regression. Only through new lives and new experiences
and adaptation to new environments could man develop his consciousness,
which ‘will ultimately cause him to live in such a manner that it raises the
awareness of other people around him and transform the world into a better
place for every one’.
What we have to take full cognizance of is that making available the
technical means of immortality or extended youth, or doubling or trebling of
the human life span, will not resolve any of the problems that afflict human
society. Poverty, prejudice, discrimination, inequity, bigotry, will not only exist
but also get further exacerbated. The climate crisis will not get resolved; it may
make the ‘one-percent’ more brazen with the knowledge that they could be less
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affected, as they already are. We will still have wars. In short, if you do not die in
any other way, you won’t die of death. Most deaths then will be violent deaths
and escaping such a death will have a high premium; because then you can live
virtually forever. But, make no mistake, death will still get you: or an iPhone will
explode in your face; or the roof will collapse on your head, or a drone could hit
you by mistake. Whatever science can do to prolong life or make you deathless,
it cannot shield your body from harm’s way, even if we become all-metal; in
which case, it makes no difference anyway. What is called ‘digital immortality’,
or mind-uploading, does not also sound so endearing. Who wants to ‘live’ in
a machine without the pleasures of the flesh? In any case, we do ‘die’ and are
reborn as our digital copy. And, on top of it, what we might end up with in our
quest for immortality adds one more dangerous divide, and as good a reason as
we can ever get to kill each other. The ‘immortals’ will still live in dread of death
as they will not be impregnable to either disease or accident or the wrath of the
left-behind and locked-out humans. We will have two more sedative triggers for
suicide: extended boredom for some, and deep disaffection of much of the rest.
The massive diversion of scarce resources, creative and economic, to this line of
research, at the expense of far more worthy and critical priorities, will tantamount
to adding fuel to the fire. Really, there will be no winners but a lot of losers in
such a wounded world. What science needs to focus upon is not technologies that
cure the ‘disease of death’, but on technologies that improve the infrastructure for
a healthy and fulfilling life