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

‘basic income’ will free us from all work, there is no telling
what kind of ‘nightmare’ our craving for comfort will yield. We now even claim
the ‘right to be lazy’, blurring the boundary between labor and leisure. What we
are forgetting is the potential risk to our future, indeed to our evolution. Recent
research is showing that what we use and how we adapt the body in so doing can
affect physiological evolution.
A new study has found that the human body has shown an adaptation
to technology used in everyday life. A recent newspaper headline says it all:
‘Mobile users develop horns’.31 The fact is that even if more terrifying findings
emerge, nothing will change, and people will que up hours ahead to be the first
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ones to buy a new gadget. It brings to mind the lethal power of persuasion,
and the vulnerability of the human mind. In 1978, in ‘Jonestown’ (Guyana,
Africa), some nine hundred followers of the cult leader Jim Jones (Peoples Temple)
knowingly stood in a long line to drink a poisoned soft drink. Jim Jones called
it ‘revolutionary suicide’. In fact, ‘Jonestown’ and its ill-fated inhabitants remain
an apt metaphor for much of the modern world and mass of humanity. Many
are ‘comfortable’ spending much of their time constantly dangling on the edge
of the abyss to clasp the latest popular thing they see on the screen. The human
mind instinctively prefers to live in a comforting daydream than in painful
reality. Instinctively, we also feel that, like Plato’s cave-prisoners, abandoning
the captivity of ignorance is unbearable. Today’s technologies like virtual reality
(VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR), and even more those in
the offing, are capable of creating such sophisticated imitations of reality that
the imitations can be mistaken for reality itself; that is, they make one wonder
if there is anything ‘really real’, or if everything is surreal. One could even argue
that if imitation is more comforting and makes it easier to live, then why do we
need the ‘truth of the real’? This sort of twilight-living instills in us a need for
superficialities that would never be satisfied, which is what today’s society and
mass media relentlessly endear to do. To quote the Rolling Stones: “I can’t get
no satisfaction, ‘cause I try and I try and I try and I try, I can’t get no, I can’t get
no.” Never being satisfied, and always wanting more, we become slaves unto our
senses. At least in this respect we are getting perilously close to what God said
of Satan before his heavenly expulsion: “You corrupted your wisdom because of
your splendor”.32 For us, it is the splendor of craving for comfort. If we continue
on this slippery slope, a time might not be far when man’s fate might well come
to resemble that of the people of the kingdom in Gertrude Landa’s tale, The
Palace of the Eagles (1919). In that fable, the inhabitants, inured to a life of
comfort and luxury, so depleted their resources that when hunger came they had
nothing to eat, and had to resort to grinding pearls and rubies into finer flour.
But, as they could make no bread and died, in an ironic twist, in death through
their bones they became food for the eagles.
No other species can rival the pain, misery, and suffering we inflict
on each other through multiple and macabre means: vengeful mass murders,
regicide, matricide, patricide, infanticide… all the cides really. What is heartThe
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wrenching is that it calls for so little to soften suffering; sometimes, just the offer
of a comforting shoulder could do. It might well be true that, as is often said,
‘pain is inevitable, suffering optional’, but more than pain it is suffering (which
is mainly mental) that is the killer. We seldom realize but all killing as a human
being is self-killing, all cides are shades of suicide. The human species has always
struggled with the inevitable ‘ending of life’—with the choice between letting it
happen and making it happen. Contrary to what Pope Francis said—“Always
safeguard life, God’s gift, from its beginning until its natural end”—many see
that the ending is no longer a solitary, ‘end-of-life’ event, something that happens
in its own right at the fag end of life. South African writer Karel Schoeman, who
committed suicide at the age of 77 (he preferred to call it selfbeskikking, selfdetermination
in Afrikaans) wrote, “You reach a point when the handle in the
shower cubicle is more important than immortal prose” (At Close of Day, 2018).
For some, physical debility could prove too limiting for a fruitful life, but in the
end, suicide is mental and the mind of a ‘suicider’ is the ultimate sphinx. Why
some, as a recent suicide note confessed, ‘succumb to the situation’ and others
don’t will always remain a riddle. A sea-change has occurred about homicide too,
in the human mind. We don’t really know why or how or when, but at some
point in our not-too-distant past, a devilish thought crossed the human mind
that at the core of every pricky problem lurked a living human body, and if one
could somehow get that ‘body’ out of the way, the ‘problem’ would have no leg
to stand on. For it is life that complicates matters and if there is no life there is
no problem. Life itself is no longer non-negotiable.
Humanity has fallen under the spell of what Saint John of the Cross
(16th century) called ‘the dark night of the soul’, by which he meant a state of
spiritual myopia, despair, and desolation, as a prelude to profound self-realization.
Tolstoy wrote in the introduction to his book My Religion (1885) that after he
went through a sudden transformation, he realized that he was ‘nailed to a life of
suffering and evil by an incomprehensible power’ that caused so much suffering.
What is paradoxical is that, as Buddhist scholar Shantideva once said, we want
to shrink suffering but love its causes (The Way of the Bodhisattva). What we are
traumatized by is mental and psychological rootlessness, crushing emptiness, a
creeping sense of hopelessness, and a gnawing hunger for belonging or a more
authentic and close-knit way of life. We are so obsessed with self-satisfaction,
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success, and strength, that we do not realize that there is nobility in humility,
virtue in vulnerability, and incandescence in the bleakness of what has come to
be called the human condition. The fact that we often tend to choose the dark
side makes us feel bad about ourselves. Some like Jeremy Griffith argue that since
we cannot accept our badness and yet do bad, we live in a state of denial. The
real reason is that we do not choose anything, neither good nor evil, darkness
nor light. What we think that we have chosen is but a reflection of the state of
the war within. If, for example, the forces of love, kindness, and compassion are
dominant at that time, then we choose the options that are compatible to them.
If, on the other hand, the opposite forces come to call the shots, then our choices
would be selfish, socially injurious, and environmentally hazardous.
Our behavior is nothing but a sum of our choices. And our choices are the
‘food’ for one or the other side in the war. We have long been bewildered by our
own behavior, and have wondered, as biologist Edward Wilson once ruminated,
if we are a suicidal species. ‘Being suicidal’ is wider than contemplating or
committing suicide. It is being self-destructive. Our driving desire to ‘merge
into a machine’ is ‘suicidal’, even if we are ‘reborn’, as we hope, a smarter and
stronger being. Another example is how we knowingly pollute and adulterate
everything we put into our body. A study of fifty common ingredients, taken
randomly from a cookbook, found that forty of them were the subject of articles
reporting their cancer risks.33 Even if these studies are a stretch, the fact remains
we routinely cut corners of all kinds to maximize money-making, and somehow
think we ourselves are immune or at ‘low-risk’.
At a more basic level, we are all committing a kind of ‘spiritual suicide’
by leading wholly material lives, by being wholly immersed in satiating material
desires, instead of cultivating spiritual sensitivity. The line between needs and
wants, desire and delusion is blurring. Symbolic of this is the suicide note left
behind by the American jazz-age cartoonist Ralph Barton to the effect that that
even though he had every ‘success’ in life and few difficulties, he was “fed up with
inventing devices to fill up 24 hours of the day”. That was because he, like the
rest of us, viewed ‘success’ as a purely personal pursuit of his own happiness. To
give meaning to ‘success’, we should find someone or something ‘to be successful
for’, ‘good life’ to do good to others. Every action should be to serve and give.
The thrill one gets will swamp all thoughts of self-destruction. Then we will find
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that Barton’s suicidal ‘too-long-to-fill 24 hours’ is not long enough to care for and
help others. Throughout human history, suicide has provoked an astonishingly
large array of reactions—bewilderment, condemnation, glorification, empathy,
anger, moral or religious reprimand—but it is never uncontroversial. The act is
the same but the motivations, the tipping points and triggers have changed. In
a culture that preens itself on its ability to fulfill every human fantasy, suicide is
becoming for many a ‘defiant declaration of liberation’, no longer a shameful
act of cowardice, an escape from the ‘malaise’ of the human condition, not a
violation of the divine dictum, and a way to deal with their own inner desolation,
the ‘dark night of their soul’. And for many others, it represents a secure place
to go where no one can go after them, and make life miserable for them. For,
suicide is never an act in isolation; it is often an act aimed at another person
or society. As Aristotle, in addressing the question, ‘Can a man treat himself
unjustly?’ says, “The just and the unjust always involve more than one person”.
Suicide, and in its broader sweep, self-destruction, is now a major manifest of the
state of human of society. Society is the aggregate conglomerate of individuals
all interdependent; when that cracks, the individual becomes self-destructive as a
way to assert his resentment at society. What it means is that if we want to change
our suicidal way of thinking, we need to bring about a cathartic consciousnesschange.
Everything is consciousness, and all differences are different states. God is
supreme consciousness. Christ is called Christ consciousness; Krishna is Krishna
consciousness, also described as cosmic consciousness. Consciousness is what both
unites and separates us. It unites, as all are reflections or sparks of the same divine
Consciousness. And yet, we have separate consciousnesses as individuals. It is what
defines who we are, and all evolution is the evolution of consciousness, and all
transformation is the transformation of consciousness. But there are those who
say that consciousness itself is but a mistake of nature, and that all our problems
began when we became ‘self-conscious’ and realized that life ends in death. It is in
the territory of our consciousness that the war within takes place… it is also the
trophy at stake. In that sense, the consciousness of each of us is the battlefield of
Kurukshetra, the great war of the Indian epic Mahabharata. The only difference
is that in that war, Lord Krishna was on the side of the Pandavas, the righteous
side, but in ‘our’ war—the war within—he is more of a sakshi, a witness, than
a charioteer. Krishna was also the sutradhaar (anchor, narrator) of the war, and
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He was the one who goaded the reluctant Pandavas to transgress some rules of a
just war to ‘win’ the war, giving rise to the often-asked question, “Do wrong ends
justify the right results?” What we forget is that Krishna was the personification
of the divine, and, as Einstein said, “Morality is of the highest importance—but
for us, not for God”.34 What is implied is that we cannot comprehend, with
our ‘weak and transitory understanding’, the dynamics of divine justice. For the
considerations that come into play in divine decision-making are a billion times
more varied and complex than those of the human.
Still, the question that has often been asked is: With so much going
for him—made in God’s image, inherent divinity, self-awareness, the capacity
to separate the good from the bad—why is man so self-righteous and selfdestructive?
Einstein once said, “Only two things are infinite, the universe and
human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former”. For it is only stupidity—
the full spectacle of our