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

the Bhagavad
Gita—nishkama karma—which is to perform one’s actions and duties diligently,
without anticipation and expectation of the fruits thereof. All the evil and good
that comes to us, comes from ourselves: from the karma we would have created
in the past. In that sense, we alone harm and we alone help ourselves. And we
harm ourselves if we harm others, and help ourselves by helping others. Karma
needs company. Depending on how we react to each experience, we create the
karma that will color our future. Our reaction, based on our experience, ignites
new karma and a new cycle of creation and experience. We can allow that cycle to
continue in an endless sequence. The great drag in virtuous or spiritual life is the
burden of radical selfishness. Expectation is selfishness; freed from expectation,
our myriad activities will become dharmic or righteous. These, in turn, will act
as appropriate ‘feed’ and food for the fighting wolves of the ‘Cherokee story’ of
good and evil. As it is said in that original fable, “If you feed them right, both
will win… How you choose to interact with the opposing forces within you will
determine your life. Starve one or the other or guide them both”. How can we
‘feed them right’ and ensure that ‘both win’ is the conundrum. The fact is that
both wolves have no other source of nourishment except what we provide. We
feed them, even by what we ingest, and how we live, what we eat, see or hear,
and by the choices we make with our thoughts, emotions, and feelings. We have
a tendency to ignore the small, ordinary things of life, the trillions of things done
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by billions of people, and try often in vain to do extraordinary, exceptional and
out-of-the-box deeds. But actually, it is the ‘most ordinary’ ones of our everyday
life, which some call the ‘miracle of the ordinary’, that are the most important
for spiritual life and for the war within. And it is that ‘miracle’, the millions of
our daily doings, that can also combat the climate crisis, not any ‘miraculous’
discovery. If we live righteously and act in the spirit of nishkama karma, and with
an attitude of gratitude, consideration, and compassion, the ‘goodness in us’ will
be the dominant. And if we live with meanness, malice, and egocentrism, then
the ‘evil within’ will call the shots…
But whatever we do and whichever way we do it, we must remember
that both opposing sides will survive. The bottom line is that there is a ‘within’ in
each of us, and that within is in a state of war. Only by going within can we aid
the forces of goodness and righteousness to occupy the commanding heights of
our consciousness, which is to have the upper hand in the war within. It is now
clear that what once served as a moral watchdog—our pricky conscience—is
either unequal or has been rendered redundant. Had it not been so, there would
have been no climate crisis or the problem of intolerable economic inequity.
While, generally, the climate crisis is viewed as a potential existential crisis,
economic inequality is regarded purely as an economic issue. What is at risk
is the bedrock idea that equality means that everyone has equal value not only
under law but as a form of life. There is mounting murmur that this inequality
is now so intolerable that it is bound to blow up. Some are also arguing that we
must get rid of the malaise of the modern world, what Daniel Cohen called the
“infinite desire for growth”,58 which, by common consent, is a major cause of the
climate crisis. Stanford professor Walter Scheidel posits that throughout history,
economic inequality has only been rectified by one of the ‘Four Horsemen of
Leveling’: warfare, revolution, state collapse, and plague (The Great Leveler,
2017). Current economic inequality, by any reckoning, is glaring and vulgar, a
sign of creeping decadence, a major source of, in Bertolt Brecht’s words, injustice
without outrage (To Those Born After, 1939). There is no outrage because what
we have is secret envy; we want to be ‘one of them’. And ‘being one of them’
means the lure of owning a Lamborghini, a yacht, a Hawaiian island or, perhaps
the latest fad, possess the skeleton of an extinct species. The opposite of ‘owning’
is losing and the fear of losing, what Henry Miller called ‘the most terrible bond
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of all’ (Sexus, 1949); it makes us virtually mad and induces us to do horrible
things. For example, it is this ‘fear’ of someone else ‘owning’ that is primarily
responsible for turning a lover into a killer. In almost every decision we take,
in every activity we undertake, money is a major, even preeminent factor, and
often its influence induces us to do the wrong thing, to make the wrong choice.
In the real world, money improves a person’s circumstances that often constrain
and confine their life. Money wipes out all human deficiencies with it; it does
not matter what else we do not have. And money in multiple ways can be a saver
or a killer. As Bill Gates said, “For under a dollar, there were interventions that
could save lives that just weren’t being delivered”.59 On the other side, millions
of children die because their parents do not have, or are unable or unwilling to
earmark enough money to keep them alive. Again, as Gates said, “Children died
because their mothers and their fathers had no power in the market and no voice
in the system”. Perhaps the greatest challenge man faces now is not to seek to
make the world ‘money-free’, but to transform money into a moral medium. For
that to happen, we have to bring to bear in our daily decision-making factors
like kindness, empathy, and compassion. The choice we will make will then be
different and moral.
The key is the heart. Longfellow implored us to live ‘with a heart for any
fate’ and to ‘learn to labor and to wait’ (A Psalm of Life, 1839). For it is only
with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
Cutting-edge research indicates that it is the energy of the heart that literally
links us to each other, and that every person’s heart contributes to a collective
field environment. We must learn to listen to our heart’s calling, which some
call the ‘inner voice’, to be able to see what the Quakers call ‘inner light’. In
ancient Greek and Egyptian civilizations, the heart was considered the seat of
intelligence and consciousness. Research is able to reveal how, in myriad ways,
the brain and the heart communicate, and, in fact, work back and forth on
each other. The crying need of the desperate hour is to add more heart to our
broken world, and incorporate heart intelligence and emotional energy (which
we try to suppress) into our day-to-day experiences and interactions. It will
also help us to ‘win the war within’. When asked what the essential quality was
for prayer to be valid, Prophet Muhammad replied, ‘presence in the heart’. He
meant the spiritual heart, and we are everywhere but absent from our own heart.
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We scan all over looking for ways to boost our intelligence, but ignore our own
heart intelligence. Einstein said, “We shall require a substantially new manner
of thinking if humanity is to survive”. That new manner of thinking can only
come from a new source and that ought to be the heart, not artificial intelligence
(AI). We must also clearly understand that our obsessive passion for AI and
the machine is, at its core, our lack of faith in our own selves; we don’t believe
anymore we are good enough for our greed, or to turn ‘green’. But then, as EM
Forster says, “Something good enough had long since been accepted by our race”
(The Machine Stops, 1909). Since we are not ‘good enough’ for our own good,
we think that a machine will do better. We think we are more secure stashed
away in a computer than in our own soul. Most of all, we identify ourselves as
no more than a body and, as a consequence, we believe that if we can somehow
hang on to our bodies everything will be fine. Actually this is science’s ‘Plan B’
for immortality: in case we fail to achieve at bodily immortality then we will
upload our thoughts and feelings and all we can of our existence into computer
programs and live out our existence there.
Not only do we want to ‘exist’ forever at any cost and in any way, we
want to do nothing in such existence. Our idea of utopia is no work and all play,
although, as someone quipped, we don’t know what to do with ourselves on a
rainy Sunday. It means ‘money for nothing’ and every need, if not want, is a
given. Mechanization of human life is the means. That might not actually even
come about. Karl Marx was right when he wrote that ‘machinery is the surest
means of lengthening the working day’ (Das Kapital, 1867). What we need to do
is not to strive for a ‘world without work’ in the sense of what ‘work’ has to mean,
but move its focus towards service. What we are gravely underestimating is the
pivotal place of ‘work’ in the human as a social being. Work is not merely a means
for distributing purchasing power. It is also among the most important sources of
identity and purpose in the lives of individuals. In a world without work, we have
to figure out not only what to do with ourselves but with one another. What we
tend to ignore is that people are happy only when they earn their own success. It’s
not the money per se, which is merely a measure—not the source—of this earned
success. Work is what we do in cooperation with others to achieve a common
goal, to make or serve something for society. It is through ‘work’ that we finetune
our faculties; it is through work that we can labor for the common good.
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In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says, “There is no work prescribed for Me
within all the three planetary systems. Nor am I in want of anything, nor have
I a need to obtain anything—and yet I am engaged in work”.60 And the ancient
Greek philosopher Hesiod wrote, ‘Labor is a universal virtue of Man’ (Works
and Days, 700 BCE). If an AI-inspired epidemic of automation gains speed,
and machines replace men, and even if (a huge ‘if ’) making money is NOT any
more tied to work (universal basic income; or basic economic security), gaping
inequalities will still remain, and, as Robert Theobald says, wealth would still be
transferred to the rich, fuelling deep dissent and resentment, possibly leading to
what is called ‘the revolt of the rest’ (Free Men and Free Markets, 1963).
For both consciousness-change and contextual-change, harnessing the
heart intelligence is a prerequisite. And, above all, to help the forces of good and
righteousness in the war within, it is consciousness that we now have to focus
upon. We must understand that everything is a state and level of consciousness,
from the mineral to the divine. The Buddha is a state of consciousness; so is
Christ; and so is a stone or a sinner or a psychopath. Even death is a state of
consciousness. What unites is consciousness, and what both unites and divides
is consciousness; we are all sparks of cosmic consciousness; and yet we also have
consciousness of our own. All beings in the biotic community are bits and pieces
of the cosmic consciousness. The renowned Vedantist Swami Vivekananda
foretold that he would not live past forty years. He explained that the reason was
that his soul (which is pure consciousness) was getting bigger and bigger and that
his physical body would not be able to hold it much longer. On the other hand,
the default mode since long happens to be that the good guys are on the losing
side. The downward spiral is supposed to have begun eons ago, with the onset of
Kali Yuga, the age of darkness and evil, but it has now gathered speed. And that
‘speed’ has, in more recent times, become a precipitous fall. It is not that there
was no evil, or evil men, in the earlier ages. They were vastly outnumbered by
goodness and good men. It is the other way around now. That is the root reason
for the terrible state of affairs in the world in modern times.
The paradox has always been that in human society those who care do
not matter, and those who matter