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

way is to engage in spiritualizing our daily doings.
We must bear in mind that our sense organs act as a two-way street. In
Hinduism, they represent the pleasure principle and are considered divinities or
gods in the microcosm of the body. They connect the world within and the world
outside. They act as exit points for the war within to impact on our behavior,
and as entry points for us to send in supplies and reinforcements to the opposing
forces within us. It is left to us to decide what we send and for whom, to the good
side or the evil side. If we behave thinking of the other’s needs more than our
own wants, with what Buddhists call maitri or loving-kindness, and, in Einstein’s
words, by ‘widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures’,
the corresponding forces in the war will become stronger. Recent research is
indicating that compassion is a key component of both quality of health and
quality of life. It depends on each one of us, and on the way we act and react
in the context of daily life. Numbers do matter. Fortunately, we do not need
every human to come on board; the minimum ‘critical mass’ of like-minded
individuals is sufficient to create an unstoppable momentum for the triumph of
the good within, as well as in the world without. But there is no way to know the
threshold number of people and actions below which we lose the war, and above
which we can win. Prudence tells us that each of us must believe and behave as
if he or she is that very threshold.
Strangely, there has never been an in-depth analysis of this war despite
the fact that the very word ‘war’ transfixes our attention, and we mobilize all our
resources more fully in this situation than in an other. War also allows us to let
loose the worst in us and satisfy our darkest urges. It can be explained by the fact
that although this ‘war within’ is the ‘mother of all wars’, it is invisible, and there
is no apparent cost or casualty. And the weapons of the war are our own urges,
drives, and raw passions. Anything that calls for determined and sustained effort
is termed a ‘war’ primarily to motivate and mobilize the public. Then again, there
is always in every society, a constituency for wars, which drags the rest along.
There is no such advocacy group for this war within. This war wages without our
consent, complicity or connivance, and that is why we pay no heed to it.
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But if we stay still and remain unconcerned, and ignore this war, we will
continue to lose all earthly wars on social ills and evil. Perhaps the most fateful
war we are waging at the moment on earth, is the war against runaway climate
change, caused primarily, if not wholly, by human activity on earth. There are
clear signs that, despite global efforts to contain and curb greenhouse gases and
global warming, mankind is losing this war too. But there is still hope, if we
can make some sacrifices in the way we live, particularly in industrialized and
affluent sections across the globe. But, instead of taking serious steps to reduce
our emissions, we are contemplating more risky and potentially more damaging
radical remedies. Such thinking is typical of our mindset. We want to pass the
buck, separate us from the problem we face and make others responsible. And
it brings to the fore one important message, which in fact is applicable to the
other stubborn problem we face. It is another ‘inadequacy’: our abject inability
to do what we know needs to be done for our own good, particularly if it calls
for short-term sacrifice. It is a form of self-deception that lets us lead our smug,
shallow, and self-destructive lives. The only way to resolve climate change is
consciousness-change. Only such a change can make us look at this problem not
merely as an economic or environmental issue, but as an essentially moral crisis.
It might perhaps be the most challenging test that man has ever faced, a real test
of our claim to be a moral and spiritual being, our claim that we are a ‘higher
animal’. It is a moral issue because the impacts of climate change are greatest
on the poor and disadvantaged, who contribute relatively little to the problem.
It is a moral issue because it involves inter-generational equity and justice. The
decisions we are making now—whether proactively or by default—will very
likely impose horrific consequences on future generations, on our own progeny,
who of course have no say in those decisions.
Climate change brings to the fore a central fact of modern life; indeed
human life. It is that our very existence, and the way we have organized our
civilized life, makes it virtually impossible to lead a moral life. Indeed this is not
new. Tolstoy wrote, “My very existence, entangled with that of the State and the
social existence organized by the State, exacts from me an anti-Christian activity
directly contrary to the commandments of Jesus” (My Religion). The dilemma
is not only a Christian issue but generic and general. It is that not only our
moral life is in crisis—but morality itself, its intent and content, philosophy and
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purpose. The context of human life has so radically metamorphosed, that old
norms of what constitutes a moral life need also to be revisited. Man is at once
a more selfish and social being. He is more self-centered in his desires, demands,
dreams, and drives, and rage and resentment arise when we are socially obligated
to be more prudent than just, more pleasing than honest, truer to others than
to ourselves. And in this sense of frustration and resentment, all the countless
miseries of man lie in germ. In a world fundamentally and irremediably bad,
irrational, and meaningless, is morality another absurdity? Emerging advances in
technology are raising new issues such as the moral status of an embryo, and when
we should call a fetus one of us. Under what conditions would helping someone
to die become an act of compassion or callousness? If a certain technology is
inaccessible to a needy person for reasons of affordability, are we all morally
culpable? Can we be factually and semantically correct and morally obsolete? The
simple fact is that man cannot endure for long except as a moral being. Moral
he must be, but that ‘moral’ must also be contextual, not counter-productive.
Morality, like all else, must serve a purpose, and the purpose must be to make
the human a humane and harmonious being, and the world an arena in which
everyone lives in the spirit of synergy. Former US President Woodrow Wilson
once said, “There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and
that is the power of mankind”. The fact is that human liberation can never be
realized unless our consciousness is liberated from the grip of the human mind.
In today’s world, being a ‘good’ man in the traditional sense is not good enough
to be a moral being. He or she must act in line with the Gandhian dictum, ‘be
the agent of change you want to see in the world’. Morals contained in religious
commandments and conveyed through classical moral stories are grossly
insufficient as guideposts to face the challenges that modern society churns and
throws up. Fundamentally, the focus and emphasis must move from personal
piety and probity to common good and social congruity. It is not that traditional
virtues and values are now obsolete. They remain relevant but not sufficient,
and where there is a clash, they must yield place to what society requires for
fairness and stability. A similar, indeed even more urgent updating has become
imperative about the rightful place and relevance of money in human life.
We live in a warped society in which those with money have relatively
few unsatisfied wants, and those with many unsatisfied needs have no money.
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Wordsworth characterized our relationship with money by the words, “getting
and spending, we lay waste our powers” (The World Is Too Much With Us, 1807).
The Bible warned us that we cannot worship God and Mammon at the same
time. But we have pretty much managed to do the impossible: we have merged
both ‘worships’. In fact, we seek God’s help more on Mammon-matters than
anything else. Perhaps a great indictment of human ingenuity is that money
is man-made, yet is so essential for human life. So many people need so little
to, as it were, keep their body and soul together, but human ingenuity hasn’t
found a way to make it accessible and available where and to whom it is needed
most. On the other hand, it has become a major source of tension, stress,
anxiety, and friction, and a trigger for every kind of violence and homicide. It is
now becoming increasingly clear that unless we are able to comprehensively
alter the way money, both private and public, is spent, used, and dispensed,
we cannot bring about the right contextual-change or significantly improve or
better our social life, or abort a future financial meltdown. Every time we spend
money, we must ask ourselves: what else can this do? How can we give value to
the world and to the community? Legal money is not necessarily moral money.
No amount of money, and no way of making it, is too small or sinful to share.
Money is neither evil nor good; it depends on its flow. If we open ourselves
up to a greater flow of abundance, we can then choose what we are directing it
towards.
What needs to be done about the third ‘M’—mortality—is different.
We are so much in love with the perks and trappings of the ‘good life’ that we
want this life-affair not to end even at death. And for that, man wants physical
continuity and bodily permanence on earth. For that, some are prepared to be
deep-frozen for two hundred years and pay close to a million dollars to have
a surgeon sever their dead head and freeze it, in the hope that cutting-edge
technologies will use their DNA to grow a new body so that they can have it
reattached and carry on for another hundred years. Big money is flowing into
the search for immortality; already many affluent societies spend almost 50% of
their healthcare money “in the final six months of life, literally throwing money
at death”.94 Yet there are many observers like James Watson,95 who question
whether more life is always better and if “the desire for immortality” (or at least
life-extension) “would rectify the problems it was originally intended to solve”.
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And then, when does a life become not worth living and under what criteria? It
is mortality—the visceral conviction that not only ‘I’ but everyone else will die
one day—that has kept whatever semblance of peace and order we have had. We
have long derived some consolation in the thought, in the words of Shakespeare’s
Juliet, that “If all else fail, myself have power to die”. The philosopher Bernard
Williams, in his essay, ‘The Makropulos Case’, posited that “immortality, or a state
without death would be meaningless… so, in a sense, death gives the meaning to
life”. The other risk of immortality, as Williams puts it, is the risk of eventually
altogether having too much of ourselves. Mortality is also seen as the final level
playing field and the ultimate justice. If that is disturbed, even the possibility
of immortality or even radical life extension, could destabilize human society
like nothing before. If life extension adopts the universal divide between haves
and have-nots, it will probably further widen an already growing life span gap,
with the poor dying earlier and the rich dying later, resulting in the creation of
a minority of ultra-wealthy immortals. What, one wonders, will they be doing
with their mountains of money in comparison to what today’s uber-rich do—
buy the bones of dead species like dinosaurs! We must remember that corporate
money is coming in on the expectation that there is much more to rake in. And
corporations are not going to stop at anything to get their pound of flesh. That
certainly means riding roughshod over morality, and on far higher priorities like
funding research on providing basic needs of those over a billion at the bottom
of the heap. On the other hand, if these very resources are spent elsewhere, on
creating the very conditions that have lengthened the life span in the developed
world—sanitation, healthcare, education, nutrition, etc.—we could turn it to
increase the global average of human life span. In other words, we can achieve
the very spirit of ‘immortality’ in