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

blind
eye to the mounting evidence, but also to still ask if global warming is real and if
human actions have any bearing on climate change…
The right contextual-change will help trigger the right consciousnesschange,
and elevate human consciousness to a higher level and make a deeper
difference. And, in the reverse direction, it will help mitigate and dilute our
‘negatives’ and help confront the vices of greed, vanity, and violence. We must
however remember that we can only mitigate or contain them, not erase them.
These ‘negative’ emotions possibly served a purpose in our earliest days, when we
were fighting simply to survive. Technology has turned things 180 degrees. The
hunted is now the hunter. The upshot is that these destructive traits are now a
more dominant part of our consciousness, as the ‘positives’—like love, kindness,
altruism, and compassion—have taken a back seat. They are weaker because
their role in our daily context of life, in the ordinary things we do ordinarily,
have become weaker in comparison with the role of our ‘shadow’. Whatever
you want to achieve in life—to be a global citizen, a moral being, a spiritual
person, or to resolve the climate chaos, or any other pressing problem, and more
fundamentally ‘to win’ the war within—all that you need to do is to be righteous
in whatever you do, with a helpful, not harmful, intent towards another ‘person’.
You need to constantly and consciously try to put someone else on par or above
yourself in any reckoning. Concretely it means putting our sense organs—what
we see, touch, hear, smell, and eat—to good use, consciously and deliberately.
Science now says it can help. Researchers have found that a part of our brain
called the right ‘temporoparietal junction’ is activated when we contemplate the
perspective of someone else, even when it differs from our own. All this does not
mean that the world will be crowded with awakened empaths, effective altruists,
and self-sacrificing Good Samaritans—but it does mean that evil, whether it is a
thing in its own right or absence of something else, banal or brazen, will not be
able to look straight into our eye with a smug sneer; our behavior will be more
benign, and our reflexive reactions less motivated by egotism, mendacity, and
malice. We will be able to deal with the triad of our obsessions—morality, money,
and mortality—bearing in mind the common good of the commonwealth of
mankind. We must get a firm hold on these ‘three Ms’, and ensure that the way
we think through and take relevant decisions are for the benefit of the masses,
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not just for the miniscule minority of the affluent and privileged. We need to
put all three in their proper place. That will decisively change the context and
content of human life, which, in turn, will trigger the consciousness-change.
That will reverse the waning fortunes of the forces of righteousness in the ‘war
within’. And that is the only way we can avert or abort the looming existential
threats such as climate change, rogue artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and
suicidal man–machine-merger.
To avert what David Wallace-Wells102 calls ‘climate genocide’ we need
consciousness-change, and for that we need to ‘win’ the war within. Much of what
causes us so much distress and dismay, anguish and angst, springs from the fact
that we are obsessed with the wrong wars and are even unaware of the only war
that counts. What is heartening is that we don’t need the entire mass of mankind;
a ‘critical mass’ of global citizens that could trigger a chain reaction would as well
do. We must remember that the right way to ‘win’ this war is to see that both
opponents win. It is not conquest; it is ensuring that the ‘good wolf’ consistently
keeps an upper hand. If we ‘win’ this war this way there will be no more wars like
the ones we now wage. And that means being able to view life not as a zero-sum
game or a game of cat and mouse or a ruthless rat race. Waging and ‘winning’ this
war is the antidote to what Philip Zimbardo called the Lucifer Effect, the tipping
point in time when an ordinary, normal person first crosses the boundary between
good and evil to engage in an evil action. It is this war—the way it is waged, how
we feed the opposing forces, and its outcome—that will determine the balance
between dharma and adharma in the world. And if we so conduct ourselves so as
to sustain and strengthen dharma, then we will be doing His will on earth. And
‘winning’ this war could not only let us get off, in Bill McKibben’s words, the
“long escalator down to Hell”, but also abort what is being called the ongoing
‘sixth human-caused mass extinction of life on earth’. ‘Winning’ this war will, at
last, save us from ruminating in desperation and despair, the twin questions with
which we began the ‘beginning’ of this book: Why can’t I be good? Why do I do bad?
And then our proclivity to akrasia (lack of self-control or the state of acting against
one’s better judgment) will yield to cultivating enkrateia (self-control, control over
one’s own passions and instincts, and self-mastery). When that moment comes, the
human world will come close to what Hindu scriptures so eloquently proclaim:
Vasudaiva kutumbakam—the whole earth is one family.

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The Beginning
1.
“I do not understand my own actions because I do not do what I want to. But I do the very thing that I hate. … I can will what is right but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good that I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” [Romans 7:15]. “Why is a person impelled to commit sinful acts, even unwillingly, as if by force, O descendent of Vrishni?” [Chapter 3, verse 36].
2.
“It is not we who sin, but some other nature that sins within us… My sin was all the more incurable because I did not think myself a sinner.” Confessions, Book V, Section 10.
3.
“On bended knees I beg: when men can get all they want, the four purusharthas—dharma, wealth, pleasure, liberation—by following the path of dharma, why do men indulge in adharma? Source: Immortal Words: an Anthology. 1963. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Bombay, India.
4.
Dharma is a key concept in Hinduism. This Sanskrit word has multiple meanings, and there is no single-word translation for it in Western languages. Dharma signifies one’s comportment in life in accordance with the Order that makes life and universe possible, and includes duties, rights, laws, conduct, virtues, the ‘right way of living’. In Jainism, dharma is the body of doctrine pertaining to the purification and moral transformation of human beings. In Sikhism, it means the path of righteousness and proper religious practice. (Source: Wikipedia). What is not dharma is ‘adharma’.
5.
Source: Pandava Gita, 57:58.
6.
20th century American cartoonist and caricaturist.
7.
Storr, A. 1999. The Essential Jung: Selected Writings. Introduced by Anthony Storr. New York, USA: Princeton University Press.
8.
Cited in: Serpell, N. 2019. The Banality of Empathy. The New York Review of Books. USA. NYR Daily. 02 Mar 2019.
9.
Wood, H. 1923. Studies in the Thought World, or Practical Mind Art.
10.
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11.
JK Rowling’s Harvard Commencement address: The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination. 5 Jun 2008, Harvard University, USA.
References and Notes
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15. Challa, B. 2011. Man’s Fate and God’s Choice—An Agenda for Human
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21. The ‘Cloud’ is a general metaphor that is used to refer to the Internet. The term
typically denotes a vast global network of remote servers, each with a unique
function, which are hooked together and meant to operate as a single ecosystem.
The Cloud is not a physical entity. The remote servers of the Cloud are designed to
either store and manage data, run applications or deliver content or services such as
videos, web mail, software or social media.
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23. Proverbs 18:21.
24. Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust.
25. Oskar Schindler, German industrialist and a member of the Nazi Party who is
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26. Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi.
27. Lanier, J. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget. New York, USA: Alfred Knopf.
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35. Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond god and evil.
36. Ligotti, T. 2011. The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of
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37. Galatians 5:17.
38. Pontoppidan, H. 1905. Lucky Per. Chapter 25.
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40. Revelation 12:7–10.
41. Ephesians 6:14.
42. Srimad Bhagavatam. Canto 12, Chapter 3, Verse 25.
43. Srimad Bhagavatam. Canto 12, Chapter 2, Verses 2 and 4.
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49. Bhagavad Gita. Chapter 5, Verse 22.
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51. Freud, S. 1930. Civilization and Its Discontents.
52. Adam Curtis. 2002. The Century of the Self. BBC Two documentary series.
53. Luke 13:32.
54. Lyrics from the 2018 song Honey by Swedish singer Robyn.
55. Source: Kaneda, T. and Haub, C. 2018. How Many People Have Ever Lived on
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57. An American military science fiction television series, and part of the Battlestar
Galactica franchise. (This series was a re-imagining of the 1978 Battlestar Galactica
television series).
58. Cylon (Battlestar Galactica). Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia
Foundation.
59. Title of the 2011 book by the renowned horror writer, Thomas Ligotti. The
Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror. Hippocampus Press.
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61. The Papal Encyclical Evangelium vitae (The Gospel of Life), promulgated on 25
Mar 1995 by Pope John Paul II.
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