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

manipulation and implanted
or uploaded into a computer. It means man, or more aptly macho machineman,
will have to exercise his almost divine power with essentially the same or
similar content and character of consciousness. Fact is, the human is always
found wanting in handling any power. It is good to remember what Robert
Ingersoll once said of Abraham Lincoln: “Nothing discloses real character like
the use of power. Most people can bear adversity; but if you wish to know what a
man really is, give him power”. That being so, can we trust the human to be any
better than what he is now? Without radical consciousness-change of the right
kind, and with primordial and promethean power, this Homo sapiens will be a far
greater menace both on earth and in the cosmos.
The potential flip side is that, like in our driven desire to solve deep
mysteries we sometimes stumble upon deeper riddles, we might awaken sinister
secrets, with consequences we would be unable to apprehend or anticipate.
Quite apart from the risk of trespassing into the divine domain, immortality,
for instance, can fan the flames of immorality, and make us hark back to the
view held by some sophists in the fifth century, that practicing injustice was
the most profitable way to live. In our times, when profit-making and pleasureseeking
are the primary impulses behind almost all human endeavor, such a view
could be unstoppable. In fact, present-day man would rather seek the ‘lower
pleasures’, mainly connected with immediate physical gratification and delight,
as John Stuart Mill defined it (Utilitarianism, 1861), which are quite distinct
from ‘higher’ pleasures—the cultivation and enjoyment of art, literature, poetry,
and friendship. We are told that since death would not be inevitable, we would
not have to worry about after-life, judgment day, and so on, and there would be
no need therefore to be ‘good’ in the present life for a better post-death future.
The Bible says that death came into the world through one man, and spread to
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all men through sin.86 Science is saying there is no connection, and you can sin
and do not have to die! But neither has addressed the more basic question: why
is death bad ? Is it because of what we expect happens or because it does not
happen? Not only relief from the shadow of death, science is also promising that
through such technological manipulations as genetic engineering, better drugs,
and precise stimulation of various localities in the brain, human beings can live
in a sort of paradise, in which all unsavory states of awareness would have been
banished. That is the story science is telling us and selling us, as we struggle to
make sense of what we really ought to do with ourselves. It raises other serious
issues: is it ethical to disrupt our modern-human genetic heritage which has
evolved naturally over at least the last 200,000 years?
Another sea-change concerns life as we understand it. Life was touted as
priceless and the ‘right to life’ was deemed a fundamental human right. And that
meant the opposite of death. But no longer. Across the world, especially in those
parts where people have the time to worry about issues beyond the immediate,
there is a simmering sense that the right to life includes the right to die, and even
more, the right to be helped to die. Some are even arguing that everyone, including
a murderer on death row, has a ‘right to painless death’. The logic is that society
cannot have it both ways: it cannot deny its citizens good health or a life of dignity,
and also deny the right to die in dignity. Indeed, dying with dignity is being hailed
by some as the biggest shift in morality in a generation. That is because dying is a
part of living, and one cannot be deprived, at the time of death, of the rights and
privileges one enjoyed while living. There is also a sense that society spends far
too much to keep a few alive, who often are the rich, at the expense of the basic
health needs of the poor. “The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human
animal like nothing else,” wrote Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death.
We do still fear death but it is slowly getting compromised by the more fearsome
realities of life. What we are seeing is the unheralded emergence of death as a
kind of liberator. Death is asserting its independent right to be given its due on
matters of life. Death has often been called the ultimate leveler. Science says that
it might not soon be so. But it is a leveler in another sense. Whether one is rich
or poor, well-off or on welfare, healthy or sick, it doesn’t always matter; anyone
can ‘decide to die’ and any human emotion can trigger it. Let us also note that
there are a growing number of thoughtful people who think that the best service
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man can render to the planet—and contribute to the holy work of mending the
world—is to stop any more human reproduction, and do everything we could
to become extinct sooner than later. A similar view was voiced by biologist EO
Wilson: “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to
the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago”. The meeting
point is that neither is content with the present disposition—those who advocate
our early voluntary extinction as a way to make moral amends, and those who,
on the contrary, want to live forever. What we consider the current reality has
become so morally fraudulent and egregious that, for many, the status quo is
no longer acceptable or suitable. And everyone blames everyone else for their
misery. As the 18th-century French philosopher and moralist Joseph de Maistre
said, “It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man”. Everyone fears the
future, but no one is prepared to give up any of the goodies of good life to solve
any existential problem, or to bequeath a healthier world to their progeny. Down
the ages and through our march into modern times, we have been blessed by the
noble sayings of scriptures, by the presence amongst us of great prophets, rishis,
saints, and mystics. Among them were those, who “having reached the supreme
God from all sides had found abiding peace, had become united with all, had
entered into the life of the Universe”.87 Those wise men were generous with their
instruction and advice on the path we have to follow. Even they could not arrest
the moral drift of mankind.
Things have only gotten worse over time. Why have we been so impervious
and hostile to what the wise have always exhorted us to do, to become better
human beings? How come the precious seeds they had sown and sprinkled never
sprouted inside us? They have always told us the same message: have a good
heart, harm no one, help all, do to others what you would like done to you,
fight injustice and evil. That is the path to both a good and virtuous life as well
as a better after-life. Most prophets and sages failed in their own lifetime not
because the message wasn’t right, or that the messenger was flawed, but because
the intended audience was not ready. They, like us, lived too much in their head
and too little in their heart. The 20th-century spiritual master Ramana Maharshi
said that the essence of spiritual discipline is to plunge the purified mind into the
heart. The heart too must be seen and used differently. We must invest far more
on exploring how to harness the effective guidance from our heart’s intuitive
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intelligence. We have to ask of ourselves: why is the seed wrong or the soil barren?
Have we, while paying lip service, chosen to ignore them, much the same way we
ignore the clear signs of climate change, because it entails doing something that
our mind does not want?
We are living in turbulent times when all assumptions about human life
are running for cover and we don’t know what to expect from each other as
fellow-travelers. Most people feel besieged in their own lives, trapped in their
own bodies. We have so far sought to find the causes and factors externally and
intellectually, in our conduct and context of life. We need to go within—in
Anne Sexton’s words, “Put our ear down close to our soul and listen hard”—and
ensure that what we wish to do, or avoid doing externally, is first facilitated in
the deepest, fathomless recesses of our being, before anything takes shape as
a thought or word or action. A thought or word or action is already an arrow
unleashed. First, we must stop endlessly debating which is stronger in human
nature: good or evil. We must accept that both are latent, and whether we do
good or bad depends on what happens within at a certain time. Having said that,
we must acknowledge that, in reality, we seem more and more prone to evil and
sin. As someone drily noted, we don’t have to teach our kids how to sin; it seems
to come out naturally. But then that happens because the evil is stronger within
than goodness. Thomas Moser, psychological biographer of Joseph Conrad,
wrote, “In order to truly be alive one must recognize the truth, the darkness, the
evil and the death within”.
What we must up front understand is that nothing is cost-free—to get
something, something else has to be given up. And that everything is ‘doubleedged’,
that we all lead ‘double lives’, and the one inside is where the real ‘person’
is. Every serious struggle, competitive action, anything we deeply desire to
achieve, we call a war—such as, war on consumerism, war on crime, war on
drugs, war on terror, war on pollution, war on black money, war on Wall Street,
even War for Kindness.88 Some even characterize the cut-throat competitive
culture as a ‘war of each against all others’. The truth, though, is that we think
we are ‘fighting’ these wars, but actually, through our actions and attitudes we
are fuelling them. We devour war movies and honor war heroes, who, sans the
halo of war, become mass murderers. Yet, despite being suffused with war in
our outer life, we know nothing of the war within. And we must understand
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that everything that happens, at least anything consequential—whether we do
good or bad, how we behave and relate with the rest of the world, even how we
think and feel—is but an extension, an expression of the state of the war within
ourselves at a given point in time. If we accept the actuality of this war, not simply
that we are capable of entertaining horrible thoughts and vile emotions, many
things that seem inexplicable—why is there so much evil and suffering? why is
our behavior so unpredictable?—begin to become intelligible. We must stop this
futile and tiresome debate about whether we are essentially good or bad, spiritual
or material, and why we behave so badly at times, and what to do to be better
beings. None of these have a firm footing of their own; they change according
to the vicissitudes of the internal and external wars. If the forces of good have
the upper hand, we will do good, and bad otherwise. And that ‘within’, the
inside of us, the core of our being, what Keats called ‘the abyss of himself ’, is the
spiritual space at our innermost depth. Lao Tzu famously said that a journey of
a thousand miles begins with a single step. Many limitations man has overcome,
but for what thwarts the journey within, he is at a loss to know how to take the
first step. We are launching things into space ‘like crazy’ but none into the inner
space. We need something like a ‘spiritual SpaceX program’ to explore the world
within. The fact is, as Pico Iyer (Global Soul, 2000) reminds us, “The Inner
World Is a Great, Undiscovered Terrain”. With all the tremendous advances in
medicine we really do not know how the various organs in our body function
independently as well as in tandem with each other, how they together constitute
the physical body and make the difference between life and death. We know we
have a mind, but not much about what it actually is, and where it resides. We
know we have a consciousness, but not much about its content or character. We
know so little in the world of our inside—adhyatmika, in Sanskrit—because we
don’t think it is important to get what we want from life, and because it does
not come in the way of our worldly pursuits. It does not