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

person
and make a living, and yet be a caring, considerate, and compassionate person.
That must be an integral part of education. What is called for is a judicious mix
of ‘how to make a living’ and ‘how to live wholesomely’.
While the reality is that we are all sojourners on earth, each of us wants
to leave footprints that don’t fade with time. We always want to win, to prevail,
to dominate, to control every situation and contingency. So dominant and
destructive is our desire to control others that Erich Fromm has called it another
form of necrophilia. Everyone except oneself, and everywhere except within.
That must change. The fact is that while we have traveled very far into outer
space—far into the void out there, between the planets, and beyond the solar
system—and gained much knowledge of the cosmos, our knowledge of the inner
space is abysmal. But what is this space, this within that we relentlessly refer to?
The Chandogya Upanishad describes it as the city of Brahman, a secret dwelling,
the lotus of the heart. It has an inner space within which is the fulfillment of our
desires. The Upanishad goes on to say that whatever we know in this world, or
not know, is contained in this inner space. We have focused entirely on technical
tools like Voyager 1 to wander into the far reaches of outer space, but have paid
no attention to find or innovate heart-centered spiritual tools and techniques to
delve into our own selves. We are expending enormous resources and human
creativity to develop what astronaut Andy Thomas described as “go-nowhere,
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dead-end” technologies to put humans in space at the expense of basic needs,
like food, water, shelter, and sanitation for a billion humans on earth. This has
been our greatest failing and greatest challenge. The fact is that the methods used
by mystics, masters, and rishis—like tapas, mind-control, intense prayer, prapatti
or absolute and unconditional divine surrender—are not easily adaptable to our
outrageous world. That must change. Plans are afoot for a round trip voyage
to Mars in thirty years, but the odyssey within, we haven’t even started. And
that must change, too. Unless we learn to intervene and influence the internal
ebbs and flows, we cannot change anything externally. All the problems, be it
climate change or corrosive consumerism, the emerging pandemics of suicide
and homicide, mindless militarization or moral decline will only gain speed. But
if we can change the tide and ensure that the righteous forces attain and maintain
the upper hand, then we can have a pandemic of peace and virtuous infection
and contagion of compassion.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once told a friend that ‘all his life
there had hardly been a day, in which he had not at one time or other thought
of suicide as a possibility’. The Italian poet Cesare Pavese said it explicitly: “No
one ever lacks a good reason for suicide”. For, otherwise they wouldn’t do it any
way. In fact we all have ‘good reasons’, but for some that ‘good’ becomes good
enough to impel them to take their own lives. Now, we don’t need a reason,
or every reason gets turned around to be good enough to entertain self-harm.
Actually, nowadays, no emotion or thought or feeling or passion can be ruled
out as a potential inducement or provocation for suicide. It has also become
a soulful cry for help, an assertion of autonomy over one’s own life, a way of
protest or even a bargaining chip and blackmail. We also find that, in some
instances, the same conditions and context that provoke a suicide in one culture,
become a trigger for a homicide in another culture. In Japan, a disgraced man
will do hara-kiri; in USA, he might more probably go on a killing spree. Little
noticed and shockingly, across the world, more people die from suicide every
year than from conflicts, wars, and natural disasters combined. We don’t realize
it, but suicides, which some call ‘deaths of despair’, can be contagious, like the
common cold. There are troubling signs it is already happening, for instance,
following a celebrity suicide. When a much-publicized suicide becomes a trigger
for a ‘suicide contagion’, it is called the Werther Effect, named for Goethe’s novel,
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The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). If suicide is being seen as a viable way to
end suffering and sadness, homicide is being viewed as the viable way to end or
avenge dishonor, harassment, humiliation, and injustice. Fundamentally, deep
inside us, suicide seems to have shed its ‘sin-skin’, as an extreme step of the truly
desperate, depressed, and mentally unstable. It is now inching to the top as the
de facto default choice to get over any irksome situation, a route of escape from
a troubled childhood or relationship or marriage, or even as a way to punish
those against whom one has a grudge or grievance. And homicide is no longer
the ‘heinous crime’ perpetrated by really bad people or psychopaths or sadists,
or committed under intolerable provocation or in the heat of passion. But it is
useful to remember that both the growing casualness of suicide and the seeming
triviality of homicides are but symptoms of a larger malaise of the mind: moral
nihilism. Human beings are not seen as responsible for what they do, therefore,
each individual makes up the difference between good and evil. Nothing has
any intrinsic value, even life, and a negation of the basic laws that society has set
up—either religious or social laws—makes them meaningless or menacing. The
practical way is to simply destroy everything—anyone, oneself or others, nature,
planet earth, or other species. It is moral nihilism that makes us believe we can
barter humanness for efficiency—maximum productivity with minimal effort
and minimum time.
Efficiency, and its twin, competence, is what we seek and pursue in all
walks of modern life, and this leaves no room for any weakness or stiffness.
Increasing the ‘efficiency of performance’ is now a top scientific priority. In this
mindset, a murder is merely a ‘contract job’, and rape another form of ‘rough
sex’ gone a bit too far; and stealing is no different from sharing, and lying is a
way to wield leverage. For someone who feels left out of school, the school itself
becomes a symbol of failed society that can be ‘fixed’ with minimal effort. In the
same way, that person’s focus shifts to other symbols of society or religion—a
church or mosque, a packed promenade or stadium—which could be targeted
for maximum destruction. To stem this macabre trend, we must change the
tides of the ‘war within’ through consciousness-change and contextual-change.
Whatever we do, we cannot tame the tide from the outside. Something truly
hideous has happened inside each of us. The point is not that technology is bad,
it is the obsessive human desire to control the uncontrollable, to pursue anything
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that obscures the reality of man’s own life. It is there, in that dark corner of the
human psyche, where the monsters lurk. It is about this human tendency to
take just about anything and turn it into something awful. Whether it is God’s
inscrutable leela or play, or the work of the Devil, or an ‘occupational hazard’,
we do not know. If we fail to tame the tide, homicides will become as common
as the killing of animals today. We feel no guilt or remorse in killing animals
because they are not human. In the future, we humans may cannibalize each
other because we are not animals. In addition to the existing killing triggers like
rage, revenge, religion, greed, we will kill each other for sport and fun, as avenues
of diversion and entertainment. As a society, we are constantly and endlessly
‘entertained’ by the preposterous, the absurd, the volatile, and the violent.
We have failed to hold a steady course and to resolve or manage the
many existential problems that we confront. Humans have consistently shown
that they are rather lax at any kind of risk management. We are not very good at
risk/return analysis, or at narrowing down possibilities into probabilities. That
is why we are always caught on the wrong foot when a crisis hits us, whether
it is a natural disaster or financial crisis or climate change. It is also because
experts never agree on anything and so we, rather our minds, simply pay heed
to the one that suits us and ignore the rest. A clear example is climate change.
Depending on who we are asking, it either doesn’t exist, or is an engineering
problem, or requires nothing short of global mobilization, or could be solved
by simply nudging the free market into action. When it comes to risks that
threaten our very existence, and we have to take measures to monitor, minimize,
and control any adverse impact, our mind simply refuses to get involved. Our
own behavior belies us, makes us sometimes wonder: ‘Is it really me out there?’
That is because whether it is risk management or behavior, they are the external
ways, whereas the source and the cause are internal. The way to move forward is
to shift the arena of action entirely from behavior and context to consciousness
and its content, character, and control. It is time to pause and ponder on this
word consciousness. Although a “word worn smooth by a million tongues”,90 it
has remained the holy grail of our ‘thought-tormented age’, to borrow a phrase
from James Joyce (The Dead, 1914). In one sense and at one level, consciousness
is everything, a state of being, a substance, a process, a place, an epiphenomenon.
It is at once individual and universal, personal and cosmic. It separates as well
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as unites. Consciousness is what keeps us alive; it is what makes us do what
we do. Although some behaviorists have associated belief in consciousness with
superstition, there is general and broad agreement that we, and perhaps all
sentient beings, have consciousness. Freud said, “What is meant by consciousness
we need not discuss—it is beyond all doubt”. And Tolstoy once said that death
is the disappearance of the object of consciousness. When we are alive, it is the
force that drives us, that impels us.
Scholars have long debated about the precise relationship between brain,
mind, and consciousness. Many believe that conscious awareness originates in
the brain alone, more precisely in the neocortex. A growing body of evidence
suggests that the heart plays a particularly significant role in this process. Many
spiritualists say that in addition to the physical heart, we all have a spiritual heart,
and it is this latent force that we need to re-awaken. They call for a heart-based
consciousness, using the heart as the organ of perception. While the physical
heart works to keep us alive, the spiritual heart acts as the center of control in
our spiritual life. The impulse for consciousness-change must come from this
center, and it will come only if the center is awakened. Recent research91 also
indicates that intelligence does not only reside in the brain, but also in the heart.
And that the heart is a conscious organ, and the ‘heart’ of consciousness exists
in the middle of the chest.92 To achieve one of our long-standing goals to bridge
spirituality and science, we need to turn to the heart, and building such a bridge
must be part of consciousness-change. A critical requisite for consciousnesschange
is to restore the right balance between our mind and our heart. As of
now, it is all about the brain, and it is through this path that science has been
furthering its agenda. And that is the grievous error. With the brain as the sole
navigator, anchor, guide, and beacon, we will never be able to introduce ‘higher
dimensions of our consciousness into our awareness’, as the Chinese philosopher
Lao Tzu pointedly told us. It is everyday awareness that makes us who we are,
and it is at that level that true change is needed. Native wisdom and nascent
research tell us that the human heart is a source and storehouse of intelligence,
memory, and energy, independent of the brain. It is the pump that keeps us alive;
its regression as a source of intelligence is the beginning of much of what ails us
as modern humans. If, as Einstein cautioned us, the same consciousness that
created a problem cannot solve it, then we need a cathartic consciousness-change
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and the heart must be at its center. The only revolution that can truly transform
the world is that of the consciousness within. Many now believe that it is only by
restoring the heart to its rightful and righteous place that we can cure our ills and
evolve further. This is the true alternative to our frenzied embrace of the machine
as our salvation.
But context too is