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

in the words of Kirkpatrick Sale95 “the ideal of industry is to
eliminate the living factor, even including the human factor”. It is the culmination
of what Andrew Kimbrell calls, “living fully in the technosphere”. The only way
to arrest this fatal attraction is to diminish the dominance of our mind in our
consciousness. That change must come in the world within as a part of the broader
consciousness-change. In the world outside, we have to orchestrate a contextualchange
that involves, in particular, the way the three Ms—morality, money, and
mortality—are currently being perceived, understood, and addressed. The three
are interconnected, and have to be dealt with in tandem with each other. For
example, for morality to be strong in the world, money must be weakened; and
for money to be a moral tool, we need a new framework for moral life. Mortality,
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rather our timeless thirst for eternal life, besides running the risk of yielding
unintended consequences, is emerging as a major make-or-break moral issue, a
source of a new dangerous divide and potentially the last straw on the backs of
the poor and powerless, the marginalized and the social left-overs.
The bottom line is that we humans, given the kind of consciousness we
have, are now simply too much of a toxic baggage for nature to carry around
too long. We are blissfully unaware but we are all potential ‘suicide-terrorists’.
Mercifully, most of us might live through and remain ‘potential’; but you never
know what could be the trigger or tipping point, ideology or inspiration, irresistible
temptations of evil or dark impulses looking for an alibi. The point is not that we
always mean bad, but we do mostly bad despite our best intentions. We can be
a murderer or a martyr or a mahatma, but we have no clue which of these three
will crash through our defenses. We can’t get a hold on ourselves because we are
wholly clueless about the fierce fight between the two polar sides of our psyche
to shape and control our personality. Whatever we might call the process—
mutation, metamorphosis, transformation, transcendence, transmutation—
we must give way or go in, even without knowing the answer to the Vedantic
question, “Who am I ?” Because the answer to the question, self-evident as it
may be, is that human intellect is not only incapable of comprehending but fully
capable of subverting it. And if we keep doing what we are doing, we will keep
getting what we are getting. We must now shift the gaze from “What are we?”,
to “What should we be?”, and work out how to bring that about. It is important
because who we think we ought to be affects how we behave.
The world needs a ‘New Man’—a humane human, not a humanoid
human, a new paradigm, persona and personality, a new mindset and a new
heart-driven consciousness. It is only through that way can we bring about a
blend between mind-driven rational intelligence and what in Sanskrit is called
‘ritambhara prajna’, or heart-centered intuitive intelligence. Technology, versatile
and invaluable as it is, cannot create such a man by blurring the boundary between
man and machine. The marriage or merger might not give us a god but a demon
with godly powers. We are like Oscar Wilde’s fisherman who, for the love of the
mermaid, shed his soul on the advice of a witch, and we could face the same tragic
fate in our ‘love’ for the machine.96 Our ‘witch’ is technology, and the one we are
prepared to give up to ‘marry’ the machine is the very essence of being human.
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The fatal attraction for the fisherman was the mermaid’s ethereal beauty, and
for us it is eternal life. Without consciousness-change, even radical extension of
longevity can make the human the greatest menace since life began on earth. The
man of the morrow has to be more a spiritual being than a material being, born
within each of us, raised from the rubble of the greatest of all wars—the invisible,
inhouse war in the battleground of the Kurukshetra of our consciousness. What
we must bear in mind is that, in the end, as the Greek philosopher Plutarch said,
“Whatever we achieve inwardly will change outer reality”. If we can change what
is happening ‘inwardly’ in the right direction then we can change outwardly
in the right direction and bring about a better world. And as JK Rowling told
Harvard grads (2008), “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all
the power we need inside ourselves already”. This is the only war that makes it
possible to harness such a power; everything else is a skirmish, a sideshow of the
shadows. Unless we unravel the way to intervene and influence, if not control,
the fortunes of this war, the world will only wind down into a more horrific place
than it is now.
This book presents a mélange of ideas, options, and insights to make it
possible for the good in us to prevail over the evil in this war within.
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Chapter 1
Musings on Mankind
The Human Animal
The state of the world today raises deeply troubling questions about the state of man. Now, more than ever, the unrelenting refrain is ‘we are the world’. For, the human is the one who is singularly responsible for everything that has gone wrong, and for every crisis the world faces. Man the Unknown, is now Man the Terrible, the most feared beast on Earth, feared both by man and by fellow beasts. While our ancestors have been around for much longer, about six million years, the modern human, Homo sapiens, only evolved about 200,000 years ago. Quite apart from prehistoric civilizations and those inferred from religious texts, human civilization, as we know it, is barely 12,000 years old, and the era of industrialization started in earnest only in the 1800s. Yet, in this blink of time, we have managed to do quite a bit! We have quadrupled our number, in a little over 100 years, to 7.3 billion—which is projected to reach 9.7 billion by the year 2050, and 11.2 billion by 2100. Although new studies reveal a continuing slowdown in the rate of population growth, due to the near-global decline in fertility rates, the matter of greater concern ought to be human behavior, not human numbers. Instead of focusing on how many we will be in the future, what we should ponder over is this: how can a being, to describe whom scriptures slip into superlatives, and science goes into raptures, how could such a being behave so badly and so irresponsibly? Although we humans are just 0.01% of life on earth, man has become the exterminator of all other life on earth, the plague of the planet. In spite of being a diminutive harbinger of death and destruction on his planet, the human animal has been the most aggressive and murderous of all. Douglas Fields (Why We Snap, 2016) elaborates: “Violence exists in the animal world, of course, but on a far different scale. Carnivores kill for food; we kill our family members, our children, our parents, our spouses, our brothers and sisters, our cousins and in-laws. We kill strangers. We kill people who are different from us, in appearance, beliefs, race, and social status. We kill ourselves in suicide. We kill for advantage and for revenge, we kill for entertainment: the Roman
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Coliseum, drive-by shootings, bullfights, hunting and fishing, animal roadkill in
an instantaneous reflex for sport. We kill friends, rivals, coworkers, and classmates.
Children kill children, in school and on the playground. Grandparents, parents,
fathers, mothers—all kill, and all of them are the targets of killing…” It means
that human killing does not stem from our being a primate; it is endemic to our
species. Not only that, we view everything in human terms, anthropomorphize
animals, giving them human attributes and values.
Our attitude towards other forms of life on earth has always been at best
ambivalent. With a broad brush, we can classify that attitude in five ways. One,
we are directly made by the divine as an apex of creation, with the implicit
mandate to deal and dispense with the other forms as we will. Two, we too are
‘animals’ but, at the same time, we are so uniquely endowed that we are actually
a genre apart. Three, we are a ‘higher-animal’, and all the rest are ‘lower’ animals.
Four, we are just like any other animal and what we think ‘unique’ about us is
nothing but what is necessary to be a ‘human animal’, and every other creature
has its own ‘unique’ attributes. Five, judging from what the human has done since
his appearance on earth, we are the ‘lowest’ of them all. The moral and spiritual
dimensions cut across all five posits. If we are already and actually ‘all-divine’ or
made in ‘His’ image, we should be expected to manifest the moral qualities we
commonly associate with the divine: noble, good, kind, compassionate, just, etc.
If we are altogether a different ‘make’ of an animal, or the highest, one would also
expect our behavior to be qualitatively ‘superior’.
Our historical footprints indicate, at least from a moral perspective, as
Mark Twain observed, that we are the lowest animal. Twain wrote, “… for it obliges
me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man
from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that the theory ought to
be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named
the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals”. And that conclusion, he wrote,
he had arrived at through a ‘scientific method’ and ‘actual experiments’ made in
the London Zoological Gardens, and covered many months of painstaking and
fatiguing work. He also noted that covetousness, avarice, indecency, vulgarity,
and obscenity are ‘invented’ by the human animal.
In fact, we ‘humanize’ even the divine and feel disappointed when the
divine does not measure up to our expectations. As biologist Jeremy Griffith
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puts it, “…words used to describe human behavior… demonstrate that there is
a psychological dimension to our behavior; that we don’t suffer from a geneticopportunism-
driven ‘animal condition’, we suffer from the psychologically
troubled human condition”. Another study shows that our violence operates far
outside the bounds of any other species. A recent study elaborates that “human
beings kill anything. Slaughter is a defining behavior of our species. In addition,
humans do have this high propensity for proactive violence, which is basically
what is responsible for war. We kill all other creatures, and we kill our own”. This
killing spree is gaining speed day by day. According to the World Wildlife Fund
(WWF), mammal, bird, fish, and reptile populations have fallen on average by
60% since 1970. The biggest cause of wildlife loss is the annihilation of natural
habitats followed by killing for food. It is not the wrath of God but the greed of
man that is more fearsome. Whatever ‘good’ we did do was actually saving the
planet from humans. According to a recent study, since the dawn of civilization,
humanity has caused the loss of 83% of all wild mammals and half of plants,
while livestock kept by humans abounds. And so dominant and overpowering
is human presence on earth and so affected the planet’s environment, geology,
and climate, that the present period in human geological history is now officially
called the Anthropocene era.
That honor, or dishonor, of accelerating extinction that is bestowed
on us is due to what is referred to as the Great Acceleration of human activity,
which is closely connected with the sixth major phase of extinction that we are
witnessing on earth. The way we have decimated and denuded the planet is so
predatory, that, in the words of astronomer Martin Rees, “the darkest prognosis
for the next millennium is that bio, cyber or environmental catastrophes could
foreclose humanity’s immense potential, leaving a depleted biosphere” and a
crippled planet. Comparison of mammal numbers of the time before humans
became farmers and the Industrial Revolution began, reveal that just one-sixth
of wild mammals, from mice to elephants, remain. That ruthless destructiveness
equally cripples the human world. And much of all the gut-wrenching things
that shock and distress us are consequences of that very streak of destructiveness
of man, much of it the ruins of our path to progress, prosperity and ‘good life’.
It is ‘destruction’ that matters, no matter who or what is on the way, even our
own selves. Some use ‘destruction’ to find themselves. In Hermann Hesse’s book
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(Siddhartha, 1951), Siddhartha, with his lofty