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

Evil
118
entitled to the same needs and privileges that we claim for our own selves, in
every choice and decision that we make. No man deserves all that he wants; and
when we begin to think that we alone are entitled to something, we begin to
exploit others. Entitlement can slip into ‘embezzlement’.
We must bear in mind that every choice we make speaks more about
ourselves than about the choice itself, and by our choice, we construct what we
most fundamentally are. God is not unduly worried about how we treat Him in
our mind; He will make up his mind on how we have lived, based on how we made
a difference to the lives of His fellow-creations. Because, whether we like it or not
we do make a difference; it is impossible not to do so; even indifference can make
a difference. There is no neutrality in life. The question is, to what effect? Have
we, through the myriad things we do, voluntarily or involuntarily, made the lives
of others better or worse, made their burden lighter or heavier? That is the only
thing that matters, here and hereafter. Although what we do matters, it is also
only a visible extension of what goes on ‘down there’, without our knowledge or
control. The body is merely a medium and the instruments are the sense-organs.
Unless we can somehow get a peep beneath, get to know what happens before
we speak or act, we cannot change our behavior. Many a thing we attribute to
the ‘inside’—brain, mind, heart, soul, spirit, conscience, consciousness, and so
on. Man needs all those to work in symmetry for a harmonious life. Each has a
part to play and the interplay between these gets translated into behavior. That
inside is where thoughts originate, feelings are formed, emotions coalesce, words
germinate and actions incubate.
All scriptures and wise men have emphasized the need for a clean ‘inside’
life, in order to live a life in harmony with the outside world. The Maitri
Upanishad eloquently advises: “Let a man strive to purify his thoughts. What
a man thinketh, that he is: this is the eternal mystery. Dwelling within himself
with thoughts serene, he will obtain imperishable happiness”. Gandhi echoed
the same, “aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well”.13 The
Buddha said that ‘with our thoughts we make the world’. Emerson said that
‘thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it’. Descartes
famously uttered, “Je pense, donc je suis” (I think, therefore I exist). So, who,
then, is the thinker? According to the Kena Upanishad, the thinker is the ‘Self ’,
described as ‘bodiless within the bodies, as unchanging among changing things’,
Musings on Mankind
119
the divine spark within all living beings, which is not different from the Divine,
which the Upanishads call Brahman. The Kena Upanishad further says, “the Self
is in the ear of the ear, the eye of the eye, the mind of the mind”. The basic
premise is that if we want a certain fruit we should sow the right seed. We cannot
harbor impurity inside and expect purity to permeate outside. Hindu scriptures
advocate three types of purity for a spiritual person: purity of consciousness
(chitta suddhi); purity of nerves (nadi suddhi); and purity of body (bootha suddhi).
Our ‘within’, the theater of our life experiences, is like a blender; what comes out
depends on not only on the ingredients but also their relative weight. The brainmind
has come to occupy a huge chunk of the ‘inner space’ and that, in turn, has
distorted human society.
Governance Deficit
Human society has never been able to arrange, organize, and manage its affairs
in an orderly and harmonious manner. Whatever is ‘unique’ about the human,
in relation to other animals, the paradox is that we alone need ‘governance’, and
we alone are utterly ungovernable. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, we cannot
repose “confidence in man”, and we need to “bind him down from mischief in
chains”. But we never found a way without turning the chains into suffocating
shackles. What we have ended up with is that man is more unruly than ever; man,
more than ever, needs to be restrained, and all the governance experiments we
have tried—from City-state to Nation-state—have fallen far short. Indeed, they
have had a perverse effect. This has led to what is often referred to as ‘governancedeficit’,
which afflicts man at once internally and externally. We are in the dark
about what goes on inside, and have no control about what we do outside. Both
lurch with a momentum of their own. But life hurtles on, without a pause either
for the query or the answer.
The sacred word says that the solution is to explore the deepest depths
of our own being, to conquer our internal enemies, to tame our dark passions,
to tap into the nobler side of our consciousness. Vedanta expands it and says
that to become and behave wholly human, we should know or realize, at the
deepest level of our awareness, that we are wholly divine. Science has a oneword
answer to all human personality problems: the ‘brain’. By striving to use it
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
120
better, and by dissecting and diving into its depths, science believes that the brain
will empower us to fashion new technologies like nanotechnology to eventually
help us become invincible, invisible, and immortal. Various technologies make
us believe that we can live outside ‘normative nature’ and give rise to what are
called ‘revenge effects’. These are not merely side effects, but are consequences of
technology (or of human interaction with the technology) that partially negate
the advantage that the advance was supposed to bring.14 Although in one sense
all technology is enhancement of one or the other of our natural abilities, what
is being attempted is qualitatively different. We are attempting to overcome our
biological limitations when we try to cultivate x-ray vision, and exponentially
increased the ‘speed of cerebration’. This raises an ethical question: is there any
point at which human ‘enhancement’ is just wrong? Or are these just tools like
any other—and part of our inevitable future?
Helping: When Joy Comes Calling
The subtle secret, the eternal enigma of nature and life is this: we cannot control
events, but we can control our responses to events. We cannot choose our destiny;
but we can choose how we face up to it. How we react to what happens is more
important than what happens. Eknath Easwaran says, “It’s a perplexing paradox:
so long as we try to make ourselves happy, life places obstacles in our path. But
the moment we turn away from ourselves to make others happy, our troubles
melt away. Then we don’t have to go looking for joy; joy comes looking for us”.
We cannot do much about our own suffering, but we can do a lot to help others
to absorb their suffering; when it is reciprocated, our suffering too dissolves like
snow in summer sunshine. Help is service by another name. We should try to,
in Swami Vivekananda’s words, “look upon every man, woman, and everyone
as God. You cannot help anyone, you can only serve: serve the children of the
Lord, serve the Lord Himself, if you have the privilege”. We can do very little to
avoid getting hurt, but a lot more not to hurt others. A huge hinge of human
suffering is built into the very sinew of human society; individual human beings
instinctively act in self-serving ways that are not conducive to the commonweal
or to his spiritual growth. That becomes easier if we remember that what ‘others’
want from life is the same as what we yearn for—harmony, love, meaning, peace
Musings on Mankind
121
of mind, good health. As Raoul Vaneigem (The Revolution of Everyday Life, 1967)
puts it, the reality of our life is that “we seem to live in the State of variety, wherein
we are not truly living but only in appearance: in Unity is our life: in one we are,
from one divided, we are no longer… While we perambulate variety, we walk
but as so many Ghosts or Shadows in it, that itself being but the Umbrage of the
Unity”. One of the classic dilemmas in human life arises from the situation in
which multiple individuals, acting independently and rationally, will eventually
deplete a shared limited resource, even when it is transparently apparent that it
is not in anyone’s long-term interest for this to happen. Our consciousness can
only grasp what is demonstrably—and dramatically—of utility to us, and the
awareness that that leads to long-term detriment eludes us.
The current crisis of climate change is an illustration. Man, in the space
of a handful of millenniums, has drastically changed the composition of the
atmosphere—which now contains much more carbon dioxide—and of the
oceans, which are more acidic because more of that carbon dioxide is dissolving
into them. And, because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, we are changing
the climate by melting glaciers and raising sea levels. At least 75% of the world’s
land surface has been modified by humans. It is human activity that is reshaping
the planet’s rocky material—mining and other excavation shifts four times the
amount moved naturally by glaciers and rivers. As the world’s population has
grown from 2.3 billion in 1950 to over 7 billion today, some 3 billion hectares of
the world’s original forest cover—nearly half—has been lost. The world’s forests,
the lungs of the earth, have shrunk by some 40% since agriculture began 11,000
years ago. Three-quarters of this loss occurred in the last two centuries, as land
was cleared to make way for farms and to meet human demand for wood. The
World Resources Institute (WRI) reports that, of the forests that still stand,
“the vast majority are no more than small or highly disturbed pieces of the fully
functioning ecosystems they once were”. There are now more trees on farmland
than in forests, and if we were to weigh all of earth’s land vertebrates, 90% of the
total would be made up of humans and the animals we have domesticated. And
yet much of the world is caught between climate zealots and climate skeptics.
Only human ‘intelligence’ is capable of quibbling about what it all means. On
matters not even comparable in gravity and enormity, we say ‘prudence is better
part of valor’, or ‘when in doubt, err on the safer side’. But when it comes to the
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
122
very survival of the species, we opt for complacency and risk self-destruction. We
assume that the earth’s resilience and replenishment capacity is endless, and that
it will always bear our burden and backstop human life. But we should not forget
that the earth’s environment has not always been so benign, and, for roughly half
of the earth’s history, the atmosphere lacked oxygen and was replete with noxious
gases, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and methane.
Another human flaw is our chronic, if not congenital, inability to
harmonize individual interest and common good, the immediate and the
important, the beauty and the beast, and most of all, the mind and the heart.
While Vedanta says that it is so because we fail to recognize that we are parts of
the Cosmic One. Modern thinkers like ecologist Garrett Hardin (The Tragedy
of Commons, 1968) wrote that ‘ruin is the destination towards which all men
rush, each pursuing his own interest, in a society that believes in the freedom
of the commons’. The truth is that the myriad things that define life are such
that almost none of them are possible without coming into conflict with other
things equally necessary for our lives, and often for other lives. That means that
at every step of our way in life we leave behind, as it were, a ‘dead body’ or a
‘wounded soul’. Indeed no karma, or action, is possible without any kind of
papa or sin; without causing some sort of harm to another life, perhaps even
killing. That, in the holistic sense, is another dimension of interconnectivity and
interdependence of all life—and death—on earth. To be alive is to live for others;
the only way to get ‘relief ’ is to make our life useful to others. In every death
we also ‘die’ because the ‘dead’ were a part of the holistic ‘We’. And in the ‘life’
of other people we also live. We are partners in the success and failure, triumph
and tragedy of everyone else. We abhor death, fear death and profess ahimsa
but it is at best an anthropocentric view; the fact is we cannot move from any
place to any place, perhaps not even breathe or till without some killing. While
‘killing’ is deemed as the ultimate crime and a sin, the fact is that we inflict
more lasting pain and suffering on others through our very way of life. One
might even say we