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

laws of nature. Such warnings
have always been sounded and man still went ahead, with no ill effect, at least
visible. Indeed, we are where we are because of that. And yet, in every game there
are rules, and every play has a script, and every species has an assigned role in
maintaining the cosmic order, disobeying which will lead to chaos. But chaos is
needed for creativity. One of today’s hot-button issues is: how far we can push
our planet’s natural systems and deplete its resources, beyond which we will incur
a major blowback? Does man’s tireless effort to be ‘immortal’ amount to one
such ‘rekha’ or forbidden line? By extending human longevity, are we not, in
principle, crossing it? One could passionately and persuasively argue from both
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sides. But the essential point is this. Even assuming that scientific technology
can make man a mini-Methuselah, give him angelic youth and x-ray eyes, make
him ‘invisible’, and enhance every body-part, it cannot change the quality of his
consciousness, or the way he now acts and reacts, reflects and responds, thinks
and feels. And without that man will be a marauding menace. If our sensations,
responses, reactions, impulses and instincts remain unchanged, then we cannot
resolve any of the serious problems the world faces. Contrary to what we assume
man has become, if not the ‘monarch’ of the earth, at least the dominant species,
ushering in what has come to be called the Anthropocene era is but a fraction of
the time we have been around, at best a few thousands out of a million. That
struggle for survival and the wages of modernity have taken a huge toll on all
human relationships and on human consciousness itself, and have corrupted our
cognitive capacity, the very process of knowing, information-analysis, reasoning,
judgment and decision-making.
For us to have the capability to move towards a cathartic change in our
social behavior we must cleanse the ‘entire process’. We must also at once bear in
mind another crucial factor. When we talk of ‘behavior’ we refer to our physical
activity. While ultimately everything becomes action, more often than not, it is
through our words that we relate with other people. Much of the good we can
do and the hurt we can inflict come from the words we use. The advice of a
saying variously attributed, from the Buddha to Mary Ann Pietzker,24 is worth
bearing in mind: before we say anything we should be reasonably certain and
ask ourselves, “Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind?”. Perhaps one could reverse
the order; fact is, much of what we say is ‘needless’, even noxious. Too often we
speak when we have nothing to say; and when we do have something worth
saying, words are hard to come by. As for ‘truth’ and ‘kindness’, it is also worth
remembering another advice: “And never say of any one; What you’d not have
said of you” and, most important, “No ill of any man to say; No, not a single
word”. But ‘word’, spoken or written, is a mighty force. In fact, Hindu scriptures
say that the entire cosmos emerged from the sound ‘Aum’. Before the beginning,
the Brahman (absolute reality) was one and non-dual. It thought, “I am only
one—may I become many”. This caused a vibration which eventually became
sound, and this sound was Aum or Om. Creation itself was set in motion by the
vibration of Om. The closest approach to Brahman is that first sound, Om. Thus,
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this sacred symbol has become emblematic of Brahman. The vibration produced
by chanting Om in the physical universe corresponds to the original vibration that
first arose at the time of creation. The sound of Om is also called Pranava, meaning
that it sustains life and runs through Prana or breath. Curiously, an American
neurosurgeon, who, after he ‘died’ and went to heaven and came back, described
hearing the sound of the word Aum and identified God with that sound.25
One of the necessities of living is cleansing, a process by which we discard
the filth and toxin we gather in the sheer process of living. Even in the purest of
‘living’ we attract and accumulate impurities through our body as well as mind.
The problem has become more acute in modern times. We are constantly exposed
to potentially dangerous toxins through the food we eat, the air we breathe,
and the water we drink. There is almost nothing uncontaminated that we put
into our bodies. Humans are the biggest producers of rubbish. Huge amounts
of plastic now roam the oceans, where they threaten marine life by blocking
out the sunlight that nourishes plankton and algae. It is estimated that over
100 billion gallons a year of fresh water is turned into toxic fluid that contains
multiple chemicals. And the almost insane irony is that we want to live forever
but still poison our bodies through everything we put into them for the sake of
‘making more money’. We need to detox our body, mind, and consciousness;
and, perhaps even our soul; and it has to be constant and continuous. Still, it
is easier to cleanse what we put inside than control what happens inside. That
is because we have no tools to go ‘in’; to know what happens before we act; to
know what takes place in the melting pot of our consciousness. The tools that we
now have are scientific, which have made a tremendous and tectonic difference
to human condition and well-being. But it has also brought us face to face with
many problems the world now faces, forcing many to think that maybe we have
gone too far and deep in our reliance on what is called the ‘scientific method’,
and that we have strayed too far from the scriptural and spiritual path. There is
also a gnawing unease about the nature, content and character of our very being
as a living entity, that our lives are bereft of both depth and what psychologist
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls the ‘flow’.
Superlative and seductive scientific claims are being made, and we find
ourselves bewitched and bewildered. We are being told that computer software
is so reorganizing the world that “with our bodies hemmed in, our minds
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have only the cloud—and it is the cloud that has become the destination for
an extraordinary mental exodus”.26 That millions of people are finding their
lovers [and mates] in the cloud, that though geographical distance separates
our bodies, the distance between our minds is being measured geodesically, that
is, in terms of “the number of degrees of separation between two nodes in a
social network”.27 And that soon we could soon live in “cloud towns, then cloud
cities, and ultimately cloud countries”.28 But then we all know that the cloud is
hardly a place to build an edifice. We no longer have to be perturbed about the
‘energy problem’ and ‘our own’ sunup in the sky can bale us out… Some spiritual
teachers say that this body itself is a piece of earth powered by the sun. Each one
of us is a solar-powered life. In terms of the solar and lunar cycles, the human
body is perfectly poised. Mystics have long believed that the sun is not a mass of
exploding gas, but the gateway from the physical universe into the astral worlds
from which life energy is ever pouring forth to enliven our solar system.
Another nagging problem has been the very way our brain ‘thinks’ that
makes us bad, but we are assured that soon we will be able to ‘fix’ our brain
and smother our meanness, that we could soon swallow a ‘pill’ and become
compassionate, that we will finally achieve our long-sought goal of understanding
human nature and even “change the way we think about each other”. What are
we, the non-scientist, not-so-smart people of the real world, to make of all such
scientific stuff? And what are we supposed to do? If all of these do happen,
substantially if not entirely, man could become, in behavior, if not in spirit, a
true satvik,29 a semi-saint made by science. But the real reason why we feel so
reassured is not because of such a prospect—no one wants to be a ‘saint’, of
all earthly things—but it could mean ‘business as usual’; that we can merrily
go on messing up the earth and environment, and feel no need to make any
‘adjustments’ in our parasitic lifestyle. Clearly, if there is one thing evolution and
history teach us, it is that in nature and in life, short-cuts are treacherous terrains,
and silver bullets and golden hammers and holy grails are ever elusive.
Scientific Insignificance and Spiritual Completeness
The dilemma is that, even if we want to move away from the ‘scientific method’,
we see no path that is easy to tread. By making our life comfortable and
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pleasurable, and by minimizing our bodies and brains to have a ‘good life’, it
has made us unfit for any alternative life. Science has also, more fundamentally,
altered our perception of ourselves on the cosmic canvas. It has given us both
perspective and a sense of insignificance that is further complicating our search
for a choice. It is good to be cut to size, but if we are ‘nothing’, then what use
is anything? If something is yours, whether it is body, mind, or soul, then the
logical inference is that that which is ‘yours’ cannot be you; and so, who are
you? The truth is that, as Advaita tells us, we are ‘no-thing’ but ‘not nothing’.30
Zen puts it differently, ‘there is no better thing than no thing’, meaning that no
matter how wonderful anything is, there is nothing more wonderful than no
thing. Even science says that ‘nothing’, even empty space is nothing. In other
words we are the ‘nothing’, or the Thing beyond all things. And that Thing is
nothing but what the Upanishads, summoning the highest of human thought,
describe as “the ear of the ear, the eye of the eye, and the word of words, the mind
of mind, and the life of life”. And as the One who sends the mind to wander afar,
who first drove life to start on its journey, who impels us to utter these words,
who is the spirit behind the eye and ear. The fact is that, as John Updike (1985)
puts it, “Our century’s revelations of unthinkable largeness and unimaginable
smallness, of abysmal stretches of geological time when we were nothing, of
supernumerary galaxies and indeterminate subatomic behavior, of a kind of mad
mathematical violence at the heart of matter, have scorched us deeper than we
know”. And, “standing on our microscopic fragment of a grain of sand” (James
Jeans),31 we have stumbled into this ‘terrifying universe’ if not by mistake, at least
by ‘accident’. Jacques Monod, author of ‘Chance and Necessity’ (1971), said, “the
universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number
came up in the Monte Carlo game”, a random happening.32 Max Tegmark said,
“Our lives are small temporally and spatially. If this 14-billion-year cosmic
history were scaled to one year, then 100,000 years of human history would
be 4 minutes and a 100-year life would be 0.2 seconds”.33 The philosophy of
cosmicism, advocated by the scientific indifferentist, HP Lovecraft, echoes the
same idea. But it is not only science that instilled the idea into our head. Eons
ago, the Greek God Apollo said: “Insignificant mortals, who are as leaves are,
and now flourish and grow warm with life, and feed on what the ground gives,
but then again fade away and are dead”.34 Such a vision stems from what some
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call a “banal metaethical confusion”,35 and they persuasively argue that issues
of scale have little impact on meaning, significance, and value, and if certain
things possess intrinsic value, then their value is not diminished or eliminated
by the largeness of anything else, even that of the cosmos. But in a different
way, ‘scale’ does matter. One of the problems we now face is that everything is
so gigantic that we lose our identity as a part of it. ‘The ever-expanding scope
and scale of the global economy obscures the consequences of our actions. In
effect, our arms have been so lengthened that we no longer see what our hands
are doing’.36
We may be ‘insignificant’ from a scientific or cosmic view point, but
from a spiritual perspective, each one of us is cosmos itself; there is nothing in
the cosmos that is absent inside each of us. Indeed, Vedanta proclaims Aham
brahma asmi—I am the Brahman, the supreme Soul, the transcendental Being.
Vedanta follows up with Tat tvam asi—That thou art, where ‘that’ stands for the
almighty Ishvara or Brahman, and ‘thou’ stands for the jiva. It