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

is exposed to what King Solomon
cautioned his son against: “Greedy for gain, which taketh away the life of the
owners thereof ”.49 The cultural and classical moral defenses of many people are
crumbling. Our dependence on gadgets and laxity in morals is aptly expressed
by a Hollywood actress who said, “We live in a world where losing your phone
is more dramatic than losing your virginity”.50 As one of those experiencing such
angst puts it, ‘Nothing provokes an emotional response anymore; fear, happiness,
anxiety, are all feigned. I’ve truly forgotten what it feels like to love or to laugh or
really to just be sincere’. That is a terrible state: forgetting how to be ‘just sincere’.
Sitting and staring at screens all day long is making many youngsters socially
sterile face to face, inept interpersonally.
Thwarted and tormented, frustrated and frightened, they try everything
from corrosive consumerism to reckless road rage, from liberated libido, to use
of levitating drugs like LSD or Ecstasy, all to get some ‘relief ’ from the draining
drudgery of daily life. They want to be suffused with what they describe as
‘the stream of joy’, to experience the ‘high’—a short-cut to a higher state of
consciousness, a new and improved religious experience. And, in the words
of Albert Hoffman (LSD: My Problem Child, 1980), to realize that ‘what one
commonly takes as ‘the reality,’ including the reality of one’s own individual person,
by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—
that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also
a different consciousness of the ego’. That is the essence of all scriptures, and if
one can really transcend to that level of consciousness, the world will be rid of all
that afflicts it. Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962) elaborates: “I
believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has
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to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people
think it is so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy
that invented it, what is it? Because they’re afraid that there’s more to reality than
they have confronted. That there are doors that they’re afraid to go in, and they
don’t want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something
that they don’t know. And that makes us a little out of their control”.51 That
might well be true; our lives are so suffocated and strictly controlled by tradition,
culture and order that we shrink from anything that even appears to threaten
that state. One could certainly agree that the world desperately needs go beyond
‘just thinking’ to a new plateau of consciousness for man to evolve and reach
his full potential. The problem is that, while it might be possible to experience
a momentary euphoria through experiments through synthetic drugs, it is facile
to think that that is the route to human transformation. Instead, what seems to
happen is that the existential vacuum implodes, the quest comes to a crash, a bud
gets crushed before it can flower, fracturing its fragrance. It often leads to what
French sociologist Emile Durkheim (Le suicide, 1897) called ‘anomic suicide’, a
“product of moral deregulation and a lack of definition of legitimate aspirations
through a restraining social ethic, which could impose meaning and order on
the individual conscience”.52 Durkheim explains: “One cannot long remain so
absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted
to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its
nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be
completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist”. It makes inroads into
those minds that are fragile or overly sensitive—the adolescent and the early
young; and those who cannot handle either emptiness or excessive fullness. At
another level of awareness, we want both ‘fullness’ and ‘emptiness’. We have a
‘secret streak’, to discard, to empty ourselves, to be fully free, to feel weightless,
to fly like a bird. That is why, even though there is no need to, we get naked,
shed all our clothes, even ornaments, when we ‘make love’, give ourselves fully,
to ‘unite’ with, to dissolve into, a beloved. If only we can show even a shade of
the same ‘giving’ towards the rest, we can find peace within and outside. Trapped
in the coils of a coarse and corrosive life they conclude that the only way out is
all the way out. Durkheim elaborates: “It is too great comfort which turns a man
against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes
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where it is least harsh”. In the early 2000s, it was reported, for example, that
suicide was the third cause of death among youth fifteen to nineteen years old,
and second among college students in USA. In that country, by 2016, suicide
surged to the highest levels in nearly 30 years.53 What is alarming is not only the
growing numbers but even more their all-encompassing casualness, ordinariness,
and matter-of-fact-ness. The fact remains that with all the advances in psychology
and ability to peep into human emotions, we still do not know what pushes
one person to resort to what the papers euphemistically call ‘taking the extreme
step’, and another person, similarly situated, to be able to cope with it. Equally
alarming is that more often than not, suicides end up with homicides, often with
people taking their loved ones, their own children. While explanations abound,
we must once again turn our search for answers inwards, and treat this situation
as yet another tell-tale sign that we are fast ‘losing’ the war within.
Traditional safe-havens like religion are no longer able to offer a shield
against the merciless maelstrom of life. Most people might still see their roots in
their religion and do what is expected of them, but that does not seem to answer
the existential questions they struggle with. We are much like the pilgrim in
Dante’s Inferno, who finds himself in a dark wood, at a dead end in the midst
of life, with a sense that all the ways to move forward are shut. Or like Arjuna,
in the Mahabharata, who finds himself with no way out of his predicament of
either killing those he venerated, or being called a ‘coward’ by his own divine
mentor. There is a growing sense that although our brain/mind has made man
the monarch of earth, it is also to blame for much, if not all that is wrong with
the world. There are also serious questions about identifying the brain with
the mind, and the mind with consciousness. And grave doubts if completely
targeting the brain to better ourselves is a wise thing at all.
Many fear that the force within that has guided us in our march to
modernity is pushing us to the brink, to the edge of the abyss, towards premature
earthly passage and, in spiritual terms, to the ever-widening chasm that, in
Thomas Merton’s telling phrase, separates “us from ourselves”.54 And let us be
very, very wary: this ‘enemy’ is not the enemy that Jesus exhorted us to love.55
This ‘enemy’, make no mistake, is ‘real’ but invisible, lurks and hides deep in the
depths of our consciousness, always waiting for a tempting opening to take over,
make us do things we detest. Oscar Wilde quipped, “a man cannot be too careful
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in the choice of his enemies”. Maybe, we have been—in trying to be too careful,
and perhaps trying to find a ‘worthy’ external enemy, and not finding anyone
‘suitable’—egged on by the internal enemy, and turning on each other. One
explanation is the theory of karma; we are all ‘heirs to our karma’; we have to do,
or not do, certain things, regardless of our wish or will, because only in that way
can a particular prarabdha karma can be acted upon. The package of prarabdha
consists of very diverse components. When other people hurt you it is their
karma; and how we react is our karma. To exhaust them we play multiple roles in
life, as parent, spouse, son and daughter, sibling, lover, friend, foe, professional,
and many other some seemingly trivial. If a certain role is not required for a
particular prarabdha of a particular person, we will not play that role. For example,
some remain unmarried or un-partnered; some have no siblings; some have no
children; some are still born; some die in a few days; some die very young and
some live long. It is because that particular prarabdha requires before it completes
this life. How we perform each role and whether we give or receive happiness
or unhappiness depends also on which way a particular prarabdha requires. It is
said in Buddhism, “Yadisam vapate bijam tadisam harate phalam”—as we sow,
so shall we reap. The same theme is replicated in the Bible, “Do not be deceived:
God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap”. If one suffers,
then the cause lies in him, and it is futile blaming someone else or believe that it
is the wish of an Almighty Creator God, or is due to an original sin. According
to Buddhism, there are several causes for any one event or happening. Karma is
a vital factor that plays an important part in the life of beings in making their
life miserable or fortunate. In the Karma Café, it is said, there is no menu; you
get served what you deserve, and until you fully partake of it you cannot leave.
The other explanation is how we behave, act or react, respond to circumstances
is a direct reflection of the ever-shifting and fluctuating fortunes in the ‘war’. We
must stop debating and wasting our energy and intelligence of every kind about
‘this’ or ‘that’; if we are ‘spirit’ or ‘flesh’; ‘good ‘ or bad’; ‘selfish’ or ‘altruistic’; and
so on. We have always been, we are, and we will always be all of ‘them’ and more.
Every one of us does some ‘good’ or ‘bad’ all the time, consciously or otherwise;
we are capable of both causing and relieving pain and suffering, even saving a life
or taking a life. But we still do not know when we become capable of which or
what. That is because it reflects the state of the ‘war’, and we have no control over
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it. The attendant issue is, “which of the two—doing good or doing bad—is more
natural, easier, more effortless, more spontaneous, and reflexive. The answer too
is the war. If the ‘good’ opponent has a clear ‘winner’ in a battle, not the war, then
the good we want to do occurs without much laboring; if it is the ‘bad’, then we
do bad more banally and brazenly.
To ‘survive’ and to ‘succeed’—these are the ‘mantras’ we chant and the
ones we have come to accept as the only goals in life, which eclipse everything
and anything else. But the Buddha offered us a model that is both ethical and
practical: “To prosper in harmony, your success must not result on the failure of
others. Your success must not harm others. Your success must not make others
unhappy. Your path to success must be a way to nurture everybody”.56 What
matters in the end is, how our ‘time’ on earth affects others’ ‘time’, and that often
ends as travesty or a tragedy. Joseph Addison, in his essay, ‘The Vision of Mirzah’
(The Spectator, 1711) voices it well: “Alas, said I, man was made in vain! How
is he given away to misery and mortality; tortured in life; and swallowed up in
death”. We might quibble about morality, but about mortality we think we are
more sure-footed. We are told that we are on the verge of a scientific ‘second
coming’, as it is being dubbed, namely ‘death control’—to make death obey our
dictum; to hasten or halt death, to postpone or prevent any earthly ending, to
cure the ‘disease’ of death, not to become one not-so-fine morning as though we
have never been.
Whichever way we are headed as a species, the ‘troubles’ are what we
wrestle with every day in our mundane, meandering and muddy lives. That,
according to the Bible, is what God allotted to the human lot. It says, “Mortals,
born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble”.57 Perhaps to ensure that we
cannot fight the ‘troubles’ too easily, God put the epicenter of our ‘troubles’ as well
as the know-how to overcome them tantalizingly close, but beyond our routine
reach: deep inside our own consciousness. It means that for all our