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

‘troubles’, we
will have no one to blame but ourselves, nowhere need we go but inward. The
fact is that before we ‘behave’, before we say a word or take any action, before
even a thought crosses our mind, a whole lot happens somewhere within our
own mortal body that determines our relationship with the rest of the world,
and how we connect with fellow-humans and with other creatures. Whatever
we do, whatever happens at any given point of time, depends on who or what
Musings on Mankind
147
gains an upper hand at that point. If we are doing ‘good’ deeds, it means that the
goodness in us is prevailing at that time, and if ‘bad’, because the negative forces
are ascendant at that time. In one sense we are much like ‘programmed puppets’,
‘manipulated marionettes’, if you will, by an internally ‘external’ force over which
we are outwardly powerless. Perhaps puppets or marionettes are better performers
because they are wholly mechanical and are free from self-consciousness. And
that ‘internal’, ‘inside’, ‘interior’, ‘within’ is what we loosely call ‘consciousness’.
What we see and experience is the screen projected by the real action deep in the
depths of our being. And, either by divine design or traits innate to the human
condition, we have no insight into what we might call the ‘infrastructure of our
inside’. Advaita Vedanta compares it to watching a movie on a screen in which
we actually see and experience buildings burn and turn to ashes, but the screen
itself remains unburnt. The screen is real and the action unreal.
The Age of Loneliness
The big temptation has always been to dismiss all that is wrong with us—any
behavior that troubles us too much, that makes us uncomfortable—as a random
malevolence, deviant aberration, the deranged doings of a crazy nut, of a genetic
freak, or as acts of momentary madness; everything except identification with
our own ‘untamed’ selves. That has always been a grievous error, never more than
now. This streak of destruction is also responsible for our assault on nature. It
is important to note that human beings destroy their living environment at the
same time as they destroy one another, and that healing our society goes hand
in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the world. If our
relationship with each other is rooted in what Buddhists call ‘loving kindness’,
then our connection with nature will cease to be destructive. The defining drive
in contemporary life is a cocktail of disaffection, discontent and despair, and
if everyone of that ilk seeks to avenge them through destruction of those held
directly or indirectly responsible, the human world will then slide into a horrific
hell-zone.
While such a ‘cocktail’ can be a positive force for ‘progress’ and excellence
if properly directed, the truth is that it has become another manifestation, or
‘operationalization’, of unbridled greed, which is now getting blurred with
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
148
another ‘unique’ human feature: the feeling of ‘entitlement’. Greed is wanting
much more than you need or due, but ‘entitlement’ is to view what you want as
what is your right. Deserving is different from entitlement, just as greed is from
desire. It undermines contentment. But contentment has also a downside. It can
lead to complacency and conformity, to love of the status quo, and to the ‘slow
but sure stamping out of individuality’ (à la Dylan Thomas), to a life that is but
a bargain, that is no more than, ‘so much per week, so much for this, so much for
that’. There are a growing number of people in the world who think they deserve
whatever they want, and when they don’t get it they conclude that it ought to be
the fault of some other person or society. A growing number of people, covering
a broad spectrum of society, not only the weak-minded or having psychological
problems, are convincing themselves that that which is denied to them is their
due, if not a right, be it money, love or sex, or power, and that if they cannot have
it, no one else deserves to have it. It is a ploy of our mind to shift the responsibility
for our failures from ourselves to another person or society. In one sense, it stems
from the fear of failure, or the fear of being the loser. Like with sex, our sense
of ‘morality’ is obsessed, and afflicted with, success and scorn at ‘failure’. John F
Kennedy, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco, rued “success has many fathers; failure
is an orphan”. Nothing we dread more than being dubbed as such. ‘Failure’, even
more than the belief that we have ‘failed’, deals a mortal blow to our sense of selfworth,
social standing, and that dread drives many towards suicide—shockingly,
kids have killed themselves for not getting good grades in a school test. Such is
the humdrum human mindset about ‘success’ and ‘failure’. And both are defined
and measured by immediate results and material well-being—passing an exam,
getting a job, getting a promotion, a happy relationship. Most of us might not be
able to put to practice Samuel Beckett’s vision of ‘heroic failure’ as a way of life,
which he expounded in his acclaimed work Westward Ho! (1983): “Fail again;
Better again; Or better worse; Fail worse again; Still worse again! Till sick for
good, Throw up for good”. He himself ‘failed’ to hide his ‘success’. No one really
knows what ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in the totality of life is, but that does not deter
us from venerating ‘success’ and vilifying ‘failure’. Generally we think ‘success’ is
to have a good career, make a lot of money, have a good marriage, or ‘partners’, or
‘raise’ a good family and so on. The absurdity and agony of human predicament
is that we do not know what else to judge our life with. Our ‘intelligence’ is
Musings on Mankind
149
not good enough for us even to ‘know’ how to assess our life, in all four stages,
childhood, adolescence, youth, and old age. And that failure is not an end point
but an essential component of a cyclical process. So many have lived worthless
lives, so many buds did not blossom, so many flowers smothered; so many have
killed themselves, so many have been wrongly applauded, all because of this
‘mother of all of failures’.
Education, career, home, and workplace pretty much gobble up our life,
and how we do in these places has, by default, come to sum up our success or
failure. If we don’t do well in education—which means getting good marks in
the hundreds of tests and exams we take over a period of 15 to 20 years through
our childhood, adolescence and youth—then our family, friends and society will
pronounce that we are, if not a failure, certainly not a success. We don’t get a job,
therefore we are a ‘failure’. If we don’t have a good career, do not get one, or don’t
rapidly climb up the professional ladder, or worse get laid off, we are deemed a
failure. At the workplace, failure has a heavy price, can cost you the job itself.
However, some researchers are arguing that venerating success and looking down
on failure is shortsighted even from a business point of view. Ron Friedman’s The
Best Place to Work58 makes the same point and suggests that companies wanting
to be competitively successful and on the cutting edge of innovation need to
embrace failure in their employees, and “accepting failure doesn’t just make risktaking
easier, but “in a surprising number of instances, it’s the only reliable path
to success”. Often what we call failure is part of the learning process. Thomas
Edison said, “I failed my way to success”. A Chinese proverb says that ‘failure
is the mother of success’. JK Rowling in her address to the graduating class of
Harvard (2008) said, “You might never fail on the scale I did. But it is impossible
to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might
as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default”. In fact, many
great achievers—Walt Disney, Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh, The Beatles,
Michael Jordan, to cite but a few—failed repeatedly or were considered mediocre,
before tasting success.
Success or failure also has a huge bearing on the morality of means. These
two are also another dwanda, part of the inherent duality of life. We should not
be elated by success or afraid of failure. We need take the two in their stride but
should not be possessed by them. Even in our own personal lives, looking back at
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
150
what we once thought was a setback would have later turned out to be a stepping
stone to success, a set-up for a comeback; and what we then considered a success,
we might now wish it didn’t happen. Most times, it is other people’s opinions
that shape our own view whether we are a success or not. We should not extol
success or look down upon failure. That is one of the qualities of sthitaprajna
(steady wisdom) as detailed by Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita. Most of us
cannot reach those heights; but even if we cannot reach the peak, at least we can
go to a higher plateau. The stranglehold of success and the burden of failure in
our culture need to be loosened and lightened. That could save many innocent
lives and make life way less miserable to most people. And that could be a big
step towards eliminating a huge moral temptation from our lives. For too often
we sell our soul for success. We might not know that but it exacts a terrible
toll on our psyche. An agonizing number of people, particularly young adults,
already tired to the bone with what success entails in today’s ruthless world, are
behaving as if they are ‘constantly torn between killing themselves and killing
everyone around them’, and they seem to feel that these are ‘the two choices;
everything else is just killing time’. Such are the states of mind that breed mass
murderers and lead to senseless school shoot-outs. We can’t derisively dismiss
them as twisted minds and crazy loonies. Too often some of them are some of
our most promising; their mindset is a product of our tormented times, wages
of our warped values.
The Two Journeys—Outer Space and Inner Space
Man has long had two ‘dreams’, both integral parts of the ‘human story’. One
is to go higher and higher into the far reaches of space, and the other is to go
deeper and deeper inside our own selves. The outer space is the cosmos, limitless;
the inner space is physically bounded but still limitless. The real ‘beyond’ that
is most impenetrable is not outer space but the inner space. The Chandogya
Upanishad eloquently explains: “As great as the infinite space beyond is the space
within the lotus of the heart. Both heaven and earth are contained in that inner
space, both fire and air, sun and moon, lightning and stars. Whether we know
it in this world or know it not, everything is contained in that inner space.
Never fear that old age will invade that city; never fear that this inner treasure
Musings on Mankind
151
of all reality will wither and decay. This knows no age when the body ages; this
knows no dying when the body dies. This is the real city of Brahman; this is the
Self, free from old age, from death and grief, hunger and thirst. In the Self all
desires are fulfilled”.59,60 Advaita Vedanta says that “to keep the mind constantly
turned within and to abide thus in the Self alone is Atmavichara (self-enquiry)”.61
The 16th-century Spanish poet and Roman Catholic mystic Saint John of the
Cross described it as a journey through ‘the dark night of the soul’. Marcus
Aurelius described it as ‘to retire into yourself ’. That is a way to get a grip on
our own selves, our mind, our consciousness, to awaken and bring to bear the
best out of us in the service of man and God alike. This is the essence of what
the Upanishads call ‘Self-realization’, what the Buddha implied in his vision of
Nirvana, what Lao Tzu referred to when he said that ‘He who knows others is
wise; he who knows himself is enlightened’. It is the idea behind the Delphic
axiom ‘know thyself ’ and the ancient dictum ‘man, know thyself ’. Paramahansa
Yogananda says that “self-realization is the knowing—in body, mind and soul—
that we are one with the omnipresence of God… God’s omnipresence is our
omnipresence”. The principal reason that none of us is content with what we
have, is because we do not know who we truly are, and that is because what goes
on inside us is a mystery to our