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

own selves. We are strangers to our own selves,
always surprised by our own actions, bewildered by our own behavior. We are
foreigners to our own passions and the compulsions, temptations, and terrors
that impel us, sometimes seduce us—to do what we do, or not do what we want
to do. The world confronts two kinds of ‘terror’: terror for a fanatical cause; and
terror of sheer ‘living’ with dignity. Both terrors have a single source: the within.
Often times, we ‘know’ more about another person than about ourselves. In one
sense, the person that stares back at you in the mirror is more of a ‘stranger’ than
a stranger on the street. Ironically we can, if we want to, share a smile with the
external stranger than the ‘internal’ stranger with a smirk on his face.
Human reach has extended into outer space, and peering through, say,
the Hubble Space Telescope, we can see galaxies billions of light years away. And,
we are told that “we can only realistically expect to send spacecraft to within the
boundary of our own solar system”. Going to the Moon, like climbing Mount
Everest, is no longer breaking news. The destination now is Mars, the aim is to
put up a permanent space colony on that planet. NASA, for example, is now
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mandated and tasked to ‘get humans to Mars by 2033’. We have several plans
to send manned missions to Mars, with a view to “eventually settling on and
terraforming the planet, while utilizing its moons, Phobos and Deimos”.62 The
space entrepreneur Elon Musk built the rocket company SpaceX from scratch, in
order to take us to the Red Planet. An initiative of several distinguished scientists,
including the late Stephen Hawking, aims to send a spacecraft to Proxima
Centauri b, the planet closest to Earth outside the solar system. The motive is not
only to experience the thrill of going ‘where no man has gone before’, but also,
as Elon Musk envisions, to reduce the ‘risk of human extinction’ by making life
multiplanetary, which he calls a ‘strong humanitarian argument’... It is to jump
the ship before it sinks and land on an island, so to speak. We have traveled to
Pluto, and we are well on our way to the Kuiper Belt, the region of the solar
system that exists beyond the eight major planets. We have even traveled into
interstellar space. About our outward odyssey, with remarkable prescience, the
French novelist Jules Verne had written, way back in 1865, that “in spite of
the opinions of certain narrow-minded people, who would shut up the human
race upon this globe, as within some magic circle which it must never outstep,
we shall one day travel to the moon, the planets, and the stars, with the same
facility, rapidity, and certainty as we now make the voyage from Liverpool to
New York”.63 That indeed might come true and we might even, as someone
predicted, be ‘honey-mooning on the Moon’ in our own lifetime. But that might
not prevent us from burning a bride for dowry while on the Moon!
For, on the very face of it, we have made more headway on our outward
journey, ‘investigating the heavens’, than on the ‘inward’ voyage, to explore the
cosmos within. The Upanishads proclaim that the little space within every living
creature is a replica of the cosmos and contains “The sun and the moon and the
stars. Fire and lightening and winds are there, and all that now is, and all that
is not”. Our ‘inner space’ has remained more impenetrable and unfathomable;
more of a black hole than those out there in outer space. But, like outer space
black holes, it is the brightest spot in our inner universe. We are making more
‘progress’ and are able to go deeper into distant space, and know more about the
stars, galaxies, and universes in the cosmos, than in our timeless thirst to travel
inside to know what makes us who and what we are. Without ‘going down’, if we
‘go up’, as we do now, there is a huge risk; with the mindset man currently has,
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he is likely to behave no differently on Mars, or the Moon, or on any ‘new earths’
than how he behaves on this earth. The fact is we have largely exploited everything
we can over here, and knowing it is going to come to an end, we are looking for
another place to exploit. We will exploit other places also the same way and move
on to yet another place. Unfortunately, we are looking at space exploration and
human migration into space as a technical, technological or economic (how to
bring down the costs) challenge. Through all his long evolution, man has been
earth-bound and that is not simply a physical fact; it is also psychological and
psychic. The earth is in each one of us, not simply the ground on which we
stand. We are often disoriented, even if briefly, if we even relocate our place of
residence. We must also bear in mind the ‘mental’ implications of our outreach
into the womb of outer space. The human mind, prevailing for the most part
in the ‘war within’, having, ‘colonized’ our consciousness, is now trying to
conquer extraterrestrial space. Even more worrisome is that the ‘content’ of the
human mind itself is under threat of radically being modified through applied
neuroscience, drugs, computerized implants, brain-machine interfaces, by
nano-scale devices, or other advanced technologies. There is little doubt that all
these will leave an impact on human consciousness and human behavior but,
unfortunately or by divine design, our ‘intelligence’ is not good enough to guess
in which direction. Another way of putting it across is to say that that human
‘power’ has broken the defenses of the world beyond, but it is still knocking on
the outer rampart of the inner world.
Human ‘intelligence’ has unraveled many ‘secrets’ of nature, or so it
believes, but has come a cropper in regard to the ‘war within’. We must remember
one thing and grasp its full import. Man has become awesomely powerful and
much of it is misdirected. We must remember that much of the power man
has acquired is to do exactly what he wants, which often translates into what is
dubbed as the ‘conquest of, or over, nature’. And, as CS Lewis explains: “Each new
power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker
as well as stronger. In every victory, besides being the general who triumphs,
he is also the prisoner who follows the triumphal car”.64 And it is inherent in
human ‘culture’ to use every power we have, to test and use every weapon we
make, even if it is self-destructive. Maybe one day, sooner than we can imagine,
some nutty democrat or true dictator will ‘test’ our missiles on celestial objects
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or other planets. Control over ‘outer space’ without control over ‘inner space’ is
hazardous. Although the ‘Outer Space Treaty’ clears forbids states from placing
‘nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction in orbit or on celestial
bodies or station them in outer space in any other manner’, clearly when a
country becomes capable of doing so, it will do so. Already, there are reports that
Russia is planning to build a ‘nuclear space bombing machine’.65 There is another
danger. Why does man want to migrate to Mars or the Moon or whatever? Is it to
escape from earth or seek new fortunes, to conquer new land, or to dig for gold?
Would the lure of getting away from our seemingly doomed earth, decimated
by man himself, act as a spur to further ravage our dear earth and play havoc
with its ecosystem and environment? That is a real probability, given man’s track
record. Without getting rid of malice, if man ‘colonizes’ other ‘earths’, as some
eminent scientists like the late Stephen Hawking have advocated,66 what is being
described as ‘space settlement’, those earths too will meet the same fate as our
own. Even if we train to become the ‘Mars Generation’ we will, consciousnesswise,
still be the same toxic humans we are on earth today. We humans have
not been able to make something so simple as wishing others well an effortless
habit; with what gumption do we want to spread ourselves elsewhere! Or, even
call ourselves the ‘most evolved’ species or ‘essentially spiritual’ species. The same
greed, possessiveness, and predatory behavior that have brought this earth to the
brink will drag the ‘others’ too to the same fate. And if our passions remain what
they are directed towards, and if we try to ‘humanize’ the universe, it might lead
to unforeseeable and unwelcome consequences. Then there is the question: could
the huge resources spent (a single space shuttle outing costs over half a billion
dollars) be better utilized down here on priorities like eradicating mass poverty,
cleaner environment, etc.? Whether or not Man, as a species, is the ‘measure and
mirror of all things’, as we proudly proclaim, Man, as the individual, is certainly
the ‘measure’ and ‘mirror’ of mankind. Man is his only limit and that limitation
comes from within. The Sufi mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi said, “The garden of
the world has no limits, except in your mind”. More appropriately, it is our
‘inside’, our ‘within’, of which the mind is but a part. Margaret Mead once said,
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change
the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has”. While an individual is the
basic unit, and it is not possible to affect any radical alteration on a mass scale,
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what is needed for a cascading and self-propelled momentum is a ‘critical mass’
of connected kindred spirits. For, “when an idea reaches critical mass there is no
stopping the shift its presence will induce”.67 And we do not need to be heroes to
align history; we only need to mend the way we ‘live’, ‘make a living’, ‘deal’ with
other people, with other creatures and, most of all, with nature. And everyone
can be an agent of change, as Mother Teresa said, by casting “a stone across the
waters to create many ripples”.
The Natural Need for ‘Negatives’
Looking at all the horrors of the 20th century, and even more at what the ordinary,
normal people—whose names, in the words of John Keats, are ‘writ in water’68—
do these days to their own selves and to fellow-humans, one wonders: How can
human beings behave in ways that so thoroughly violate both reasonable and
rational norms, and are obviously self-destructive? That includes not only what
we are doing to each other but also to the environment, earth and nature, which
can only be explained away as another form of self-destruction. But such are the
laws of nature that, as GK Chesterton said, ‘nothing is more effectively hidden
in the farthest recesses of the oblivious than the obvious’. We blush about our
own behavior, because we are blissfully oblivious and unobservant of what goes
on within our own selves. Nothing seems so mysterious or a riddle or an enigma
than our own behavior, both individually, collectively, and as a species. Aghast at
his own behavior, man has always struggled to know why he does things he hates
to do, to rid himself of his negative traits like prejudice, violence, ill will, hatred
etc. The true answer is this: we are mixing up ends and means, the instrument
and the direction. Nothing in life is unitary, or single-edged. Everything has a
dual-purpose. In nature too, what we call ‘negatives’ exist, they are essential;
without them creation will cease. Violence has a place, even anger, envy, rage,
lust; it is the intent, person, principle, purpose, and whom it benefits that make
the difference. In the wrong hands, and at the wrong time and circumstance,
anything can be harmful; anything in excess, in isolation can do more bad than
good, defeat the very purpose. If everyone is calm, incapable of anger, if we
are all passively peaceful, mind our own business, that would give free reign to
‘evil’, which also is a powerful part of nature. Similar is it with another that we
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are advised to guard against—doubt. But often it is not doubt by itself that is a
negative. We can make grievous errors if we are ‘doubt-less’ and too sure; Ezra
Bayda tells us: “Provided we don’t get lost in the negative beliefs that arise with it,
it [doubt] can lead to a deepening of our quest”.69 Divine avatars never hesitated
to use what we usually view as ‘negatives’ as means to achieve a ‘positive’ end. We
often miss this central point. We need both ‘positives’ and ‘negatives to survive
and