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

to help maintain equilibrium, within and outside. It is our ‘behavior’ that
is so baffling; it is because we are not able to ensure the ‘equilibrium’ in the ‘war
within’. We have crafted a way of life, the human way, that feeds, abets and aids
almost wholly our ‘negatives’. There is no ‘equilibrium’ any more in human life.
That must be restored, an exercise that some call ‘spiritual struggle’.
Our ‘behavior’, whether ‘autistic’ or altruistic, benign or malign, is, in
turn, nothing but a replica of the ever-fluctuating fortunes of that epic struggle.
Every event in our life, every triumph and tragedy, every success and setback,
the way we deal with every situation, has already happened, even if it is a few
seconds sooner, before we actually ‘do’ or ‘experience’, enjoy or bemoan. All our
past and present, everything that happened and is happening, every atrocity,
all great human accomplishments, everything as a species we are so proud of,
is but an outward projection of the state of this eternal war within, particularly
of the people concerned at that particular point in time. If we can grasp this
fundamental fact, nothing will surprise or shock us, and everything becomes
explainable and comprehensible. The same will hold good for the future too.
If we want to see that our future is better than our present, the only way is to
positively affect the flow of the war.
Tikkun Olam—Healing the World
To affect the flow of the war, we have to affect the flow of our daily life. We cannot
predict the future, but what history tells us is that what seems promising can
become a nightmare; things can go horribly wrong and we can encounter what
are called ‘tail events’ and ‘black swans’, events so out of everyday observations
that we will fall short of what is required of us to meet such events. It all comes
down to how human consciousness acts upon these ‘possibilities’ at a certain
point of time and place, in the shape of certain human beings. We must also
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come to terms with another reality. We cannot any longer trust, or turn to, what
Mark Twain called our ‘sleepy conscience’, what Gandhi called the ‘inner voice’,
as our moral watchdog or as a tool to aid us in judging right and wrong. That
‘sleepiness’ is so deep and prolonged that it has made us virtually comatose. We
need to turn our attention from conscience to our consciousness. We need such a
tool to imbibe and internalize the simple message from nature: a life not useful is
useless; or in Goethe’s words ‘an early death’. The famous motto of the Christian
Methodist faith expresses this thought beautifully: “Do all the good you can, by
all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the
times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can”. In Hebrew, the
purpose of life is Tikkun olam, helping and ‘healing of the world’. Carl Jung said
that the ‘sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of
mere being’.70 A beautiful poem, Another Reason to Live, by Zen monk Seido Ray
Ronci says it all: ‘To hold the hand, to kiss the forehead; to wipe the face, to clean
the soiled sheets of the dying’.71 Swami Vivekananda simplified it in his usual
way: ‘he alone lives, who lives for others’. There is another reason why we have
to make our lives ‘useful to others’. Because we depend on others for our very
existence, even just to be alive. Einstein expressed this thought when he said,
“Many times a day, I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon
the labors of my fellowmen, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert
myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. My peace of mind
is often troubled by the depressing sense that I have borrowed too heavily from
the work of other men’.72 Fortunately, we do not have to struggle too hard to
do that. That ‘being useful’, that ‘living for others’ can take multiple forms and
ways, depending on the nature of the need, not the person. The simplest way is
to try one’s very best, use every might, ‘to see that every single act you do creates
or contributes to what you care for, at least does not dilute. Whether the person
is weak or strong, wretched or privileged, wicked or virtuous, does not matter.
In Emerson’s words, ‘to leave the world a little better, and to know that one life
has breathed easier because you lived here’. And we don’t have to do something
heroic or extraordinary. In a figurative way, we have to be ‘doctors’ and relieve an
other person’s pain and suffering; and it can be physical, mental, or even spiritual.
It is said that there’s a passage in the Pali canon where the Buddha talks
about himself as a doctor. He was indeed a peerless physician for the spiritually
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sick. Regardless of who the ‘patient’ is, we should simply heal and help in every
way we can, and not worry about how that help is used or misused and what
comes in return. That could be a good point of departure for us when we are
caught up in life’s balancing act. We are all bound to each other, and by helping
others, we will discover an unacknowledged, undervalued part of our own selves.
When we acknowledge that suffering is our common ground, it enables us to
feel as though everyone we see has been our mother, father, daughter, or son
or a friend or foe in one or other of millions of lives, not only in the human
form. Sometimes in separate lives, some kind of a karmic role reversal takes place
between husband and wife, parent and child, master and servant, even owner
and pet. What in Buddhism is called the Bodhisattva path is dedicating one’s life
to the benefit of all beings, doing whatever we can to help ourselves be happy and
free. According to this ‘path’, helping yourself, when your goal is to help others,
might seem contradictory, but in fact it is the only way it can work. In the end,
the notion of putting oneself last is really an inside-out form of self-cleansing.
One such injunction even states, “when somebody whom I have benefited, and
in whom I have great hope, gives me terrible harm, I shall regard that person as
my holy guru”. The person becomes a ‘guru’ because, by his actions, he tests our
resolve and patience. The great 9th-century Buddhist Sage Shantideva taught
that all the joy that exists in the world comes from wishing for the happiness
of other sentient beings, not merely other human beings, and all misery from
narrow egotism. He was prepared to exchange his happiness for the suffering of
others, and he says, “May I become a servant for those sentient beings who need
a servant”. Perhaps the most impossible thing to do in human life is to be, and
behave, like any other person, the exchange of ‘self with the other’, or one’s life
for another life. That is the ultimate separation. But, without at least bridging the
gap, we cannot really fully share our life with others or look at a problem from
another’s perspective. Great souls, and Bodhisattvas and rishis, have struggled
with this issue of how to create the space to put ourselves in someone else’s skin
to the best of our ability, imagining what they’re going through, and how they
perceive us, and identifying how we might help. A side benefit of seeing ourselves
from another’s perspective is that it is a great way to keep the ego in check, if
not to abandon altogether. Ramana Maharshi says, “The individual being which
identifies its existence with that of the life in the physical body as ‘I’ is called
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the ego… This ego, or individual being, is at the root of all that is futile and
undesirable in life”.73 He also says that the common religious view of the three
fundamentals as separate entities of world, soul and God lasts only so long as
the ego lasts.74 And that so long as the ego lasts, human effort is necessary, but
when the ego goes, actions become effortless. One of the principal ‘undesirable’
manifests of the ego is to make us always look for self-gain and to desist from
doing anything that could possibly be of any help to anyone.
In Einstein’s words, ‘only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile’.
It is ancient wisdom too, as voiced by Marcus Cicero: Non nobis solum nati
sumus— not for ourselves alone are we born. In the Mahabharata,75 the dialogue
on statecraft between Dhritarashtra and Vidura has this to say: ‘One should
wish for the prosperity of all, and should never set heart on inflicting misery on
any group. One should pay attention to those who have fallen in distress and
adversity; One should show compassion to all creatures, do what is good for
all creatures rather than a select few’. Buddhism even calls for compassion to
someone who tries to kill you. It says that ‘when someone is trying to physically
injure us, the practice is to meditate on patience for oneself and compassion
for our enemy’. Martin Luther King Jr brought all this esoterism to a simple
question, and said that life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are
you doing for others?’ The answer to that question, if we ponder over it for a
while and be truly honest to ourselves, has to be: “what we are ‘doing to others’
is currently the chief source of suffering; none of us can claim that we caused no
suffering to anyone”. Two things are inescapable: we all ‘suffer’; and we make
others ‘suffer’. That is Man’s Fate and God’s Choice. Lord Krishna calls the world
of life ‘Duhkhalayam asasvatam’, the place of suffering and the non-permanent.
Buddhism says that all suffering is delusive like the death of your child in a
dream. The great paradox, and also the great opportunity, is that it is easier to
help people than not hurt them; it is easier to alleviate ‘suffering’ than not cause
it; it is easier to be nice than not being nasty; it is even easier to save; but not
nag, nibble, and negate others. In general, one might say that life is such that
cultivating ‘positives’ is less arduous than avoiding ‘negatives’.
Before we wander any further into the woods and get lost in Auden’s
‘lovely, dark, and deep woods’, it is important to note and never forget another
fact of life: that everything, all knowledge we possess and are able to have access
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to, indeed everything in life and life itself, is provisional, conditional and, at
best, an approximation, a good guesstimate, if you will. Everything in life is
impermanent, qualified, finite, but it, as Vedanta affirms, is all an ‘appearance’; it
seems so; not is. And, ironically, it is ‘appearance’, the way we look, the image in
the mirror, that dominates modern life. It is ‘appearance’, not the reality, which
we want to change, to ‘improve’, to ‘augment’, to ‘enhance’, to make whole. To
cater to this ‘need’, to satiate this thirst, we have a surfeit of help at hand: plastic
surgeons, navel and nose fixtures, fitness gurus, diet doctors, therapists, life
coaches, body-shapers and fashion consultants and so on. Vedanta says that the
Absolute alone is real; this world is only ‘appearance’, maya or illusion. Vedanta
says the way out is to become the ‘Absolute’. What modern man wants to do is
to use his knowledge and intellect to not remove, but to perpetuate the ‘illusion’
to work on his ‘appearance’ and make that the ‘absolute’. What he wants, in
practical terms, are better jobs, a better love-life, better clothes, better cars, better
relationships, better social statuses, better financial situations, etc. But at the
end of the day, few are satisfied and many are bitter, angry, lonely, alienated, and
disillusioned.
A World of Individuals
We must bear in mind that when we talk of the world in abstract, we are actually
talking of a ‘world of individuals’, a conglomerate of ‘units of life’, each ‘unique’
and ‘not being anything else’. It is the sum total of what the multitude of
individual men and women feel, know, imagine, reason to be, and of whatever
is knowable to a human now or ever. For long, philosophers and scholars have
debated who is supreme: the individual, or society, the unit or the conglomerate.
Some say that the liberty of the individual is