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

the greatest thing of all, and that
‘the submission of the individual to society—to the people, to humanity, to the
idea—is a continuation of human sacrifice… the crucifixion of the innocent
for the guilty’. Others argue that it is our inability to go beyond the bounds
of what psychologists call ‘individuation’, described as a process by which
individual beings are formed and differentiated (from other human beings). That
‘individuation’ is the cause, root and reason for all the travails of mankind. And,
individuation is greatly influenced by ‘intelligence’. We still do not know what
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intelligence in the operative sense means. And who is ‘more’ or ‘less’ intelligent
than another person? Someone who is a genius in one field of awareness or activity
might be a novice in another aspect or area. And we know all too well that a most
‘intelligent’ man amongst us, whose hallmark is ‘reasoning’ capacity, might act
most ‘foolishly’ at times. In fact, many of the problems that mankind faces spring
from the exaggerated confidence in reason. That is because we are more than
‘intelligence’ or ‘intellect’, and we ignore the other two dimensions: the psychic
and the spiritual. The great rishi Sri Aurobindo said that a ‘true transformation’
of man can happen only through a triple transformation—psychic, spiritual,
and supramental. He writes, “The forces that stand in the way of sadhana are the
forces of the lower mental, vital and physical nature. Behind them are adverse
powers of the mental, vital and subtle physical worlds. These can be dealt with
only after the mind and heart have become one-pointed and concentrated in
the single aspiration to the Divine”. The aim of the sadhana is “to transform
the whole nature, so that the being may live in union with the divine, and the
nature becomes a field for the action of the divine Knowledge, divine Power and
the divine Ananda”. What is necessary for man to do is to surrender some of his
individualism for the collective good. Indeed, as Tagore says, “creation has been
made possible through the continual self-surrender of the unit to the universe.
And the spiritual universe of Man is also ever claiming self-renunciation from
the individual units”.
Such are the soaring visions of realized souls—what the human form
is capable of, and needs to work towards. Sri Aurobindo himself says, “He can
succeed in this only if he makes it the supreme object of his life and is prepared
to subordinate everything else to this one aim. Otherwise all that can be done is
only to make some preparation in this life—a first contact and some preliminary
spiritual change in part of the nature”. Yet, at the level at which we live our lives,
the connecting thread of all human thought, scriptural and scientific, sacred and
secular, is veneration of life and vilification of death. Death, our ‘intelligence’
tells us, is dirty, dreary, dreadful, and an unnecessary—and unfair—end to being
born human. And even if we have no clue what happens next, whether we go
nowhere or somewhere, we believe that any sort of life with any amount of
misery and depravity is better than any sort of death. We are even prepared to
‘die’ temporarily if we can escape death ‘permanently’. That is why we abhor
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‘killing’ of any kind or for any purpose. Without ‘killing’ there is no death; we
are ‘killed’ either by bacteria, decay, and disease or by an insect, animal or an
appliance, or another man. And every ‘death’ is at once natural and induced;
‘natural’ because everyone dies; induced or enforced, because no one wants to
‘die’, even the one who commits suicide. A suicide note often simply says ‘consider
my death as normal’ and describes it as one’s ‘last wish’. Alongside the instinct for
self-preservation, we also have the urge for self-destruction. Freud hypothesized
that humans have a ‘death drive’ or ‘death instinct’, which he called Thanatos,
but it appears to be accelerating. What Camus called the ultimate philosophical
question, is fast becoming the ultimate ‘final’ solution to life’s problems. It takes
a trifle of an effort to ‘die’ than to ‘live’, many are coming round to feel. For a
growing number of distraught and desperate people, the very thought that they
can actually do something, anything—it just doesn’t matter what—, that actually
puts an end to an intolerable relationship, a pestering problem, a debilitating and
draining condition, a crippling loss of a beloved or even of a crop, or just the fear
of having to live out life in this world, is becoming a temptation too strong to
resist. The searing commentary on our modern life is that suicide has become, in
the minds of many, not an extreme step, but a reasoned response to the ugliness
of modern life, which is defined, in the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as
“physical bloom, happiness, and leisure, the possession of material goods, money,
and leisure, toward an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures”. All
this and the ‘psychological detail’ entails “the constant desire to have still more
things and a still better life and the struggle to this end”.
The allures of the luxuries of life, and the uncertainty of after-life, cease
to be deterrents in that frame of mind. And it is seducing many young lives, not
only those who are anyway at the end of life’s journey. It is an issue that requires
deep introspection and close attention of psychologists, religious leaders and of
all thoughtful and caring persons. The basic facts of ‘death’ are stark and simple.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad explains: “When body and mind grow weak, the
Self gathers in all the powers of life and descends with them into the heart… By
the light of the heart, the Self (which is hidden in the lotus of the heart) leaves
the body by one of its gates; and when he leaves, prana follows, and with it all
the vital powers of the body. He who is dying merges in consciousness, and thus
consciousness accompanies him when he departs, along with the impressions of all
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that he has done, experienced, and known”. And it offers an analogy to illustrate
the process: “As a caterpillar, having come to the end of one blade of grass, draws
itself together and reaches out for the next, so the Self, having come to the end of
one life and dispelled all ignorance, gathers in his faculties and reaches out from
the old body to a new”. Simply or simplistically stated, one moment we are ‘alive’
and the next we are deemed ‘dead’; ‘life’, or whatever it might be, departs, the
body disintegrates and decomposes and is quickly disposed off and never again
to be seen, and the rest of mankind get on with their lives till their time ‘comes’.
The ‘dead’ are ‘gone’ but not altogether forgotten. While some believe that the
dead drift into the domain of fading photos, in some cultures and traditions,
the ‘dead’, our ancestors, are ritually remembered through requiems; and even
‘fed’ every year, which it is believed is a day for the ‘dead’, for their sustenance
wherever or whatever they might be or become. ‘Death’ defies logic, and there is
no intelligible rhyme or reason, save, to some extent, the theory of karma, why
at any given point one person is ‘alive’ and another is ‘dead’. Maybe what we call
‘death’ is what we think is ‘life’ and vice versa. Then again, while death is ‘earthly
departure’ in human terms, a matter of dread and regret, what about ‘earth’? Is it
a matter of ‘relief ’ and ‘celebration’, the lessening, however infinitesimally little,
of the human burden on earth? We can surmise and speculate but we cannot shy
away from the fact that with all our intelligence, knowledge, scriptural wisdom,
scientific insights, messages from mediums from the other side, ‘we have never
found either a modus vivendi or a modus operandi with mortality’, a way to accept,
accommodate and absorb ‘death’ into our earthly existence. Every ‘death’ of a
known person intrudes into and affects our affects our lives. We visit the ‘place’,
attend rituals, comfort the bereaved even if we really do not know what to say
and say good things about the dead that you did not tell them when they were
alive. The sun does rise the next morrow and we do our oblations as a part of
‘being alive’, and the ‘dead’ go wherever they go, or nowhere and henceforth they
remain a part of our past.
Seminal Choice—Merger with the Machine or Evolution from Within
But the irony is that while we all blame brain-led human behavior as the source
of all the problems of the world, we are also trying to solve the problem only
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by augmenting that very brain-power artificially. Our present mindset is that
whatever we want and for whatever is wrong with us, we can get a fix through
ersatz, artificially or synthetically. That is not confined to either organs or
intelligence. It includes even overcoming our moral flaws through what is being
described as ‘artificial morality’, a research program for the construction of
moral machines. Suddenly, the name of the game in town, the flagship issue, the
panacea for all our troubles is the ‘machine’. Alexis Carrel suggested, “Humanity’s
attention must turn from the machines of the world of inanimate matter to
the body and the soul of man” (Man, The Unknown, 1935). We are doing the
opposite. The irony is that while the machine is man-made, we trust it more
than ourselves. We are seeing virtues we think we ourselves lack; we think that
a machine can act as a cover for our weaknesses and vulnerabilities. The guiding
philosophy so far has been, in the words of Henry Ford, “for most purposes
a man with a machine is better than a machine without a machine”. But the
question is, ‘better’ for what? In any event, we are about to make a quantum
leap, a paradigm shift in our relationship with the machine. The accelerating
advances in synthetic body parts, artificial intelligence, stem cell research, and
genetic engineering, it is expected, will move us to a new era, where humans
mingle with humanoids, cyborgs, and artificially intelligent robots. We not only
want to make more and more sophisticated machines, appliances and gadgets
to make our life ‘better’; we want to go all the way like what scriptures told
us to do with God—merge with it; dissolve into it. What adjustments we are
forgetting is that in the man-machine symbiosis, it is man who has to make all
the adjustments and compromises; the machine can’t, or does not need to. It is
through such a ‘merger’ or ‘dissolution’ that we want to become immortal, travel
to and live in outer space, colonize the moon and Mars. Besides the machine,
what we bank upon is the brain. In fact it is the blend of the two that is the magic
wand to solve all our problems. The fact that we still do not have a ‘fine-grained
understanding of the neural structure of the brain’ does not deter us from finding
ways to merge our mind with the machine, which is the aim of projects like
Elon Musk’s Neuralink, the neurotechnology initiative that is reported to be
developing implantable brain–computer interfaces. Instead, what we ought to
be working on is how our brain and heart can better work together to broaden
and better the base of our ‘intelligence’.
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We are now stranded in a state of ‘materialistic slavery’; we have long
ago almost lost what we might call the innate capability to live without some
mechanical help. We rebel and fight against all kinds of slavery, personal, social,
political, but we wallow in this slavery. To get freedom from this slavery too we
need help, not materialistic but spiritual help. For long, having some sort of a
machine allow us to do work with less muscle effort and greater speed, has been
a part of human life and history, perhaps even pre-history, from the time of our
human predecessor Homo habilis, which means ‘handy man’ or ‘capable man’.
But it has always been a supplement, complement, something that reinforces
us. Now, if the present trends continue and forecasts come true, the machine
might replace us; we will be reinforcing the machine, helping it to do its work
better, with less ‘machine’ power, by offering our muscle power. There are a
number of religious leaders who are greatly concerned about this trend. Pope
Francis, for example, says that “work is a necessary part of the meaning of life on
earth, a path to growth”.76 And we are doing it willfully, eagerly, even ‘lovingly’;
looking at the machine as a kind of a modern Messiah, a savior, to bale us out
of our own trap,