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

contingent on the ‘state of mind’ of the mind. The mind manifests
as logic, reason, and intellect. They have played a huge role in human survival
and supremacy. But they have their own character and limits. The biggest of
the challenges mankind faces at this hinge of history was best summed up by
Alexis Carrel (Man, The Unknown, 1935): ‘Those who desire to rise as high as
our human condition allows, must renounce intellectual pride, the omnipotence
of clear thinking, belief in the absolute power of logic’. The great 8th-century
Indian philosopher and theologian, Adi Sankara, assuredly one of the sharpest
human intellects ever and an unsurpassed spiritual master, expressed the same
skepticism when he asked, “have we not exaggerated the power and role, the
clarity and reliability of reason?” He said that it is not ‘cold logic’ that can lead
to self-realization; it is insight that we need, which is “the faculty of grasping
at once the essential out of the irrelevant, the eternal out of the temporal, the
whole out of the part”.97 Voltaire said, “Judge a man by his questions rather than
his answers”. A Chinese proverb adds: ‘He who asks a question is a fool for five
minutes; he who does not ask a question is a fool forever’. The poet David Whyte
wrote about, “questions that can make or unmake a life… questions that have
no right to go away”. They won’t ‘go away’ but cannot also be settled the way we
want it. After twenty years of what he himself called ‘presumptuous research’,
Raimon Panikkar reached his ‘humble conclusion’ and asked, “How can human
thinking grasp the destiny of life itself, when we are not its owners?”98 Whether
our ‘natural’ destiny was to ‘squat in caves and shiver, then die’99 or conquer
the stars and be immortal, as we dream to do, our task on earth ought to be
to make the planet a safe place for future generations to live upon. And, we
must acknowledge that all ultimate ‘questions’ have no infallible answers, and
all human ability to ‘know’ is tightly circumscribed, for good, or godly, reasons.
We must also never allow ourselves to go soft on another central fact.
While perennial questions concerning the origin of evil, what is evil, and whom
we can call evil, and under what circumstances will never ‘die’, the reality is that
in the innermost recesses of our being there are seeds of both good and evil, and
that an epic struggle is constantly raging between the two for the conquest of
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our consciousness. And yet, one cannot exist without the other. We must bear in
mind that even if it is a struggle we don’t witness or feel or experience, it is real
and if we want to rise to our full ‘humane’ potential and become a more benign
being and seriously address any of the existential threats the world is facing, then
we must prevail in this mortal combat—at the least manage a positive stalemate.
In all of us there are two men, two personalities. One is one whom some call,
a bit unfairly, the ‘animal man’, or more accurately ‘self-centric man’, slave of
the senses, driven by desire and pursuit of pleasure; the other is the ‘spiritual
man’, essentially struggling or seeking to turn his existence into a tool to be
useful to others. What we call our ‘behavior’, which often surprises, saddens
and maddens us so much—how could we, we wonder—, is but an external
extension or reflection of the ‘state of that struggle’ between these ‘two men’.
Call it the karma of Kali Yuga, our current age, or whatever else, over the recent
past, the personality of ‘self-centric man’ has become the dominant force in our
consciousness. And that, we need to change, using every means at our disposal,
every trick or trade, to induce and bring about an internal ‘regime-change’, a
revolution in the psyche of every human being. But such a revolution cannot
be brought about solely by any external entity alone, be it religious, political, or
social. Yet context matters. To change something we must be open to change. In
fact, that is a central fact we tend to ignore. Nothing in nature, nothing in life
happens, or can happen, out of context, or in isolation. Everything that happens
in life has to happen for something else to happen, or has happened. All morality,
all virtue, all religions, all scriptures, all science, all thinking are contextual,
outcomes of space and time. We venerate scriptures as sacred, and a truly religious
person is expected to live by the Book. They might be the very word of God, but
the medium, even if he is a prophet, is the human consciousness. Some scholars
even say that different portions of the same Book have different things to say,
reflecting the ethos of the time of the specific part. For example, it has been
said that the peaceful Quran passages were revelations that began in Mecca, and
the war-like ones were from Medina. When context changes, content changes.
And if it doesn’t, it becomes irrelevant and injurious. It is our constant failure
to accept and adapt this truism that is responsible for so much of what went
wrong in human history. We cling to ideal concepts, ideologies and beliefs that
demonstrably do more harm than good. What has thwarted our aspirations to
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lead happy, harmonious, and fruitful lives is due to another central fact. We have
been completely clueless and powerless to do anything about anything ‘within’
and that ‘helplessness’ has a huge bearing on how we lead our lives in the karana
jagat, the causal world.
Man—Noble Savage, Civilized Brute, or Half-Savage?
If we are ‘moral’—or spiritual, for that matter—then we wouldn’t be so reflexively
self-righteous, a trait that rationality again rationalizes. After all, the line between
‘self-belief ’, or ‘self-esteem’, which we deem a virtue, and self-righteousness,
which is bad, is very thin. It is rationality that draws the line. The ‘moral’ state of
man at birth has long been a subject of scholarly and speculative debate. Some say
that “men come into the world with their benevolent affections very inferior in
power to their selfish ones and it is the function of morals to invert this order”.100
Others aver that we are essentially ‘good’ at birth and it is culture and civilization
that corrupt us. Whether we are a ‘civilized brute’, ‘noble savage’ or, to borrow a
phrase from the American television serial Star Trek (Arena) ‘half-savage’—there
is hope. The fact is that we have always been, are and will always be, morally
mixed-up and messed up, although the make-up of the ‘mix’ varies from time to
time and person to person, even within the same person, sometimes dramatically
and drastically. Everything that is in nature—the good, bad, and ugly, noble and
nasty—they are all there within each of us. They constantly collide and fight
for supremacy. There is almost nothing that has always and everywhere been
deemed either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. When the necessity and context change, the focus
of what is moral and what is not also changes. What might appear as immoral
or cruel now, like slavery, patricide or infanticide, for example, were at another
time conceived and viewed as acts of mercy and morality. Furthermore, if man
had been wholly selfish or selfless, he would have been extinct a long time ago.
And whether any such ‘event’ would have been good or bad for life in general is
another question. Another point we must remember is that all morality heavily
hinges on the assumption that we have a good measure of freedom of choice
between good and evil. The point is that none of us is so right or righteous that
we can walk through our lives sniffing and mocking at others. Our ‘morality’
too is double-faced. One for us and for our ‘near and dear’; another for others.
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Although a bit too biting, in one sense, there is still some sense in Oscar Wilde’s
quip that “morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we
personally dislike”. But even that ‘double-face’ is a part of evolution. Had we
been entirely morally even-handed and treated everyone alike, we would again be
extinct by now. That is how generations succeeded each other in an uninterrupted
continuum.
What we should never lose sight of is the supreme, and subtle, secret of
nature. In fact, it is no secret; it is overt, open, and apparent. It is two-fold. To
harness nature we must first befriend it. Blavatsky’s The Voice of Silence (1889),
a translation of The Book of Golden Principles says, “Help nature and work with
her, and nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance. And
she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers; lay before thy
gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom”. We have
been exploiting nature’s treasures, not by ‘working with her’ but by ‘groping’
her ‘bosom’. What we see is its backlash. The ‘second’ is that everything in the
cosmos and creation, comes as a dwanda, a pair of opposites, like light and
darkness, positive and negative, good and evil, leaving and clinging, hardship
and hope… And that, the great Sankara, the foremost exponent of the Advaita
philosophy, says, is also due to the power of maya, the cosmic illusion, sometimes
called the Indian Sphinx.101 Everything is dual, but knowing it is not, is wisdom.
The conundrum is that nothing is ‘standalone’, all by itself, and yet any action
should be performed as if it is. In a basic sense, they are not ‘opposites’; nothing
in nature is opposed to another; each is different; and that ‘difference’ has a
cosmic purpose. Each is distinct, indeed exists, only because the ‘other’ is out
there. In fact, they create each other; like ‘being’ and ‘non-being’. Without
darkness there is no light; if there is no error there is no truth; without vice
or evil there is no virtue or goodness; without a road up there can be no road
down; and without death there is no life, and so on. Inside each of us and in life
at large there is a dwanda. In fact, the Jewish Kabala describes the Infinite God
as a ‘unity of opposites’. Lord Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita that He is the
dwanda-atheetha, the One beyond any ‘pair’, beyond any compound. He tells
Arjuna, “By the delusion of the pairs of opposites, sprung from attraction and
revulsion, O Bharata, all beings walk this universe wholly deluded”.102 Becoming
an ‘atheetha’ ought to be the goal of life. That, in effect, is a state of harmony. But
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then, what is the certainty that ‘delusion’ itself is not an appearance of illusion?
The fact also is that even a ‘negative’, properly used, can be positive. The same
snake venom kills but also saves. Context also changes the character of the same
action, positive or negative, virtuous or sinful, legal or illegal. The parent of all
paradoxes is that the ‘parent’ of all pairs, the dwanda, is the one within. The way
to ‘support’ it is by the way we ‘live’, which, in turn, is greatly influenced by the
balance in the internal ‘dwanda’. Being different is good; being indifferent is
bad. Indeed, “we are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the
same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that
all colors and all cultures are distinct and individual. We are harmonious in the
reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity”.103 People have lost
interest in people; it is things that matter. We may not even notice this about
ourselves, but none of us are truly interested in anyone; it is only that which we
think will be pleasurable and comfortable for us to be familiar with that we care
about. If we can grasp and comprehend this fundamental truth, everything falls
into its proper perspective, like looking at the earth from the moon, and will
give us what we need most in life—a launching pad for lift-off, an anchor to
wrap ourselves around. Even our existential experience in daily life tells us that
our cognitive capability is ‘necessary but not necessarily sufficient’ even to lead
our mundane and meandering lives. We are creatures conditioned by context,
molded by space and place; so is knowledge.
Has God Gotten Weary of Man?
Three of the foundational questions that have long haunted humankind are:
“Who in the world am I?”, “Why am I doing what I am doing?”, and “What
ought I to do to become what I ought to be?” More practically, how much of
what is amiss