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

and remiss, innately illicit, deficient, and decadent in us is our
fault, and unique in particular in each of us, and what should be the source of
the change from within that changes the way we relate and connect with the
world? Given the inroads that the machine has made into human life and turned
man into a means for its perpetuation, and given our dismal terrestrial track
record, we must wonder if the ‘human machine’ has become so irreparable and
fatally dysfunctional that we should accelerate our efforts to lighten the ‘human’
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part and heighten the ‘machine’ part. Some argue that “a moral machine is
better than a flawed human being”.104 Should we now actively work to install
an ‘autonomous’ robotic-machine as our natural biological successor on earth?
Are we safer with ‘synthetic biology’, said to be already in transition from field to
reality?105 The emerging field of synthetic biology envisions engineering the living
world. Record sums are being invested in research in this direction. Although the
premise is that it will deliver novel biofuels, drugs, foods, materials, bio-products
like organs for transplant, chemicals, and even perfumes, clearly it will also yield
unexpected other offshoots. A field of such potentially huge significance requires
informed social and ethical attention.
Besides all the timeless questions of theology and philosophy, we must
now add another one: has God finally given up on man, the one who, as the
Bible says, was ‘made in His own image’? And, has God left him naked to the
malice of his own mind? We have no way to know, but what we do know is that
we are getting disdainful of God. Many mock and ask “what has God done for
me lately?”106 Pope John Paul II said that “the limit imposed upon evil, of which
man is both perpetrator and victim, is ultimately the Divine Mercy”.107 Is that
why evil, these days, has a smirk on its face? We have performed, in Nietzsche’s
words, ‘divine decomposition’. Whether avowedly atheistic or not, whether or
not we have ‘faith’ and/or ‘belief ’, we so conduct our lives as if God is either
helpless to help us or to hurt us, and therefore skeptics conclude that a “God that
matters, in the 21st century, is all but extinct”. And an ad is out for a “God who
matters and can be trusted”.108 By ‘to be trusted’ we mean to do our bidding, to
be at our beck and call—that is what we want from God. Even if we believe in
God, we have come to convince ourselves that to please the extant God we need
not be good and virtuous, that by being ritualistically devout, worshipful and
‘charitable’ with God, we can sanitize, if not sanctify, our bad behavior, and we
can wash away our evil. From the prehistoric times to the modern day in human
consciousness, God, religion, and morality are, as a recent study reveals, deeply
intertwined with what it means to be human, for better and for worse.109 At
the practical level, most of us no longer feel any discomfort in being ‘pious’ and
ritualistically zealous in our theological life, while being immoral and malicious
in our interpersonal universe. We are able to indulge in all this duplicity, doubletalk,
jugglery, and are able to get away with it, and to a large extent are able to
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‘have it both ways’ because we are in practical terms slaves of our mind. Our
mind is so cunningly nimble that it can explain away anything and turn a mass
murder into a holy action. And it is not only ‘fanatics’, whom Vivekananda
called ‘the sincerest of mankind’, and ‘extremists’ who are led to do such things;
even ‘responsible, ‘deeply religious’, god-fearing ‘leaders’ have justified gross evil
as righteous acts, ‘just wars’. Another instance is President Truman calling the
atomic bombs, which he ordered to be used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as
‘merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness’. He did not
say, as many have said, that it was a ‘lesser evil’ or ‘necessary evil’, or that he was
doing his ‘duty’. All his life, he never doubted why he did. The bomb was not
dropped on Tokyo, where the people who were waging the war were living, and
there was never a credible explanation. One view was that dropping the bomb on
Tokyo would have led to ‘lesser’ damage, as it was already a rubble, and another
very curious, if not cynical, reason was that they did not want to kill those—
the war-wagers and leadership—with whom they had to negotiate surrender!
Purely objectively, how can we ‘rationalize’ it, reconcile an individual’s presumed
‘goodness’ with cold-blooded murder of thousands of innocent people? The
mind can make us anything, and make us believe we are ‘moral’.
It is our artful ambivalence about God, divine disconnectedness, and our
broken relationship with nature, that has led some perceptive observers like Mark
Juergensmeyer, Dinah Griego, John Soboslai to conclude what is responsible
for many of our thorny problems like the current environmental crisis110—and
most certainly for the current ‘morality crisis’. Ivan Karamazov of Dostoyevsky’s
Brothers Karamazov111, 112 says, “Without God everything is permitted now, one
can do anything”. Or, according to a different translation, “If God didn’t exist,
everything would be possible”. The key word is ‘if ’; the premise is predicated
on the non-existence of God. It does not mean that Ivan believed in that; in
fact (in the book), he later confesses to Alyosha that he does believe in God.
But the quote is often used to signify that sans belief in a supernatural, supreme
power, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong, even
right from another right, and wrong from another wrong. The positive take away
could be that we then know we are on our own, are socially responsible for our
actions, with no alibis or evasions, nothing to explain away with. If we have full
faith in God, however we visualize and wherever its, or His, locus might be, we
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have a solid anchor, a clear focus to ‘realize’ Him, to live life according to His dos
and don’ts as revealed in the scriptures. Most of us are in the world in between,
neither with implicit faith and belief nor with explicit denial. What we ‘know’
is so ludicrously little either to affirm or deny. We want the divine on our own
terms in our own den; we think that God owes us much in return for our belief
in Him. And we think that devoutness can be an antidote to immoral behavior
and acts as a buffer to injustice and oppression. We use worship to try to placate
or even bribe God into overlooking how we ill treat and exploit other people and
torment and torture other species. This is not a nascent trait or tendency. One of
the Hebrew prophets, Amos, for example, warned against this and posited that
God’s absolute sovereignty over man compelled social justice for all men, rich
and poor alike.
Conclusion
Things seem so awfully out of control in the world primarily because the human
animal is out of control. He is out of control because control over human
consciousness is in the wrong hands. That is, in the hands of the mind. So long
as that remains unshaken, it doesn’t matter if we become ‘immortal’ to migrate to
Moon or Mars. If any, things will get far worse. And that is why the war within
is doing so badly. That is why human behavior is going from bad to bizarre. The
planet itself is in peril primarily due to human activity, but man, instead of owning
responsibility and redressing the situation, is making plans for lunar or Martian
escape. So then, if things are like this, can it get any worse? Is the ‘weary’ God, to
paraphrase Rick Yancey (The 5th Wave, 2013), divesting humankind of humanity
to rid the earth of humans? Has self-immolation become the sacred and solemn
duty of every caring human being, to rid the planet of what Agent Smith (The
Matrix) calls ‘the cancer of the planet’, a plague? But if we don’t do that and we
choose to stay on the slippery course, will we become a multiplanetary species,
and who could that ‘we’ might well be? Will the post-modern man become the
Biblical Methuselah (and live very, very long)? Or, will he become the Puranic
Markandeya of Hindu scripture, and live forever? Or will he become someone
like the Immortals of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—people who do not
die, but age and become ill, demented and hunger for death? Put differently,
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the darkness that is currently enveloping us the time before dawn or the time
after dusk? Is it the death throes of a doomed species or, as the Bible says, ‘the
beginning of the pangs of birth’? Can we turn the gilded age into the dawn of
a golden age? Will money further exacerbate the greed, rancor, and injustice in
the world and trigger a catastrophic collapse and a social meltdown, or can we
transform money into a moral tool to usher in a more just and egalitarian human
society? Will morality continue to offer a cover for social ills, or would we be wise
enough to consensually create a ‘new framework for ethical living that is socially
and spiritually topical? Will technology succeed in its goal of turning the human
into a Deus or god, or will it turn us unto a hybrid of zombie and walking dead?
Or will it help erase absolute poverty, mass illiteracy, and ill health from the face
of the earth, and arrest and reverse existential threats like climate change? Will we
continue to look for new ways to nag and nibble, torment and terrorize, divide
and destroy ourselves, or realize the oneness of all sentient life, that we are all
manifestations of the same Supreme cosmic consciousness, which, in the words
of Richard Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human
Mind, 1901) as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual, and entirely alive? Will
we continue to be the butchers of biodiversity and terminators of terrestrial life,
or recognize, as William Blake said “everything that lives is holy” and that every
form of life, from ant to elephant, termite to tiger has an irreplaceable niche in
nature, and that their premature passing could cripple the ecosystem and life in
general, and that the human, whoever technology will turn him into, is by no
means immune? No one knows for sure. The answer can be anything. It depends
on what happens in the womb of the world within, and how the war therein
shapes up, and which side of us—divine or demonic, good or evil, wise or wild,
noble or nasty—comes to control the commanding heights of our consciousness.

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Chapter 2
The Two Cherokee Fighting Wolves
Within—And the One We Feed
The Triad of Worlds We Live In
All of us talk routinely and reflexively of the world we live in as if it is a stand-alone, homogenous, harmonious entity. We actually live in three parallel, yet interdependent, worlds. And our inability to harmonize the three worlds is the source of much misery. The first is the world as another name for Planet Earth—seen as a pale blue dot from space—which harbors and houses over seven billion humans, and many more billions of non-humans. It is a ‘dark, dreary, and dangerous’ world that catches our eye and engages our attention, but we never truly believe we are a part of it, that what happens to it is of any relevance to our life. Practically speaking, we don’t live in one big world. We live in a collection of small worlds. The second is the world of near and dear and neighbors, family, friends, and foes. This is the world that truly matters, and yet we are affected by what happens in the first world. The way we have tried to overcome this ambivalence, this ‘irksome inconvenience’, true to our genius, is to have it both ways: to be caring and cooperative towards a few, the ever-shrinking ‘near and dear’, and be competitive and callous towards the rest. Caring for the ‘few’, as the Dalai Lama noted, is ‘emotional attachment’, not ‘genuine compassion’. As he puts it, “true compassion is universal in scope”—one might add, not subject to reciprocity. The Dalai Lama goes on: “The rationale for universal compassion is based on the same principle of spiritual democracy. It is the recognition of the fact that every living being has an equal right to and desire for happiness… Compassion and universal responsibility require a commitment to personal sacrifice and the neglect