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

of egotistical desires”. Jesus said, “You must be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate”. And compassion is simply ‘returning a favor’, a quid pro quo, if it is shown only to those who are ‘good’ to us’. True compassion comes into play when it is extended to those who do ‘harm’ to us. In the karmic, if not cosmic, sense, those who harm others, ‘suffer’ more than the others do. Human nature is such that if we do, or think we do, ‘good’ to
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other people, it is natural to expect recognition, if not gratitude, from them. And when we do not get it, as it so often happens, we feel hurt, even resentful. And that sours our own mood and mind and affects our future responses to similar situations. Expectation always leads to disappointment, and it is very hard for a person of average abilities to do anything, particularly an act of altruism, without expecting something in return, even a simple and sincere ‘thank you’. Scriptures and sages tell us that we should try to transcend that spiritual ‘limitation’. Prof. Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, a philosopher, reformer, and educationist, whom the Sage Ramakrishna himself hailed as compassionate, was once informed that someone was abusing him. Prof. Vidyasagar reportedly answered, “Why so? I do not remember having done any good to him”. Compassion is not only for ‘others’; we need to be ‘compassionate’, at least ‘considerate’, towards our own selves. Too often people try to cope with their suffering with low self-esteem or harbor a sense of inadequacy and failure. They fall into patterns of stressful and destructive self-loathing which just multiplies into misery. Self-compassion is different from self-love, which is injurious to others; compassion, wherever it is directed, can only do ‘good’. It is also different from random acts of kindness; they lull us into thinking that we are ‘good’, that it balances our ‘bad’; which might even embolden us to be more brazen. Compassion essentially is a state of sublime consciousness, and once we cultivate it in our whole mindset, our behavior and personality changes. We do not need to become a Buddha or Christ or even a Gandhi to be compassionate. At its core must be the dictum that our lives and those of all beings are connected as in a giant web spread right across the planet and indeed beyond. If we can imbibe the sense that we are all made of the same stuff, subject to the same natural processes, all sailing in the same ‘existential boat’, we will naturally feel compassion towards all other life and forms of life. As the Buddha sings in the Karaniya Metta Sutta: “Have that mind for all the world, get rid of lies and pride, a mother’s mind for her baby, her love, but now unbounded”. It is relatively easy to accept this intellectually, to feel good about ourselves and stay stranded in the smug status quo. For it to have any practical effect it has to become our reflex reaction.
The third and the most important, is the world within, our inner world, invisible, impervious, and impenetrable. The first world is our only home. Although the world outside, the phenomenal world is the same geographical zone
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of activity, different people perceive it differently. For some, the world is wondrous
and the people are good, while for others, it is, in Arthur Schopenhauer’s words,
‘such a miserable and melancholy world’, where the people are deceitful and
sinful. It is so, because the outer world is the projection of our inner world. But
somehow, we see ourselves apart, and separate. The paradox is that everything
is globalized in this world but not our mindset. We stay connected regardless
of distance or culture, but lose touch with our own inner or deeper selves.
Everything any of us does affects everyone else, and yet we all behave as if we are
an island unto ourselves.
Deep down we just believe that the ‘fate of the earth’ is not our fate; and
even if it is, we will somehow survive it, triumphant amidst the smoldering ruins
and burning ghats of a dying earth. That is the headwater of all that is amiss
with humanity today. It is this facile, if not false, faith that lets us go to sleep at
night, and do all the sundry silly things the morning after and feel good. And
that is why the second world is the real world we actually care about, because
everyone in this world is but an extension of ‘I, me and mine’. It is from this
world that we derive our sense of identity, or sorrow and well-being, rather than
from the first world or the third, the world within. The lives in the second world
crisscross ours, give us joy or sorrow, delight or despair, make life tolerable or
toxic, meaningful or malignant. It is what happens in this world that seduces us
to suicide, and impels us to homicide. What is upsetting about death, in fact, is
the prospect of getting separated from the second world, not the first, universal
world. The ‘third world’ is the inner world, the most consequential and the most
meaningful. It is this world that Matshona Dhliwayo calls the ‘greatest temple
in the universe’ (Lalibela’s Wise Man, 2014). Both the first and second worlds are
but its reflections and extensions. But our inner world is invisible, and yet, as
George Eliot says (Middlemarch), ‘the true seeing is within’. The biggest change
mankind has to make, is a paradigm shift in its preoccupation and focus from the
external to the internal, from the without to the within, from outer space to the
inner space, and, most of all, shift his focus from the wars outside to the spiritual
war within. The world within is the world of our consciousness, and the ‘war’
that rages is for gaining control of its commanding heights.
The paradox is that there is no consensus on the definition of what
constitutes this ‘third world’, except that it is not the much-talked-about ‘Third
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World’, the economically underdeveloped countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. This is not a geographical or physical world; it is the spiritual world.
Although we used to think that it is exclusive to the human world, many scholars
and researchers are now positing that it is inherent not only in the animal
kingdom, but also in the vegetable and mineral kingdoms, although human
consciousness is higher than that of others. And that spiritual growth calls for
attaining higher levels of consciousness. Consciousness is both universal and
unique; unites and separates. Both unites and divides. All of us are fragments
or sparks of the divine or cosmic consciousness. And yet, as individual forms of
life, we all have our particular consciousnesses. The dissolution of the particular
into the universal or cosmic consciousness is the ultimate spiritual goal. Views,
however, vary on where we are consciousness-wise at this juncture in our history.
Some say that although everything appears dark, grim, gloomy, and depressing,
there are tell-tale signs that we are actually poised at the dawn of a global or
planetary consciousness. From the other end, others argue that all the stomachturning
things happening in the world, perpetrated by us humans, indicate how
depraved and debased human consciousness is. If that were so, how does one
explain the good things people still do? In truth, both are true. Our individual
consciousness houses all our emotions, feelings, and inclinations and dispositions
and passions and, depending on their intrinsic nature, they all fall into two
camps or sides or opposing sets of forces: good and bad, darkness and light,
constructive and destructive, raga (attachment) and dvesha (aversion), positive
and negative, righteousness and wickedness, altruism and selfishness, mind and
heart. And the opposing forces battle for control of the consciousness. We do
good when the forces of goodness attain an upper hand, and bad when the bad
adversary dominates. The good, the bad, the ghastly that happens in the world
is simply the external manifestation of this war, and it has its ebbs and flows,
and fluctuations and swings. It is an intense and fierce struggle for control and
conquest of this planet and the human consciousness. In spiritual terms, the
fight is between our two ‘selves’, higher and lower. And the final goal is not to
‘defeat’ or ‘eliminate’ one or the other, the good or the evil, the raga or the dvesha,
but to transcend them. That is what the Bhagavad Gita suggests—raga dvesha
viyuktaihi, transcending the opposites—as the way to cultivate tranquility and
divine grace. But in the intermediate state in which we live, the ‘fight’ goes on.
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What is striking is that nothing grabs our adrenaline more than war; it brings out
man’s true nature—good and bad, noble and ignoble, heroic and horrendous.
And yet, we are utterly oblivious and unaware of this deterministic of all wars
within. In the words of the Christian evangelist Billy Graham, “The wars among
the nations on earth are mere popgun affairs compared to the fierceness of battle
in the spiritual unseen world. This invisible spiritual conflict is waged around
us incessantly and unremittingly”. It is our consistent and persistent failure to
recognize and pay sufficient heed to this greatest of all wars, the war within,
that is the root cause of all our troubles and problems, and for all the venom,
virulence, and violence in the world that causes so much despair. This explains
the stubborn persistence of organized violence in the human world. War-making
is a major aspect of modern life, and research indicates that this has been the case
for the past several millenniums. In recent decades, numerous anthropological
studies have presented compelling evidence that interpersonal violence and
warfare, in varying degrees, have been an integral part of humanity’s history.
Current studies suggest that some of the earliest humans did engage in organized
violence that appears as approximations, forms of, or analogues for what we now
view as warfare. Some scholars even suggest that it could have been a significant
driver of human evolution.
As for the ‘war within’, we really don’t know when it began—estimates
vary from two million years to three thousand years. Many scriptures have
referred to the evil within, and the paramount need to fight it, and some saints
have lamented their inability to do what is right, but no one has painted it in its
true colors. We have been waging all sorts of wars for several centuries, but few,
if any, have realized that the most important of them all is going on right under
our noses, inside the citadel of our own consciousness. We have long wondered
why we behave so badly at times, but never even suspected that the cause as
well as the remedy is in the sanctum of our own soul. It is a matter of everyday
frustration that we are often paralyzed into passivity in showcasing qualities like
what the Buddhists call ‘loving kindness and compassion’ in stressful situations,
but it never occurred to us that it is because these very qualities are on the losing
side of the war within. Human transformation has for millenniums been the aim
of our spiritual sadhana (practice), but it always gave us the slip because we chose
to ignore the fact that true transformation must rise, like the Phoenix, from
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the ruins of the war within. When ‘breaking news’ tells us of a bloody massacre
somewhere in the world, we ask, like an alien up in the sky, ‘what is happening to
humankind?’, but it never crosses our mind that it is the ascendancy of this very
mind in our consciousness that is responsible. And so the capacious charade goes
on: we get on with the myriad mundane things of our meandering lives, always
surprised, shocked and saddened, but feel helpless even as the forces of anarchy
and evil gain strength, fed by our own actions. The answer to the question why
we do nothing individually, even as a blind man can see that the climate crisis is
real and potentially capable of making the planet uninhabitable, is that without
consciousness-change, climate change, like the ill-fated Titanic, is headed towards
its own iceberg—our willful blindness.
All too often, we feel overwhelmed and besieged by what life entails, and
we get stricken with a sinking feeling, like a raft let loose in a stormy sea. It is
because our gaze, attention, and energy are wrongly directed. We gaze at the stars
instead of ‘seeing within’; we voyage