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

to outer space, instead of ‘going within’; we
marshal all our forces to wage all kinds of wars, driven mainly by ego, avarice,
and malice, instead of directing out attention to the ‘mother of all wars’, the
War Within. And this war, unlike other wars, has two frontlines: consciousness
inside and context outside. We really do not know when this war began. Some
say it was there all along, and that it gained speed and shape only with modern
man. Others say it began when human evolution evolved to the present selfaware
level—what Julian Jaynes calls the ‘breakdown of bicameralism’—about
three thousand years ago. But the fact is, whether it was a war or not, a struggle
or fight between two sets of intrinsically inimical forces, good and evil, light
and darkness has been a constant through the ages. To ‘win’ this war—which is
to facilitate the ascendancy of the forces under the rubric of good over those of
evil—we need to induce and orchestrate a radical modification of the character
and content of our consciousness in the contemporary ‘human way of life’.
Forward—Outward or Inward?
Framed differently, the question is: is the way forward outward or inward ? Do
we turn our gaze and energy to engage with the universe within, or do we
exploit and enjoy the world without? Almost instinctively, we view them as
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separate, even alternatives or opposites. The idea that everything in nature comes
in pairs of ‘opposites’ permeates Greek philosophy too. The most prominent
is the ‘Table of Opposites’ of Pythagoras, which, among other items, includes
good and evil, and light and darkness. Such examples are ‘day and night’ in
Heraclitus’ philosophic theory, ‘justice and injustice’ in Anaximander’s, and
‘love and strife’ in Empedocles’ philosophy. The paradox is that both ‘opposites’
are two primal cosmic energies, two poles which are opposite but, at the same
time, complementary to each other and which are both manifestations of the
one and only reality. How to harmonize the two without destroying either is the
challenge we face, which is at the heart of the war within. We tend to think that
science deals with the world ‘outside’, and spirituality with the realm ‘within’.
We assume that the within is a given, but unknowable unknown, about which
we can do little. But the outside, we feel, is within reach, which we can mold and
manipulate to our advantage at will, to make human presence on earth eternal
and unchallenged. The fact is that they—the worlds within and without—
are holistically connected, even functionally interdependent; neither can exist
without the other. And the ‘world within’ is a veritable gold mine of all that
we seek and long for. In the Indian epic Mahabharata, queen Gandhari, who
willingly marries the blind king Dhritarashtra, chooses to blindfold her own
eyes for the rest of her life, to show her oneness with her husband. Henceforth,
she does not see the world without, but she receives the “choice blessings of
the world within” and acquires great spiritual powers, strong enough to throw
a curse on Lord Krishna himself. The macrocosm is within the microcosm, as
much as the microcosm is within the macrocosm. That is the central message
from the Upanishads. Swami Vivekananda explained, “The microcosm and the
macrocosm are built on the same plan. Just as the individual soul is encased in the
living body, so is the universal Soul in the Living Prakriti [nature]—the objective
universe”. The inward–outward dichotomy is also used to define the man–God
interrelationship. Meister Eckhart wrote, “The more God is in all things, the
more He is outside them; the more He is within, the more without”. Everything
that comes out is but an extension, reflection, and projection of what is already
inside. And the ‘already inside’ is itself an outcome of an internal struggle. We
may think that only wars of the world are real, but spiritual warfare too is very
real. Warfare happens every day, all the time inside us. Whether we believe it or
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not, all of us are in a state of war. Eknath Easwaran says, “Spiritual life too is a
battle. Mystics call it the war within; the clash between what is spiritual in us and
what is selfish, between the forces of goodness and the powers of destruction that
clash incessantly in the human heart”. He also says that the subject of the great
epic Bhagavad Gita is “the war within, the struggle for self-mastery that every
human being must wage if he or she is to emerge from life victorious”.
The arena, the theater of operations, where we can find any leads to solve
our problems can only be within the microcosm—the individual man. WB
Yeats wrote in his poem Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea, “I only ask what way my
journey lies”. Jalal ad-Din Rumi said, “Everything in the universe is within you.
Ask all from yourself ”. But the outward-to-inward journey is more complex; it
requires more effort. For, how we live in the world outside influences what goes
on inside. The inward journey has been characterized as the longest journey,
the path to God, the internal pilgrimage, etc. The ‘inward’ is the world beyond
perception, the world of intuition, emotion, and feeling, the world of seekers and
noble souls. The destination is the nihitam guhayam, the One hidden in the ‘cave
of the heart’, the Atman, the Self. And the obstacles are the senses and ‘mindbody-
identification’. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna draws the analogy of
a tortoise to convey the message. He says, “When, again, as a tortoise draws in
on all sides its limbs, he withdraws his senses from the objects of sense, then is
his understanding well poised”.1 Just as our brain and body are connected, so are
our inside and outside. We are fairly clear that what appears as the outside is the
phenomenal world in which we exist, work, play, live, and die. The conundrum
is that while we must undertake a journey inwards, we do not know the way; we
only know the way outward, but it leads nowhere. We must transcend our robotlike
existence that devours all our energy and attention, even imagination, mostly
just to stay alive, to fulfill our obligations, to earn a living, to raise a family, to have
fun. In the end, we feel only inadequate, going from crisis to crisis, while time
ticks away to an end that ends it all. Most thoughtful people concur that what
mankind needs is a cathartic cleansing of consciousness. With our consciousness
composed of different stages or levels, some say we are now at the stage that
manifests as the ‘me-first’, materialistic, and aggressive behavior; but there are
signs that we are on the threshold of a leap up the ladder to a consciousness
driven by ‘trans-rational intuition’. Scientists tell us that man is certainly at the
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same time the most aggressive and altruistic animal. In other words, different
individuals, or the same individual at different times, can respond differently to
different situations, and temptations and provocations. It is said that “evolution
didn’t just shape us to be violent, or peaceful, it shaped us to respond flexibly,
adaptively, to different circumstances, and to risk violence when it made adaptive
sense to do so. We need to understand what those circumstances are if we want
to change things”.2 If we want to tame human aggression we have to create
appropriate circumstances. Many might argue that the circumstances we are
shaping will make us more aggressive; others opine that once the consciousness
threshold is crossed, man could become a more introspective, tolerant, socially
sensitive, and environmentally harmonious person. When that threshold is
reached, consciousness does not dissolve; it is the limits that dissolve. The final
stage, reached by prophets like Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha and Mahavira,
by mystics like St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, by masters like Ramakrishna
Paramahansa, and by teachers like Sankara and Swami Vivekananda, is when we
are able to erase the boundary between the creator and creation, between one
living being and another living being, and reach a level at which humanity itself
becomes one tribe, living in harmony on sacred Earth. We might indeed all have
clairvoyant consciousness, dormant but extant, with which the living can talk
to the dead. While we can speculate about the evolution of aggression of the
human, the two critical factors that everything hinges on are consciousness and
circumstance.
Our chief living limitation is our instinctive interpretation of our own
selves as limited and lone beings. It is our inability to comprehend the import of
the Upanishadic mahavakya, ‘Tat tvam asi’, (Thou art that), and come to terms
with what Martin Buber3 called the ‘Ich und Du’ (I and Thou) relationship. We
think, feel, and behave as autonomous individuals; all pleasure and pain, happiness
and misery is experienced by our ‘standalone’ selves. However, most religions
tell us this is the greatest misconception. The truth is that everything is united,
everything is connected, nothing is separate, and the substratum, the ground
underneath is all divine. What we have to overcome is not a malfunctioning
brain or a wayward mind or even a corrupted consciousness; it is to move into
a different realm of reality. The realm we are comfortable with is the one that is
physical, observable, measurable, and repeatable; in short, borne of the scientific
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method. We have ignored the spiritual realm. We possess all the pieces of the
jigsaw puzzle but it is so huge that we never see it as whole.4 And we wonder why.
Could it be because of the brain that nature has given us? The brain—the ‘three
pounds of strange computational material found within our skulls’—is master of
the body. For happiness and harmony it should work in tandem with the body,
but for over a million years of our evolutionary struggle for survival, the leftbrain,
which is the seat of what we call reason and logic, became the dominant
part, and the right-brain, the source of emotion, intuition, love, and empathy,
became a passive passenger. We are now poised at a momentous crossroads.
The kind of intelligence we will nurture towards what direction and purpose
will shape human destiny. Intelligence is the one thing that separates man and
other species, and man from man, and contributes to making us how successful
we are.
The aim of artificial intelligence (AI) research is to develop thinking
machines that outdo and overtake all human cognitive capabilities; leaving
mankind, in the words of Donald Michie, Britain’s leading AI researcher, “living
in the interstices of uncomprehended, incredibly intelligent electronic organisms,
like fleas on the backs of dogs”.5 The irony is that we are increasingly more
comfortable in the company of thinking machines than of thinking men. There
is growing concern that technologies like the internet are not only intrusive, but
might be making information so easy to obtain that it is atrophying our very
ability to think.6 In effect, it means that ‘we have two people living inside our
heads, the person you call ‘you’ and a total stranger who lives in the other half
of the brain’.7 Another view is that it is not that we have two brains but actually
two minds, ‘one of which has far greater powers than the other’.8 A certain sort
of ‘ancestral harmony’ existed in human evolution between the ‘two minds’ that
allowed smooth flow of communication between them, and enabled man to
lead reasonably well-ordered and symmetric lives. Problems started when this
flow was interrupted, or became one-way, from the objective to the subjective.
Einstein said, “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a
faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has
forgotten the gift”. A radically different viewpoint is that it is not a matter of two
minds, but a matter of head versus heart. We have two autonomous but interreinforcing
sources of energy, memory, and intelligence, centered around the
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mind and heart; and that until recently it was the heart that was the dominant
partner, and man was a happy and harmonious being. For reasons not quite
clear, the mind acquired ascendency, the heart went into eclipse and all our
troubles started. Such a view is no longer confined to scriptural thought; it is now
emerging as a scientific possibility. Julian Jaynes called the ‘dual-centered’ human
consciousness a ‘bicameral mind’. We all know that we have something that we
have come to call ‘consciousness’, but we do not know what it really is and how
it operationally relates with the brain, mind, and heart. Yet another hypothesis is
that we all have a ‘Laurel and Hardy type of consciousness’, two different selves
that constantly spar with each other. In addition, we also have, according