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

to this
view, a third person inside, a robot, who or which performs all repetitive tasks
of life.9 Some argue that we all have hidden, dormant, occult powers. These are
more pronounced in some people, and were possessed by our ancestors but have
been lost as they were no longer needed. While we live in the visible physical
world, there is another invisible, ‘normal, original, eternal, spirit’ world.10 Our
ancestors were in constant contact with the ‘spirit world’, and literally conversed
with the gods. The complete severance of this communication is responsible
for our diminished human lives. Rudolf Steiner even says that if we do not get
closer to the world of spirits, “something completely different from what ought
to happen will happen to the earth”.
As if we are not sufficiently befuddled we are also told that that what
appears remote and marginal is “often what the soul inwardly needs”.11 But then,
some researchers tell us, about ‘the power of thinking without thinking’,12 that
more often than not, right decisions are taken not after deliberative thought, but
by instinct and blind feeling. Chesterton wrote that you can only know truth
with logic if you have already found it without it. Whether we rely on intelligence
or intuition, the question that arises is that if life’s road, in the harrowed phrase
of Emily Bronte, ‘winds uphill all the way’, a Sisyphean struggle, then why not
quickly slide down and end it all? To whom should we turn for help—the ‘you’,
the ‘stranger’, the ‘robot’, the ‘hibernating heart’, the ‘hidden self’?—and for
what purpose, and how? Does the solution to all our problems, personal and
civilizational, lie in harnessing our hidden powers, described as ‘a sign of our
evolutionary potential’?13 And if so, how? How do we untie the knots that hold
us back? If we want to turn our lives around and become modern-day ‘miniThe
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mystics’ or ‘miniature-mahatmas’, or simply men without malice, what is the
road map?
Consciousness-change and Contextual-change
The real suffering, and its only solution, is embedded ‘within’ each of us. And,
each of us requires each one of us. The deepest secret of sentient life, particularly
human, is very simple. We can achieve everything, fulfill every desire, and
dream, not directly but through a detour; not explicitly but implicitly, through
the medium of another person. Anything done solely for self-gain is pyrrhic;
anything we do for another’s well-being is a win-win; you benefit more than the
beneficiary. Only by sharing can we become whole; and make life less difficult
to someone else, anyone from spouse to stranger. All our life, we search for a
meaningful life when the ‘elephant’ is next to us. We seek the divine everywhere
when our true ‘identity’ is the divine within, the immortal aspect of our mortal
existence, the Atman as the Upanishads call it. It is something that we cannot
‘see’. There is a growing realization in the world today, especially in the New
Age movement, that the only way to avert a cataclysmic catastrophe is a gradual
shift in global consciousness, that without such a paradigm shift nothing else
will work, nothing else will save us… Before we even ponder over such weighty
issues, it is important to offer some cautionary caveats. Like in all issues relative
to the future of Homo sapiens, it is possible, even highly probable, that all our best
answers are tantamount to tilting at windmills; for the truth is beyond our mindmediated
capacity of perception. The capacity we need is to be able to ‘see things,
ourselves, other people… differently’, à la Beau Lotto.14 But this much is still
true: whatever might possibly happen in the future is contingent and congruent
upon the direction of the transformation not of the world around, but of our
inner life—a process that spiritualists call ‘consecration’. And just as in worldly
life we don’t win or lose, but live, so it is with our life within. We cannot ‘survive’
either victory or defeat, triumph or capitulation. What we should aim at is a
constructive stalemate, a favorable deadlock. All creativity is transformation. In
fact, without transformation there is no life. The key question is transformation
from what to what, and how. While we are witness to and passive participants
of external transformation, we are wholly clueless and utterly unaware of what
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goes on inside us, and that results in a disconnect between the two: external
transformation and internal transformation. As a direct consequence, many of
us try to deal with this ‘disconnect’ by resorting to all kinds of distractions and
amusement. American writer Scott Fitzgerald portrayed the 1920s as a decade
that began with ‘the general decision to be amused’. This applies even more
sharply to the 21st century. What is important to note is that these distractions
and delusions do not end at amusing or entertaining us; they act as nutrients to
our internal destructive passions, and feed the ‘wrong’ army in the war within.
One of our biggest obstacles to bringing about a holistic approach to
address the challenges of our time is that, although we talk of ‘one humanity’
and ‘one world’, we all exist in our own personalized worlds, which are specific
and special to each individual, a fraction of humanity. As the Mexican saying
goes, cada cabeza es un mundo (‘every head is a different world’). In fact, it is
the head that gives form and shape to everyone’s world. And that is the chief
problem man faces. We mistake it for an answer, whereas it is really a question. It
is the main handicap and hindrance to better the human condition, and stands
between morality and man. Perhaps the greatest ‘delusionary illusion’ is to think
and act as if there is an unbridgeable chasm between our life’s inside and outside.
The fact is, for something to happen outside in the external world, that activity
has to be caused by something inside in our internal world, and vice versa.
The war within is also the answer to the question why, despite being
essentially a ‘spiritual being’, man has become an economic animal. If we can
change the direction of our desires, it will change the direction of human effort
and creative power. We will then be able to radically alter not only the context of
our life, but even the content of our consciousness. However, the ‘consciousnesscontent’
cannot be changed unless the ‘context-content’ is changed. And then
again, what does God, up from the sky or deep inside each of us, think of all this?
While it is sheer stupidity or utter naivety to rule out any possibility, a note of
caution will be in order. Logically then, we should all somehow cling to life, hang
on for a quarter century, by which time, it is expected that people will start lives
that could last a thousand years or more. The down-to-earth reality, however, is
far more modest and matter of fact: so far, whatever science has done in this field
is to prevent premature deaths and thus increase the average life span; it has not
really extended our actual life span, which is generally believed to be 120 years,
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even by a single year.15 The irony that eludes our acumen is that on the one hand,
man, unable to come to terms with the demands of modern life, is struggling to
find reasons not to die, and, on the other hand, science is dangling the carrot of
immortality before us. Perhaps the greatest indictment of contemporary life is
that so many are finding it easier to end life than to continue living. If ever the
era of immortality does descend, we might well see a reversal of roles; just as we
now long for immortality, men then might yearn for mortality.
What we are outside impacts on what happens inside, and what goes on
within our consciousness makes us who we are. Most of us live outside and strive
to achieve some goal, some ideal, through our external effort. But the truth is
that there is nothing ‘out there’ unless it already is ‘in here’, within the confines
of our consciousness. We may not know exactly what consciousness is and its
link with the brain and mind, but we do know that it is, in large measure, the
difference between being alive and being dead; and that it is what both unifies
and differentiates us as living beings. If we want compassion to be our compass
in navigating through life, we need a compassion-dominated consciousness, and
for that we need to nurture a compassionate context of life. What we need right
now is a new compass to set our direction and steer us through the stormy seas
of our own consciousness. And, it is important to note that it carries some basic
evolutionary implications. Natural selection has been a governing principle in
creation for over four billion years. As Elizabeth Kolbert points out in her book,
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), whether we intend to do it or
not, we are deciding which evolutionary pathways will be shut off forever, and
which can be left open to flourish. We are moving towards what is being described
as ‘evolution by intelligent direction’.16 We are also being told to brace ourselves
for the seismic possibility that the human, or whatever remains of him, is about
to transcend Darwin, and that evolution will be, in the future, mediated by man,
not natural selection, which has held sway for over three billion years. What does
it all amount to? And what does that mean for the much-talked-about New Man of
the New Millennium? If the species has been static on the evolutionary scale, since
the monkey became a man, and if an equally seismic man-mediated change that
rivals such an event is coming soon, how should we react and, more importantly,
try to influence such a change? If we are approaching a tipping point in which
all things that were hitherto impossible suddenly become commonplace, and
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if everything we wish we could actually make it happen, then are we yet again
eating another forbidden fruit? And does this prove or disprove the all-knowing,
all-powerful Almighty? Whichever answer appeals to whoever, the stark fact of
the matter is that mankind is tottering on a balancing beam, and there is a more
than a fair chance that it is about to get thrown off the beam. And man is not
even sure what is down below. The scary thing is that while the outside world
is brimming with hair-raising events, profound mutations are happening inside
our consciousness, even as we go about living, working, mating, multiplying,
murdering, and, most of all, making money. And that entails much more than
going to work everyday and getting a periodic paycheck to buy groceries and
gadgets; it has an enormous ecological cost. Even spiritually we are all at sea, as
uncertainty meets us at every step. Is mortality the sinful fruit of our Biblical
fallen nature? Or is it a golden gift of life, the envy of the angels, or an epiphany
liberating us from life’s fait accompli? All this rumination within trickles down
to three matter-of-fact matters: world-weary as we might well be, how do we
live so that life is worth its whole? And, on the individual level, as long as I am
alive, how should I relate with other sentient beings who are anyhow as alive
as I am, both in its limited and larger sense? And then, what is this I am that is
so intrusive and insolent, at once threatened and vulnerable? So, who is that ‘I’
(or ‘me’ or ‘mine’) that we so pathetically and pathologically cling to as sentient
beings? According to the Vedanta school of Indian philosophy, all troubles start
the moment we utter the ‘I’; everything else is an illusion.
To this ageless list of questions we need to add one more, probably the
most momentous, the most fateful of them all: can such issues be considered
academic or superfluous now because we might not after all be around for too
long? We seem to be, in our preternatural hubris and inebriated haughtiness,
crossing two dangerous thresholds—the Darwinian and the Divine. The first, by
trespassing into the forbidden zone between animate and inanimate beings and
trying to turn machines into ‘conscious beings’, or living things. The second, by
seeking ‘death-less’ life and mimicking, or mocking, God. Once man himself
was described as the ‘ultimate machine’, a ‘complex machine created through
nature by God’. The tragedy is that, instead of optimizing and fine-tuning,
harmonizing fully what this natural ‘machine’ is endowed with and is capable
of, we are diverting our entire energy and creative power to making external
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machines to get what we want from life.