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

We must understand that every form
of life is a blend of attributes, and trying to enhance any particular ‘ability’
might be counterproductive, and could upset the balance in nature. That applies
even to the length of life span. It is said that we are on the verge of uncoupling
intelligence from consciousness, and machines might come to know us better
than we know ourselves.17 Whether that ‘knowing better’ is good for us or not
is a wholly different issue. Now, man wants to create ‘conscious machines’—
possibly moral machines18—outside the realm and reach of nature, and turn
himself into a ‘god’ by linking up with it. A huge chunk of man’s ageless effort
has been to go beyond being human, or to be more than human. That ‘more
than’ has now crystallized into becoming a ‘god’.
If there is one common thread between all religions and most cultures,
it is the sanctity of human life. It is based on the premise that ‘life’ is priceless
and the human is special, closest to the divine. Scriptural injunctions like the
Jewish Talmud say, for example, that since all mankind is descended from a
single person, taking a life is like destroying an entire world, while saving a life is
like saving an entire world. But these have largely ceased to be serious restraints
to taking a life… While we are, on the one hand, trying to achieve breakthroughs
in living without ageing, and living as long as we wish to, without regard to
cost and consequence, we seem, on the other hand, to have lost our nerve and
self-confidence. Such is the depth of our self-belief that we have, for all practical
purposes, given up on ourselves and our own internal power, and cast our lot
with external powers, be it artificial intelligence or thinking computers or robots
or androids or cyborgs, to help us out. And it is not science-fiction—about
4000 Swedes are already “cyborgs”, part human and part machine. Implanted
in their hands is a tiny identity chip, which they can use instead of ID cards or
credit cards. We have cognitively concluded that without hooking up with an
external contrivance we will not be able to achieve anything. The surprising thing
is that every time we have to believe something, say God, we want proof, but
when it come to technologies like artificial intelligence, we trust them even if we
don’t understand how they actually work. And although we associate proof with
rationality, not everything can be proven true or false. In Kurt Godel’s words,
“You’ll never be able to prove every true result… you’ll never be able to prove
every result that is true in your system”. The ‘fact’ is that facts on their own don’t
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tell you much; in fact, they can lead you astray. It is only when coupled with
what you desire and with whatever gives you pleasure or pain, that they can guide
your behavior. That is why it is so important to desire the right desire, and want
the righteous want. In real life, the dividing lines between proof, fact, opinion,
and truth overlap and crisscross. It is important not to underestimate the power
of hatred, like love, in the world and within all of us. It gives, albeit depraved,
a sense of purpose larger than life, of working for the greater good. Purpose is
highly personal and subjective, and yet it always develops in a social milieu and a
consciousness-context. To have a right purpose requires a right mindset and that
requires the right balance and mix in our consciousness. It means that what we
need now is not a cognitive but a ‘consciousness revolution’, powered by both
cognition and intuition, mind and heart in the right combination. While the
two have to work in harmony, not in hostility, we must make sure the command
and controls are with the heart. A sprinkling of brilliant minds can vest us with
promethean powers, but a few beautiful hearts are not enough to ensure that we
are worthy of having them. The new word to put us in our proper place is that
humans are organic algorithms.
Literally everything around us today runs on algorithms. They power the
internet, make all online searching possible, they direct our email, work silently
behind the scenes when we use our GPS systems, etc. Smartphone apps, social
media, software… none of these things would function without algorithms.
Altruism itself is based on algorithmic calculation of cost and expected payoffs,
which are vital for self survival. The humble algorithm is now being anointed as
the New Almighty of the techno-religion, omnipotent, omniscient, and invisible
but all-pervasive. As Yuval Harari puts it, “More than a century after Nietzsche
pronounced Him dead, God seems to be making a comeback. But this is probably
a mirage. Despite all the talk of Islamic fundamentalism and Christian revival,
God is dead—it just takes a while to get rid of the body”.19
The Power of the Heart
The power to effect a consciousness revolution must rise from within. And that
‘power’ is none other than our own heart. We learn early in life that it is good to
have a kind and caring heart—and it feels good, too. The intuitive intelligence
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of the heart could tilt the scales in the war within. The spiritual story of the 21st
century will be, at a deeper level, the drawing and redrawing of the battle lines of
the head and heart, between what you know and what you feel in the war within,
of how Homo sapiens is trying to broker a kind of détente between the two, to
ensure the survival of both but in a different blend. We live in a world where
the logic of the head is at odds with the emotion of the heart. For a wholesome
and harmonious life, we need to listen to both the heart and head, but too
often, the voice of the head almost silences that of the heart. We are now pretty
much focused on our head, or brain, which James Watson20 called the ‘grandest
biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe’.
While pretty much ignoring, and taking for granted, the even grander frontier—
our heart. The relatively new concept of ‘coherence’ is emerging, pioneered
by institutions like the HeartMath Institute;21 it is a highly efficient state in
which all of the body’s systems, in particular the heart and mind, work in sync,
ensuring that the whole of us is more than the sum of our parts. To be fully
human, we must ensure the development of the heart and the head. It is in this
spirit and with this objective that initiatives like ‘activating the global heart’ are
being taken to bring about a shift in the content of global consciousness, a work
in progress. In his work The Celestine Prophecy, James Redfield, for example,
wrote that ‘over the past half century, a new consciousness has come to the
human world’.
We need to blend both our strengths and weaknesses in the right
proportion to have the right consciousness. The renowned 20th-century Indian
philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti said that “intelligence comes into being when
the mind, heart, and body are really in harmony”.22 He also underlined the
utter inadequacy of thought and thinking. He believed that it was thought that
gave us religion, and it is thinking that separates us as individuals from one
another. But to overcome the impediment of their ‘insufficiency’, we don’t have
to abdicate thinking and eliminate the mind. What we need is a new balance and
baseline in our consciousness between the two primary sources of intelligence
and energy—the mind and the heart. We must also bear in mind that everything
in the cosmos, from trees to humans, is energetically connected. But like in
every situation and between any two things, there cannot be perfect equality;
one or the other has to be a dominant partner even if it constantly changes. And
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it applies to the head and heart, too. We have to make a kind of choice no man
has ever been called upon or required to make: which of the two must be at the
commanding heights of our consciousness—the head or the heart? Science is
working in both directions, although the bulk of the effort is brain-centered.
And that has to change; science must have a greater heart-centric focus. Only
then can we achieve what we glibly call a paradigm shift, and move towards
what some mystics call transcendental consciousness, or cosmic consciousness,
which induces awe, supreme joy and the highest, unalloyed felicity, free from
pain, sorrow, and fear. It is, in its effect, a divine consciousness, a state of sublime
spirituality attained by prophets, ancient rishis and great saints and sages. The
Upanishads proclaim it as all-embracing, one that keeps the stars, the sun the
moon… all in their place in a state of close communion. Most of us cannot
attain that state, but we can certainly move towards it in different degrees. That
is the kind of consciousness-change that mankind should strive towards. Only
that will enable and empower us to see ourselves differently about our place on
the planet, and only then can we alter the causal course of human creativity. If
we do that, and if we do let the heart control the mind, then ‘we are off to the
next galaxy, both inward and outward’23, and will almost permanently prevail in
the perennial war within. Man by himself is incomplete for that task. In Hindu
scriptures like the Vishnu Purana, it is said that the final or tenth avatar of Lord
Vishnu, called the Kalki avatar, will not only restore dharma to its rightful place
on earth but also awaken the minds of those who live at that time. Our age is
that time and it could mean that the advent of the next divine manifest on earth
could well entail and result in a profound consciousness-change. That is because,
unlike in earlier divine avatars, evil on earth is not personified in some of us. As
Nwaocha Ogechukwu says, “No one can deny that each one of us has an aspect
of the devil within us” (The Secret Behind the Cross and Crucifix, 2009). But for
God to restore dharma on earth, He cannot simply slay modern-day rakshasas
(demons), which most of us are in different degrees. He has to help us win the
war within, and that will lead to a consciousness-change. And that is the only
way to what the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu called, “the introduction
of higher dimensions of consciousness into our awareness”, which theosophist
Annie Besant compared to the snake shedding its skin and the butterfly emerging
from its chrysalis.
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As a species we are at a critical crossroads and have to make a decisive
directional choice between two divergent paths. The Katha Upanishad speaks of
the two-fold path available to mankind: the Pravritti marga (path of material and
bodily pleasures), and the Nivritti marga (path of goodness and righteousness).
We can frame it differently for the 21st century: today’s pravritti is augmentation
of cognitive intelligence through artificial intelligence (AI). And, nivritti
is exploring and energizing the awesome but dormant power of the heart’s
intuitive intelligence. AI is now clearly at the cutting edge of our creativity (and
big business, too), whereas we know very little about the heart as a source of
intelligence and energy independent of, or in tandem with, the brain. Heart
intelligence is ‘the flow of intuitive awareness and inner guidance we experience
when the mind and emotions are brought into coherent alignment with the
heart’.24 The inner dynamic working of the deep consciousness is altogether
different from the dynamics of the rational mind, which we are familiar
with. We have been conditioned to perform all our cognitive, analytical, and
synthesizing activities of knowledge at the rational level. This conditioning is so
deep that we have forgotten the faculty of intuition that we possess inside our
heart intelligence. That is why our choices and decisions are so skewed. Recent
cutting-edge research suggests that the “heart also is an access point to a source
of wisdom and intelligence that we can call upon to live our lives with more
balance, greater creativity and enhanced intuitive capacities.”25 Both the brain
and that thumping organ in our body are powerful tools that not only sustain
life, but help us experience the world in a profound way at a deeper level. A
proper alignment of the heart and mind can help us make better decisions and
live more balanced and peaceful lives. And that calls for a fundamental change in
the content and balance of our consciousness. Consciousness is the master key,
and every crisis the world faces—political, economic, climatic, social—is