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

but a
reflection of a ‘crisis of consciousness’. It is, in Jiddu Krishnamurti’s words, “a
crisis that cannot anymore accept the old norms, the old patterns, the ancient
traditions. And considering what the world is now with all their ill will and
destructive brutality, aggression, and so on, man is still as he was: brutal, violent,
aggressive, acquisitive, competitive, and he has built a society along these lines”.26
When Pope Francis said that the “ecological crisis is also a summons to profound
interior conversion”,27 he meant consciousness-change, a fundamental shift in
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the command and content of our consciousness. Climate change is more than
ecological crisis; it a mirror to what is wrong with the human way of life.
Nothing deters us from dreaming to be the masters of the universe, of
birth and death, of brain and body, and willing to be, as Thoreau once said,
‘the tools of our tools’. Some may not flinch from death, but they still want
to make our lives free from fear, worry, pain, and anxiety. The fundamental
question this generation of humans must ask itself is, what must we desire or
hope to have? For hope is no longer so harmless, and desire can be decisively
destructive. Earlier, in the main, our dreams and desires, hopes and aspirations
and ambitions were largely individual-centric and local, and our failures and
setbacks were individualistic and isolated and the fall out was also limited and
contained. To meet, to really connect, and to encounter another as deeply as
possible—this has been an abiding and enduring human aspiration. Now we
can have the unlimited ability to technologically communicate, combine,
connect, and cooperate on a species-scale. But that immense ‘ability’ to better
the human condition largely remains untapped. But it is not merely technical
or technological; it is spiritual too. In Karen Armstrong’s words, “We urgently
need to examine received ideas and assumptions, look beneath the sound-bites
of the news to the complex realities that are tearing our world apart, realizing, at
a profound level, that we share the planet not with inferiors but equals”.28 What
we ought to strive towards is consciousness-to-consciousness, and heart-to-heart
communion, not mind-to-mind communication and microchip-implants.
To arrest the drift and drag, and to change the course of our civilization,
we need another internal revolution: a consciousness-revolution, an inner
alchemy that allows us to go beyond the boundary of thinking itself and restores
or reawakens the role of heart intelligence. The very evolution that led to this
impasse has to be re-directed within. We have to contain the predominance of
our mind in molding the way we live and that requires drastically diminishing
the mind’s internal monopoly. For that, we need an internal counterweight,
which can only be the heart in its role as a major source of energy, memory, and
intelligence. The real reason why we have failed to make any breakthrough in the
face of problems that threaten our very future—like climate change, terrorism,
moral paralysis, runaway mechanization, materialism, and militarism—is our
abysmal inability to take cognizance of the fact that there is a whole universe
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within, and that what happens there has a decisive bearing on what happens in
the world in which we are born into, live and die. Spiritual literature is replete
with words like ‘inner world’, ‘inner self ’, ‘power within’, ‘inner seeking’, ‘inner
awakening’, ‘inner journey’, and so on. We have been repeatedly told that we
can find everything we search for if we can reach inward into our heart: truth,
strength, love, hope, happiness. And inward is not a direction or depth but a
dimension. As Rainer Rilke said, ‘the only journey is the one within’. For Rumi,
we enter ‘a mine of rubies and bathe in the splendor of our own light’. All such
are noble thoughts and wise advice, but the reality is that we are stranded at the
gates of our own skin.
We are living at a time when events around us are occurring at such a
dizzying pace in many parallel and diverse directions, that our cognitive capacities
are unable to put them all together, to clear the detail from the design, the structure
from the substance, and read the portends and grasp their true significance. Our
evolution has not equipped our brains to handle such a blinding blitz from so
many quarters simultaneously. We no longer know if the ground beneath us is
solid earth or swirling sand, and the more we know, the more we come to know
how little we know. Our very sense of reality, even the feeling that we ourselves
are authentic and ‘living’ is in question in our own mind. Is reality itself real or
relative? Are the feelings, thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and situations that
make up our ordinary human experience obstacles or opportunities, or alarm
bells to our growth as essentially spiritual beings? According to the Upanishads,
‘The wise man should hold his body steady, with the three upper parts—chest,
neck and head—erect, turn his sense, with the help of the mind, towards the
heart by means of the raft of the Brahman to cross the fearful torrents of the
world’.29 In short, if man wants to change his behavior for the better or to make
spiritual progress or move towards a higher level of consciousness, the way of the
heart is the only way.
The Evil Within
While we externalize the clash between good and evil, it actually is an incestuous
affair. As Carl Jung puts it, “Nothing is so apt to challenge our self-awareness
and alertness as being at war with oneself.”30 Even if we do win all external
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wars, it will be a vacuous victory; it would be, as the Bible says, tantamount to
losing the soul.31 Among our contemporary great thinkers who have pondered
long and hard over this war, the one that springs instantly to mind is Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn. In his monumental 1973 work, The Gulag Archipelago, he brings
out its immediate context and its intricate complexity, and writes, “If only it were
all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing
evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and
destroy them!”. And he goes on, “In my most evil moments, I was convinced that
I was doing good; and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was
only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the
first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating
good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political
parties either—but right through every human heart, and through all human
hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within
hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even
in the best of all hearts, there remains… an un-uprooted small corner of evil.
Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world.
They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being).
It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety but it is possible to
constrict it within each person”.32
These are very weighty and wise words. We can ‘constrict’ the evil within
each of us only if we can positively influence the war within. However, we have
almost convinced ourselves that if we do not want to end up on the scrapheap of
scapegoats, or be labelled as a loser, we must at the very least acquiesce to evil. Once
we allow ourselves to wallow in that line of thought, the temptation becomes too
much to resist to cover up for all our misdeeds; ‘necessary’ becomes ‘necessity’.
Such a necessity is the necessary evil that even if we behave badly towards other
people, we still think we are ‘good’ people. Our moral nonchalance and ethical
apathy to what happens around us—which is unfair, unjust, exploitative—
and our inability to instinctively or impulsively respond to other’s suffering,
has become so ingrained in daily life that it has taken a tragic toll on human
personality. Thomas Hobbes tellingly wrote that ‘all in their natural condition
are possessed of the will to injure others, to tyrannize over other men; each has
thus to fear the other’. And by ignoring the within, we are injuring ourselves,
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putting our well-being, even health, at risk. It is now even being said that ‘cancer
is thus a breakdown from within’.33 It means that not only evil, but illness too
is within. A Rwandan proverb reminds us, ‘You can out-distance that which is
running after you, but not what is running inside you’. The world outside is the
periphery, but the epicenter is within. We can control the periphery if we control
the center. What we do on the outside influences what happens inside, but it is
the center that prevails. We talk of good people and bad people, and that if we
can get rid of the baddies, the problem would get resolved and the world will
become a place of peace and harmony. One actually wishes there are identifiable
bad people; it would then be easy to exterminate them like what we did with
smallpox and polio. Alas, that is not only too simplistic but also false. We know
that all of us are both good and bad at different times, or to different people at
the same time. And we do not always feel bad about being bad to a person who
is not considered bad. Our idea of someone being good or bad hinges purely on
how that person behaves towards us, not on what others think. The burden of
our suffering often is to ‘suffer’ others. If everything about morality is so sliding,
slippery and subjective, or as-you-like-it, how then can we know how we’re
doing, and if we cannot, how can we become better? Contrary to what Spinoza
tells us that ‘to act in conformity with virtue is to act according to the guidance of
reason…’ it is a good which is common to all men, and can be equally possessed
by all in so far as they are of the same nature. And contrary to what TS Eliot said,
“So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good; so far as we do
evil or good, we are human; and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than
to do nothing: at least, we exist”,34 we do both ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and evil today
is so stomach-turning that ‘doing something’ to combat is better than ‘doing
nothing’. The accent here is on ‘doing’, not ‘being’. It simply means that every
time we do anything, we must try to do the ‘good’ thing that is good for our
soul and does no harm to anyone else. But to do that does not depend on ‘us’,
the breathing, walking person who stares back at us with a smirk in the mirror;
it depends on the ‘war within’, inside our own deepest depths. The truth of the
matter is that inside each of us “Dragons are there, and there are also lions; there
are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels,
the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the
treasuries of grace—all things are there”.35
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We must bear in mind that this is not something metaphorical or symbolic
or figurative that we can ignore or condescendingly nod our head and do nothing
about. Starkly put, everything we do in our life, agreeable and disagreeable,
good, bad, ugly, has an effect on the War Within. In the language of worldly
war, they are the ‘supplies’ and logistical support that gives the wherewithal to
both sides to wage the war. This War is as literal, real, actual and authentic as
any other on the ground; if any, it is even more tangible, as it underpins every
other war. It is not a ‘star war’, or ‘war of the worlds’, or some remote ‘tribal war’
about which we can, in the comfort of distance, read in the papers or see on a
screen, be entertained or get our adrenalin worked up, and feel smug that we
are not on the frontline or have to bear the collateral consequences like in the
external wars. Everything about this war is about us; the place, the fighting, the
forces, the fallout, they are all ‘us’. This ‘war’ rages inside each of us with every
breath we take, all the time, without a lull or break, relentless, remorseless, with
no shut-down at sundown. And more ominously, every shift