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

in the course, and
the flow and every turn of the tide impacts on us in every thought, word or act
that we entertain or engage in. Every ‘happening’ or activity in what we tend
to call ‘our everyday life’ affects the war. It determines ‘who we are’ and what
and how we do, and what we create and for what purpose. We tend to think
that what we think is ‘life’ is different from our ‘everyday life’. We want our life
to be ‘beautiful’, but lead everyday lives in ugliness, pettiness, and perfidy. We
view everyday life as some kind of a prison and yet we crave for eternal life of
the same genre. Our ‘within’ is both a ‘black hole’ and a ‘war zone’. The ‘black
hole’ inside each of us, the blacker and darker, is more impenetrable and more
difficult to get in than any in the cosmos. The perplexing part is that, unlike in
any other war, we have to take sides in this war; help one side any way we could,
but we cannot let the other side get annihilated. God can sit on the sidelines
with a smug; that is why he is He and we are not. Nothing happens to Him,
everything happens to us. All our problems arise because, for a long time, the
‘other side’—the evil within—has gained dominance. There are clear tell-tale
signs. Some of these are the steady surge in senseless suicides, cutting across
all ages, particularly children, the casualness of homicides, mass murders, and
suicide-bombings. Every religion has projected its own vision of God and we
have had so many religious wars—some people even blame organized religion for
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most of history’s killings, and Christianity alone is blamed for the deaths of some
17 million people36—but what is needed now is a change in our perception of
and posture towards God. Scriptures and sages have told us to treat God as our
savior, refuge and shelter, and to surrender to Him wholly—called prapatti or
saranagati in the Vaishnava tradition of Hinduism—and absolutely, but now we
want Him to submit to our ‘strength’ and we ask ‘clever’ questions such as ‘what
has God done lately for me?’. This line of thought is closer to what the great
anarchist Mikhail Bakunin said—“If God really existed, it would be necessary
to abolish Him”—than to Voltaire’s aphorism, ‘If God did not exist, it would be
necessary to invent Him’. We turn to god-men and gadgets to help us out, not
to God. With them we have more patience, and even faith, than God. All this is
due to the fact that, wittingly or unwittingly, both by what we do and, perhaps
even more, don’t do, we are doing the opposite of what we want to do—lending
support to the endogenous forces of immorality, wickedness, and evil. What we
should constantly strive to do is to support the nobler part of us so as to empower
it to have an upper hand over our nastier side. Henry Miller wrote, “every day we
slaughter our finest impulses”. We ‘slaughter’ by constantly singing the ‘sutra of
success’, which usually translates into academic excellence, professional progress
and making a lot of money. ‘Success’ is also associated with ‘control’ and ‘power’,
and we act on the premise that ‘every increase of power means an increase of
progress’. Sometimes our success might be similar to what Mary Shelley wrote
about Victor Frankenstein’s ‘success’ in creating a monster: “Success would terrify
the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He
would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated
would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would
subside into dead matter”.37 But like Frankenstein, we too cannot escape from
the ‘success of success’. We can ‘succeed and fail’ and ‘fail and succeed’, and
we can never really know, if in either case we are failing or succeeding. That
is because both are relative and contextual. Our obsession with ‘success’ is so
overpowering that when ‘failure’—the antithesis of what success stands for—
stares us in the face, be it a term test in school, or in keeping a job or in love,
and the whole world crumbles, life itself becomes both worthless and wearisome
and the ‘sutra’ turns out to be one for self-destruction. The ‘success sutra’ is
exacting a terrible price from society. The lead character in Greg Egan’s story The
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Infinite Assassin (Axiomatic, 1991) proudly defines himself as “‘I’ am those who
survive and succeed. The rest are someone else”. That ‘rest’, that ‘someone else’
is, above all, the stranger within, the alien inside. But ‘success’ is a measure as
decided by others, which we ourselves deploy when dealing with others’ success.
We must also bear in mind another little-noticed factor. It is about what we
take for granted almost routinely: ‘everyday’ existence; what it could do to us;
its grind and drudgery, what it entails, how much of our psychic and physical
energy it extracts. In modern society, an individual cannot see himself, as Albert
Camus wrote, beyond the routine and the ritual. All life is nothing but so many
‘everydays’; every new sun a new beginning. Everyday has a name, a particular
day of the week, and a number on the calendar; the day and date is the setting
for every triumph, the mundane and the magical. Nature gives so many chances
to relive our lives; it makes every morning a new birth, to start all over again,
and to die when we sleep. And no matter what we do, or don’t, the War goes on.
The ‘war within’ is not only a war for the control of our consciousness;
it is also within the consciousness. In fact, they are the two aspects of the same
war. The fight is really between ‘mind-controlled consciousness’ and ‘heartincubated
consciousness’. This ‘war’ is crucial for mind-control, and crucial
for the cathartic cleansing of our inner cosmos. And for better behavior and
for a world in harmony with itself. Unlike external wars, the aim cannot be to
ensure ‘permanent’ victory or total defeat of either of the two ‘blood-brothers’.
The human genus cannot afford the luxury of total and comprehensive victory
of either of the two. Were that to happen, sooner or later, the human will be
extinct. Not only do we need love, compassion, generosity, altruism but also
things like anger, aggression, avarice, at the proper time and place. If they are
not necessary they wouldn’t be there in the first place. Duality is not necessarily
hostility. We have the tendency to view and label things either ‘good’ or ‘bad’,
and wish to get rid of the ‘bad’. They are as much a part of us as our ‘better’ ones.
They are essential for the existence of the other. Without chaos there can be no
order; without darkness we cannot experience light. In fact, even the so-called
‘negatives’ if rightly redirected, can do us a world of good. If we are all and only
‘good’ inside then too there will be trouble. What’s good may not always be
good, and what’s bad may not always be bad in the world outside. On that most
can assent. Some say that ‘being kind and caring is a good thing—as long as the
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person you are kind and caring towards deserves your kindness’. Being forgiving
may produce contentment—except when the forgiven has no plans to make
amends. Even that may sound sensible. But in the crucible of give-and-take
living, we find it very difficult to forget our hurts and forgive our tormentors.
But as Jack Kornfield puts it, not-forgiving is tantamount to ‘giving up all hope
of a better past’. In that sense, forgiveness is really not about someone’s hurtful
behavior; it is about our own relationship with our past. All this sophistry misses
a central moral point. Why do some people go out of the way to help someone
whom they hardly know, and why do many others pretend not to see or turn a
Nelson’s eye?
The tragedy of our life is that it might well be possible to live a life
without consciously helping anyone, but it is not possible to live without hurting,
intentionally or unintentionally, anyone anytime. All of us, sometime, hurt
someone or the other, almost routinely and almost every day. We need to forgive
and be forgiven. A withering glance, a wounding word, even killing one’s own
self can hurt another human being. It can happen anywhere, at home or at work.
Anyone who has suffered a grievous injury knows that when our inner world is
disrupted, it is difficult to concentrate on anything other than the person who
caused it. Forgiveness is easy because it is unilateral, an act of compassion towards
the person who, not you, has to pay the price. The ‘good’ we feel about ourselves,
many psychological studies have shown, is tremendous. But in practice, we find
it very hard to ‘forget’ or to ‘forgive’. And that includes forgiving ourselves,
sometimes harder than forgiving someone else. Instead of forgiving, we play the
blame-game. In fact it is easier to ‘forgive’ than to ‘forget’; for forgiveness comes
from the heart and forgetting from the mind. Indeed, the heart is the fountain
not only of forgiveness but also of love, kindness, and most of all of mercy.
If we can manifest these qualities in our life we will also be strengthening the
‘virtuous’ forces in the ‘war within’. If, for example, as Pope Francis implored,
mercy—which he described as the ultimate and supreme act by which God
comes to meet us—becomes ‘the basis of all our efforts’38, then the very ‘context’
of our daily life will become compassionate. The opposite of compassion, we
must remember, is not cruelty; it is complacency, which is what afflicts the most
‘good’. Sometimes we face questions such as these: Can we be compassionate
without taking sides in a dispute? In other words, can we be compassionate for
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both sides? And does that amount to encouraging evil? A thorny issue that all
of us, even God, face, is how to balance mercy and justice, and which assumes
paramountcy, in the infinite possible variations of human life. Mercy too at a
point becomes unjust. Jesus, when asked how often one should forgive, said, up
to ‘seventy times seven’.39 Lord Krishna, in the Mahabharata, promised that he
will forgive Sisupala ninety-nine times and slays him the hundredth time. Simply
put, what we do and what happens has a huge bearing on what happens after
death. This message comes out strongly in what has been called the Myth of Er
in the last chapter of Plato’s Republic. Socrates says that not only do justice and
justness and injustice and unjustness, good and bad, play a huge role after death,
but also implies that Er was chosen to be the messenger to humanity about what
he has seen take place between death and new birth. In the words of Socrates,
“For each in turn of the unjust things they had done and for each in turn of the
people they had wronged, they paid the penalty ten times over, once in every
century of their journey… But if they had done good deeds and had become just
and pious, they were rewarded according to the same scale”.40
We can also see the ‘war within’ in the form of a clash between ‘mercy’
and ‘justice’, or ‘intuition’ and ‘intellect’. Einstein once 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”. That again is a fallout
of the internal war. What we need is a harmony and ‘positive’ balance in the
consciousness. If we can shift the center of gravity of our consciousness away from
intellect to intuition, our vibration begins to change; we begin to feel greater levels
of peace and well-being in our life. If we can induce such a ‘shift’, as it were, we
will begin to realize that we are a powerful spirit, experiencing ‘being human’ for
a period of time, and not a human being striving for a spiritual experience. The
stakes are simple but stark: whether the human continues to be the most malicious
creature that ever walked on earth until he implodes or immolates and cripples
earth itself, or if he will mend course through a ‘conscious’ consciousness-change
and becomes a benign being, a soothing, ‘spiritual’ presence on earth. Many
great thinkers have long recognized that imperative and some have predicted
an impending leap in human consciousness. In 1974, the American professor
of psychology Dr. Clare W Graves wrote an article for The Futurist magazine,
titled Human Nature Prepares