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

for a Momentous Leap, which he described as “The
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most difficult, but at the same time the most exciting transition the human race
has faced to date. It is not merely a transition to a new level of existence but the
start of a new ‘movement’ in the symphony of human history”.41 Some predict
what Terence McKenna called The Archaic Revival, of the emergence of a ‘Global
Tribe’. Everything else other than ‘consciousness-change’, the shape and form
it will take, are but mere details. But then, as is said, often the devil is in the
detail. Those ‘details’ are our daily deeds, what Coleridge describes as the “petty
things of daily life”.42 As for ‘God’, man’s mind has effectively rendered him an
‘opportunistic option’; no longer even a ‘necessary nuisance’. We have turned the
aura of ‘divine sanction’ to whip up our darker urges and come to believe that
if we are ‘pious’ we do not need to be pure at heart, if we are devout we do not
have to be decent, and if we try to get closer to God we can be callous to human
suffering. Nobody wants to ‘suffer’; everyone shuns it except those who see it as
a way to constantly seek God. In the Mahabharata, the mother of the virtuous
Pandavas, Kunti, prays to Lord Krishna to bless her with perpetual sorrow, as
she realizes that if sorrow deserted her, she would cease to seek Him. It brings to
mind what Keats said about sorrow: “But cheerly, cheerly, She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind: I would deceive her, And so leave her, But
ah! she is so constant and so kind… But now of all the world I love thee best”
(Ode to Sorrow in Endymion, 1818).
Once we recognize and accept and come to terms with this bedrock
reality of this ‘war within’, and its implications and impact on our life, all
contradictions, confusion, and conundrums will dry up. Our task will then
become very simple and straightforward: to do all we can and could to help
the kinder, gentler, better-half be the dominant partner. The ebbs and flows of
the war are so continuous and shifting that we become unsure of everything
because our fortunes and misfortunes reflect the state of the war at that time.
That keeps us always in an ambiguous state, always on the edge, and prevents us
from ‘making up our mind’ and to act upon what we even know to be the right
thing. To illustrate, even assuming that ‘being moral’ is good for our own wellbeing,
we are plagued with nagging questions. Is it universal and timeless or is it
subject to time and space? And if it is both or neither, how does one distinguish
the timeless from the time-bound, and the perennial from the particular? Does
a ‘higher’ moral end justify ‘lesser’ immorality, or in dharmic terms, should we
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sacrifice the ‘lesser’ dharma that is enjoined upon fewer people at the altar of
the ‘greater’ dharma that contributes to the cause of the ‘greater’ good? This
is the question that emerges out of the Indian epic Mahabharata. So much
scholasticism has accumulated on this subject that there is a whole winnow of
metaphysical knowledge, generally called moral philosophy or ethics, that deals
with questions such as the right and wrong of what we do and how we ought to
live our lives. And it is so closely interwoven with religion that morality without
religion is deemed not only dangerous but also blasphemous. The entrenched
belief is either God crafted the moral sense during creation or inspired religion
to show us the path to morality. There are others who argue that there is nothing
divine about morality, that habit is purely a human expediency and an atheist
can be equally, if not more, moral than a theist.
One cannot deny that religion has helped man to become a better person,
but we must not also ignore that the corruption that has engulfed religion has
also sapped the moral sensitivity of man, and a great deal of evil springs from
the realm of religion. And it springs not only from religious zealots, or as we
call ‘fundamentalists’, but, even more, from all of us. The real problem is not
any religion per se but its selective attribution and misinterpretation, looking
for isolated passages to do what we want to do and turning it into the Only
Truth. More fundamentally, religion, like any knowledge, is corrupted because it
is filtered through our consciousness, which is dominated by the human mind,
and the attributes of the mind—malice, self-righteousness, intolerance—get
attached to religious practice. No moral self-righteousness and intolerance is as
lethal as the religious type because it is clad in the authenticity of God. Of all
the human attributes, perhaps the only one which is not double-faced, which
scorches what it touches is, malice. If malice is our defining signature and if we
are the most endowed of all forms of life on earth, then what human or creative
purpose does it serve? Einstein once said that ‘the Lord God is subtle, but He is
not malicious’. But how does one explain our inherent divinity with our unique
attribute of malice?
A major watershed development over the past century is that human
power, which for long has maintained some sort of balance between its
constructive and destructive dimensions, is now out of sync. One of our greatest
failings as a species is our inability to live in a state of cooperative cohabitation
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with other members of our own kindred kind. We find it so hard to work with
others, labor and live together as a cohesive species, something that other notso-
intelligent species seem to do almost instinctively. Even worse, we alone are
capable of willing each other harm, even without any expectation of self-benefit.
Although biologically we all belong to the same species, in practical terms our
main qualification is that we still interbreed, out of which come out future
humans. We must learn that sometimes compassion takes the form of stepping
aside, letting go of our need to be right, and just being happy for someone. Now
we can ill afford ill will. The Buddhist Medha Sutra meditation says, “Let none
by anger or hatred wish harm to another”. Now, not ‘wishing harm to others’
in itself, is no longer lofty as it is, a moral precept; it has become an existential
‘essential’. The choice between ‘harm’ and ‘help’ in our social life is no longer a
‘personal’ or ‘private’ matter, to be judged elsewhere or hereafter. Edgar Cayce
alluded to the rewards of hereafter when he said, “You’ll not be in heaven if
you’re not leaning on the arm of someone you have helped”. That may well be
so; indeed it must be so. Modern life, with all its downsides and drawbacks,
coarseness and insensitivity, carries a huge hope. It has changed the motive and
dynamic for helping each other into an imperative; it is no longer an option.
Every one of us is now indispensable for all of us to be what or who we want to
be. In one sense, each one of us is the proverbial ‘hundredth monkey’ to all of
us, potentially a critical member whose behavior could help us reach the tipping
point. Technology has so intertwined our lives that our actions affect others and
others’ actions affect ours. Technology accelerates everything, and has, according
to some psychologists, a ‘profound effect on the way we experience time’.
Technologies like communication technologies shrink time and distance and
inform us instantly about any happening anywhere and empower connectivity
for any cause, noble or noxious. The speed of intercontinental travel—soon,
we are being promised, we can go around the globe in sixty minutes—is also
turning infectious diseases into pandemics, and also creating a level playing field
of potential victims. Pathogens with the means to travel respect neither class nor
position, neither race nor religion, neither the rich nor the poor. When it comes
to susceptibility to new organisms and biological weapons, in a hyper-connected
world, we are all equal prey. In fact, technology is slowly but surely replacing
human interactions and has come to mean so much that “we actually expect more
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from technology and less from each other”43—probably even from God! Since
we think that technology will ‘fix’ every problem, our behavior is also becoming
more reckless, profligate, and predatory. Even what we used to do earlier like
conservation we are not doing now. Technology is also relentlessly replacing
human labor, which happens when, in the words of John Keynes, “unemployment
due to our discovery of means of economizing the use of labor [outruns] the
pace at which we can find new uses for labor”. It has profound consequences,
far beyond the ambit of economics; it goes to the very root of ‘being human’.
Although we have reduced work as wage-earning, it is a tonic to both body and
brain. Mass scale and prolonged human idling can become another existential
threat. An idle mind, it has been said, is a devil’s workshop, and if a man’s hands
become idle what would the world be like? The ever-accelerating technological
change, in particular digital technology and automation, threaten to idle millions,
even billions, depriving not only the means to make money but also depriving
identity and dignity of life, potentially triggering a kind of catastrophic social
conflagration. We no longer can be sure who is a neighbor and who is a stranger,
who is a native and who is a refugee. It essentially undermines our humanness—
what makes us who we are as ‘persons’—and of being the human species—who
we are collectively. It is distrust that drives automation. And automation, as has
been said, breeds automation. Fundamentally, our love of the machine comes
down to one thing: we don’t like others who we have to live with or work with
to be who we are, and exhibit the same qualities we have—be he or she a spouse
or servant, colleague or a concubine, worker or a whore. What is being called
‘digital damage’ is affecting nearly every kind of human relationship, and the
‘digital divide’ is wider than the economic divide, cutting across every society.
Too much digital participation, it is feared, is corroding human empathy. For, as
Baroness Susan Greenfield, author of the book Mind Change, says, “If we don’t
speak to each other, it is harder to establish empathy”. Empathy, the ability to
comprehend and share the feelings of others, is central to moral life. Everyone
needs it, rich or poor, powerful and powerless, villain and victim, and if we
let that go then any hope for human betterment would become a mirage. For
empathy is more basic than sympathy or compassion.
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The Three ‘M’s and the War Within
While consciousness-change entails altering the current content and character
of our consciousness so that the very dynamics that drive our thinking, feeling,
and experiencing change, contextual-change encompasses change in the way we
create our living context. In that context, at this tumultuous time, the three most
important constituent parts are the triad of the three ‘M’s—morality, money, and
mortality. Unless we are able to totally and comprehensively rethink, reconfigure
and renew our conception and understanding of what they ought to mean in
modern life, we will continue to lose the war within. On all three fronts, we
need to go back to the drawing board, so to speak, to break out of the box
and turn the three obsessions into openings and opportunities to tilt the scales
in the war within. These are so intricately embedded in human consciousness
that there is nothing we can do without the underpinning of one or two or
all the three. Of the three, it is the magnetic might of money that is now at
the frontline of both human transformation and planetary destruction. And the
time has come to comprehensively rethink its role in human destiny. Invented
as a means of exchange, money has no intrinsic value, but allows us to ascribe
relative values to all things. Money is more portable, more durable, more easily
exchanged and hence more sought after than other goods. It is almost a cliché to
say that time is money, but time is also life, and we ought to demur at putting a
price on our own lives. Money’s very pervasiveness and transformative power also
makes it a translucent instrument, a spiritual tool. Money, righteously earned
and shared, can make the world so much better. There is no doubt that ‘money
makes the world go around’. The deterministic role of money was long foreseen
in scriptures. In detailing the traits of the age of Kali Yuga, it was