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

are
about 75 trillion of them. During a normal life span, the heart will pump about
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
276
1.5 million barrels of blood, enough to fill about 200 train tank cars. The first
heart, a tiny group of cells, begins to beat as early as when a pregnancy is in its
fourth week. Humans form an emotional brain long before a rational one, and
a beating heart before either. Heart intelligence is really the source of emotional
intelligence. The heart has its own independent complex nervous system known
as the ‘brain in the heart’. Its ‘intelligence’ is independent of, but constantly
in communication with, the brain, and the source of much that is good about
us. Heart intelligence is the flow of awareness, understanding and intuition we
experience when the mind and emotions are brought into coherent alignment
with the heart. Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry said, “It is only with the heart that
one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye”. It validates the idea
that people can be smart in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with IQ
scores.
What we should worry about is not only how to avoid a ‘heart attack’,
but equally how to make our hearts rule our lives, or at least have a greater say in
what goes on inside us. For, as Blaise Pascal said, “the heart has its reasons which
reason knows not”. And as an extension it implies that if we can learn to listen
to those ‘reasons’, or rumblings, we can become less confrontational and more
caring in making choices in our lives. However new research is indicating that
intelligence and intuition are heightened when we learn to listen more deeply to
our own heart. It’s through learning how to decipher messages we receive from
our heart that we gain the keen perception needed to effectively manage our
emotions in the midst of life’s challenges. The more we learn to listen to and
follow our heart intelligence, the more educated, balanced and coherent our
emotions become. Without the guiding influence of the heart, we easily fall prey
to reactive emotions such as insecurity, anger, fear, and blame as well as other
energy-draining reactions and behaviors. Such ‘wisdom’ can be now validated
or legitimized by emerging science, but mystics have always known that true
intelligence is a blending of head and heart, of thought and feeling. Our heart
needs the help of our head to generate and act on more skillful emotions. Our
head needs our heart to remind us that what’s really important in life is putting
an end to suffering. ‘Intelligence’ has to be holistic and the next phase of human
evolution must include this dimension. Then alone can we live as ‘we are one
another’ and be able not to ‘stop at our skin’.
The Two Cherokee Wolves Fighting Within
277
Restoring the Heart to Its Rightful Place
Looking at all the unsettling and unsavory things happening in the world, a
growing number of people have come to believe that, as Steve Grand75 puts it,
“there is a strong possibility that we’ve got everything horribly wrong”. They are
beginning to see more clearly than before when the ‘wrong’ began. It began with
the virtual monopoly of intellect in orchestrating our lives and the sidelining of
our intuitive heart intelligence, or as some call it, ‘heart’s consciousness’. The
heart is now emerging as a key to a better human future. The beginning is to
shed the sense that the heart is simply a superb hydraulic pump that pushes
blood through the arteries, capillaries, and veins to deliver oxygen and nutrientrich
blood, and evacuate waste products to and from the tissues of the body.
Recent research indicates that it is not merely a pump and that our heart is ‘more
intelligent than the brain’. It means that those feelings we have are ‘intelligent’
feelings and that strengthens the fact of all of us having inherent psychic abilities
and intuition. If we could shed our brain-fixation and tap more of our ‘heart
intelligence’ we might make more headway. Contrary to what we now assume,
the ‘organ of intellect’ was not always known to be the brain. In fact, for long,
there were two competing views regarding where the intellect is in the body:
the brain or the heart. Even Aristotle argued for a cardiocentric (heart-centered)
model, that the heart is in fact the primary organ of intelligence. In this, he
differed from his teacher Plato, who subscribed to the encephalocentric (braincentered)
model, and posited that the “eyes, ears, tongue, hands, and feet act
in accordance with the discernment of the brain”. It is the heart, not the brain,
which is the major energetic organ of organization and integration of the human
body, and the physical and spiritual energy link up in the inner heart.76 Our
heart, in fact, has its own nervous system where the neurons are connected
differently and more elaborately than elsewhere in the body, and while they are
capable of detecting circulating chemicals sent from the brain and other organs,
they operate independently in their own right. Having its own mini-brain is the
reason why heart transplants work, given the fact that severed nerve connections
do not reconnect in a different body. Furthermore, this elaborate nervous center
in the heart has more functions than simply regulating the electrical activities of
the heart to keep it pumping. It is interesting to note that while the heart can
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
278
be influenced by messages sent from the brain, it doesn’t necessarily obey them
all the time. Furthermore, the heart’s mini-brain can send its own signals to the
brain and exercise its influence on it. Charlie Chaplin, who wrote a beautiful
poem on turning seventy77 which, inter alia, said “When I started loving
myself I recognized, that my thinking can make me miserable and sick. When I
requested for my heart forces, my mind got an important partner. Today, I call
this connection heart wisdom”. And lest we forget, “connections are made with
the heart, not the tongue”—nor with the mind.
“Perhaps the heart path represents a different way of interacting with the
world than our current brain-dominated approach, a path many of us might
want to explore and one that is based on sensing the energy that resonates
within everyone, than always trying to master and control things, people and the
cosmos”.78 We have to review our ideas of intention, intelligence and intuition.
The French philosopher Henri Bergson, for example, posited that intuition is
deeper than intellect, and said that the next human quality to develop is intuition.
The theosophist Annie Besant brought in the spiritual dimension and said that
intellect has to be “subordinated to the higher spiritual quality, which realizes
the unity in diversity and therefore comes to realize the divine Self in man. That
is the next step forward, looking at consciousness”. 79 And that way we could
accelerate both ‘consciousness-change’ and ‘contextual change’. Sri Aurobindo
declared that for “man to come face to face with the realization of all that has
remained his dream and his aspiration through the ages, [he must] emerge into a
higher stage of consciousness”. Such a higher stage of consciousness has to be in a
state of better balance between mind and heart, between brain-based intelligence
and heart-intelligence.
“Cardio-energy not only maintains the very interactive cellular structures
of the body, but interacts with other hearts and energy systems as well, creating
an ever-increasing unity of ever more complex systems of energies which are
constantly in communication and interaction with each other. Therefore, it is
the individual heart which receives from outside itself, sources of information its
related mind organ cannot access on its own, and in turn, transmits information
to other hearts multiplied exponentially by the countless sources of cardio-L
energy which contribute to its own ‘wisdom’. In so doing, the individual heart
becomes a microcosm of the larger macrocosm of cardio-energy of which it is a
The Two Cherokee Wolves Fighting Within
279
part, and to which it contributes, thus, in a most significant manner, participating
in the creation of its own reality. This notion of the ‘wisdom of the heart’, not
only in the sense of what the heart knows and intuits, but also from where and
to where its wisdom travels, and with what effect, is a central theme in Kabbala
and Hasidism”.80
It is also suggested that “it would be a serious mistake to view congestive
heart failure and its treatment merely from the materialist perspective of physical
organ dysfunction. Rather, such ailments of the heart must also be understood
within the context of the heart’s very own L energy and therefore, and most
importantly, from the perspective of the heart’s own energetic and spiritual effects
upon itself ”. Some like Rabbi Nachman “speak not only of the role of the heart
in terms of one’s own health, but also that, the good thoughts in the heart are the
good inclination, through which good deeds and attributes are revealed. This is
a formation for good. Thus, when a person thinks good thoughts, he purifies the
Space of Creation”.81
If we can manage to harmonize the three independent but interconnected
intelligences that we have—mental (IQ or left brain), emotional (EQ, or, right
brain), and heart (HQ)—then, only then, can we change what and how we think
and feel. Without such change, our behavior will not change and we will not win
the war within. Only by that harmonization can we truly improve the quality of
decision-making. Only then can we “foster a new level of understanding of the
phenomena of life in the biological sciences, and enable physicians to rediscover
the human being which, all too often, many feel they have lost”.82
Conclusion
The question why humans kill one another so needlessly has tormented the minds
of philosophers, sociologists, and psychologists. Why is peaceful, amicable,
and constructive conflict resolution so difficult in daily life? Why has diversity,
instead of enriching, become so divisive and destructive? Will we be ever able
to make sense of human behavior and truly understand the human condition?
Are we innately violent, as Thomas Hobbes hypothesized in the 1650s, or is our
bearing and mien influenced more by nature, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau theorized
a century later? Can we ever become truly moral beings?
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
280
While we will never have clear answers because there are no clear answers,
one thing is clear. As Carl Jung said, “wholeness for humans depends on their
ability to own their own shadow”. The ‘shadow’ we have to own is ‘the black
box inside of humans they can’t go near’. The box contains all that we don’t
want to own, even admit: violence, cruelty, sadism, hate, bigotry, etc. That many
saints and mahatmas have confessed to these failings should only enhance, not
diminish their saintliness. We have long lived with the agony of the good vs
evil affliction and how to resolve it. The great philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev
wrote, “There is a deadly pain in the very distinction of good and evil, of the
valuable and the worthless. We cannot rest in the thought that that distinction is
ultimate… we cannot bear to be faced forever with the distinction between good
and evil” (The Destiny of Man, 1931). What we have not sufficiently recognized is
that our behavior, whether we do good or evil depends on what happens ‘within’
our consciousness, which in turn is in a state of war between these very forces:
good and evil. Although recent studies do suggest that there are “good grounds
for believing that we are intrinsically more violent than the average mammal”,
we should not forget that we are also, on the other extreme, equally capable of
supreme sacrifice and highest altruism. Fact is that if there is evil within, there is
goodness too. Along with ‘selfish’ genes we are also hard-wired for empathy and
compassion. That is why we are also the most complex form of life on earth. Our
range of emotions are far wider and most exist as pairs of opposites, love and
hate, cruelty and compassion, indifference and empathy, malice and altruism,
etc. Our consciousness is also more evolved and that makes it more of a player in
our lives than of other species. The result is that co-existence of ‘pairs of opposites’
in our consciousness turns into conflict, and conflict into a confrontation, and
confrontation into a no-holds-barred war between two sets of forces, dharma
(righteousness) and adharma (wickedness). And this War is all that matters, all
there is to do. To ‘win’ the war, rather, more to the point, help the forces of
good to prevail in this war, we have to do good in our daily life, helping and not
hurting, and by ensuring that whatever gets into our body through our senses
is wholesome for the forces of righteousness. In other words, the war within
can be ‘won’ by leading