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

and destructive in
our deportment? Why is ‘separateness’ so stubborn? Why is it so herculean to put
another person ahead in our choice-making? Why is it so Sisyphean to try to live
inside someone else’s skin? At a more conceptual and cognitive level, our problem
with compassion is like the ‘difficulty of being good’. We know that ‘being good’
is good for us, but we often find many good reasons not to do good. In fact, it
is easier to do good, which most of us do, sometime or the other, than ‘being
good’, which is not ‘doing bad’, which really is more difficult. It is instructive to
remember what Jesus, surely as good a man as is possibly possible, said, “Why
do you call me good? No one is good except God alone”79 If Jesus himself did
not (out of modesty or candor) or could not claim to be a good person, who are
we even to debate the issue? Most of us think we are good because we ‘do good
things’, but the real test is to desist by word or deed not doing any bad, not
causing hurt or harm to any sentient being. Similarly our experience shows that
compassionate actions make us feel good about ourselves, but we still find that
callousness and indifference are more reflexive. Whether it is willful blindness or
sheer selfishness, we have become indifferent to the distress of others, and to the
woes of other species. We can pass by a critically wounded man with scarcely a
sigh and still find good reasons for having done so, like telling ourselves ‘it is not
my job, or ‘someone else will take care’, and so on. Our stomach rarely churns
when we hear and read news about the rape of, say, a little child, or when we
read about a mother murdering her own kids to get back at her spouse, or about
the sadistic crimes of serial killers and mass murderers. We tell ourselves, ‘we are
not them’, and the truth that those persons are also human beings matters not.
We feel safe in our home and under our skin. Ideas and idioms like solidarity,
brotherhood, and ‘one in all and all in one’ are good sound-bytes but mean
nothing. And we feel no sense of guilt at all about the atrocities committed by
our own governments in the guise of ‘national interest’. We feel no awakenings
of remorse or pangs of virtuous shame, and can rationally explain away why we
do nothing in the face of economic inequity or social exploitation. Our mind
provides us with evasions, explanations and excuses for our un-compassionate
behavior. And rather than view ourselves as insensitive, much less callous, we
hold the ‘system’ responsible. When it comes to sharing the spoils, we ask ‘Why
not me?’, and when it comes to fighting the same system, we ask ‘Why me?’
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
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To be compassionate is to reach a deeper level of consciousness. For that,
we need a two-pronged approach. We need to shift the center of gravity internally
from the mind to the heart. Externally, we need a compassionate environment.
But that environment itself is of our own making, the projection of what goes on
inside, the ‘war within’, over which we have no control. It means that we must
somehow get a hold on that war if we are to be considerate or compassionate
or even responsible in our behavior. What we do every time is itself the result
of the war, the outcome of a constant Kurukshetra, if you will. If we want to
do right and be a good person, we must somehow go deep under own skin and
ensure that the things we value—morality, consideration, compassion, kindness,
sharing, and so on—come to prevail over forces we do not like, such as envy,
jealousy, indifference, intolerance, injustice, etc. Even if there is a biological base,
not just a moral motive, for compassion, it is not sufficient to make us moral in
our day-to-day living. But we also know from our own experiences that constant
exposure to compassionate environments softens our rough edges and enables
us to be more sensitive to suffering. It also means that with some rebooting
and reengineering, and with some internal cleansing, by tapping some of our
dormant energies and by creating a congenial external environment, we can
make compassion our ‘natural’ and ‘normal’ response. And we do have inside
us what it takes to convert the ‘feeling’ into active action. The desired change
cannot be left to our sense of ‘good sense’ or spontaneity, or sense of fair play
or justness, or to the proverbial pangs of conscience. That is the menu or mix
that now prevails, and the present mindset is its child. We cannot also brush it
aside and say ‘it is a state of mind’. It is much more than that; it is a matter of
the level and content of consciousness. And that can be inculcated and imbibed
incrementally, almost on a daily basis, event by event, so that, after a while, it
becomes a reflexive ‘habit’, even an effortless addiction. For, as Aristotle said, ‘we
are what we repeatedly do’. That is the only way we can become a truly moral or
an essentially spiritual being. But the troubling question we must first address
is this: ‘If all religions advocate and extol compassion, if we have all that it takes
for us to be compassionate and if ‘being’ compassionate does not really require
any extraordinary effort, then why is the human world so soaked with so much
divisiveness, desperation, depravity, enmity, and hostility?’
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
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Active acceptance of one’s own self—and of others as they are and as
elements of the Cosmic Whole—is the prerequisite for personal growth, which
is not the same as physical growth (which is self-driven). As the prostitute Sofya
tells the murderer Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, “Accept
and achieve atonement through it—that is what you should do”. That kind of
acceptance is not very different from prapatti in Hinduism, the unconditional
and absolute surrender to the divine will. If we bear in mind that everyone is
both a villain and a victim, or put positively, that no one is all evil or all virtue,
or in Vedantic terms, that all of us are a part of the same cosmic consciousness,
it becomes easy to be compassionate, even towards those who harm us. In
the karmic context, those who inflict hurt on us are helping us and harming
themselves; we are spending some of our ‘bad karma’ and they are acquiring it.
And they being bad to us is a part of our prarabdha as much as theirs. Whichever
way one looks at it, the bottom line is that it is almost impossible to lead a
minimal human life without hurting, which means also being hurt. Since we
cannot help but hurt, what we can do is to do the opposite—heal. And we
can do that in multiple ways: just being there, offering a kind word, giving a
supportive hand or shoulder, simply listening, sharing one’s space, time, labor,
wealth, etc. We can heal a wound with the warm touch of a tender hand and a
gentle hug. Sometimes, just being with someone is enough, without even a touch
or a word; to help the person get the feeling that he or she is not left alone in this
wicked world. One can hurt or heal even through thought. Even a sincere and
strong desire can help or heal. Just as self-destructive behavior can cause harm to
those that love and care for us, equally we can help and heal others by helping
and healing ourselves.
The Five-Point Formula for Decision-Making
Every crisis the world faces—ecological, economic, ethical, moral, and
spiritual—is a result of the poor decision-making capacities of our human ‘brainbased
intelligence’. We are just unable to get it right, get a grip on what causes
them, and what is required of us to resolve them. These are also an extension
of the internal crisis, inner struggle for supremacy—the war within—in our
consciousness. While we are busy toning our ‘disaster-management’ skills to face
Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality
463
up to ‘natural disasters’, which are increasingly ‘man-made’ than ‘natural’, the
turmoil in our ‘inner world’ gets no attention, or even recognition. Firestorms,
tornadoes, typhoons, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes are taking place within
our consciousness, more turbulent and tempestuous than the ones we experience
in our outer world. The Indian mystic Osho said that to find harmony and
happiness in life one must shift the gaze from the ‘objective’ to the ‘subjective’,
and try to ‘look deep into our inner world, the world that is absolutely private
to us’. Just as our physical acts affect the outer world, similarly the play of forces
that control our consciousness directly affects the inner world. Our ‘world within’
and our world outside are intertwined and they mutually reinforce and reflect
each other.
The outer world is a mirror of our inner world. Trouble is that we have
been trying to focus all our attention and ingenuity on the extrinsic world without
paying any heed to the endogenous world. At the basic level it is a question of
how we look upon ourselves in relation to nature. We abuse and ravage, plunder
and pillage the external world because we think it is ‘separate’ from us and that
what happens in the world has nothing to do with us. There are unmistakable
hints and portents that we are very near to what Nietzsche called “the hour of the
greatest contempt”,80 an hour at which one asks: ‘What good is my happiness?’
and ‘What good is any good?’ and ‘Why is bad bad, when it makes me feel
so good, and when few, if any in all of humanity, seem worthy of respect, let
alone reverence?’ ‘Happiness’, or ‘human flourishing’, what the Greeks called
Eudaimonia, is the magical word. That is what everyone, all the time, seeks,
strives for, pursues and prays for but never seems to have it, or enough of it for
satisfaction. It is because we want to monopolize it and identify it with satiating
our desires and dreams. Once someone said to the Buddha, “I want happiness”,
and the Buddha replied: “First remove ‘I’, that is Ego; then remove ‘want’, that
is Desire; what you are left with is ‘Happiness’. Buddhism says that anytime we
identify with a sense of ‘I’—as in: “I feel something”; “I have lost something”;
“I am lost”; “I have done it”—we are identifying with the wrong person. We
are identifying with the ego, with our pain body, not with our pure nature. The
famous Buddhist saying, Sabbe dhamma nalam abhinivesaya (nothing whatsoever
should be clung to as ‘I’ or ‘mine’) is considered as a summation of all teachings
of the Tathagata (the word that Gautama Buddha uses when referring to himself
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
464
in the Pali Canon). The Buddha says that if you have heard this phrase, then you
would have heard everything there is to hear. In ‘moral decision-making’, that is
a very handy point of reference. In practical life, we cannot confine happiness to
a few crisp words but we can experience it, even if ephemerally. Whatever it is
and however much it varies and is elusive, the bottom line is this: true happiness
is never either or; it doesn’t diminish if we spread it. Even our daily experiences
tell us that the ‘happiness’ we can get by making another person happy is
immeasurable. And it lies not only in ‘doing good’, but also in realizing that there
is nothing we gain by ‘being bad’, even to those who are, or at least we think
are, bad to us. Returning ‘good’ for ‘bad’ is smart one-upmanship, the recipe to
dissolve ‘bad karma’. The attitude of others towards us often causes unhappiness,
but seldom do we realize that it could be a reflection of and reaction to our own
attitude. If you deny others their happiness, you are wasting your own power of
happiness. Sadly, most of us have become incapable of respecting those who can
be of no possible service to us, or to treating with consideration those who can
do nothing for us, or are so positioned that they cannot return our rudeness. We
tend to look down on people who we think are intellectually ‘inferior’, socially
‘low-standing’ or economically disadvantaged. ‘Looking-down’ is, at a deep level,
another attribute of the mind; the mind instinctively looks up at someone it
thinks is stronger, and looks down on those it considers so weak that it can
exercise control over them. What we should always remember is the sage advice,
“Never look down on anyone unless you are helping them up”. Ours is a time
when a growing number are coming to