The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

The War Within –
Between Good and Evil
Reconstructing Morality, Money, and Mortality
Bhimeswara Challa

Dedication to a Daughter
In fond remembrance of my daughter Padma Priya Challa, who died,
solitary through her life, at the age of 54, on 22nd March 2020. She was
innately loving and giving, exceptionally endowed—a rare blend of beauty,
brilliance, and above all, as a friend described her, an ‘enormous heart’—
much admired but much misunderstood.
She was a bundle of pure joy while growing up, scaled high academic and
professional heights, but a slew of fateful setbacks, professional and personal,
set in, and a life of uncommon promise went woefully wrong.
She was carefree about her future, and whenever I worried, she used to
heartrendingly reassure me: “Don’t worry, Dad; I will die before you’.
Doubtless, she is now in a far, far better and more caring place, surely to join
the many she loved down here who are already up there.
By the way she led her life, she helped me to settle my karmic dues of this life
at her own expense, and, as per this book, by her very inability to sufficiently
‘feed’ the ‘good wolf ’ in its fight with the ‘bad wolf ’ in her ‘war within’,
she aided me in waging my own war. What more can any daughter do?
After saying thanks to her, even if posthumously—for thanks must be said
wherever they are due, as my mother once said—I will now meander in the
remains of my time, bearing, in the words of the Greek philosopher Aeschylus
(Agamemnon, 1602), “even in my sleep pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon my heart”.
So long, my love! Rest in paradisiacal peace. And please take my hand
when I come there. God! I implore on bended knees: give her your merciful
forgiveness she longed and prayed for. Free her from all sin and future pain;
and shelter her at your lotus feet.

Contents
Epigraph—Why Me? 1
What I Owe to Whom 13
The Beginning 15
The Twin Questions and Twin Inabilities • The Lure of the Forbidden and the Streak of Cruelty • Struggle for Supremacy Over Consciousness—the War Within • Homo sapiens to Homo Deus • In the Melting Pot of Life and Death • Coming Soon—‘Machines-Better-Than-Me’ • The Way Forward is the Way Inward.
Chapter 1: Musings on Mankind 101
The Human Animal • Empathy—Not a Human Monopoly • The Mood of the Moment • Governance Deficit • Helping: When Joy Comes Calling • Packaged Pleasures • Being Better Than We Were Yesterday • Scientific Insignificance and Spiritual Completeness • The Age of Loneliness • The Two Journeys—Outer Space and Inner Space • The Natural Need for ‘Negatives’ • Tikkun Olam—Healing the World • A World of Individuals • Seminal Choice—Merger with the Machine or Evolution from Within • Brain—the Beast Within • Man—Noble Savage, Civilized Brute, or Half-savage? • Has God Gotten Weary of Man? • Conclusion.
Chapter 2: The Two Cherokee Fighting Wolves Within—
And the One We Feed 185
The Triad of Worlds We Live In • Forward—Outward or Inward? • Consciousness-change and Contextual-change • The Power of the Heart • The Evil Within • The Three ‘M’s and the War Within • The Cherokee’s Two Wolves • Mind Over Mind • The Quicksand ‘Within’ the War Within • Technology
and the ‘War Within’ • Court of Conscience • A Stinging Word and a Withering Glance • Sexuality, Gender-neutrality, and the War Within • Our Two ‘Hearts’ and the War Within • Kurukshetra—Arjuna’s War Within • Empathy vs Reason • Of Head and Heart • Restoring the Heart to Its Rightful Place.
Chapter 3: Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha—All-in-One 283
Money, Homo economicus, and Homo consumens • Epiphany of Modern Man—Money • Mind and Money • The Three ‘M’s • Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha • The Many Faces of Money • Money—from Summum malum to Summum bonum • The Great Moral Issue of Our Age—Money Management • Money, Body, and Brain • The ‘Good’ That Money Can Do • Killing Kids for Money • Money, Poverty, and Morality • Materialism, Market, and Morality • Morality and Money • Money, Good Life, and Goodness of Life • The New Gilded Age and the Emergence of the ‘One-Percent’.
Chapter 4: Towards a New Vocabulary of Morality 359
Malice and Morality • Enlarging the Circle of Compassion • ‘Cast Out the Beam Out of Thine Own Eye’ • The Doctrine of Dharma • Moral Progress and Animal Rights • Morality and Duty • Satya, Himsa, and Ahimsa • ‘Moral Crisis’ to ‘Morality in Crisis’ • Moral Gangrene and Unbridled Evil • Morality and Modernity • Moral Ambivalence and Serial Fidelity • Every Minute a Moral Minute • Kith and Kin—And the Rest • Monetary Affordability and Moral Accountability • Schadenfreude, the Modern Pandemic • If God Does Not Exist… • Nexus With Nature • Morality and Mundane Manners • The Five-Point Formula for Decision-Making • The Age of the Anthropocene?
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
Chapter 5: From Death to Immortality 473
Death, Be Not Proud • The Mystery of Mortality • The Moral Purpose of Mortality • Becoming a Jellyfish, at the Least a Turtle • Immortality—Are the Gods Hitting Back At Us? • When Death Strikes Home • ‘Desirable Death’ and Anaayesaena maranam • Missing the ‘Dead’ • Morbidity and Mortality • ‘Practical Immortology’ or ‘Immoral’ Immortality • Immortality of the Soul • Four Paths to Immortality • Pandemics of Suicide and Homicide, and the ‘War’ • Death—the Default Mode • Morality of Murderous Weapons and ‘Murderous Martyrdom’ • Morality and ‘Gamification’ of Violence and War • Mrityor ma amritam gamaya: From Death to Immortality • Mortality and Famous Last Words • Climbing Heaven’s Hill With Mortal Skin • Death and ‘Worn-out Clothes’ • Conclusion.
The End of the Beginning 547
Are Humans ‘Worthy’ of Survival? • Can We Win the War Within? • From Akrasia to Enkrateia.
References and Notes 633
Index 677
Contents
1
If a writer is different from others because, simply put, he writes, then what does he seek by giving so much of himself with so little certainty of anything in return? The fact is that every book is, ipso facto, autofictional, if not a covert confessional, a kind of dancing star borne out of the intense chaos in the writer himself. That is perhaps why it has been said that “there is book inside every person”.
Maybe that is what writing eventually crystallizes into—the ‘book’ inside the writer turns into the persona of a poem or prose. Many have spoken about why writers choose to put themselves in the firing line; why, so to speak, they want to choose to stand naked, to be probed and disrobed at a public haunt, why they don’t flinch from facing, in Philip Roth’s words, daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. There is always something of the siren call of the rolling waves and a Sisyphean struggle in their perseverance and pluck. There have always been much easier ways to earn a living, and, as they say, make both ends meet.
And so very often, every visible sign of success in the literary world turns out to be extraneous to the real value of literature; it has never been more so than now. Not only writing but even reading has taken a beating. That is a huge tragedy, for reading itself is an act of creation—writing can’t exist as more than words without a reader, so to speak. In this day and age, few have the urge or élan or leisure to read anything in black and white, either for engagement, for entertainment, much less for enlightenment. The pen might be mightier than the sword elsewhere, but merit is certainly not mightier than money in the province of publishing. Although the intimate conversation between writer and reader—some yet to be born—is almost magical, the rude reality is that once the writing is done with, the writer is rendered marginal to the reading. As a result, as Kurt Vonnegut says, a writer has to be no different from a drug salesman, or maybe a dealer of used cars, to get to see ‘what he says’ in print.
And yet, there is still hope in humanity because countless people continue to write—and die, unknown and unwept. It is not that they are selfless souls or murdered martyrs. It is like death; every person knows everyone will die, but expects he himself will not. Similarly, everyone who writes hopes that he would somehow prevail, unlike many others, and live to experience the dawn of his dream; to be recognized, rewarded, and respected, to become rich and
Epigraph—Why me?
2
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
famous, and autograph copies of his book at a packed bookstore. And then the intoxicating euphoria: the world might come to an end, but the author himself would live on through his work. We can take some consolation from what Jorge Borges puts across: “When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation”.
The crux of the matter is that the ‘why’ of writing embraces a rainbow of reasons but, in the end, it remains what George Orwell said: ‘a mystery, something which one would never undertake if one were not driven by some demon that one can neither resist nor understand’ (Why I Write, 1946). That ‘mystery’ is what underlies all my scribbling, besides giving me a chance, as Byron puts it, “to withdraw myself from myself”, and to heal the wounds of a labored life spent in seeking in vain. It brought to my mind the famous poem of Rumi lamenting about the pain and sorrow in his heart: God tells Rumi, “Stay with it; the wound is the place where the Light enters you”. For some, as long as the wound stays open, that light becomes life by way of writing.
In the preface of my previous book—Man’s Fate and God’s Choice: an Agenda for Human Transformation (2011)—I wrote, not yet aware of Orwell’s words, that that book was a ‘mystery to myself’. Fiction, I can somewhat relate with, to give life to what I truly am deep inside, through characters in a story. Even articles in journals can be explained away; they let me have my say on issues of topical relevance. But this sort of scholarly nonfiction on an esoteric subject is positively presumptuous, if not utterly audacious. Nothing of my life in this life had prepared me or deserved it. The mystery has deepened with the present book, to the point that I sometimes felt that I was possessed. Much to my surprise and delight, my first major nonfiction work was widely well-reviewed. I felt good when the ordinary next-door-neighbor kind of people said things like, “do people still write books like this?” And it was never clear to me what people meant when they asked, ‘How did you write this book?’ And I used to murmur: I did not write the book; the book got written by me. I meant the author is the unknown; I was only a scribe. It was not meant as a sleight of a phrase or a show of cleverness. I always felt I was more a conduit than a creator; more a monkey than the organ grinder. I am the builder, not the architect, in a reversal of what Herman Melville said about himself while writing Moby Dick (1851). After getting my first book ‘successfully’ published, I felt totally drained but relieved.
Epigraph
3
‘That’s it!’ I told myself; ‘I am now immortal; I can live on earth even if I die’.
The rest, as Einstein said about the mind of God, are details. It has been said that
the story of one’s life ends long before one dies. I then thought my story ended
the day my preceding book, being done with me, bid farewell to me. That being
the premise, there was no need anymore to subject my wearied and worn-out
body to the demanding drill of crouching before a computer, half-blind and