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

model as it is subbed—designed for agriculture,
with decision-making software adequate for walking, running, and digging and
climbing trees. Mechanization has further eroded even that vitality. Perhaps it is
useful to pause and ponder over what we think is missing in mortality. “The desire
to live forever is the desire never to be ended or closed-off; the desire, in effect,
to contain everything, so that there is nothing outside oneself that one will not
eventually grasp”.20 Or is it that we are unaware of the sea of possibilities for us
which are going to be shut off by death? Is it that there are places that we cannot
reach or simply that there will be people we know who we will cease to know?
There are no certain answers, and we end with the paradox that while there will
always be reasons to labor to live longer, even much longer, there will always be
reasons to worry why living forever would turn ‘death’ into what we think life is.
Immortality—Are the Gods Hitting Back At Us?
The irony is that humans want to conquer ageing, disease, and death, but at
the same time, every day, they are discovering or inventing new and innovative
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reasons to kill each other, not reasons to live for or die for, raising the question if
the propensity to kill each other itself is integral to evolution, without which we
would not have survived as a species. Every human killing falls into two types:
authorized and unauthorized. It is only the latter that is deemed as a crime or
sin or evil. And whether it is ‘authorized’ or not depends on who you are, where
you are and how it happens. The same action by the same person at a different
time, place and circumstance can become horrendous or honorable. Leonardo
da Vinci said, “We live by the death of others. We are burial places”. Byron
wrote, “This is the patent age of new inventions for killing bodies, and for saving
souls. All propagated with best intentions”, words which served as an epigram for
Graham Green’s classic The Quiet American (1955). Man has always physically
eliminated another man since the time he sharpened a stone, and will continue
to do so, increasingly for more reasons than he thinks he has to live for. ‘Killing’
satisfies many diverse urges. In Biblical terms, at least man’s revolt against God
in the earthly paradise was followed by the deadly combat of man against man,
Cain and Abel. Although debatable, by and large human society has tended
to view killing as the ultimate crime as well as punishment, and a deterrent
against future unlawful killings. Individually, it can be a product of unbridled
passion and anger; it can even be unintentional and circumstantial; it could be
simply a matter of sheer survival—‘it is either he or me’. In karmic terms, killing
or getting killed is not very different from other forms of death; it is another
settling of karmic debt. The killer and the killed are playing their parts. In the
Bhagavad Gita, when Arjuna hesitates to kill those he revered, Krishna says that
those people are already standing to be killed; that Arjuna is simply playing his
part as an instrument. Man will do anything to enjoy perfect health, but he is
almost hypnotically poisoning the very infrastructure of life on earth, raising the
question if that is the manifest of our collective ‘death-wish’. Could this be the
way gods are getting back at us for seeking to undermine their monopoly on
immortality? Whether it is divine wrath or human folly, the fact is that after over
a million years of human evolution on earth, “the global human enterprise is on
a collision course with the physical and biological limits of earth”.21
We may like to defy death, physically, or digitally; but the grind and
grandeur of life is a given, something we learn to live with. Also ‘given’ is our state
of ignorance about the fundamentals. Socrates lamented that all his life he had
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sought knowledge and didn’t find it, and it was said that he was called the ‘wisest
man’ among his contemporaries because he knew that he knew nothing. We are
told that the human alone, among all the creatures on earth, wants to know more
than we need to know to be alive. Lest we miss the point: according to the Bible,
man was thrown down from the heavens because he ate the fruit of ‘The Tree
of Knowledge’ (called Etz haDaat tov V’ra, in Hebrew). It is the lust ‘to know’
that defines us. Indeed the very name we have given to ourselves, Homo sapiens,
means ‘wise being’ or ‘knowing being’. We have known a lot but the essence has
been elusive and like Tennyson’s Ulysses (1842), we too are ‘made weak by time’,
but still we want ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’, and hope that ‘some
work of noble note, may yet be done’, while still doing what we need to do to
stay alive. But unlike Ulysses we are ‘not strong in will’; nor are we ‘one equal
temper of heroic hearts’. We are wobbly in will and our hearts too are getting
weary of us. Still that ‘wary’ will is the most powerful force on earth, rivaling the
very divine. That is the paradox—and peril. We cannot speak for other species,
but as far as the human is concerned, the human consciousness, more precisely
the human mind, has demonstrably fallen short in handling power, domestic
or societal, personal or public, physical or psychological, economic or political,
religious or spiritual. Our darkest desires, deepest flaws seem to come into full
play in circumstances when we dispense power over those who have none or not
in equal measure. Some say ‘will to power’ is intrinsic to being alive. Nietzsche
wrote (Beyond Good and Evil) that “Anything which is a living and not a dying
body, will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread,
seize, become predominant—not from any morality or immorality but because
it is living and because life simply is will to power. ‘Exploitation’… belongs
to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence
of the will to power, which is after all the will to life”. Without some kind or
degree of ‘exploitation’, at least human life is almost impossible. The poet WH
Auden said, “Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue
as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated
when one or both parties run out of goods”. One of the tragedies of human life
is that although a healthy relationship is supposed to be mutually reinforcing,
they have become mutually restrictive. No relationship can be exempted from
this restriction including the most important, the man–God relationship. Our
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‘behavior’ also substantially changes depending where we are positioned. We are
almost different human beings at home, at work, at play. This, in turn, brings
out a philosophic question about the innate nature of life. Is it irretrievably,
irreversibly ‘unfair’, unequal, a ‘hell’, as Schopenhauer characterized it, to be
done away with as soon as possible? Or is it ‘beautiful’, a divine gift, to be savored
and experienced to its brim? A supplementary question is how should one ‘do
our time’ here on earth? Some say that it is to get away as far as possible and
the way is self-sacrifice and self-imposed poverty. Others say enjoy it as much as
you can, live for the day, let the senses have their fill… As Scarlet O’Hara told
herself when Rhett Butler walked away, which is the last sentence in Gone With
the Wind, “after all, tomorrow is another day”. The real question, though, is not
if there is or there isn’t an after-life, or if life is ‘ugly’; or rapturous’. The question
is: like anything we have on our hand, how do we use it, be it ‘useful’ or ‘useless’.
When Death Strikes Home
Our ‘differences’ with death essentially are four. One, it is its awesome finality, its
utter completeness; its no-holds-barred nothingness; its intrinsic irrevocability.
Two, the absolute absence of any rhyme or reason, fairness or justness in the way
it strikes. Three, death may be ordained but not orderly; pre-determined but not
predictable; there is not a single universal principle, save its inevitability, that
governs death. Four, it is one state of ‘existence’ about which ‘experience’ makes
no difference. Nor does our preparedness, or who stops from whom, death or
us. Emily Dickinson wrote an ‘immortal’ poem (Because I Could Not Stop for
Death) about mortality: “Because I could not stop for Death; He kindly stopped
for me; The carriage held but just Ourselves; And Immortality”. The poem is
often portrayed as the ‘mortal experience from the standpoint of immortality’,
of the ‘conflict of mortality and immortality’, ‘defining eternity as timelessness’.
Emily envisions death as a ‘kindly’, not grim and cruel, carriage driver, who
is lauded for his ‘civility’, and stops for one who could not stop for him; the
only other ‘passenger’ inside is immortality. The drive, Emily describes, was
reassuring, ‘with no haste’, and the passage is through life experiences, which is
captured in metaphors like school, setting sun, children, grazing grain, swelling
on the ground, each symbolizing a stage in life, until finally, the last is a grave.
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The carriage is headed to eternity, with Death as the charioteer; the passengers,
mortality and immortality. We travel through life with the twins, mortality and
immortality; sometimes they may clash; sometimes they can be cuddly, but never
far from each other. As Schopenhauer said, “Each day is a little life; every waking
and rising a little birth; every fresh morning a little youth; every going to rest and
sleep a little death”.
How we perceive death affects how we live. Some say that when whatever
we do comes to a screeching halt, what difference does it make to what we do
or do not do? If we kill somebody, so what; anyway that person is going to die
sooner or later… Others posit that the very reason to conduct your life is so that
it makes some positive difference to other people’s lives. Whatever we might say,
we do adopt ‘double-standards’. To put death in perspective and to erase the fear
of death, scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita tell us that death really is no big deal,
that life and death are parts of a continuum, that what we deem as death is but
another passage, like from youth to old age, and that what passes through or out
is the physical body, not the imperishable Atman. But in actuality, we mourn
death and celebrate life. And when death does come too close for comfort, all
wisdom and equanimity evaporates. That is true of great as well as garden-type
men. Two examples illustrate the point. In the Ramayana, when the mighty
Kumbhakarna is slain by Rama, and Vibhishana (Kumbhakarna’s brother) wails
in grief and remorse, Rama consoles Vibhishana saying that his brother died
doing his dharma, that death is only for the body. But when Rama’s own brother
Lakshmana is mortally wounded by Indrajit (son of Ravana, and nephew of
Vibhishana), Rama becomes inconsolable, and even says that suicide is preferable
to going back to his kingdom Ayodhya without his brother Lakshmana! Similarly,
in the Mahabharata, Krishna expounds the great Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna, on
the battlefield of Kurukshetra. The essence of the Gita, according to Krishna,
is that one must perform nishkama karma (action without attachment to the
fruits thereof ). Arjuna then picks up his mighty bow and kills his own very dear
and revered grandfather, Bhishma. But, later, when his own son Abhimanyu
gets killed in the battle, Arjuna becomes inconsolable and vows vengeance on
Jayadratha, who had simply blocked the attempt of Arjuna’s brothers to aid
Abhimanyu, but had no hand in his actual killing. Although one could argue
that a young boy is different from a centurion man, the point is that in death too
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we discriminate, and that when it actually strikes where it hurts most, we react
differently.
But it is noteworthy that no Hindu avatars flinched from killing to fight
evil. In fact, it was the preferred mode, the very aim of the avatar. The evil ones
God descended to kill were actually His devotees who were cursed to become
demons, and it was a favor that He did to them, to liberate them from the curse.
In the epic wars of Ramayana and Mahabharata, no one was taken a prisoner or
let off mortally wounded or incapacitated to wage war. No ‘villain’ or evil-doer
repented and sought forgiveness or