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

of youth is one of humanity’s oldest and most elusive goals. Science is
saying that it can deliver what legendary figure like Gilgamesh failed to grasp.
According to the distinguished Russian scientist and philosopher Igor Vishev,
it is likely that there are people alive today who will never die. He calls his
line of thought ‘practical immortology’. As the science of ageing advances,
scientists have made tremendous progress in extending the human life span.
From lowering infant mortality rates to creating effective vaccines and reducing
deaths related to disease, science has helped increase the average person’s life
span by nearly three decades over the past century. Genetic engineering,
replacement of natural organs with artificial instruments, nanotechnology,
and other developing technologies could now extend our lives well beyond
today’s assumed limits. But immortality will not mean invincibility, or bodily
impregnability. People could still die, accidentally or by their own hand, or
by some disease or other. People will still kill, the body can yet be destroyed.
Suicides and homicides and fatal road accidents will not vanish. Eventually,
techniques of ‘practical resurrection’, towards which today’s cloning is but a
tentative first step, would be able to restore life to those who somehow lose it.
Does that mean that a million years from now, man will be walking on earth
with the present body? If that were so, what about mutation and evolution?
What about the mind/consciousness? In an immortal society, how do you make
room for new generations? Science also dangles before us, through what they
call ‘age disrupters or interrupters’, a cure for ageing, if not the elixir of eternal
youth. One line of thinking is that ageing is plastic, that it is encoded. And if
something is encoded, you can crack the code. The secret to becoming immortal
lies, according to scientists like Aubrey de Grey, not in some mysterious elixir
of life, but in the power of regenerative medicine. His strategies for engineered
negligible senescence (SENS) are based on combating what de Grey has
identified as the ‘seven deadly assassins’ in our bodies, including our immune
system. We must remember that what differentiates the immortality of the
scriptures and of science is that the scriptural is indirect, implicit and of the
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510
soul or spirit, while the scientific one is direct, explicit and of the shell, but
melded with a machine.33 In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna explains: “For
the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time. He has not come into
being, does not come into being, and will not come into being. He is unborn,
eternal, ever-existing and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain”. The
body is simply an external covering of the soul. Being material, the body is by
nature temporary, and must at some point decay, deteriorate, and die. The soul
on the other hand is spiritual in nature. For it, there is no beginning or end.
Krishna further clarifies: “One who has taken his birth is sure to die, and after
death one is sure to take birth again. Therefore, in the unavoidable discharge
of your duty, you should not lament”. He describes death as “a man casting
off worn-out garments taketh new ones, so the dweller in the body casting off
worn-out bodies, entereth into others that are new”.
Swami Vivekananda further amplified it and said, “Even the lowest
of the low have the Atman (Soul) inside, which never dies and never is born,
immortal, without beginning or end, the all pure, omnipotent and omnipresent
Atman!” Not only scriptures and sages but also philosophers have envisioned the
‘immortality of the soul’. One of them is Immanuel Kant (Theory of Ethics) who
wrote, “Pure practical reason postulates the immortality of the soul, for reason
in the pure and practical sense aims at the perfect good (Summum bonum), and
this perfect good is only possible on the supposition of the soul’s immortality”.
Another 18th-century philosopher Marquis de Condorcet wrote, “Would it
be absurd now to suppose that the improvement of the human race should be
regarded as capable of unlimited progress? That a time will come when death
would result only from extraordinary accidents or the more and more gradual
wearing out of vitality, and that, finally, the duration of the average interval
between birth and wearing out has itself no specific limit whatsoever? No doubt
man will not become immortal, but cannot the span constantly increase between
the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or
accident, he finds life a burden?” (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress
of the Human Mind, 1822). The irony here is that on the one hand, we want
to shrink or slice off or slow down ageing and attain bodily permanence, while
at the same time deliberately poisoning everything that goes into our body
through our sense organs—what we see, eat, drink, hear, and breathe—that
From Death to Immortality
511
makes us sick and debilitated. It is only when we can instinctively connect with
others’ pain that we can attain the kind of ‘immortality’ that is implied in the
words of Norman Cousins: “If something comes to life in others because of
you, then you have made an approach to immortality”. In fact, man’s time-worn
longing for immortality belies his claim to be the only rational animal. In life,
he wants everything ‘new’; discards everything out of boredom, even ‘partners’;
he constantly wants to ‘experiment’; yet, he wants to cling to this body, even
when it is terrible to behold, worn-out, when it is no longer able to give the one
thing man pursues all life: physical pleasure and sensory satisfaction. Why does
he want to carry the boulder of such a body eternally? Is this some kind of
cosmic curse on the Homo sapiens, his inane or insane desire to evolve into Homo
immortalis?
While scientists and researchers are trying to curtail, if not cure, old age,
and double or triple our life span, if not outright personal eternity on earth, an
ever-escalating number of people are unable to absorb or accept what ‘being
alive’ entails, and are prematurely terminating their allotted tenure on earth. For
the rest, every minute they are alive is actually a sort of ‘suspended animation’,
simply ‘living’ by default, or, as the 112-year-old Japanese supercentenarian,
Sakari Momoi put it, “simply have not died yet”. Despite the fact that “in less
than a century more years were added to life expectancy than all years added
across all prior millennia of evolution combined”,34 and despite the wonders
of medicine and our bodily obsession, the truth still is that both an individual
life span and the timing of death remains a matter of random luck and pure
perchance. But every minute also, as Henry Miller35 noted, “is a golden one for
him who has the vision to recognize it as such”. Whether it will be ‘golden’ or
‘ghoulish’ hinges on the state of our consciousness. The pertinent question about
‘practical immortology’ is, if freed from the fear of death, how will man behave?
What will man do with eternal life? We are completely at a loss about what to do
with ourselves in a life span of less than a century. Those who want immortality
have no idea either; they just don’t want to die, that is all. If the entire complex
of our culture, mindset, and perception of life were to move from one based
on the certainty of human mortality to one based on the prospect of human
immortality, what will happen in the ‘war within’? What might happen to man’s
quest to be a moral, spiritual being?
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512
The practical possibility of death becoming a human choice, not an
implacable inevitability, has affected the human psyche profoundly. It raises
some very fundamental issues and turns everything upside down. Our evolution
has not prepared us for this, nor our consciousness. How to prepare for and
cope with the certainty of death at an uncertain time is the central theme of
all religions. We cannot pinpoint when man first became aware of the fact that
life ends in the endless darkness of death, but nothing has been the same since.
In fact, it was that ‘awareness’ that was the beginning of religion, philosophy,
and human inquisitiveness about the meaning of his being and his manifest
mission on earth. The two things that make life so difficult for man are the
certainty of death, and the uncertainty of the hour of death. Although all ‘living’
beings die, death is, in its effect and impact, a quintessentially human grief; other
animals are not tormented by it as we are. When the time is up, often as a prey
of another animal, they just die and are done with it. But after billions of words
spoken about it, and despite John Donne’s ‘no man is an island’ and ‘every death
diminishes me’, the fact remains that each of us wants to be a ‘walled island’. What
we truly detest is not death but our death. Some deaths we might mourn, because
a bit of us too dies when someone we love dies; other deaths we do not mind at
all; inwardly we might even be relieved.
The social dimension of mortality must be given far more importance
than we do now. On a planet so crowded and with so many deprived of dignity
and decent ‘living space’, the question crops up: Is immortality itself immoral?
And could it be that ‘hastening’ a mortality is the height of morality? Is death
dissolution or deliverance, simply shedding of worn-out clothes for new ones,
as the Bhagavad Gita says, or is it turning totally ‘naked’? Is mortality the only
route to reach God? If human birth, being the highest form of life on earth (so
we self-proclaim), is required for all creatures to end the cycle of birth and death,
then does deathlessness of a few deprive the rights of millions? Do we have other
bodies besides the physical one we live in, and is there such a thing as soul,
and are we the only privileged ones? And the most troubling question: Is there
any cosmic cause and divine design in the suicides and homicides in the world
that are fast approaching pandemic proportions? In other words, could this be
nature’s response to man’s pursuit of bodily permanence?
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513
Four Paths to Immortality
To arrest the ‘drift’, to recover lost ground, we must get down to the basics; get
to know what happens inside each of us as we get on with our myriad choices of
our mundane lives. It is a telling paradox how much ‘knowledge’ we have of the
world outside and how little of the one within. Billions of people go about their
lives without any awareness of anything about their essence and inside. And it
also tells a lot about the human condition, human travails, and frustrations and
about why we behave the way we do, so completely beyond our own control.
We do not know why we behave the way we do, simply because we do not
know what makes us do what we do. It is like wondering why the car is breaking
down, without opening, or being unable to open, the bonnet and peering in.
Our ‘behavior’, our very way of thinking, our priorities are all baffling paradoxes.
Had they been exhibited in any other species, we would have called them either
daft or deranged or perverse. On the one hand, we are doing everything we could
to hasten our collective mortality and, on the other hand, we are sedulously
seeking individual immortality. The belief is that immortality might be possible
if we stop programming our consciousness about mortality, and reject all our
preconceived notions about death. We are also not sure what we really mean
and want from ‘immortal life’. Does human ‘immortality’ offer immunity from
suicides or homicides or fatal accidents? In fact, in all probability such deaths
could well be the major and infectious ‘diseases’ of the future. Among the
three—suicides, murders, and accidents—the less noticed but increasingly more
lethal is accidents. And within the rubric of ‘accidents’, which include industrial
accidents like Bhopal and Chernobyl and Fukushima, airplane crashes, crippling
injuries, and fatalities on the road are mounting. In fact, our roads and highways
have become the new killing fields of the world, outranking the toll in wars
and natural calamities like typhoons, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes. Man
kills himself on the roads with the aid of the very machines he has developed to
‘kill’ distance. Our insane fascination with speed also contributes. An estimated
1.2 million people are killed in road crashes each year, and as many as 50 million
are injured, occupying 30% to 70% of orthopedic hospital beds in developing
countries. And if the present trends continue, road traffic injuries are predicted
to be the third-leading