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

are not even sure if without ‘prolonged or perpetual youth’
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we want eternal life. Do we want to ‘live’ long or forever, as it were, as is where is,
subject to decay, old age, disease? Can our body become indestructible and can
we ‘live’ if we fall from the Eiffel Tower? Does it mean that no one or nothing
can kill such a human being? William James pictures what we want, “The fact
that we can die, that we can be ill at all, is what perplexes us; the fact that we now
for a moment live and are well is irrelevant to that perplexity. We need a life not
correlated with death, a health not liable to illness, a kind of good that will not
perish, a good in fact that flies beyond the Goods of nature.”72
Factually, it all comes down to the ‘body’. Our attitude to our physical
frame is riddled with paradoxes. Even scriptures are ambivalent. On the one
hand, they say get rid of body-identification, and that that is the chief obstacle to
spiritual growth. The great Adi Sankara wrote, “You never identify yourself with
the shadow cast by your body, or with its reflection, or with the body you see in
a dream or in your imagination. Therefore you should not identify yourself with
this living body either”.73 On the other hand, scriptures also say it is the abode, a
temple, of God, and we must tend and take care of it. How we came upon earth
and how we depart has little to do with what we do. Not to be born is, beyond
all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best
by far, that, with utmost speed, he should go back from where he came. For
when he has seen youth go by, with its easy merry-making, what hard affliction
is foreign to him, what suffering does he not know? Envy, factiousness, strife,
battles, and murders. Last of all falls to his lot old age, blamed, weak, unsociable,
friendless, wherein dwells every misery among miseries.74 Put differently it is:
“Naked came I upon the earth, naked I go below the ground—why then do I
vainly toil when I see the end naked before me?” We feed it and starve it too;
we put in ‘supplements’, but poison it too. We are not really happy with it but
we want to keep it forever. We ‘worship’ it, but we abuse it perhaps more than
any other material thing. In fact, we don’t mind a ‘better body’ but so long
as it is ‘alive’ in this body. We are not happy with any back-door, indirect or
implicit ‘immortality’ through things like procreation, pencil or pen or paint.
Plato’s prescription, in Symposium, that ‘mental procreation’ is the sublime way
to immortality has never quenched human thirst to ‘live forever’. Nor has the
Hindu belief—that it is only the body that perishes but not the soul, which
is deathless, immortal, and eternal—dimmed our dream of immortality. We
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want to freeze the physical frame, here and now, nothing else, nothing less. We
don’t want to live in or through others; we want to be ourselves and yet become
immortal. We want ‘life’, even if it hurts a lot. We are prepared to tolerate any
kind and amount of suffering, if only we can survive. Philosophers like Socrates
might say that death is not a bad thing; indeed, it is even a good thing, but most
people will skip ‘good’ death and choose ‘bad’ life. We are not too interested to,
in the words of Mark Johnston, to live in the ‘onward march of humanity’; we
want a continuum of this very life. We do not want to ‘live’ either as an invisible
but eternal soul, or as a corpse in a freezer. We want this body, worn out and
wrinkled, feeble and frail it might be, to experience life. Our ‘obsession’ with
immortality is but a reflection and extension of our obsession with our body. For
some, man becomes a soul, à la Henry Wood, “after a certain event called death”,
but that he is the same here and now does not occur to them… man is not a body
having a soul, but a ‘soul having a body’.76
Mortality and Famous Last Words
The fact is that death precedes life, follows life; it frames life. As Somerset
Maugham wryly noted, ‘death is a dreary affair’, and we all wish we could follow
his advice ‘to have nothing to do with it’. But it shadows every step we take and,
as Greek philosopher Epicurus (341–270 BCE) noted, ‘the unacknowledged
fear of death and punishment’ has become ‘the primary cause of anxiety among
human beings and the source of extreme and irrational desires’.77 Ernest Becker
wrote, “The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the
anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we
must shrink from being fully alive”.78 In one of Bob Dylan’s songs, we encounter,
“he not busy being born is busy dying”.79 Epicurus asks, “Why should I fear
death? If I am, death is not. If death is, I am not. Why should I fear that which
cannot exist when I do?”80 We are told by Lord Krishna, that “Certain is death
for the born; and certain is birth for the dead; therefore, over the inevitable thou
should not grieve”.81 It was said that when Rabbi Simcha Bunam lay dying, his
wife burst into tears. He said, “What are you crying for; my whole life was only
that I might learn how to die”. So often, we discover ‘good’ things about the dead
we did not notice when they were alive. Instead of extolling them when they are
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dead, it would do us a lot of good to be good to them when they are still alive.
Every time we go to a funeral or cremation—setting aside the comical remark
about funeral attendance: ‘Do go to people’s funerals so that they can come to
yours’—we should ask ourselves, “I knew him when he was alive; what did I do
to make his life a bit easier?” The ‘dead’ have no need to worry what we say about
them, alive or dead. They have a journey on their hands.
The scriptures describe how a soul departs from the body. The underlying
idea is that death or dying is a process, not an event, and the dissolution of the
physical body by burial or cremation does not mean the person is ‘completely
dead’. In many traditions and cultures, the ceremonies go on for different
periods, the belief being that some kind of presence or energy lingers until that
time. In Hindu homes, after a person is ‘dead’, a lamp with ghee is lit and left to
burn for 24 hours, which creates a certain aura that helps the passage to after-life.
Hindus believe that the soul leaves the body from one of its natural openings or
exit points, some of which are considered ‘good’ or auspicious and others are
not. The Garuda Purana says that the soul of a sinner leaves through his lower
regions, such as the anus, and that the soul of the virtuous departs from the head,
from his eyes, mouth, nostrils, or ears. For the really pious and truly religious,
or for whom prescribed rituals like pouring of tulasi leaf water are performed,
the point of exit is said to be the top of the head, called the Brahma-randhra or
dwara. The dying moment, the moment when life leaves and the soul departs,
has long been considered a very special time. In a certain sense, a person’s whole
life is but a preparation for that moment. The character of consciousness at death
determines the next destination. Vedic scriptures even say that a man will be
born in his next birth as that thing about which he was thinking most at the
time of his death. The well-known Jada Bharata in the Hindu scriptures Vishnu
Purana and Srimad Bhagavatam, recounts a story about the virtuous emperor,
Bharata. When he grew old, Bharata apportioned his kingdom to his sons, and
repaired to the forest, to immerse himself in austerities and religious rituals. He
became a great sage. Once, when he was offering prayers to the Sun god, he saw
an old pregnant deer quenching its thirst at a nearby stream. Terrified by the roar
of a lion, the young deer gave birth to a little fawn and fell dead. Whereupon,
Bharata took pity on the fawn, and tended it and took care of it at his ashram. In
this process, the old sage became so intensely attached to it that, when he himself
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lay dying, the fate of his deer was uppermost in his thought. As a consequence,
the story goes, notwithstanding all his righteous life and virtuous deeds, Bharata
was born as a deer in his next life. Our first reaction is to cry foul: showing
caring to another helpless creature in dire need should be rewarded, not
penalized. The message of the story is that compassion and affection are noble
qualities; when they turn into obsessive attachment, the spiritual decline follows.
We are advised to draw a fine but clear line between affection (which ennobles)
and attachment (which enslaves), and between love (which elevates) and desire
(which entraps).
Many ‘last words’ uttered by, or attributed to, great men have become
legendary. It has sometimes been said that people tend to become most honest
and wise when they are about to die, since they are not ‘afraid’, they have nothing
to lose or gain, and their soul or spirit is in ascendency at that time. Some have
even said that of all the words a man utters in his entire lifetime, it is what he
says on his deathbed that makes the most sense. But the phrase ‘last words’ itself
is ambiguous. Are those the ‘words’ uttered seconds before a man ‘dies’ or the
words that were last heard? And what about the ‘state of mind’ and lucidity?
Usually by that time one becomes extremely weak and emaciated. The fact of
the matter is that most people at the actual time of their death are unconscious,
and hence unable to say anything or even ‘think’ of anything. When God was
once asked what happens if a devotee suddenly dies and hence unable to think
of Him, the divine reply was ‘Then, I will think of My devotee’. If ‘last words’
mean last spoken or last heard words, they may not be true to the spirit; if the
person did not know he or she was dying soon thereafter, those words might fit
the description of being ‘honest’, ‘fearless’, or ‘spiritual’.
Historically, one of the most intriguing last words were those of Socrates.
As the effect of the hemlock was slowly rising up from his feet to his heart, the last
words of Socrates (according to Plato) were: “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius.
Do pay it. Don’t forget”. Those few were much scholarly, and led to spiritual
speculation. Three interpretations are possible: one, they are factual; he said what
he meant; two, they are hallucinatory, effect of the creeping hemlock that had
reached up to his waist; three, they are profound, with a hidden meaning and
message. The first, for the admirers of Socrates who are legion, seems somewhat
of a let-down, unworthy of his renowned sagacity and wisdom. The second seems
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less uncharitable; after all, he was human and poison is poison for everyone. The
third, which was offered by other philosophers like Nietzsche, who argued in
the Gay Science, that Socrates was glad he was going, as he believed the soul was
immortal, that he was about to be ‘cured’ of the disease of life, and so he wanted
Crito to make an offering to Asclepius, the Greek god of healing, and offering
a cock in sacrifice was a way of thanking him for healing Socrates with the
hemlock. But other and more recent philosophers question this interpretation,
particularly comparing life to a disease, that such cynicism was unbecoming of
both Socrates and Plato (who was not present but recorded it). But the pragmatic
question is: if that was what Socrates meant, why did he not say so, instead of
leaving it, as he surely would have known if he remained lucid. Why make his
last message clothed in riddles, and Socrates was always direct in the words he
chose. One must also reasonably assume that Socrates was not hallucinating as
he was in good health and fully coherent at that time, and the deadly hemlock,
as