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

our consciousness. Although we still
do not know what consciousness truly is or isn’t—some even speculate that
it resides not inside us but in an as-yet-unknown space in the universe—that
it is the key to human transformation and evolution has long been a part of
indigenous wisdom. Exploring expanded states of consciousness is now at the
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cutting edge of science. If we are able to change that state for the better, then
our behavior will become better and we will not be a threat to anyone, much less
to ourselves. We can then be, in good conscience, ‘worthy of survival’. What it
all underscores is that for anything good to happen to man, or to the planet, a
profound metamorphosis must be triggered in the deepest depths of our being.
Only then can our behavior routinely, if not reflexively, put another’s needs on
par, or above, our own, which is the alpha and omega of the transformation we
need in our day-to-day life. Otherwise, we can, with a status quo consciousness,
turn even Shangri-La into Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. For, as James Hilton says, “If we
have not found the heaven within, we have not found the heaven without”. That
is the way to find the way to ‘love each other’ and that as, Walt Whitman says,
will ‘make us invincible”.13
All these are tantalizing possibilities, but for now, heaven is still high
in the sky, and we cannot even live with each other, let alone love each other.
And the baseline is that we are all beast inside and outside. What is striking is
that, even as an animal, we are actually the microcosm of the macrocosm of
virtually the entire animal kingdom. That is because all human traits exist—to
some degree—in other animals, because our pasts are intertwined, as Darwin
said in his Descent of Man (1871). We subsume in us almost all the defining
features of other animals—the sociability of a lion, the ferocity of a tiger, the
aggressiveness of a wolf, the intelligence of an elephant, the meekness of a lamb,
the cunning of a jackal, the nobility of a dog, the venom of a serpent, and the free
spirit of a bird. In fact, our ‘gold standard’ for excellence is what other creatures
can do better. Our ego says if they can do, why not we? If a certain jellyfish can
be literally immortal, why not we? If a certain marine worm can literally sprout
new heads (including brains), why not we? But, in the end, as Mephistopheles
(in Goethe’s Faust) says, we are “more bestial than the beast”. That is now a
greater peril than ever, with what technology is trying to do to the mind (mind
control) and creating human-like machines more intelligent than man himself.
Our history is animal, and destiny is divinity; the bridge between that we are
trying to build is the machine. We read that research is on to conduct human–
animal embryo experiments, and we really have no way to know where and what
we might end up as. Half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who coined the
famous phrases, ‘the medium is the message’, and ‘the global village’, warned that
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tools are merely outreaches of ourselves, reinforcing our own virtues and flaws.
And now, “we have created a godlike intelligence stained with the fingerprints
of our own sins”.14 The real problem is not the machine; it is the mind and its
unchallenged sway over our consciousness. It is the way we want to resolve any
‘problem’; destroy or eliminate whatever happens to be in the way. Instead of
finding ways to optimize human labor alongside machines, we seem determined
to turn ourselves into a sacrificial goat as an offering at the altar of our ‘progress’.
Tomorrow’s monster will be the result of an out-of-control, technologyboosted
human mind, vastly different from Mary Shelley’s monster, who was the
tragic result of misapplied technology—and who, by the way, was basically goodnatured,
but driven to be a monster by man. What is truly terrifying is that the
new-age demon will not have the visible grotesqueness of Mary’s ‘monster’, but
will be far more monstrous in his mind. Our mind makes mortals into monsters
and then puts them away as they are its own reflections. Still, we cannot turn
our back on our symbiosis with technology; what we need to do is to curb our
‘techno-lust’ on the one hand, and, on the other hand, develop a mentalité or
way of thinking not dominated by the mind. The machine, if rightly directed,
can change the nature of work from the present paradigm of doing what we need
to do to survive, to what we want to do to blossom into ‘higher’ human beings.
We want the machine to amplify and supplant the organic limits of the human
body, and make up for its fragility and feebleness. Indeed, what we don’t like is
being ‘limited’ in any way in anything; we want abundance; we want unlimited
life and liberty, health, and wealth, growth and glory, power, leisure, and luxury.
Many believe that the unhindered pursuit of pleasure itself is a basic human
right. And what we call ‘work’ consumes more of our life than anything else. We
need to move the momentum away from having all of one’s dignity and worth
tied up with the particular labor we engage in, which we detest, in any case. We
must understand that job satisfaction effectively translates as life happiness. At
the same time, we cannot let our sense and limbs become dysfunctional through
disuse, because that risks reaction from nature in ways we cannot predict. Our
relationship with the machine will probably be the most important relationship
in the coming age, perhaps even supplanting our current relationship with the
divine. We are even prepared, indeed eager, to pay to the machine the ultimate
obeisance we hesitate to offer to the divine: absolute surrender, or saranagati in
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Vedantic philosophy. What attracts us is the lure that the notional space of the
machine will be more comforting and conducive than the troubled world of
human life. What in another way also is ‘comforting’ is that it is not going to be
anytime soon, and if things do finally go wrong we would not be around to face
the consequences. And that is how we are able to so shamelessly seek more and
more comforts everyday. And that is perhaps why we are so glib and blasé about
all the talk about mind-melding merger with the machine; thank God, we won’t
be around. The underlying hope is that machines will do all our bidding and we
stay in command. But many fear that such hope is a naïve delusion, and that
we might well end up with the machines evolving and eventually obliterating
us, through hive-minded activity and skill-sharing. The helper could turn out
to be the terminator. That, after all, is what we would do if we exchange places.
Yet, so beguiled we are that we even look up to the machine to make us what we
have long wanted: free us from our biases, prejudices, and pettiness and make us
moral, if not spiritual, beings. What is likely, however, is that they will magnify
and replicate the tendencies inherent in human judgment, instead of avoiding
them. Some like Normal Mailer even posit that “technology was the Devil’s most
brilliant creation… aspires to create a mechanized world”,15 possibly as a way to
enlist us in his eternal fight with God inside us. We must also not forget that
the irresistible lure offered to Adam by Satan was to become a ‘god’. It is now
the same temptation that is at the heart of the agenda of science. We have now
sanctified science as our ‘God’ and, in return, it now wants us to make us a ‘godmachine’.
While virtually ‘becoming’ a machine—which some call ‘disappearing
into cyberspace’—is an avant-garde idea, we have long been bewildered by
the realization that any of us can become anything at anytime—bestial or
celestial, saint or sinner, bodhisattva or barbarian, murderer or martyr. We can,
like chameleons, change the content of our conflicted character, to grease our
greed, to hide our putridity, and to masquerade our malevolence. And, most
maddening, we have no say in what shape our deep-seated fury and frustrations
might take, or what we might do, and when. We never know what to hope for or
fear, or when a dream can turn into a nightmare. We are naked without a stitch
before our own vanity, venality, and depravity. In the human condition, whether
it is inherently absurd, as Camus famously proclaimed, or an unending agony
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as biologists like Jeremy Griffith tell us, or an affliction from which we need
liberation, the only constant has been what Schopenhauer called ‘the terrible
certainty of death’. Not knowing what death really is and yet all too aware that
all living is waiting for death has played havoc with the human psyche. If the veto
of destiny is death, what good is anything, any effort, any result, any difference
anyone can make? How laughable all life then is? Oh, if only we learn to laugh
at ourselves! If ‘being mortal’ is what we are born to be, why then should we be
moral and miss out? Not finding any answers we have decided to, as it were, go
for broke and try to make death itself optional, put an end to the End, as it were.
We want to, as the Immortalists would say, ‘look beyond the past of dying to a
future of unlimited living’. À la Dylan Thomas, we don’t want to go gentle into
that good night. We always wonder: what do we miss when we die, and who will
miss us and why? Being alive is itself a congenital fatal condition; the diagnosis
is death; what is unknown is the trigger and the timing. Wisdom lies in making
every minute an opportunity to turn, as it were, the ‘candle in the wind’ into a
‘candle in the dark’; to use life to, in George Eliot’s words, make life less difficult
to others; so that when our time is up, we don’t look back and see a wasteland
or a graveyard. Accepting death means to be clear and candid, as Atul Gawande
(Being Mortal, 2014) puts it, about the boundaries on our quality of life that we
are unwilling to cross when pursuing medical treatment. What is paradoxical is
that the more medical science and technology advances, the more it is revealing
how ignorant, fallacious, and mistaken we still are in many ways about issues of
health, illness, life, and death. In the midst of that ‘uncertainty’ we have reached
a stage when to a large extent, a human doesn’t have to die when death comes,
notionally though not yet operationally. And we are completely ill-equipped
to internalize it. And, as a result, we face a surreal situation; death is under
more of our ‘control’ than our own creativity. And much of what we ‘create’ or
innovate—our technical capability—has become a threat to our own existence
and to planetary well-being.
Part of the problem is that we never see the world as it is, because we don’t
see the world within. Whatever happens in the external world is but a reflection
and projection of what happens in the world within. What is ‘happening’ there
is a process that we call war in the outside world, a war between our own innate
instincts, emotions, and impulses. And this ‘war’ is the untold story inside
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us. According to biologist Jeremy Griffith, our “good and evil conflicted”,
psychologically upset lives are the result of the underlying battle between our
original instinctive self and our newer conscious self (Freedom, 2016). But he
also says that humans are “not just good but the heroes of the story of life on
Earth!”16 Joseph Murphy (The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, 2015) expresses
the same idea in terms of psychology, and says, “Life events are actually the
result of the workings of your conscious and subconscious minds”, which in
our language, is the ‘war within our consciousness’. We have always struggled
to know who we are, who we want to be, and how to, in the words of the
poet Jericho Brown,17 “more fully inhabit and become this person I have been
being.” Perhaps the best we can hope for is to always be maybe. That ‘maybe’
must be what we must be. Essentially, the warring forces are of two kinds: on one
side, what the Bible calls ‘Fruit of the Holy Spirit’18—love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; and on the other side,
the opposites—hatred, misery, indifference intolerance, cruelty, evil, treachery,
insensitivity, and intemperance. Put in