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

stupidity, as someone described—that makes any sense
of two human traits; willful blindness and wanton destruction. We are masters
at turning the blind eye to the utterly oblivious things, and at scapegoating
others for our faults. According to Margaret Hefferman,35 the biggest threats and
dangers we face are the ones we don’t see, not because they are secret or invisible,
but because we are willfully blind. The current climate crisis is a case in point.
Ninety-seven percent of scientists say that it is real, but we remain unmoved,
or feign helplessness. Actually we are not helpless; it is our refusal to confront
our bedrock belief that ‘abundant energy enables modern life’ that makes it
hopeless. We behave like observers, as if the matter at issue has no bearing on
our lives, whereas it is a matter of the gravest import not only in our lives but
also in the lives of our progeny. A recent study revealed the ‘dramatic effect of
carbon dioxide on human nutrition’ and that ‘everything is becoming more like
junk food’.36 What is strange is that the very parents who are worried about the
effects of excessive exposure to computer/phone screens are unconcerned about
climate change and its effect on their children’s lives. We must remember that
the climate crisis is created by human behavior, and it can only be resolved by
that very behavior. It is said that even by ‘changing our diets to a soil-nourishing,
regenerative agriculture diet’, we can reverse global warming.37 Whether or not
it is true, the fact is that no one is going to switch his diet to save the planet or
make the world safe for our kids. But if that diet is aggressively marketed as a way
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to lose weight, many are more likely to go for it. Instead, since cutting emissions
requires some lifestyle changes, which we shamelessly say is too much to ask of
us, as an alternative, science is trying to develop ‘carbon-sucking’ technologies.
It is like saying, ‘You are addicted to defecating all over, therefore improve your
skills of cleaning up’. Our attitude has not changed even after the latest ‘news’
that the boiling point might well come in our own lifetime, not in our children’s
lifetime. Our capacity to be oblivious of the obvious and our ability to deny and
deride any amount of evidence we don’t like, is truly staggering and chilling. In
that sense, climate change, apocalyptic as it is likely to be in its impact, is still a
symptom, not the malady. The malady is the mind itself, rather the way it works.
And it is not a new insight. Hindu scriptures have described the mind as feeble,
fickle, mischievous, and malicious. The Bible38 says that the key to the ‘good life’
is the ‘renewal of our mind’. What we need is not ‘renewal’ in the literary sense,
but consciousness-change. Our lifestyle is self-destructive; almost everything we
let into our body is self-destructive; our industrial civilization is self-destructive.
And now that man has become an agent of evolution and a geological force,
human destructive power has an opportunity to go beyond the species-scale. And
if man becomes a multiplanetary species, the limitless outer space can become a
war zone, and the temptation to test or use the next generation of weapons, with
minds of their own, can be irresistible. What, so to speak, could be like blood to
a shark is the new-found knowledge that the outer space contains mind-boggling
quantities of mineral wealth. According to one estimate, the mineral wealth [of
near-earth asteroids], if equally divided among every person on earth, would add
up to more than $100 billion each.39 Some say that ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Shadow Wars’
are already a reality, and orbiting in outer space we have what are being called
‘killer satellites’ and ‘kidnapper satellites’. Scientists are exploring how to ‘most
efficiently reach and settle the 100,000 star systems that have been determined
to be habitable and suitable for life’. It could lead to a situation in which ‘we
will create billions of settlements with unbridgeable differences; each will have
weapons to annihilate, but no way to negotiate’.40 Philosopher Philip Torres
says, “In a colonized universe, the probability of annihilation of the human race
could actually rise rather than fall”. It means that while we wait for our turn to
escape earth to survive and flourish, what might happen is the reverse. As for our
other escape route—merger with a machine—, although we talk about machines
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having ‘minds of their own’, they actually will have versions of our own minds;
for the only thing our mind is capable of doing is to project its own image. It
is a fallacy to think that the intelligence in these machines will be any different
from our own intelligence. Whether it is man or machine or a blend of both,
it is all the same the human mind. And, mind you, the human mind is the real
‘existential threat’ we face; it is behind every existential ‘threat’ we face, be it a
climate threat, a rogue technology threat, or a nuclear war threat.
Can We Win the War Within?
When we constantly talk about the world, we really don’t mean a thing. We may
sing ‘the world is us’, but we don’t mean a thing. No one cares for or speaks for
the world. At best, we care, beyond our own selves, for our family, community,
or corporation or country; not for the world. We will do to other planets what
we are doing down here: make them uninhabitable to any life. It is entirely okay
to try to go ‘where no man has gone before’. That is natural to the human spirit.
What is wrong is the wrong we do wherever we are—exploit (resources), eradicate
(other life forms), and escape. Yet in our mind there is nothing wrong: What else
is earth for? We have to change such a state of mind if we want peace of mind
and peace on earth, two of our long-sought goals. Sharing the earth with other
species is an important human responsibility. For peace of mind, we need the
mind to be in its proper place, and for peace on earth, we need our behavior to
be benign. And for both—putting the mind in its place, and benign behavior—
the arena of actual action is the war within. It is through the ‘war within’ that
we can bring about consciousness-change, and it is through consciousnesschange
that we can cut the mind down to its size, which is imperative for man
to be essentially a moral and spiritual being. For the most terrifying place in the
cosmos is the human mind. The Upanishads say that an uncontrolled mind is
our worst enemy, and a controlled mind is our best friend. And they add that
impossible things like drinking the ocean dry or swallowing fire are far easier
than controlling one’s own mind. That is why the mind is sometimes compared
to a drunken monkey bitten by a scorpion. The Preamble to the Constitution of
UNESCO famously declares that “since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in
the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed”. And it is the
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mind that stigmatizes and dehumanizes those with whom we disagree. Seeing
others as less than fully human offers us an alibi and an outlet to do things which
otherwise we consider inhuman, and it is now commonplace, consequential, and
contagious. In his 1651 book Leviathan, the English thinker Thomas Hobbes
argued that humans are warlike by nature. When we believe that we are waging
a war, everything turns topsy-turvy; that which we consider as evil becomes
heroic and honorable, even rape. All wars save those for a social purpose are
horrendous, cold-blooded mass slaughter, and yet we are enraptured by war,
and without being at war, there is little that we can achieve. Yet, within each of
us a war rages, a war we are not even conscious of; and the opponents are two
siblings, two sides of our own self. The truth is that much of our misery, many
of the festering problems and existential threats we face, stem from a simple fact:
the wrong intelligence (mind) is in control of our consciousness; we are looking
in the wrong direction (outer space and cyberspace); and we are not engaged
in fighting the right war, the war within. We are not only being driven by the
wrong intelligence, we seem determined to even augment it, through artificial
general intelligence (AGI). Why we seem so obsessed to create an intelligence
that surpasses human intelligence is beyond being stupid; it is suicidal. If that
happens, consciousness-change in the right direction will not happen, and we
will continue to lose the war within.
One of the clear signs that we are losing the war within and that the
forces of goodness are in retreat is the persistent absence of shanti, or peace, in the
world. That is because we tend to look at each other with ill will, distrust, envy,
and animosity, and put selfishness before service. The place to begin is where
we are, and with the people in the proximate ‘acting one at a time, upon those
beside them’. For, to paraphrase Dostoyevsky, it is easier to sacrifice in the cause
of humanity than not be nasty to the next man. And despite our ritual chanting
of shanti, shanti, shanti (the peace mantra of the Upanishads), the fact is, as
Immanuel Kant said, “war seems to be ingrained in human nature”. Fact is, we
have waged war since the beginning of time; we have never really had real peace on
the planet. We should not confuse absence of armed conflict as peace, and peace
must serve a purpose. Either as individuals or as a society, we need an adversarial
target, an enemy to fear, to fight, and to dominate. What we don’t realize is that
the one we view as an ‘enemy’ also views us the same way, and the truth is, as
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poet HW Longfellow reminded us, “If we could read the secret history of our
enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm
all hostility” (Drift-wood, 1857). But war makes our ‘longing for ignoble things’
and our darkest desires come to the fore. That is why we condone, even extol, in
war what we otherwise condemn or feel ashamed of. Present-day human society
and culture is often accused of turning a benevolent baby into a malevolent man.
The real reason, however, is that man has never been able to get to the root, the
source of the conflict—the world within, the inner universe. It is a world that is
embedded in us; and yet it is an alien land, a forbidden place, just as the strangest
of strangers is our own self. The fact is that we ‘live’ in two worlds, within and
without, internal and external. What is lacking is connection, communication,
and conversation between the two. Even the war within and the wars outside
have to be connected. It is not that this ‘inner world’ has gone unnoticed over
the times. The Hindu Yajurveda talks about man’s inner radiance. The Supreme
Being, it is believed, manifests without a form (Nirguna Brahman) and with form
(Saguna Brahman), and that formless eternal god is within the cave of the human
heart. Gandhi said that the ‘still small voice’ within him is the only tyrant in his
life. Similarly, unless there is an internal world, how can one internalize lofty
values that many great people have spoken about? Even in our own times, the
thinker and writer Charles Haanel41 wrote, “There is a world within—a world
of thought and feeling and power; of light and beauty, and although invisible,
its forces are mighty”. And American poet Wallace Stevens reminded us that ‘the
world about us would be desolate except for the world within’. Some have talked
about the evil within or ‘evil inclination’, what in Judaism is called Yetzer hara,
and some, about the struggle within.
Some say that at the center of human nature there is ‘dark matter’, and
that forces of evil—intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean,
dehumanize, or destroy innocent others42—are as intertwined into us as DNA
is. So ‘intertwined’ that, few of us, if any, have been able to get a hold on our
own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and passions in our myriad points of contact
with other humans. We have always been a bundle of beliefs, but it is behavior
that has always escaped our grasp and grip. It has baffled and bewildered us;
it is so unpredictable that we are terrified of what we might ourselves do if we
are,