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

for example, to find ourselves in the shoes of a ‘killer’. For a species that
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prides itself on being a ‘moral’ and ‘spiritual’ species, such a possibility is truly
soul-shattering. What makes it worse is that we cannot bring to bear another
of our prized attributes, rationality, to understand why we are so vulnerable.
And ‘vulnerability’ itself is not failure or feminine; or necessarily a handicap. It
is what makes us ‘human’. It is this vulnerability that offers us an opening into
the meaning of our lives and breaks walls and builds bridges to other people.
Vulnerability, it has been said, “is the core, the heart, the center, of meaningful
human experience”.43 The true truth is that we certainly do have dark, sinister, and
savage urges deep inside us, but at the same time, we do have the opposites, like
kindness, empathy, supreme sacrifice, compassion, and altruism. If we are able to
harbor what in German is called schadenfreude (the ability to derive pleasure from
other’s pain), we are also equally able to entertain what in Buddhism is called
mudita—delight at the other’s happiness or rejoicing in the other’s joy. After all,
even a serial killer or a mass murderer does not kill every day; he could be a Good
Samaritan, a good neighbor, on the other days. The American serial killer of the
1970s, Ted Bundy, who confessed to killing some thirty young women and girls,
once reportedly jumped into the water to rescue a three-year-old child. It doesn’t
mean he was far from being a fiend; it only underscores the point that, as Martin
Luther King Jr once said, there could be some good in the worst of us, just as
there could be some bad in the best. From the other side, we have saints, who led
public lives of depravity before their hearts were converted. They wrestled with
the same faults and addictions, the same sins and bad habits that make us feel so
weighed down. The point is that serial killers and saints too were human like us,
and a ‘war within’ waged within them too. We can take heart from both: from
killers, that in the worst of us there is some goodness; from saints, that the best
of us are also fallible. But, with effort, we can overcome all failings.
Everything in nature and creation is dichotomous and exists as dwanda or
pairs of opposites, including our own emotions and passions, love and hate, cruelty
and compassion, indifference and altruism. It is possible to show both ‘opposites’
towards the same person. For example, one recent finding is that “murderers are
generally still in love with the people they kill”.44 And the opposites are constantly
at each other’s throats in our consciousness. We have long known this, but not
its true dimensions and earth-shattering implications. The war within is not a
skirmish or squabble or struggle; it is of a different genre altogether. It is a fullThe
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scale war that shapes and makes sense of whatever happens in the world outside.
It rationalizes everything we have found irrational, makes sense of all that we
find bizarre in our behavior, and lets us be not too harsh on ourselves. It gives a
purpose to our lives and an agenda to mend our meandering lives, and serves as
an anchor to the world that is adrift. The fact is, as Jane Austen’s Fanny Price said,
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other
person can be”.45 Scientists, biologists, and psychologists have long studied what
makes some people ‘snap’ into rage and violence, while others, similarly situated,
don’t do so. At a more generic level, they have examined what biologist Jeremy
Griffith called our ‘good-and-evil conflicted human condition’. We find gaping
holes in every theory that tries to explain alarming tendencies—natural-born
violence, genetic predisposition, domestic disarray, social scapegoating, sexual
delinquency—and we remain perplexed, fearful, and guilt-ridden. Even if we
fully acknowledge and accept that deep within we have a diabolic disposition,
whatever might be the wellspring—innate or evolutionary—, it will not still get
us ‘freedom’, emotional or psychological. On the other hand, internalizing such
a ‘disposition’ might make us more complacent and more blatant and glaring
in our behavior and strengthen the forces of evil in the war within. For any
sort of ‘freedom’ or any kind of transformative change, the key is consciousness.
Without it, we are left with the Hobson’s choice between the discomfort of
becoming aware of our mental maladies and the discomfort of being drained.
Some call us a species in denial; but perhaps more accurately, we are a species in
deep discomfort.
In the modern world, above everything else, might is money; wealth is
wielded as a weapon. While money per se is neither good or bad, the current
reality is that, as AQ Smith points out, “It is basically immoral to be rich… people
who possess great wealth in a time of poverty are directly causing that poverty”.46
Wealth has the capacity to heal people who are suffering, and by not helping
them we are letting them suffer. It means that not only amassing but retaining
wealth is inherently immoral. Money’s sway over us is both symptomatic and
sinister. It greases greed and causes much grief. In its spell, we cut corners and
make morality meaningless. Indeed, as Abraham Polonsky said, “Money has no
moral opinions” (Force of Evil, 1948). Even our odyssey for eternal life is finally
coming down to a matter of how much money we can muster, to live forever
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or, at the least, longer than anyone else. When Aubrey de Grey, an immortality
activist and pioneer, was asked what one’s chances are of living to a thousand
years, he replied: “I would say perhaps a little better than fifty-fifty,” and then,
after a pause, added, “It is very much dependent on the level of funding”.47
In reality, all these are but symptoms of a more basic and deeper affliction. It
is a warped mindset, corrupted consciousness, and, above all, siding with the
wrong side in an internal war that we are not even aware of. It is a war between
good and evil. It is a war with ever-fluctuating fortunes that translate and trickle
and shape how we behave. ‘Shadow’ is as important as ‘persona’, and without a
well-developed shadow side, a person can easily become shallow. ‘The shadow
represents energically charged autonomous patterns of feeling and behavior and
their energy cannot simply be erased by an act of will, however powerful it may
be. What is needed is rechanneling or transformation’.48 But in our attempt to
disown our shadow, what we do is to project it onto another person and hate him
and fight him as a proxy of our own shadow.
The war within is at once a civil war, a spiritual war, an eternal war. If
we want to be in the main a moral being, if we want to mend and better our
behavior, and if we want to free the world from any of its problems, then we need
to ensure that the forces of light and goodness (i.e., of the ‘persona’) dominate
over the forces of evil and darkness—of our ‘shadow’ self. But, paradoxically, we
also have to ensure that not only the evil side, but also the ‘good’ side, does not
triumph. For, evil too plays an important role in our psyche and equips us with
what is necessary for self-preservation. The ‘good’ that evil does is as important as
good itself. Although evil has penetrated and polluted everything, it is important
for our wholeness. Indeed, had evil been defeated or exorcized from our psyche,
we would have perhaps been extinct long ago. Had we been, in Jungian language,
a ‘walking persona’, we would have been a sitting duck and easy meat. We must
constantly strive to achieve a sort of union of the opposing forces, to maintain
the ‘positive’ balance—that is tilted slightly towards the good side—in this war.
It is similar to the principle of equilibrium in the natural world, in that any excess
is opposed by the system in order to restore balance. It is imbalance that triggers
both ill-health and evil. It is the dissolution of the balance of power that shatters
relationships. When things get to their extreme, they turn into their opposite,
which means that when good becomes too threatening, we must strengthen the
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very forbidden and unacceptable feelings inside that we try to fight and subdue.
It is a complex conundrum. The world within, the theater of the war, is so opaque
and inaccessible to our understanding, that we can never know what evil may not
be necessary in order to produce good, and what good may very possibly lead to
evil. It is somewhat similar to what the ancient Chinese philosophic thought I
Ching implied. Its central premise is that yang lines become yin when they have
reached their extreme, and vice versa.
Another thing to bear in mind is that we cannot see our behavior; others
can. In the words of psychiatrist RD Laing, “The other person’s behavior is an
experience of mine. My behavior is an experience of the other.49 Everything we
do, even the smallest action, every day has a double-effect. It affects others and it
serves as ammunition to one or the other of the two dichotomous sides—in HW
Longfellow’s poetic words, “instinct that enjoys, and the more noble instinct
that aspires” (Haunted Houses, 1858)—in the war within. We do not have to
fight the devil and demons to fight evil. We have to fight our own weaknesses
and wickedness. We must strive to do good when evil seems easy, to thwart evil
when opposing it seems foolhardy, and to resist complacency when it seems
quiescent. And to be ‘good’ one does not have to be ‘great’ or a hero or martyr.
In fact, too often goodness is the casualty or collateral damage of greatness. Most
men believe that our quest for greatness sanitizes every moral infringement.
The qualities required for greatness (ruthlessness, cold calculation, disregard for
morality, callousness for consequences, steeliness) are not what are required for
goodness—gentleness, empathy, compassion, kindness, non-injury, etc. The real
tragedy is that most of us do measure up to be ‘great’ in what we accomplish, but
still manifest its icky attribute. We have long struggled to live caring, empathetic,
and compassionate lives, but without much success. It is partly because we
just do not know how to turn it into action and, equally, because our idea of
‘success’ itself is skewed. Success, we now associate with power, money, fame, and
professional promotion. The most dreaded ‘L-word’ is loser. There are many who
commit suicide because they are not ‘successful’, not being able to be the ‘best
in the world’ in their profession. We need a fresh approach to this issue. The real
issue is not success or failure. The root of it is that in modern societies ‘success’
is sanctified and failure is fatal. They place an often unattainable premium on
excellence, increasingly a trigger for suicide. That has to change, as well the purely
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materialistic way we view and measure success. We must let children know that
it is okay to make mistakes, to stumble, and to fall and fail, so long as they learn
from that. We must shift the focus from ‘what’ an adolescent wants to be as an
adult, to ‘who’ he wants to be, in the first place. One of the most important
conversations we should have with our children is to put ‘success’ in the right
perspective. That is also a part of our effort to give new meaning to what ought
to be viewed as an ‘accomplished life’, a life well lived, and to bring in the moral
and spiritual dimension into everyday life.
The absence of this ‘dimension’ has led to a pathological impossibility
to view a situation from another person’s perspective. That makes it almost
impossible not to be selfish or unfair, and not hurt someone else. Because, if we
cannot know what a problem is from another person’s prism, how can we help
him out even if we wish to? Now, it seems that a huge leg-up might come from
an unexpected source—technology. So far, in the main, technology, which some
equate with society, is acting as a mirror and tends to magnify even the ugliest
(blackest) aspects of human nature. It is dehumanizing the individual, on the
one hand, and collectively empowering us to commit mass suicide, on the other
hand. Experts now tell us that with coming technological advancements users of
‘virtual reality’ will finally be able to know what it is like to really take another
person’s perspective, which in turn will allow us