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

to improve ourselves to become
a more empathetic and compassionate society.50
While we are preoccupied with wars in the world, whether it is a war on
poverty or terrorism or war on consumerism or a war of civilizations, the reality
is that ‘some of the greatest battles we will face will be fought within the silent
chambers of our own souls’.51 The battles that count aren’t the ones for gold
medals. The main challenges lie with the struggles within ourselves, the invisible,
inevitable battles inside all of us. And we will either be saved or destroyed from
within. While negative passions like anger, envy, hate, and malice dominate our
consciousness, we try to contain them in the crucible of everyday living. We seem
to be bogged down in this war for life without any escape or reprieve. Unlike
other wars, this war can neither be terminated nor abolished. It is a strange war
in which we have to do everything possible to help one side, the good side, but
still make sure that the opposing side, the evil one, if you will, is not routed or
reduced to rubble. This evil or wicked side is also indigenous and integral to our
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own selves. And it is there for a purpose, although we do not know exactly for
what. In other words, the evil within us is evil, but it is a part of who we are.
It is the dark pixie that lurks in the deep corners of consciousness and hides in
those places that we train ourselves to overlook and intentionally avoid. We have
to live with it, make a virtue of necessity. Horrible things happen in the world
because at that proximate time, the war within would have taken a horrible turn.
What takes place in the world depends on how we process that world within. We
must make sure, as much as we can, that the thoughts, feelings and emotions,
impulses, and instincts are of the ‘right’ kind—gentle, generous, altruistic, and
empathetic—so that they do not make us act in a way that is harmful to others.
Instead, we must make life easier and less difficult to them.
Since we are totally oblivious of this deeper dimension, we are looking to
our new God, technology, for kaivalya, deliverance. Despite being touted as the
greatest transformative force in our history, technology has had no ameliorating
effect on man’s basic instincts and impulses, drives, and urges. These have only
become more coarse, competitive, and conspicuous, and they have turned the
world into a marketplace for malice and murder. Technology has fundamentally
altered human personality and also turned us into ‘schizoid men’, characterized
by emotional apathy, secretiveness, and solitary lifestyle. Technology, it has often
been said, is a double-edged sword, which can further both human welfare and
human misery. Technology constantly changes, but how and why we use it
will depend on the state of consciousness and the state of war within. It could
give us augmented soldiers, autonomous weapons, and remotely-operated
killer drones, or it could serve to combat mass poverty, climate apocalypse,
and global epidemics. If the forces of good prevail, we will target technology
to do good. However, the way technology is being used today, to fuel corrosive
consumerism and militant militarism, it indicates that the ‘evil within’ us, a
sinister version of a dark psionic entity, which some call the ‘dark phoenix’, has
become dominant in the war. Consumerism has turned us into zombies, and
militarism has turned us into malignant beings. The first owes its origin to our
innate avarice, and the second to the malice in our mind. There is simply no
way we can seriously address the climate crisis without ‘doing more with less’,
without radically curbing consumerism. And there is simply no way we can
ensure any kind of peace on earth without radically reversing the militarization
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of human civilization—indeed the human mindset—and halting the production
of weapons of mass murder. In 2014, global military expenditure reached $1.8
trillion dollars, a massive diversion of scarce public resources which, if deployed
properly, can resolve many pressing problems like mass poverty and improve the
lives of those living little better than their livestock. We must also notice that
many cutting-edge technologies that can do a world of good, including carbon
dioxide removal have not become practical for want of funding. Militarization is
a killer in another way: a new study of Prof. Neta C Crawford highlights a littlenoticed
fact that the United States’ military is the largest institutional emitter of
greenhouse gases in the world.52 Furthermore, militaries have ceased to be the
monopoly of governments. And there are countries like USA where we now have
‘private governments’53 and private armed forces. More guns are owned than the
population of the country, and there are a lot of people who see no difference
between a gun and a gadget, and think that the ‘right to a gun’ is an essence of
‘freedom’. Having a weapon not only gives one lethal power, but it changes the
mindset: it makes an ordinary person feel like a superman; arrogant, vengeful,
and aggressive. That person then feels he can take on the world for a cause or a
grievance or glory. And when death holds no terror for him, he truly becomes the
god of death. The more destructive the weapon is, the more he would be tempted
to put it to use as a statement of his manhood.
Technological devices like smartphones are now being deemed a basic
requirement for any meaningful social life, to the extent that some even openly
say they are worth more than their very life. It is ironic that man has made
himself virtually invulnerable to the laws of nature, but he seems to feel he needs
external aid to survive in his own civilization. Jalal ad-Din Rumi once said,
“Look inside yourself and everything you need you already are”. Not knowing
how to ‘look inside’, and as a consequence unable to optimally utilize what
nature has endowed him with, man has turned the machine, once regarded as
a lifeless contraption, into a ‘living being’, a companion or a partner who can
help overcome his limitations. It also helps man to resolve what Albert Camus
called ‘the constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity’ (The Myth
of Sisyphus, 1942). But man is doing nothing about his most basic ‘limitation’—
his own mind-driven consciousness. For, even if he becomes a ‘silicon being’,
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and the farthest reaches of space open up for him, it will do man no good,
and possibly a lot of harm, if he remains as he is and his ‘world within’ does
not change.
Albert Schweitzer said, “Man has lost his capacity to foresee and forestall,
he will end up by destroying the world”. We have, in particular, lost two critical
‘capabilities’: the first is the ability to function holistically, to see the whole
picture, to do the ‘right thing’ reflexively, to be able to care for the whole of
humanity, if not all life. Spanish cellist and conductor Pablo Casals aptly said
that ‘the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance’. Karl
Marx characterized the machine as a weapon employed by the capitalist to quell
the revolt of specialized labor. What is happening is that the blend of man and
machine, coupled with the sudden explosion in machine intelligence and rapid
innovations in gene research and nanotechnology, have led to the dawn of the
age of super-specialization and over-fragmentation. We have experts for different
limbs of the body; sometimes even ‘sub-limbs’; we have workers in factories
functioning as ‘human assembly lines’, and as ‘untrustworthy human robots’,
to borrow a phrase from Simon Head. Although we think of a machine as an
external device, scientists say that in fact ‘we consist of trillions of electrochemical
machines that somehow coordinate their intricate activities in ways that allow our
bodies and minds to function with the required reliability and precision’. The big
difference is that these machines are in situ and integral, whereas the machine
that we want to unite or merge with, is external. Through such a merger, science
is seeking to create humans with vastly increased intelligence, strength, and life
spans, a near embodiment of gods. What it amounts to is, in the words of EO
Wilson, “We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions,
medieval institutions, and godlike technology”.54 Good men have long wanted
to be ‘men of God’; now, the material man wants to be a god. The key question
is: is it necessary because it is possible? We have long been warned to be wary of
what we want. What moral philosophers like Aristotle called the ‘ethics of desire’
is now more important than ever before in our pleasure-seeking, entertainmentcentered
society. As the Mundaka Upanishad says, ‘He who longs for objects of
desire, making much of them, is born along with those desires in places where he
will realize them’. A truly desire-free man or a man unattached to material things,
according to the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, “being Brahman (Supreme Self )
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goes to Brahman” after his death. Human desires or wants were a peril to human
spiritual progress. Now, they are a planetary peril, even an intergalactic threat,
as man has acquired the technical capacity, without any ethical underpinning,
to go ‘where no man has gone before’ and to get whatever he ‘badly’ wants. A
‘want’ is not necessarily bad, but we must take it to a deeper and more profound
level. There is a growing chasm between ‘goodness’ and what we think is good for
us. The implications of shifting our goal from union with God to merger with
machine are controversial, and potentially apocalyptic. Some say that it will make
us more, not less, human, make it more possible to see ourselves more candidly
in the mirror. According to the World Economic Forum, “If managed wisely,
[machine integration] could lead to a new age of good work, good jobs and
improved quality of life for all, but if managed poorly, pose the risk of widening
skills gaps, greater inequality and broader polarization”.55 Whether we manage
‘wisely’ or ‘poorly’, and with what consequences, hinges upon the state of our
consciousness.
Sceptics say that such a ‘merger’ with a machine could give life to what has
for long come to be called, in literature, as in the works of Herman Kahn (1960)
the Doomsday Machine, a machine or mechanism that brings about the end of the
world, or the end of only the human race. What has set in is a kind of mechanomorphism,
turning all life into machines and then judging and changing life
utilizing the mechanistic value of efficiency.56 What is sad and self-defeating, as
Jaron Lanier says, is that ‘people degrade themselves in order to make machines
seem smart all the time’.57 Humans have a tendency to let themselves be used
by the gadgets and machines they possess, and as a result, humans themselves
lose the sense of which is more valuable or dispensable. We must bear in mind
that our gluttonous greed for gadgets is an offspring of our technology-driven,
materialistic, mechanized mindset. And greed of any kind remains one of the
seven deadly sins. Technology itself is now a drug to which we are all addicted.
However, unlike the caution we exercise when we have to take pharmaceutical
drugs, we are not alarmed, and we don’t think twice, about the possible terrible
side effects that certain technologies could hold. Every day brings reports
of discoveries and developments in science and technology, some of which
appear downright impossible to believe, like the ‘breaking news’ that we now
have the technical capability to change reality at our will. But, man, especially
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in the last two centuries, has time and again made the ‘ultimate unthinkable’
clearly possible. It is difficult to predict the limits of human intelligence and
innovativeness, but prepared we must be for the most unexpected. And if
something makes us shake our head in dismay and disbelief, the best we can do
is to stay silent.
Arguably the most important challenge we face now is to bring about a
foundational change in our mindset, a change that makes it possible to release
the mindset from the grip of the mind. That will trigger a consciousness change,
which, in turn, could tilt the scales in the war within positively. Contemporary
ethos emphasizes competence over character and efficiency over ethics. The
message is clear and unambiguous: for any beneficial change in human basic
behavior, there is no other way than the way within, and one must intervene
in the war and ensure the dominance of the virtuous side. And the way to
do that is to imbibe the spirit of one of the central messages of