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

partly because
we already have many of their attributes deep inside. Even if we do acquire the
knowhow to become de facto demigods, the high probability is that, at least for
quite a time, the vast majority will be left out in the new ‘gilded age’. And those
‘left-outs’ are unlikely to stay quiet for too long. It could germinate so much
anger, resentment, division, and disparity, that it could let loose the ultimate
reign of terror on earth. Suicides and homicides, already major causes of death,
could become the new plague. Between the two, suicide is a better barometer
of the state of shattered social health than homicide. Contrary to what it seems,
suicides are not only increasing in many countries, but also more people are
materially and mentally affected than in a homicide, bringing into mind the
ominous words of the historian Arnold Toynbee, “Civilizations die from suicide,
not by murder” (A Study of History, 1934–61).
Clearly there are some ominous signs that call for a radical rethink, or
‘unthink the habits of thought’ as some like philosopher Owen Barfield (Saving
the Appearances, 1957) prefer to say, on our frenzied rush towards medical
immortality. We can get away with ‘playing-god’, but with death it is another
matter. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna proclaims unequivocally, “I am
immortality, and I am also death personified”.72 Man now wants to be just that:
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he seeks immortality, but does not want to give up on the goodies that mortal
flesh allows us to enjoy. And also, let us not forget, man wants immortality
in his own body, not in heaven! The Greek hero Achilles, who, when he was
alive said ‘gods envy our mortality’, changed his mind once he found himself
in the Kingdom of the Dead. He told the visiting Odysseus, “Say not a word
in death’s favour; I would rather be a paid servant in a poor man’s house and
be above ground than a king of kings among the dead”.73 Although we talk of
man becoming a god, what we are seeking is not a state of species-scale absolute
deathlessness, but exponentially extended youth and life span. For man, by any
other moniker, is man; born as a sapiens, he must die as a sapiens. He cannot hope
to do what a creepy caterpillar could: transform itself into a beauteous butterfly.
In order to be able to become a butterfly, the caterpillar completely decomposes
down to its very essence, devoid of any shape or consciousness. The caterpillar
literally dies, and the butterfly starts to put itself together—from scratch. But we
don’t want to turn into some kind of a soup in a cocoon or pupa for any kind
of transformation like the caterpillar. We don’t want to give up anything, not
even the qualities we detest; we want to get a ‘free-upgrade’ from coach to first
class and get someone (the machine) to do the heavy lifting and bring forward
our whole bodily baggage. We have more chances of becoming, or being treated
like, a hideous cockroach, like Kafka’s Gregos Samsa (The Metamorphosis, 1915)
than become a carefree butterfly. For, in the end, ‘man and roach are more the
same than we know’. Both live all life by clinging on to something or the other.
Both elicit fear and repugnance. They are each as worthy of extinction as the
other. Every species has certain given unique ‘attributes’, even immortality (like
the jellyfish), and they cannot be exchanged. What has long been our undoing
as an individual is the desire to selectively exchange places with another person,
and as a species to acquire particular attributes of some other species. What we
should aspire to do is not to be someone else, but aim to attain our own dreams
that will make someone else realize their own dreams. The secret to success in
life is encapsulated in the New Testament: “Let no one seek his own, but each
one the other’s well-being”.74 The shortest route to fullness of our life is not a
straight line, but a bypass through helping others achieve what they need to
achieve. Instead, we deliberately try to exclude others from our success and, even
worse, at their expense. We want to be supra-human without a foundational
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liberation from self-centeredness. We want to become a ‘god’ not by spiritually
attaining ‘samadhi’—the sublime state of oneness with God—but by becoming a
part of the machine. God incarnated as a man, but no man ever, delusions apart,
physically became a ‘god’ through his own body. That is possible, according to
some ancient theological schools of thought, if a person has evolved through
all the levels of relative existence and attained the transcendental state of
perfect liberation (moksha), which is nothing but total union with the Supreme
Consciousness. While ancient spiritual philosophies like Indian Vedanta tried
to bring man and God together by saying that the best way to worship god is
by service to humanity, science is saying that whatever the divine was meant to
deliver, technologies could do as well, perhaps even more. The machine now is
the modern-day messiah. We live at a time when, to get any serious attention to
whatever we seek to do, we have to somehow smuggle in the magic prefix science.
Everything is now science: even science of happiness, science of compassion,
science of gratitude, and science of the heart. The reality is that, in the words of
astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, “from climate change, to biotech, to artificial
intelligence, science sits at the center of nearly all decisions that civilization
confronts to assure its own survival”. The scientist is also a human being, and
his decisions are equally subject to the same limitations, foibles, temptations—
recognition, glory, greed, and money.
It is also necessary to factor in a new reality, which is that new technologies—
biotech, nanotech, cybertech, as well as artificial intelligence—empower groups
of individuals to have an effect by error or by design, which could escalate very
broadly, even globally. To this we must add yet another important factor. We
must remember that whenever man wanted something badly, and knew that he
could not get it directly, he achieved it stealthily. He wanted to fly like a bird; he
invented the airplane. He wanted to run like a cheetah; he made the automobile.
The means he has chosen now is mechanization and genetic manipulation to be
what he wants to be. What he is forgetting is that our life is more than our physical
and mental apparatus. He is, like Narcissus in Greek mythology, enthralled by
his own creation, the machine. The incongruity that escapes our attention is
that man is, on the one hand, telling us that individual death is not inevitable;
but, on the other hand, he is doing all he can to accelerate collective death. It
may appear exciting and euphoric, but some say that medical science is coming
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close to replicating the first deception of Satan in the Garden of Eden: ‘And
the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die’.75 Moreover, medical
science has, or is trying to, rudely cut us loose from the only certainty and the
crooked yet comforting thought that has held us together for maybe a million
years—that not only is death certain, but everyone else, rich and poor, president
and plumber, oppressor and oppressed, celebrity and common man, all have to
die too. That regardless of who you are or what you did, the closure, absolute
oblivion, awaits us all. In death we see justice denied by life. The transformation
of death from a unifier to divider carries tectonic consequences.
What draws us to the machine, among other things, is the perceived
ability to neutralize many of the things we fear about death. After all, we can
keep maintaining it regularly and keep replacing or updating it part by part
from time to time. Smart as we think we are, we want to piggyback on it to
our own immortality, not realizing that it is like riding on the back of a tiger.
By so doing, science hopes to exorcise the primordial place of the divine in
human consciousness. But, as John Robinson reminds us, “the necessity for
the name ‘God’ lies in the fact that our being has depths which naturalism,
whether evolutionary, mechanistic, dialectical or humanistic, cannot or will not
recognize” (Honest to God, 1963). The paradox is that science says there is no
need for God, or that he is now dated or dead, but wants to make man a Semideus
or Deus. But then, if God is redundant or irrelevant, how can there be
demigods? For, it is God who created demigods. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is said,
“In the beginning of creation, the Lord of all creatures sent forth generations of
men and devatas or demigods”.76 These devatas, according to Hindu mythology,
live within this material universe, in the higher planes of existence, called swarga,
or the celestial abodes. The devatas are not God; they are souls like us. They
occupy specific posts in the affairs of running the world, such as Agni Deva (the
god of fire), Vayu Deva (the god of the wind), Varuna Deva (the god of the rains),
Indra Deva (the king of the celestial gods), etc. What science is trying to do is to
play God and turn man into a deva by mating with a machine. For some, it is
nothing new or any need to be concerned because, according to what is called de
La Mettrie’s doctrine,77 we are essentially machines ourselves and no soul and no
substance separate from matter. What kind of ‘being’ or world will emerge from
such a technological trick is hard to tell, but easy to imagine. More possibly we
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might move towards Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931). When Huxley
wrote his dystopian book, he thought we would be safe from such a scary society
for at least a few hundred years. By 1958, he realized he had been too optimistic.
While we aren’t entirely yet there, the march of technology continues to bring us
the tools which make it ever simpler to make it possible. And why would anyone
resist such a ‘new world’ if it gives us what we so desperately want: security,
stability, progress, drugs for every need, and above all, what the Danes call lykke
(happiness) as the only acceptable state of mind?
Science is, intentionally or inadvertently, trying to uproot the most
stabilizing factor in human consciousness: what we might call ‘the sensation of
the sacred’. What the Japanese call yūgen is described by Jordan Bates as “an
expansive feeling, a mystical awareness, an almost soaring reverence for existence
that is summoned forth by a poignant confrontation with the ineffable details of
reality.”78 Perhaps the one man who seamlessly sewed spirituality and science in
our own time, Albert Einstein, once said, ‘The finest emotion of which we are
capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science.
Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment
and lives in a state of fear is a dead man’. The truth is that a human, to be truly
human, needs such a sensation, something that lets him stand rapt in ‘secular awe’
or ‘spiritual reverence’, the sense of something that challenges his understanding
really exists, of something that is bigger and loftier than his life. An instinct for
the supernal lives on in the human psyche. Reverence for the mysterious forces
that backstop the world is a basic human instinct. Without that, man will himself
become that which he is now trying to construct mechanically, a clumsy thinking
machine. We live in a world of high-intensity anxiety and gnawing uncertainty,
a kind of a twilight zone and surreal time, “which is precisely the conditions
in which logic is not the appropriate framework for thinking about decisionmaking”.
79 Physicist Lawrence Krauss even says that in science the very word
‘sacred’ is profane. While there are others who say that ‘sacredness is no threat to
the practice of science’, the fact remains that the lay public is led to believe that
sacredness is dated and science, and its twin, technology, can well be a substitute.
One of the lopsided things that technology has done is to erase, as someone
described, the disproportion between powers and satisfaction, aspiration and
attaining. The human now feels that if he really wants something he can get
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it. And that which he can get, he doesn’t respect, much less revere. We should
not confuse ‘sacred’ only with God or religion. An atheist too can have that
sense and spirit of sacredness and reverence. By undermining sacredness, science
thinks it is fostering the spirit of