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

said, “I and
my Father are one”.90 But for the modern man, the body is all there is, all he
cares about; and all that he wants to preserve. It is the shell that matters, not the
substance.
The irony is that we don’t have or carry the same body through life; our
body changes constantly, from toddler to a teenager, youth to old age, and in
the end, the body we want to make immortal is the one that is the weakest and
least pretty of them all—aged, wrinkled, worn-out, and wasted. At the same
time, scientists are also trying to combat ageing—what James Joyce (The Dead)
described as “fade and wither dismally with age”—on the hypothesis that while
we associate old age with susceptibility to several diseases, ageing itself is nothing
but a ‘cellular disease’, and can be cured like any other. What are the implications
of what biologist Aubrey de Grey calls ‘undoing ageing’? We don’t have to be
apologetic about our efforts to lengthen the springtime of our youth and shorten
the years of our fall. But it is the quality that maters, not the quantity. We should
aim to have what is called ‘optimal ageing’—the capacity to function across
many domains: physical, functional, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual—
to one’s satisfaction and in spite of one’s medical conditions.
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The bottom line is that immortality per se will not solve any social problems,
even if some of us with enough money do live exponentially much longer than
any of us. Worse, it could widen social rift and unrest. For if somebody privately
discovers a truly effective and expensive anti-ageing agent, it is unlikely it will
be universally shared, and money may then hit a brick wall. The planet will be
imperiled with greater impunity. Violent death might replace natural death and
suicides might well become the path to escape from the squalid reality of the
eternal bored. On top of it, it will create another issue of social friction, one more
divide—enhanced long-living humans and wholly human humans. It is money
again that matters and muddies. That has been the case since the ancient times.
After all, as the Gospel of Matthew says, it was for just thirty pieces of silver
that Judas betrayed Jesus. Everyone is now a ‘Judas’; for money we will marry
or murder anyone and barter our very soul. As philosopher and US civil rights
leader Grace Lee Boggs says, “There are so many creative energies that are part
of human history that have been lost because we’ve been pursuing the almighty
dollar. We haven’t recognized at what expense we’ve done that, the expense not
only of the earth, not only of people of color, but of our own selves”.91 The
challenge is not to shun it as evil but transform it into a moral tool.
The fact is that, even if science achieves breakthroughs in research in ageing
and dying, only the wealthy can afford what it requires. The tragedy is that, while
science, on the one hand, is determined to help man live as long as he wants, on the
assumption that that is all he wants, simultaneously, a profound transformation is
taking place in the human mind, on how death is beginning to be perceived as an
opportunity to live with life. Death too has mutated; it is simply not the same as
it has been known as, since the time of the first death. And death is not simply the
inescapable end of life, to be awaited with fear. It is now an everyday choice, to
tackle every situation, a way to overcome any impediment, a means to get anything
we want. Death has often been called the ultimate liberator, the universal leveller,
and impartial dispenser of final justice. More and more people are beginning to see
it as the immediate liberator, instant problem-solver, and an unfailing friend-inneed.
But, death has also become a new source of division and discord. Everyone
doesn’t die the same way. Money matters; wealth is weighty. The very rich symbolize
‘capitalism’s moral bankruptcy’. They can often purchase impunity for even the
most loathsome of crimes. They are not only, as Scott Fitzgerald said, “different
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from you and me” (The Great Gatsby) in the way they live, but also the way they
die. While the lower-class people die in the same ‘old’ ways—stillborn, wrinkled
and withered, of malnutrition, of tuberculosis, of cancer, of heart disease, and so
forth—the upper classes can choose to be either immortal, or die by choice in
hip and cool new ways. Now, there’s an assisted suicide pod so chic and hip that
some are calling it the ‘Tesla of Death’. It induces a sort of dry drowning: the
device induces hypoxia, which leads to a euphoric loss of consciousness followed
by a peaceful death, without the negative effects of, well, choking for breath and
panicking.
If ever a time comes when death is denied its natural role in human life,
then man will turn on man more than ever. He cannot simply wait him out. It
is another man’s certain mortality that is acting as a check against homicides.
Once the hope that one day the relief in the form of death—of ours or of our
tormentors—evaporates, then suicides will skyrocket. Suicide already ranks
higher in many societies, including USA, than homicide. According to the
World Health Organization, suicides make up 15% of all violent deaths globally,
that is, five times as many each year as all the deaths in war. There is growing
evidence that screen-time, time spent using various gadgets, might have some
connection with the recent spurt in teenage suicides. We are all brought up on
the bedrock belief that self-preservation is the strongest instinct. It doesn’t seem
all that strong now. The growing acceptance, if not attraction, of death as the
antidote to the rude reality of living is perhaps the most telling indictment of
the current techno-industrial civilization. Terrible and troubling as it is, should
we read a deeper and darker message in this? It is said that when gods want to
destroy anyone, they first make them mad. Is that what is happening in the
world? As it is said in Genesis, “And the Lord was sorry that he had made man
on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart”.92 Has God finally had it and
decided to get rid of his own image on earth? We may consider ourselves special
and exceptional, but nature might have its own way of judging the utility of a
species, its own eugenics, and could come to conclude that the human species
has forfeited its divine lineage and earthly utility, and has to be weeded out.
Has the viceroy become a villain and a traitor? Have we become, once again, a
chosen species—this time chosen for destruction by our own hand? Or, has selfdestruction
become our ‘way of making amends for our scorching presence and
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reckless rapacity’? The horrifying magnitude of our massacre of other forms of
life on earth can be gauged by the results of a survey by the World Wildlife Fund:
‘Mammal, bird, fish and reptile populations have fallen on average by 60% since
1970’. Experts are warning that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency
that threatens civilization. And we must remember, as the Fund says, “Nature is
not a ‘nice to have’—it is our life-support system”. If wildlife disappears, so will
we, at some point.
Even if such somber thoughts are unfounded or greatly exaggerated, the
fact is that what we call the ‘human way of life’, not any particular belief system
or culture or civilization or ideology, has progressively become more and more
ravenous and reckless. Man constantly wants more and more of everything,
whereas the crying need is ‘less and less’. It is not over-population—no one can
tell what an optimum population is—but over-consumption, primarily in the
affluent societies and sections, which is our principal problem. We have become
the mythical ‘hungry ghosts’, except that we have a mouth like that of the Hindu
demon Kabandha93 who was headless, and had a large mouth on his ever empty
belly. Man has consistently shown that when it comes to what he thinks he
wants, he will stop at nothing, respect no limits, and will not care about the
consequences to the planet or other species. Some fear that the quest for the
‘novel and new’ might drag in sex, too, which has up to now guided natural
evolution. We already have sex-robots, and some even speculate that in the future
one of the ways of dying will be to ‘get killed by a sex-robot’.
If there is one issue on which we need to make a seminal shift, it is our
almost blind belief in the brain; the belief that it is the answer to every problem,
and that it is a launching pad for our future lift-off. The brain is a marvel, no
doubt, but it is still a brain. To think that all we need to do to be a ‘good’
person is to stimulate a specific part of the brain periodically is too simplistic.
For example, it is said that the part that produces love is also the part that causes
addiction. The bottom line is that the brain cannot play any other role than what
a brain is supposed to. Just as a hand is a hand, and can never be a leg. What is
required, therefore, is a broadening of the very basic base of intelligence. Science
is trying to do that through artificial intelligence and machine-merging. But
in so doing, it is overlooking the alternative intelligence that nature itself has
provided: heart intelligence. Until modern times, heart intelligence played a vital
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role as a foil as well as a complement to head-intelligence. Given its present state
of somnolence, our urgent challenge is to awaken it as part of consciousnesschange,
the need of the hour. Philosopher Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances)
says that human consciousness is in the process of evolving from what he calls
‘participatory consciousness’ to ‘final consciousness’. Only then, as the Katha
Upanishad puts it, will we be able to see that the consciousness within us is the
same consciousness within all living beings. Instead, what science is attempting
to do is to employ technology to scan our consciousnesses into computers, and
to live inside them as software, virtually and forever. The real problem we face is
not so much that interfacing with the machine is necessarily all bad; it is about
relying exclusively on the present paradigm of failed human intelligence. And
there are those who fear that machines might well trivialize, even destroy us,
obeying some ghastly iteration of their programming or malicious code inserted
by one malicious human.
The crying need of the hour is a cathartic course-correction, and one that
is not confined to our intelligence. At the most elemental level, we must shift
our gaze inwards, and focus on the world ‘within’. And focus on the war within,
which scriptures like the Quran and saints like Saint Paul have spoken about. We
now have an urgent duty cut out for ourselves: invade our own world within to
initiate corrective action, which in turn will set right what ails the world outside.
It is a daunting task. It might well be that even in the future, if the direction
and dedication stay intact, we might find it easier to be a ‘Moon-tourist’ than
an immigrant to the land within. The voyage within, it has long been said, is a
most important and difficult journey. When the Buddha uttered his last words—
Appo Deepo Bhava, ‘be an island unto yourself’—he probably meant, ‘be your
own witness’, and ‘seek your own truth within your own self ’. We do not realize
but it is through different ‘ordinary’ settings that we construct who we are, and
who we are not. We have to turn to what we routinely and reflexively do in the
annals of everyday existence, in the spectrum of human life—our work, our play,
our relationships, our every movement, our every breath—into spiritual tools
capable of impacting on the war within. We must learn to look at the everyday
narrative as the story of our life. If, in this way, we succeed in ‘spiritualizing’ our
lives, we can decisively influence the war within, which, in turn, will enable us
to ethically cleanse our daily doings. Cleansing is what we also need within our
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consciousness. We have been for centuries putting in so much muck and filth
into every nook and crevice of our consciousness. It is now full to the brim. But
we have no tools to do the job; we have no vacuum cleaners for use inside. The
only