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

a better and shared way. Another major recent
development is that the concept of the ‘right to life’ is now being stretched to
include the ‘right to die’, thereby opening many thus-far-forbidden doors. In
some countries, grounds such as ‘unreasonable obstinacy’ are becoming grounds
for shutting off life support to critically, not terminally, ill patients. Earlier, the
decision to end one’s life was wholly personal. Now it is equally, if not more,
social or even moral. It is raising new ethical issues like, ‘Is saving a life worth it
if life itself is not worth living?’ ‘What is worthiness?’ Some are even asking that
about the highest moral issue of our time: ‘Do any of us have the right to live,
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after all that we have done to life on the planet?’ Should we actively work towards
creating a society like the one in the ‘Planet of the Apes’?
A grisly time might still come when ‘do-gooders’, if not Good Samaritans,
may even invoke the moral ‘right to kill’, a kind of ‘just killing’, if you will, much
like a ‘just war’, at the personal level to right a slight, to eliminate an irritant. We
might well have the 21st-century’s Rodion Raskolnikovs (of Dostoyevsky’s classic
Crime and Punishment). In that novel, the so-called anti-hero Raskolnikov kills
an old pawnbroker and her innocent but inconveniently-in-the-way sister for her
money, which he wants to put to good use. The idea is that exceptional people
have the license to kill anyone who opposes their genius and vision that historical
progress derives from violence, and great men of the past often got fame by being
‘great destroyers’. Many see that the moral dilemma that Dostoyevsky envisioned
over 150 years ago is now even more topical. In fact, philosophers like Jonathan
Glover say that it has already become a ‘background assumption’ of modern life.
After all, one could argue, is not ‘assisted death’ also a form of killing? All these
might seem dystopian nightmares, snapshots of weak or warped minds, but they
do reflect what many fear in their bones. Whether it is a dystopian or a utopian
nightmare, or a dream, it all depends on the state of consciousness. And for
consciousness-change we need contextual-change.
For contextual-change, we have to reflect and reconstruct the roles of
the ‘three Ms’—morality, money, and mortality—which obsess our mind and
dominate our lives. The three are intimately intertwined. To put it very simply,
while morality is very sensitive to money, and money at best is condescending
to morality, the way we are dealing with mortality is raising serious moral issues,
and money is coming to play a big part in when and how we die and what
happens afterwards. Without a complete overhaul of the three Ms, the dynamics
that propel the contemporary and emergent contexts of human life will not
move in the right direction. And without that, there can be no consciousnesschange,
and our mischievous and malicious mind will continue to call the shots
in the war within. We must clearly come to grips with the central truth that
without venturing within and ‘winning’ the war therein, we cannot elevate our
consciousness, and without that there can be no spiritual growth or humane
human transformation. And if we fail, the divisive, detrimental, and destructive
forces in the world will become stronger every passing day.
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In short, either to get a hold on ourselves, or to surmount the forces of
anarchy, darkness, and evil in the world, or to resolve any of our festering ills and
problems, we must find a way to go within, intercede in the war, and help the
forces of good, virtue, and righteousness. Indeed, how to engage and deal with
evil, as John Steinbeck said, is the only story in life, in nature, and in literature,
and the driving force behind God taking on human likeness. The riddle is this:
with so much going in our favor, why are we so tormented? Homer says, “There
is nothing alive more agonized than man, of all that breathe and crawl across
the earth”.96 We have long struggled to make sense of the duality of relationship
between good and evil. Most men will, at some time in their lives, succumb to
their evil inclination. The Book of Ecclesiastes, said to have been written by King
Solomon, clearly tells us, “Indeed, there is no one on earth who is righteous, no
one who does what is right and never sins”.97 Some say that evil, like everything
else, has no legs to stand on except as a part of divine design. Others posit that
evil is nothing but the absence of good, or that it is independent. Scriptures say
that a truly spiritually evolved person rises above both good and evil, and, in a
nasty twist, psychotic killers are claiming the same state of mind. Some hold
that good and evil are the two sides of the same coin. That may well be so, but
it does seem that the evil side is more firmly embedded than the good side.
Robert Wright elaborates: “Human beings are a species splendid in their array
of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their
constitutional ignorance of the misuse” (The Moral Animal, 1994). It means that,
as we all know well, it is easy to do bad, but difficult to do good. For Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, “The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every
human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Kahlil
Gibran said, “For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?
Verily when good is hungry it seeks food even in dark caves, and when it thirsts
it drinks even of dead waters”. And, as a kind of a faint flicker to those of us who
often fail to do good and feel awful about it, Gibran’s Prophet reassures, “You are
good in countless ways, and you are not evil when you are not good”. So, if evil
is but a ‘hungry’ good, and we are not evil if we are not good, then why all this
angst and remorse about not being good? Then again, many scriptures and wise
men have told us that good and evil actually need each other, but that they are
constantly at war with each other. Echoing the scriptures like the Quran, the
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Bible, and the Bhagavad Gita, Eric Burdon tells us, “Inside each of us, there is
the seed of both good and evil. It’s a constant struggle as to which one will win.
And one cannot exist without the other”. It really means that statements and
questions like ‘why we seem to be drawn to evil more than to goodness’ can be
answered only in the context of the war within. And it has also been emphasized,
strange as it sounds, that we should not aim at eradicating evil or vanquishing it
in the constant struggle. This is one war in which we must make sure the ‘enemy’
is not dead but stays barely alive for our own good. At the same time, we cannot
simply stay on the sidelines because when we do nothing in the struggle between
good and evil, it is wickedness that prevails most often. The soil within us seems
suited to the seed of evil and wickedness.
Even God in the Bible “saw that the wickedness of man was great on the
earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”.98
Although it is generally believed that good deeds bring good things, and bad
deeds beget bad, some nihilists even say that good things come from bad things.
But then, what is good for one can be bad for another; what is good for a lamb,
escaping from the throat of a tiger, for instance, is bad for the bigger beast. And
then, we do have what Nietzsche called the ‘master and slave morality’, and ‘the
higher man and the herd’. Therefore, there is neither good nor bad in absolute
terms; it is all in the mind. What we are exhorted to do by the scriptures is to rise
above this duality. But to be able to do that requires spiritual sadhana and a higher
level of consciousness. Perhaps we can get some inspiration from the way God
Himself—from whom both derive their legitimacy—copes with and handles
evil? He treads a fine line, doing a kind of balancing act. He accepts evil in the
world but vows to protect the righteous. But when evil becomes overpowering,
He intervenes in favor of the virtuous. He slew many rakshasas not because they
were powerful and denied and defied Him, but because they threatened and
made life difficult for the virtuous who are also His devotees. To establish or
restore dharma or righteousness does not mean that evil or wickedness cannot
exist on earth; it means it cannot be allowed to overwhelm righteousness and
goodness. It is essential to note that the ambit of dharma, like Brahman in the
Upanishads, is beyond narrow or rigid codification, and it is central not only to
Hinduism but also to Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism. A celebrated aphorism
in Hindu scriptures says, “Dharmo rakshati rakshitaha”—dharma protects those
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who uphold dharma. What it implies is that to safeguard this balance and ensure
a tilt in favor of dharma requires constant care and watchfulness. Watchfulness
not in regard to what others may or may not do, but what we ourselves do in the
casual course of everyday existence as we perform our chores and duties, interact
with others, serve our family, our neighborhood, our society and country, and
the world. If we act in accordance with dharma in daily life, then dharma will
ensure that good will remain dominant over evil in the war within. Restoration
of the dharmic balance is the spirit of the famous and solemn declaration of Lord
Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita that He will incarnate from age to age on earth.
And this is also, in spirit, the purpose of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
But then, why and when, and under what conditions, does evil become
so overwhelming on earth that God has no choice but to descend? It is said in
the Bible that God might have not destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah had there
been even ten virtuous men on earth at that time. What could possibly have
been the number of virtuous humans at this time of our age? The question is,
what would have been the divine primary motive: saving the good humans or
destroying the insidious evil? Or, establishing the ‘right balance between good
and evil on earth, the numbers known only to God? In fact, ‘balance’ is, in
Hindu dharma shastras, a critical difference between what is good and what is
evil or bad. Good is represented, among other things, by balance, and evil is
represented by imbalance. At least we can feel a little lighter about one thing.
After the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, God vowed, “I will never again
curse the ground on account of man, for the intent of man’s heart is evil from his
youth; and I will never again destroy every living thing, as I have done”.99 That
means that even if God does destroy much, if not all of, mankind, the earth and
other ‘living beings’ would endure. That facile and false premise robs us of the
guilt that on account of us the rest of life on earth will get destroyed. That is God’s
choice and Man’s Fate. What we have to grapple with are the more proximate
empirical matters. Why do so many good-intentioned men allow themselves to
be so easily seduced by the lure of evil? When we want to be good, what comes
in the way? From where does evil in the world derive its strength and support, so
much that God has no choice except to descend on earth and take on the vain,
venal, flawed, and frail form of a human being? Many have addressed similar
questions: Why does God allow evil to exist, and why does a good and merciful
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God stand by silently when good people suffer? Is he indifferent or incompetent,
or is He Himself evil? Our mind equates evil with terrorism, mass murders,
sadistic rapes, and so on. And we, with revulsion, separate ourselves from them.
And yet, as RD Laing says, “We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to
what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or
mature we take ourselves to be”.100 And there are subtler forms like oppression,
discrimination, bigotry, exploitation… that cause suffering. Is it God who is
responsible? Don’t we