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

pride ourselves about our free will and precious powers of
choice-making? And when we say that the innocent suffer, what do we mean by
innocence? According to what time-frame? Both perpetrators and sufferers are
humans. And no one thinks of, or thanks, God for the good things, but makes
Him accountable for the bad. Some may even ask, why must good be ‘good’,
and bad, ‘bad’? The advice and guidance of the scriptures and ancient wisdom
has generally been to be good in thought, word, and deed. They have exhorted
us to put the well-being of others ahead of our own, and to cultivate, nurture,
and practice caring, kindness, compassion, and empathy in our interpersonal
interfacing.
What is universal (happiness, misery), we try to individualize; and what
is internal (peace, harmony), we externalize. All our life we seek perpetual
pleasure. We equate peace with absence of war and conflict. That is ‘passive
peace’. Proactive peace is a state of harmony: harmony between people; harmony
between humanity and nature; and harmony within ourselves. Above all, in
every situation, we want to extract ‘profit’. We even poison ourselves for profit.
Xun Kuang (Xunzi), a Chinese Confucian philosopher, said that ‘a person is
born with a liking for profit’. That is because we instinctively want to profit
from every situation and every person. As Steinbeck says in The Grapes of Wrath,
“Children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from
an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—
because the food must rot, must be forced to rot”. We view the ‘other’ person
as completely separate and different from us, and that his ‘profiting’ can do no
good to us. Our mind tells us, ‘O fool! You are not a mahatma; you are a man.
The other fellow’s victory can only be at your expense; so, by hook or crook, cut
him down!’ It is for profit that transnational corporations flood the market with
harmful or addictive products. They spend billions on advertising, pollute the
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natural environment with toxic waste, subvert the system and sabotage laws that
protect workers and consumers. Corporations can do all that because deep inside
we too are like them—we want to extract profit from life. We too, given a way,
would exploit others, gain and take advantage, enrich ourselves, and demean
others. Instead of fighting them we want to emulate them. Today the workplace
is the most exploited place. In reality, as Elizabeth Anderson argues, the modern
workplace is a coercive, authoritarian regime in which workers are unfree in
the republican sense due to domination by their employers.101 It is this that
makes it so difficult to practice compassion—the ability to feel others’ pain in
our bones. Compassion for all living beings truly is the benchmark, the true test
and touchstone of morality, the surest and infallible test of a really good man.
Schopenhauer wrote, “Only insofar as an action has sprung from compassion
does it have moral value; and every action resulting from any other motives
has none” (On the Basis of Morality, 1840). Further, even though the sufferer is
experienced as an external being, Schopenhauer said, “I nevertheless feel it with
him, feel it as my own, and not within me, but in another person”. The Dalai
Lama said, “If you want others to be happy, practice compassion; if you want to
be happy practice compassion”. As long as any man anywhere is constitutionally
capable of deriving pleasure from anyone else’s pain, and of deriving happiness
from the unhappiness of others, the human race cannot lay claim to be a moral
species. We cannot claim that we are all connected, parts of the same Whole, and
like a snake, shed the skin of guilt and shame for what another of our species
does. What comes more naturally to many a modern man is indifference, which
is not too far off from callousness, which is a mark of the darkest moral deficiency.
Many of us might not actually share Thomas Hardy’s opinion: “Know that thy
sorrow is my ecstasy, that thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!” (Hap, 1898),
but tears do not well up reflexively when we see another shriveled and sunken
person. We shrug and say to ourselves, ‘It is their own doing or divine remiss; a
consequence of karma or a ‘natural’ balance in nature’. To be capable of feeling
another person’s pain ‘within’ us, to practice compassion as a tool of happiness,
of ours and of others, requires the birth of a ‘new man’. To cultivate the positive
of compassion, we should first get rid of the negatives of indifference to others’
misfortune, and intolerance of others’ opinions and convictions. The root of
the malaise is that we have not been able to integrate, imbibe, and internalize
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the fundamental principle of creation that nothing exists independently and
unconditionally, that everything is conditioned on something else other than
its own self, that everything is finite and incomplete, and susceptible to decline,
decay, and death. Simone de Beauvoir put it well when she reminded us that
‘one’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others’ (The Ethics
of Ambiguity, 1947). Often, the life of others we value in proportion to its value
to ourselves. Life teaches us that death, extinction, and annihilation are as much
ingrained in nature as in human life, and how a particular life comes to an end
has very little to do with how that life is lived or indeed deserves.
It is the illusion of nothingness as completeness—the idea of autonomous
entirety, that a life is worthy regardless of its impact on the world—that is the
main impediment to attaining the yearning for universal harmony, peace, and
happiness. As the Vedas proclaim, Vasudaiva kutumbakam (The whole earth is a
family); Om, shanti, shanti, shanti (Peace, peace, peace); Loka samastas sukhino
bhavantu (Let everyone everywhere be happy); and Sarvejana sukhinobhavantu
(May all people live happily). Whether it is the life of a saint or a sinner, the
life of the great or the garden-type, no life can be insulated, unlike the climate,
from the rest. The only question is, do we all add to others’ happiness or misery?
An individual will always remain frail, flawed, imperfect, unfinished, and the
only way to ‘grow’ is to seek completeness and wholeness through others’ lives,
through our effort. However much we ‘augment’ and ‘upgrade’ or ‘enrich’
ourselves and our sense organs, we cannot be foolproof or flawless, impregnable
or immaculate. We will only cease to be ‘human’, and what happens thence
is hard to tell. The problem with historic man is that instead of striving for
perfection or completeness through seeking complementarities, what he has
been doing is to be ‘one-up’ on another man, on nature and on God. As for
‘another man’, the very foundation of human culture is to view the approaching
person with trepidation, as a stranger, a rival, as a competitor; as someone whose
life, if pursued as he wishes, is bound to collide with and diminish our own
life. The watchwords in interpersonal relationships are not trust or brotherhood,
but exhortations such as ‘be wary’, ‘be vigilant lest you are taken for a ride, or
someone steals a march over you’, or ‘lest someone leaves you behind in the
struggle to become successful’. As for nature, we still debate if, as Rose Sayer says
in the classic movie The African Queen (1951), “Nature is what we were put on
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earth to rise above”, or whether we should be respectful and reverential to nature,
and behave as a part of it, not above it. As for God, we still wonder about His
existence, nature, role, and relevance, and if there is—or ought to be—any strict
‘division of labor’ between Him and us. And if ‘playing God’ is an affront to
Him or easing His work on earth. Instead of transforming his world within, man
wants to transcend the inherent nature of reality: to become permanent when
everything in nature is impermanent and transitory.
From Akrasia to Enkrateia
The way out, paradoxically, is the way in. Every other way we have tried, but
have found ourselves stymied, stranded at the skin level. If the battlefields are
two, within and without, we have to fight on both the fronts. On both fronts we
have to starve the forces of evil by choking the lines of supplies. We cannot fix the
world outside without fixing the world inside. If we allow evil to overwhelm the
good inside our consciousness, how can the good overwhelm the bad outside? It
is consciousness, and the war for its commanding heights, that we should focus
upon. The scriptural paradigm is still relevant. Indeed even more, but it needs
to be viewed and put into practice in the setting of the war within. We have
to see that what our senses let in is input of the right kind. We have to build
bridges between the social and the spiritual, and between peace, prosperity, and
the planet. And what it needs is the minimum ‘critical mass’ of committed and
connected like-minded people.
Albeit still sporadic and scant, hope now rests on two counts. One, there
are, in the terrible times we inhabit, in the awful midst of disarray and desperation
in the world—shootings, terror attacks, wars over race and religion, riots, and
ethnic and civil unrest—signs of a subtle shift towards a resurrection of faith
and spiritual awakening, of global citizenship, and cosmic consciousness with or
without religious affiliation. Across the world, there is a growing, albeit still muted,
recognition that we are responsible for each other and accountable to future
generations. As the old Irish proverb says, ‘It is in the shelter of each other that the
people live’. The much-lamented ‘unbelief’ of the millennials of the world is itself a
sign of subtle transformation, from believers to seekers, a class of people the world
needs most. Second, we now have the technical means to connect, to synergize
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disparate and isolated efforts. The very technology that gave us the toxic triad of
materialism, consumerism, and militarism, can now serve as the lift-off platform
and to build the critical mass for consciousness-change and contextual-change. So
dark are our days in these times that the words we hear or read about, or the stories
we see on the screen, are about impending doom, about post-apocalypse survivors,
and dystopia. But we are told that, in Biblical Greek, the word ‘apocalypse’ actually
means ‘an uncovering’. So, it is possible that the ‘apocalypse’ we fear is not the end
of the world but, an uncovering of our consciousness. In fact, many are already
behaving as if the end is around the corner. Yet it is possible that the doom, discord,
and decadence we are experiencing could be the harbingers of ‘the end of a new
beginning’ in human history.
Technology has the potential to turn us into a global tribe; it is up to
us to choose between being a ‘tranquil tribe’ or a ‘warring’ tribe. In fact, some
New Age gurus see wisdom in extolling the internet—which David Bowie called
an alien life form—as an extension of the human mind and the harbinger
of a collective consciousness, portending a great leap in human spiritual
development. The hope is that it would foster, in the words of Deepak Chopra,
“more collective creativity, collective problem solving, collective well-being and
collective intention as to what we want”. Not only that, it could also help us
overcome a crippling handicap in our current and past attempts: the lack of a
critical mass of committed people. Yet, there are others who see it differently.
For PW Singer, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that
humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have
ever had” (Cybersecurity and Cyberwar, 2014). We must also bear in mind what
Carl Jung reminded us: harmless creatures can coalesce into a mass, and could
emerge as a Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs movie, 1991). What the
‘mass’ earlier lacked, it has now: the technological means to mobilize. While
many warn us about the negative aspects of social media, they could also serve as
a force to transcend traditional boundaries such as ethnicity, race or nationality,
and geography, and instill a planetary mindset. If the content of human life
gets spiritualized in its right sense, then the ‘supplies’ that get in through our
senses can dramatically strengthen the righteous side in the war within. Similarly,
if we choose to tread the Upanishadic path of sreyas (good), and not of preyas
(pleasant), then we will be able to resolve climate change. Essentially it is our
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desire to cling to what seems ‘pleasant’ that induces us to not just turn a