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

bother us; so we don’t
bother about it. And then, to know what goes on within, we need a whole new
wherewithal, which is spiritual, not scientific. Indeed man’s chronic laggardness
in making spiritual progress is because of our utter ignorance of our inside.
Even if we ritually chant the Upanishadic mantra of shanti, shanti, shanti
(peace, peace, peace!) at every occasion and opportunity, there is no denying
that we love wars. Some say that even God is “pro-war”, not only us, the deeply
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flawed humans. Maybe that is why we have never had any extended periods of
grace or peace in our history. We might quote the Jewish prophet Isaiah and
repeat that ‘they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into
pruning hooks’ as an ideal and aspiration. Plowshares and pruning hooks we
have always had, but not through any alchemy of swords; instead, swords have
become guns, bombs, missiles and atomic weapons and autonomous weapons. It
was believed that some Biblical-era wars were even declared as ‘divinely-ordained’.
God, in the Old Testament, for example, ordered the complete destruction of
the Canaanites. About the great Kurukshetra war (in the Mahabharata), Lord
Krishna declared that it was necessary, when he was admonished for not having
prevented it even though it was in his power to do so. Why such a horrible
bloodshed was ‘necessary’ he did not explain. But one thing we must understand
is that we cannot apply human standards and norms to the divine. As Martin
Luther King said, divine justice is ‘entirely alien to ourselves’. We cannot judge
that which is inherently incomprehensible, divine will. The world outside is
‘incomprehensible’ because the world inside is impenetrable and the factors that
come into play to ‘comprehend’ are now far more and more complex.
Wars do bring out the worst in us, but still nothing unites a people
better than a war. It raises our adrenaline, gives focus and purpose, and helps
in mobilization. Experts differ whether we are the only war-waging animal on
earth. Some say that ants and chimps come closest. How do we explain this
self-destructive human lust for war-making? It is because war, like nothing else,
offers avenues to manifest some of our deepest and darkest urges, passions and
prejudices. We must understand that war is basically a form of conflict but on
a wider and more violent scale. And conflict is not only natural to the human
condition but is also essential to our growth. What we should seek is not to strive
towards a conflict-free world which is impossible, even counterproductive, but to
develop models of conflict-resolution through dialogue, and by mentally putting
ourselves in the situation that someone else is in. Once we do not try to impose
our will and interests on another, conflict becomes a communion. We must not
also forget that all conflicts in the external world are but extensions of the basic
internal conflict, the war within. If we want to resolve conflicts in our life, which
are inevitable and necessary, then we must ensure that the forces of goodness and
conciliation are dominant in the war. It is also useful to bear in mind the nature
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of this war. This ‘war within’ is a war without beginning or end, a civil war, an
incestuous struggle for supremacy over the human consciousness. It is a war
without victory or defeat. It is a weird war in which we cannot afford what we
yearn for in any other war: the crushing defeat of the enemy; outright victory. It
is a war in which we do not want to kill the enemy; for without the enemy, the
other side too cannot survive.
And yet we are total strangers to this war. All living is a state of war, but
the war within is the most intimate and meaningful. We believe that in life we
must not stay neutral in the fight against injustice and evil, but we are mute
and quiet to the fight against these very foes in our own breast. Yet, in that very
breast, as William Blake tells us not to forget, “all deities reside” (The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, 1790). It is not that we are altogether unaware that it is in
the ‘cave of the heart’, as the Upanishads call it, that the inner meaning of life,
the meaning of all human existence, is hidden. But that very ground deep within
is also the battlefield for the war within. It is a war that is often compared to
the great Kurukshetra war between cousins, the ‘good’ Pandavas and the ‘evil’
Kauravas. What is special is that this war was fought with God in a human avatar
being present to ensure the victory of the good. An intense struggle continually
rages within our own soul or consciousness, but we don’t know what to do, or,
more importantly, we don’t relate it to anything happening in our lives. We
know little about this war, and we don’t care to learn more, because, unlike other,
external wars, this is invisible and beyond sensory experience. Even though we
are blissfully unaware, we supply arms and ammunition to both warring sides, by
everything we do every day through our sense organs. And that, although we are
unaware of it, offers us a constant opportunity to change the course of the war.
Recent research tells us that even what we eat can have a bearing on the
war by helping one or the other side; some foods nourish positive emotions, while
some others nourish negative emotions. Indeed, the minutiae of everyday life,
things like what we buy, what we wear, what we make, what we consume, could
have a positive ripple effect not only on the world but also on the war within.
And indeed this is the only way any change can happen. If we cut out supplies to
the evil side and reinforce supplies to the virtuous front, we can ensure that the
war will wage on our terms. And if this happens, it will immediately affect every
war outside, and even more fundamentally, our mindset and behavior. We, or at
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least a critical mass of humans, could become compassionate warriors in real life,
warriors who not only help everyone but refuse to hate anyone, whose sword is
love and armor is cascading empathy, having the ability to put themselves in other
people’s hearts. But how does one attain such a lofty mindset? The Upanishads
say that the way is for us to see all things in ourselves, and ourselves in all things.
One wonders which is more difficult. If we can become such warriors in everyday
life, we can change not only the context of life but also the character of the war
within. In the end, the context of life is how we live and do our daily chores and
choices. It is these myriad things, and how we perform them, that matter and
make the difference between a worthy life and a wasted life.
We do not need to be sui generis, or do Olympian things, to change
the context of life; it is enough to be humane and do the ordinary things that
we do as a service to God, as the Bhagavad Gita implores us, or as a service to
another fellow-humans, indeed to any other sentient being, as Bodhisattvas do.
That is one way of bridging the gap between our moral values and daily actions.
It is good to remember that a universal principle of the universe is that “what
we focus on, multiplies”. If we focus on good, then the cumulative effect can
be overwhelming. One need not be a Bodhisattva to make the world a tiny
bit better. And we don’t have to be a Saint Paul who offered, ‘For I could wish
that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers,
my kinsmen according to the flesh’.89 It is enough to infuse every deed with
what Buddhism calls ‘loving kindness’. It only calls for surrendering the sense of
ownership of things that we possess. Actually we don’t ‘possess’ anything; in time,
things possess us. We can only ‘own’ that which we can absorb, appropriate and
appreciate; no more. The poet Padraig O Tuama, described as an extraordinary
healer in our world of fracture, said, “Belonging creates and undoes us both”.
While we should shun the desire to ‘own’ material things, a sense of belonging is
important for a fruitful life. What Hannah Arendt wrote in the 1930s (Origins
of Totalitarianism), “The experience of not belonging to the world at all, which is
among the most radical and desperate experiences of man”, applies equally to the
21st century. In the middle of frenetic activity, constantly being ‘busy’, many are
lonely, which is increasingly a trigger for suicides.
A related quandary many face is being part of what is described as the rat
race: we could either get caught up in a fiercely competitive struggle for wealth,
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excellence, and success at the expense of moral value, or exit the race and risk
social failure or broken relationships. We are smitten by ‘success’; we want to be
‘successful’ in whatever we do, in our job, in our relationships, in making love
or war, or making money. We also believe that the obstacle on the way to our
success is another man. The essence of this way of thinking is that everything
is justified in order to be a ‘winner’—never the L-word, loser—and that means
trampling over everyone else on the way. Our entire educational system and work
culture are tailor-made for that purpose; indeed, they feed upon it. It is a system
that trains the young to, in Einstein’s words, “worship acquisitive success as a
preparation for his future career”. The purpose of education ought to be to know
how to, as aptly put by journalist Sydney Harris, “turn mirrors into windows”. In
a ‘mirror’ we see our image and the area around, but through a window the view
is limitless. Today, what goes for education even cracks the mirror and everything
we see through is distorted. It even distorts our own image. Education, therefore,
has to go beyond manufacturing cogs for the economic engine, beyond acquiring
the skills to make money.
Although we ‘work’ all the time everywhere, what we call ‘work’ is what
we do when we go, every weekday of ours, to a particular place, an office or
factory, and spend the entire day exhibiting a particular skill in the company of
others doing a similar thing, and for which we are paid wages or salary on a daily
or weekly or monthly basis. Although it requires sharing and working together
synergistically, the work culture is competitive and the driving motive is almost
always profit-maximization. What we need to do is to turn competitive culture
into cooperative culture, and factor in social good as a part of profit-making.
Nowadays, education is designed to produce fiercely ambitious, competitive
individuals who want always to succeed, regardless of the means or methods.
And that inevitably colors their whole personality and social behavior and their
role as family members. Soon, the whole of humanity becomes a conglomerate
of cut-throat combatants, who see everyone else as someone to overcome
for their own survival and success. The mantra is ‘success’, which is material
achievement and advancement, in order to get on to the gravy train. And it
doesn’t matter how much suffering we cause to others and to our own selves.
How can we then play a role in mitigating the stock of suffering in the world?
If we are ruthless in achieving our goals, where is the room for sharing, which
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is one of the most important attributes that must be nurtured? The contextualchange
that is necessary for consciousness-change must include measures to deal
with the ravages of the rat race. We cannot seriously talk of spiritual growth if we
spend all our working life, and what goes as education, immersed in a culture of
ruthless one-upmanship, where one is constantly outfoxing each other. We need
to learn to admit that almost every problem we face is at least partly of our own
making, and that we are mad at others precisely because we see in them what we
are trying not to see in ourselves. We need to find and invent avenues outside the
current economic system to sharpen and strengthen man’s latent better instincts
and to tame, what Freud called, ‘the inclination for aggression’, without which,
he said, man does not feel ‘comfortable’. Those avenues must be such that they
are attractive and emotionally, if not economically, lucrative. It must start from
pre-school and continue through college, and include events like compassionate
retreats and empathy workshops. One must be able to live like a normal