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

spiritual goal in mind, says “I will
no longer mutilate and destroy myself in order to find a secret behind the ruins”.
We do that routinely for sensual purposes. Our response, rather the lack of it, to
clear and present existential threats like the climate crisis, is another form of selfharm.
In fact, self-harm is the signature of our species. We seem to have almost
a fatal attraction to things that harm us, even kill, especially if the substance
is slow-acting and pleasure-giving. Mentally, we keep a distance and think of
anything unpleasant or dangerous as ‘this thing over there’. That is part of how we
manage to kill ourselves without even being aware of it. The net result is that we
have become a soft, suicidal and savage species; we shun pain and we seek instant
gratification with little effort; we like short-cuts and quick-fixes; we want luxury
and laziness at the same time; we crave for conveniences and comforts. Our
growing addiction to gadgets stems from being a soft species. It is technology that
has made us soft by giving us an appliance or appendage to every task, even the
most routine, to help us or replace us with. There is a kind of a brewing backlash,
and some parents, while they continue to be consumed by appliances of all sorts,
are convinced that “the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our
children”.1 They fear that screen time is going straight to the pleasure centers
of the developing brain. It remains to be seen how the Apples and Samsungs
of the world will react to the trends, because, if kids actually start growing up
without looking at or into screens, then these companies will go out of business.
We must also be aware that if we don’t use, or grossly underuse, what nature has
gifted us, then sooner or later, nature will make constructional adjustments to
reflect the reality. For nature abhors both vacuum and redundancy. It may even
transfer our unused capacity and faculties to other species. In fact, that is implicit
in natural selection. And we have in us a stubborn streak that simply turns the
Nelson’s eye to anything that is uncomfortable, anything that threatens our ride
on the gravy train. We are now being told that we have just a 12-year window
of opportunity to set right things to avoid a climate catastrophe. But how many
of us are willing to loose any sleep or worry about what might happen after 12
years? We just hope that the experts are wrong or, on a rebound, make merry in
the meantime. The human mind resorts to one of the three ‘E’s to escape from
a tricky spot: evasion, explanation, and excuse. And that destructive capability
is daily mounting with every technological advance. The actual ‘doer’ might be
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someone else for a certain horror, but we are all participants, perpetrators and
beneficiaries. The question to ask is not ‘who are they?’ but ‘who are we?’; not
‘who is he?’, but ‘who am I?’ This question is the mother of all questions; it is at
the heart of the Advaitic Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy, and of all spiritual
sadhana or pursuit.
We must remember that anything that we make happen in the world
outside, first happens in our own mind, and in our consciousness. Man, at the
morrow of the 21st century, has become so schizoid, suicidal, narcissistic and
nihilistic that one wonders whether he has had evolution or atavism, ascent
or descent, from our animal roots. Comparisons are surely odious, but every
species has its strengths and foibles. With a mix of condescension and conceit,
we tend to think that nonhuman animals are little more than clever automata
with a toolkit of preprogrammed behaviors that respond to specific triggers. In
fact, it is this line of thought that lets us get away with all the unspeakable and
horrendous things we do to animals. The truth is that being human is to be
all-animals; neither higher nor lower. God might have run out of ideas when it
came to creating man, and He might have just jumbled up the attributes of other
animals, and, feeling a little bit sorry, added a bonus—made him in His image.
At different times, we can be any other animal: tiger, elephant, lamb, fox, dog,
wolf, vulture, snake... We never can tell which animal or divine character we
will show up as, and we seem utterly helpless about it. That is the predicament,
promise and peril of ‘being human’. That is perhaps why philosopher Peter Zapffe
said that man is a tragic animal. For, a tiger is a tiger, or a dog is a dog, but there
is no such thing as ‘man is a man’. Man is exceptional not because he has any
exclusive attribute, but because he has in him all conceivable attributes. There
is one dimension of our existence that bears some attention: it is our claim that
we are a ‘spiritual being’, implying that other animals are not. One of the things
that signify our sense of insecurity, not superiority, is our almost compulsive
comparison with animals—the refrain that we can and they can’t; that we are
and ‘they’ aren’t. Firstly, to judge whether other creatures on earth are ‘spiritual’
or not we should have yardsticks and norms to apply, which we do not have.
Everyone has their own understanding of what a spiritual life entails. Secondly,
while other animals do exhibit some of our worst traits like aggression, violence
and even cruelty, they do that as a part of their swadharma, necessary to their
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ordained way of life. In our case, those traits are optional, and not necessary for
our swadharma or survival. And then, we alone are endowed, or blighted, with
the worst of all attributes in nature: malice (wishing ill without any gain), and its
toxic twin schadenfreude (deriving pleasure from others’ misery). The closest in
nature that resembles us in this respect, strangely, is in the plant kingdom, the
Pisonia tree. This ruthless tree, found in the tropical waters of the Indian and
Pacific oceans, produces extremely sticky seedpods that get stuck onto any bird
that flies into them, either trapping it in the tree’s branches or weighing the bird
down so much on the ground that it is completely unable to fly. The bird usually
starves to death, if it doesn’t fall easy prey for crabs or other predators.
What is baffling is why this particular tree alone has this malicious
streak, and what evolutionary purpose its horrible trait serves. It is all the more
surprising when we bear in mind that it takes man mutations through several
generations for any trait to be fully formed and become functional. In that sense,
one can argue that animals minus malice are more ‘spiritual’ than humans.
Recent research suggests that animals too can have spiritual experiences. We are
all animals, birds of the same feather, but each one having a different blend of the
same menu of components. But, what about divinity, which we have unilaterally
appropriated to ourselves? If animals are ‘better’ than us in terms of how they live
and die, how can we be divine and not them? The fact is that all sentient beings
are divinely designed and it does not make any difference, if we are good or bad;
in any case, no one is all good or all bad. And nothing can exist without His will,
even evil. The only difference is that other animals live solely by instincts specific
to their nature of life; we, on the other hand, are made of a much broader range,
and live by choice. And that leads to a struggle between our own intrinsic traits,
tendencies, and dispositions. The world as it is, and what each of us does in this
world, are but sparks and shadows of this struggle.
We have expectations of a just and moral world. Man requires meaning in
a meaningless world. And we don’t think we are endowed enough to be what we
want to be—an interplanetary immortal being. That is why we are prepared to
commit mass hara-kiri and meld into a machine. Life is now all about ‘business’.
Taking a cue from that business strategy for growth, what is called ‘M&A’
(merger and acquisition), we want to do the same with our life. We have come
to believe that by merging with a machine—and thus blurring the boundary
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between animate and inanimate matter—we can acquire the elixir of eternity.
Every sentient being, even a worm or ant, is special and exceptional and fulfills a
niche in creation. But truth be told, we are quite a heady mix. Mean, malicious,
and murderous, we surely are, but also, we humans have cooperative and loving
moral instincts. As Charles Darwin said, ‘The moral sense perhaps affords the
best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals’. But others
maintain that there are no animals that are as evil as humans. It means that we
have in us what it takes to be the noblest and the meanest, the most virtuous and
vicious. Thus far, we really did not know when which of the two would show
up in our behavior, and what we could do to contain them. Only now do we
realize that the answer is within, that these two opposing sides, good and evil,
along with their respective allies, are waging a full-blown but bloodless war, the
war within. It is the flow and course of this war that manifests in our behavior
as good or bad. Although the good is by no measure gone, it is evil that seems to
be steadily gaining ground in the war. It is this war that Jeremy Griffith alludes
to when he talks about a “battle for the management of our lives… between our
already established, gene-based, naturally-selected, instinctive orientations, and
our newly emerged, nerve-based, understanding-dependent, self-adjusting, fully
conscious mind”,2 which, he says, began 2 million years ago when we became
fully conscious.
While this fierce war wages in the human consciousness, the human
condition is being transformed so fundamentally by the sweep and velocity of
cutting-edge technologies that, soon, when we meet one another on the street,
we will wonder if the other person is human. By the end of this century, it
might well become difficult to define what human means, and who among us is
human, and who is a hybrid, or cyborg or android or robot or a monster. The
human could possibly not be the strongest or the smartest, and it is debatable if
that is good or bad from a planetary perspective. If man’s dominance on earth
weakens or ends, would the world be more moral and safer if non-humans or
part-humans are in control? Would nature, so mercilessly mauled by man, regain
its resilience and grandeur? Some idealists might call that the ultimate altruism,
while realists could condemn it as foolhardy masochism.
We really don’t know, and that is the cause for concern. With all his
endowments and accomplishments, culture and civilization, self-awareness and
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ability to learn, improve and improvise, why is modern man so starved of wisdom,
good judgment, even enlightened self-interest? What makes us so willfully blind
to the obvious, and unable to work together for meeting common challenges?
The question arises: Is it all the effect of the passage of yugas, and the advent of
the Hindu Kali Yuga or Dark Age, when, as foretold, righteousness is said to
be in retreat and evil is both banal and bold? Indeed, paradoxes in the human
context abound. We are both wild and divine, made of the clay of the earth and
cosmic dust, dancing away in deep space. We are a ‘self-conscious nothing’ (as
Julius Bahnsen said) while being a geological force to reckon with. We are all
human; but few are humane. Most of us think we are virtuous; but few are bereft
of vice. We are all uniquely blessed with the power to know what is important
and what is immediate, what is soothing and what is healing, and yet so few of
us can manifest that capability to make myriads of choices of daily life. Many
of us feel we are moral and good even if, we grudgingly admit, a few times we
got carried away and did things we are not proud of, but very few shrink from
hurting the weak and vulnerable. We think we are peace-loving and non-violent
because we have not physically assaulted anyone, though the truth is we do more
hurt by our mouth than by our hand. We are endowed with the unique power
of reason, viveka (wisdom) and vichakshana (discrimination), but most of us act
with aham (ego), ahankara (arrogance), and agraha (anger). All told,