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

to liberate
the consciousness from the near-monopolistic hold of the mind. And that is the
only way we can redesign the present paradigm of intelligence, which perhaps is
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the most pressing need of the hour. We have to, as Joseph Campbell said, learn
to ‘rely on our intuition, our true being’ (The Power of Myth, 1988), which means
our heart, not our mind. While trying to get a grip on the fundamentals of this
war, it became clear that while the war is within, the frontlines are two: the deep
recesses of our inner world, and the heuristic normalcy of everyday existence.
For one of the lessons of life is that for anything to be permanent it must first
become the normal. As Annie Dillard reminds us, “How we spend our days is,
of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is
what we are doing” (The Writing Life, 1989). If we spend it wisely and humanely,
then not only will our life be well spent, but also the war within will tilt in favor
of righteousness. All that we need to do is to cultivate conscious living and be
awake and aware of whatever we do, aware of what we let in through our sense
organs, and ensure that they are of the right kind.
What all this brings out is the inherent comic tragedy of the human
‘condition’, that our salvation lies, of all things, in a venture so odious as war,
which has long been denounced as mass murder, ultimate evil, outlet for the
worst in us, and so on. But some say that much as we might not like to admit it,
warring is very much a part of who we are, perhaps even a part of how we have
evolved. That could well be so; for if war is a constant within, how can it not but
get reflected outside? The paradox is that it is a war and, at the same time, not war
in the classical sense. What we have to view as a ‘win’ here is very different from
any other; strange as it may sound, the antihero is also a hero; the evil within is
not a villain, no reprobate to be expelled. And, yet, this war embodies our only
hope for the future; the hope to set right so much that has gone wrong for so
long. And if we, like Arjuna, turn away and say ‘we don’t want to fight any more
wars’, much less something that cannot be seen or heard or felt, then nothing will
change for the good in our world or in our consciousness. It is only by the active,
even aggressive, acceptance of, and engagement in this ‘war’ that we can put an
end to all our ills, biases, and prejudices, and enable each of us to be better than
what we have been. And our behavior will become benign, and that will allow
us to put an end to what so often we are tempted to do to each other almost
reflexively—go for each other’s throat in our outer life.
As a writer, I try to step aside and be an observer, to better grasp the focus
and thrust of much of what we do, of what consumes our mind, attention, and
Epigraph
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action, without changing which we cannot change the context and character
of human life. From that angle, it didn’t take too long to realize that they can
only be the interrelated themes of morality, money, and mortality—the ‘three
Ms’. Nothing of any significance in human life will become any better unless
we can find a way to think through and deal with them very differently from
their present paradigm. Indeed, that alone will make a decisive difference to the
war. Moral is what we want to be, and often fail in practice, and bad thoughts
and urges seduce us easily. Modern man lives in what someone described as a
state of ‘ethical brokenness’, having to choose between existential destruction
and moral capitulation. Good people always did bad things but not with today’s
banal ordinariness. We are living in tempestuous times when people are seriously
soul-searching and asking such questions as: Are we worthy of survival? Is the
human species ‘expendable? Is the best we can do now is to stop reproduction?
And, à la Bill McKibben, has the Human Game begun to play itself out?
We cannot meaningfully address such questions without giving somber
thought to two of our basic moral flaws: malice in the mind and what Jews call
Sinat chinam (baseless hatred). We must work around money in a way that it
ceases to be the chief source of human strife and suffering, and gets transformed
into a potent source of moral power. With the advent of the digital economy, and
in a world that is almost wholly ‘financialized’, it seems to me that there are new
opportunities for money to work differently, both as a token of exchange and a
store of value that needs to be flushed out. As for mortality, what has to change
is our obsession with physical immortality, without regard to its ethical, social,
and intergenerational implications. The real challenge, it seems to me, is to strike
a balance between obsessive care of our physical body—which the Dhyanabindu
Upanishad says is a ‘mud vessel’—and the ability to get detached from it, much
like a snake treats its skin. I may mention in this context that the idea of focusing
my second book around these three subjects, which I call obsessions, arose in
my mind even as I was finishing the earlier work, and a mention to that effect
was made in my first book. But it was much later that their centrality to the ‘war
within’ crossed my mind.
The bottom line is this. Even if the so-called technological ‘singularity’
occurs in our natural lifetime, or if there is a breakthrough in radical life-extension
and the human morphs into a ‘Homo Immortalis Omnipotent’, and even if we do
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become a multiplanetary species, we cannot evolve in the right direction unless
we turn our skills, weapons and wisdom inwards. The war within is a catalyst
for internal liberation and renewal. If we want to get off the gravy train and
escape getting consumed by the ‘merit-based’ rat race, the war within is our only
glimmer of hope. We make multiple choices every day but not all are of equal
moral value, and to do the right thing is an ‘inside-job’, to win the war within.
Whether we like it or not, we are all proxy participants in this war through
every minute, awake or asleep. To see that this war results in the right outcome,
we don’t have to become all-sacrificing altruists or super-heroes. It simply
depends on how we routinely act and reflexively react to everyday situations
and circumstances. As the philosopher Theodor Adorno famously said, “Es gibt
kein richtiges Leben im falschen”—a wrong life cannot be lived rightly. For a
righteous life to be still possible and for the good in us to prevail over evil in the
war within, we need to change both the content and context of everyday life.
Fact is that anything we see, hear, taste, touch, or smell can trigger unintended
behaviors and impulses. Depending on what they are, they serve as the ‘feed’ to
one or the other sides in the war within. This is the subtle subtext of human life.
Whatever we want to achieve and whatever happens to us, hinges on the myriad
choices, chores, and doings of daily life. If we—at least in numbers that amount
to a critical mass—can summon the will and wisdom to conduct ourselves in the
dharmic or righteous way, we can still avert what David Wallace-Wells, in his
book The Uninhabitable Earth, calls the Great Dying, and save humanity from
the ignominy of being branded by posterity as the “only species to have minutely
monitored its own extinction”, to quote Sara Parkin.2
This book, like its predecessor, is trans-genre and not an easy read. But its
time has come. I can put my neck out and say what the great Greek historian
Thucydides said about his work: “My work is not a piece of writing designed to
meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last forever”. I do dream
that this input, however minute it might be, will contribute to bringing about
what Thomas Mann called a purer, more honorable way of being human.
Nearly eighty years since, we will do well to re-read what John Steinbeck
wrote: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow
2. Sara Parkin, green political activist and former member of the UK Green Party.
Epigraph
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here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our
success” (The Grapes of Wrath, 1939). My current offering reminds us that in
fact, such a ‘crime’ and such a ‘failure’ is ‘within’, that the present human story
is a self-made meltdown. And we will not be the only ones who will face the
fallout. It will be hundreds of future generations, an astronomical number of
humans like us, or similar to us. If we cannot reverse the present trend in the
war within and the forces of evil swamp the forces of good, then it is better that
we collectively roll off the cliff. Being humans we don’t know for sure but, in all
probability, we are not yet quite there and, recalling the last scene in the classic
1959 movie On the Beach, we can all still take comfort from the Salvation Army
street banner—“There is still time… Brother.”
Bhimeswara Challa
Hyderabad, India
September 2019

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We all know that no man is an island, and that nothing in life can be done in anyone’s life without the involvement of many others in some way or the other. We cannot live through a single day, even physically, without being obligated to a host of others. We seldom notice it, but in whatever we do, we constantly make each other, and merge the ‘I’ with the ‘We’.
If the purpose of life, as George Eliot once said, was to make life less difficult to those around us, be it one’s spouse or a servant or stranger, or even a murderer, then writing too serves a ‘purpose’. It is a way to encapsulate countless hours of one person’s sustained suffering, introspective reflection and inspired imagination into a few fleeting hours of laid-back reading by the rest of humanity.
What I wrote in the preface to my previous book, I cannot do any better: “If ‘no one is a stranger’ on the voyage of life, any potential reader would be my soul-mate, those who yearn, as Richard Bach (Jonathan Livingston Seagull) said, ‘to make life come to life’… we know that a book does not just happen”. In that preface, I also said, “Apart from the actual author and publisher, there are always unseen forces and invisible actors who facilitate the process and the product. Being invisible should not deny the right to be remembered; death should not annihilate deserved gratitude”. In that context, I expressed my gratitude to my beloved parents and siblings, “who gave me boundless love, without which any urge for creativity would have long been smothered”. I shall say the same again, and again. They are all ‘up there’ somewhere, save a sister, Kamakshi, waiting to envelop me in their embrace. And every day now seems too long; it is now a race between decay, debility, and death. And I hope the last wins.
But, among those who are ‘down here’, I must mention my family—my wife Nirmala, my son Ram, my daughter-in-law Margie, my grandson Varun, my daughter Padma and her ‘son’, the ‘divine’ dog Whiskey, truly the best of us. In particular, my wife’s silent and steadfast cooperation greatly helped me to keep writing for so long, through thick and thin, when many other more mundane things got neglected.
Like the earlier one, this book is also entirely the fruit of my own solitary travail and the offspring of the promptings of the unseen author. But among
What I Owe to Whom
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the things that made this practically possible, I must highlight and salute
the extraordinary and dedicated contribution of my editorial support, more
appropriately my collaborator, Vijay Ramchander. He was a thorough professional
as well as a person of the highest integrity, a rare blend these days. Without his
painstaking effort, this book, indeed like the previous book, would not have seen
the light of the day.