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

means that you,
I, and we, they, each of us is as ‘significant’ as the cosmos. Even from a purely
‘power perspective’, mankind is far from insignificant; we now have god-like
powers to create life, as well as to possibly destroy all life on earth. And we are led
to hope that eternal youth—like a snake we might be able to shed our wrinkled
skin and don a youthful ‘second skin’37—and physical ‘immortality’ are within
grasp. At the least, we hope to ‘die young as late as possible’. All that still does not
make a difference to our spiritual comatose existence or cosmic insignificance.
The way to be fully awake and to surmount ‘cosmic insignificance’, and our
sense of irrelevance and everyday impotence, is by imbibing the spirit of ‘cosmic
consciousness’, which as Richard Maurice Bucke38 put it, is “a higher form
of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man”, which is more of
an intuitive knowing than a factual understanding. The Buddhist Nirvana is
sometimes described as nothing more than being awakened to the enlightened
nature of our consciousness. The Upanishads say, “those wise ones who see
that the consciousness within themselves is the same consciousness within all
conscious beings, attain eternal peace”. It comes very close to what William
James called ‘mystical experience’ or ‘mystical consciousness’. Swami Sivananda,
a 20th-century Indian spiritual guru, describes it: “This new experience bestows
new enlightenment which places the experiencer on a new plane of existence.
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
138
There is an indescribable feeling of elation and indescribable joy and bliss. He
experiences a sense of universality, a Consciousness of Eternal Life. It is not a
mere conviction. He actually feels it. He gets the eye Celestial… The little ‘I’
has melted. The differentiating mind that splits up has vanished. All barriers, all
sense of duality, differences, and separateness have disappeared. There is no idea
of time and space. There is only eternity. The ideas of caste, creed and color have
gone now”.39 Some call mystical the opposite of the ‘mundane’, on the analogy of
paranormal and normal. Some even say that mystical or paranormal experiences
are really ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’, and that the rest of us operate at suboptimal
or subnormal levels. People we variously call diviners, shamans, prophets, sages,
mediums, and inspired artists are some such persons. It is also said everyone has
such latent powers, but they lie dormant ‘within’.
Cosmic consciousness, in one word, is perfect awareness of the oneness of
life, the awareness that all living beings are parts of the cosmic body, and therefore
there is no such thing as inclusion or exclusion, separation or integration. It is not
an alien state; as Sivananda says, “it is an inherent, natural faculty of all men and
women”. But sometimes we feel like an ‘alien’ in a different sense. The Tibetan
Lama Tarthang Tulku says (Love of Knowledge, 1987) that the self lives in the
world like an illegal alien, always afraid that its identity will be questioned.40 It is
partly a reaction to this feeling of insecurity that makes us so possessive, predatory,
and exploitative in our attitude towards the earth and our fellow-humans. In our
behavior we are both ‘collectors’ and ‘correctors’: we ‘collect’ everything we can
lay our hands on, and we ‘correct’ everyone else... A prerequisite to a higher state
of awareness is that we must be able to rise above the limitation of everyday
sensory perception. The capability is already present in us. It is inactive, or nonfunctioning
in the majority of human beings on account of the force of avidya
or ignorance. It is a state of consciousness that prophets, rishis, messiahs, saints
and mystics have attained since time immemorial. It is that which separates
the rest from such realized souls. The first step to take, on the road to cosmic
consciousness, is to change our perception of our own selves, not as human beings
trying to have a cosmic experience, but as cosmic beings experimenting with
human existence. We not only ‘exist’ because we are ‘conscious’, but everything
in the cosmos, including we humans, are expressions of cosmic consciousness.
Such remembrance will also help us shed our sense of limitedness, insignificance
Musings on Mankind
139
and temporariness. However infinitesimally small or infinitely finite we might be
on the cosmic scale, and however miniscule human presence might be on earth
(less than 1%) in astronomical terms, “humans have become a force of nature
reshaping the planet on a geological scale—but at a far-faster-than-geological
speed”.41 “As species go down in our presence, we’re not only altering earthly
existence. We are also altering the very potential for earthly existence”.42 The
paradox is that while humans might be peripheral in the natural world, human
actions are not. Human beings have the capacity to influence physical reality
through intentional behavior; they are ‘elemental in their force’. As Mark Lynas
puts it, “Our collective power already threatens or overwhelms most of the major
forces of nature, from the water cycle to the circulation of major elements like
nitrogen and carbon through the entire earth system. Our pollutants have subtly
changed the color of the sky, while our release of half a trillion tons of carbon
as the greenhouse gas CO2 into the air is heating up the atmosphere, land, and
oceans”.43 It is important to mark the last more prominently, the ocean, about
which we scarcely spare a thought. Man is now turning his greedy gaze on the
ocean. We are told that China is planning a massive sea-lab 10,000 feet below
the surface of the sea. Perhaps of all the ravaging we are doing to nature, the
one to the oceans is the most worrying, as it could lead to the breakdown of the
‘mystical bond between man and ocean’. We should remember that three-fourths
of the oxygen going into our lungs comes from the ocean. The acidification of
our oceans—due to absorption of more than 20 million tons of carbon dioxide
from human activity every day—could eventually cause the loss of biodiversity,
as well as food and financial security for the entire planet.44 One of the prime
causes of the greatest extinction of our prehistory was, besides global warming,
the acidification of the oceans. Is it a curious coincidence that it is happening
now? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that current
carbon dioxide levels are highest in 400,000 years. Many seemingly innocuous
things we do as a part of technology-driven modern living like emails and tweets
also contribute via their high electricity consumption. A study has shown that a
single email is estimated to add about four grams of carbon dioxide equivalent
into the atmosphere. The bitter fruit of all this rapacity is this: whichever way we
might want to look, the truth is here to behold: pristine nature—creation—has
disappeared forever.
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
140
It is vitally important to dispel the delusion that man is a product of a
freak accident and wholly a terrestrial creature, and of no particular consequence
to the cosmos. That might be true if man is “a creature not of Earth alone, that in
both a spiritual and scientific sense we should regard ourselves as simultaneously
Earth citizens and ‘heaven dwellers’…”, and that we are “active agents of our own
evolution, capable of rationally directing—or misdirecting—our human and
planetary future”.45 The truth is that we are all ‘historical figures’ and everything
we do, even the minutest, is a part of the flux of history, the stuff of the stars.
That is why every choice is a cosmic choice.
Despite our delusions of grandeur and presumed preeminence, which
is getting chipped away every day by new discoveries, there has always been
a certain unease—‘something don’t feel right’46—about the way man makes
choices that affect fellow-humans, non-humans and nature. That ‘unease’ has
now grown into what is being described as an ‘existential angst’, a gnawing
gut feeling that the clutch of certitudes that sustained us for so long are passé,
and we wonder, ‘what good would living do us?’ Simone de Beauvoir aptly
describes: “Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of
their condition. They know themselves to be the supreme end to which all
action should be subordinated, but the exigencies of action force them to treat
one another as instruments or obstacles, as means. The more widespread their
mastery of the world, the more they find themselves crushed by uncontrollable
forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is created only to
destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his own life,
and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense
collectivity whose limits are one with the earth’s. Perhaps in no other age have
they manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this
grandeur been so horribly flouted”.47 Unable to give anything meaningful or give
up anything meaningless, not knowing what the core is and what is appearance,
always falling short of what they want to be, a growing number of people have
begun to doubt the validity and viability of their very existence. Essentially, we
‘cling’ to things we should discard and ‘crave’ for things that give momentary
elation and lasting sorrow. It is these two attributes—clinging and craving—that,
according to Buddhism, are like fuel to the flames of suffering. ‘Samsara’ is the
process, not a place, by which clinging gives rise to suffering; if the fuel supply
Musings on Mankind
141
is cut off, the flames abate and we attain nirvana. In fact, it was by ‘giving up’
all that—which we, lesser men, would cherish: privileges of a pampered prince,
comforts of heavenly palace, a devoted wife and the thrill of an infant son—
that Siddhartha transformed himself into Gautama. Craving, we associate with
material objects, but the more pervasive ‘burning longing’ in the modern world
is for affection and love, even attention and appreciation. What most people
fear most in life is rejection, a cause of a great deal of violence in the world. But
our material way of life constantly replenishes the fuel of a ‘comfortable life’. As
a result, we find ourselves in what Viktor Frankl calls ‘existential vacuum’, or
what philosophers and psychologists call ‘existential angst’, or mystics call ‘abyss
experience’. Whatever term we might use, it encompasses a canvas that covers
emotions, feelings or thoughts that include deep disquiet, a sense of a ‘sinking
heart’, anxiety, anguish, fear, dread, despair about not only one’s own existence,
but of the world at large. Are we in the death throes of a doomed species? Is this
finally it, the much-anticipated or feared ‘end of the world’? And, are we secretly
happy that, at last, it is getting over?
Above all else, this malaise, this state of consciousness is what afflicts
modern man. Almost everything else is but a symbol and a statement. It is at
once a fountain and a fulcrum, cause and consequence. The irony is that what
should have been an introspective inward odyssey—to know what our priorities
should be in a lifetime, and how we should harness our time and space in this
life—this spiritual quest is now turning out to be a life-threatening emotion and
a suicidal drive. Many young people are taking their lives, desperately groping for
a meaning to their existence, unable, as a Christina Aguilera lyric laments, to find
a way to ‘dry their tears’ and become ‘free to fly’, or ‘find a place where nothing
is harder than it is’. They are coming to the conclusion that ‘life meant nothing
to them’. Many people, disoriented and disconnected and dysfunctional, find
life, in the words of Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 200),
a ‘monumental, grotesque joke’, and that the ‘unreasoning barbaric purity’ of
our ‘uncivilized’ days were better. They are disenchanted with what they see in
the mirror and disgusted with what they see around; they feel that their future is
slipping out of their grasp and lose themselves, in the words of William Thomson
“in an orgy of consumption, crime, and immorality”.48 They may savor the
good things of life, but they do not like the way they are now accessible. What
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
142
Thomas Freidman called ‘merger of globalization and information technology
revolution’ is also leading to what he called the ‘globalization of anger’. We may
add intolerance, bigotry, extremism, and racism too. Contrary to the expectation
that the more people communicate and get to know each other, the more they
will be accommodative of differences, what is happening is the opposite. It
may well be that globalization has had a perverse effect because that is what we
really are—the more differences we can discover, the easier it is to exploit. That
merger, through mediums like television, Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn,
etc., has also globalized ‘greed’; everyone is now exposed and naked to every
enticement, to the same temptation. Everyone