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

There are several other individuals who anonymously assisted
me in subtler ways, like the helper at home, the driver on the road or the friend
in need.
Indeed for anything to be accomplished, many people contribute, whose
very existence we might not be even aware of, bringing to mind the grace that
Buddhists offer as a prayer before a meal: “Innumerable beings brought us this
food. We should know how it comes to us.” A book is no less.
Last and most important, I would be committing one of the panchamahapatakams
(most heinous sins) characterized in Hinduism—ingratitude—if I do
not place on record my profound gratitude to the divine ‘Author’ who handpicked
me to be his human scribe in the writing of this book and made sure my
life does not end entirely in vain.
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The Twin Questions and Twin Inabilities
Why can’t I be good? Why do I do bad? Such angst-filled questions and reflective ruminations have, ever since man became self-aware, crossed the minds of many among us, not only saints and rishis, epic heroes, and moral philosophers but even evil geniuses and plain folks. Notable among them is Saint Paul, acclaimed as one of the authors of the New Testament,1 Saint Augustine, the author of The City of God,2 and Sage Veda Vyasa, the author of the great Indian epic Mahabharata, which, it is often said, is the last word on the nuances of ethical dilemmas that harass human life.3 And the Pandava prince Arjuna, a central character in the same epic, asked Lord Krishna, “Why is a person impelled to commit sinful acts, even unwillingly, as if by force?” What is strange is that Arjuna’s arch enemy and villain, Duryodhana, also strikes a similar refrain and confesses, “I know what is dharma,4 but am not able to practice it. I know what is not dharma, but I am not able to keep away from it.”5
In our own times, Gandhi, the ardent advocate of ahimsa or non-violence, lamented, “What evil resides in me?” From Arjuna to Saint Paul to Gandhi, no one has been able to come to terms with who they seemed to be from the outside, and who they felt they really were deep within their own better selves. In the words of Ralph Barton,6 “the human soul would be a hideous object if it were possible to lay it bare”. They (and all of us, too) cannot understand how they could be ‘who they did not want to be’, and, worse, felt compelled to do what they hated to do. We also don’t understand why, when the ideals and imperatives of life are to be cooperative, compassionate, loving, and selfless, we are so competitive, callous, aggressive, and selfish. As Carl Jung noted, “Unfortunately, there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be”.7 Jung aptly sums up the tragedy of the human condition and simplifies the direction of our aspiration and effort—try to do on the whole, more good and less bad in whatever we do routinely and reflexively. The primary reason why even great saints have been frustrated is due to the fact (which this book highlights) that we have not connected it to the war within.
The Beginning
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Like it or not, we have a horrifying history of avarice, aggression, hatred,
rape, torture, murder and war; a penchant for deeds so shocking and nauseating
that the eternal question of ‘Why?’ seems heartrendingly inexplicable. This, in
fact, was what Sage Vyasa was lamenting about: “When all the good things we
want (wealth, pleasure, liberation) we can get by being good, why do we humans
choose the bad way?” The answer perhaps is because the bad way is the easier
way, the way of human nature. Some prefer to call human nature the ‘human
condition’, some others call it a malaise or malady, an impediment to overcome
to become whole. Statements like ‘humanity must free itself from the human
condition’ are commonplace. The awful awareness that any of us can be wicked
without will, that we harbor inside not just little weaknesses and innocuous
foibles, but a directly positive demonic dynamism, has been traumatic and
deeply unsettling. It is a terrible thing; our soul is in constant flux, we live in
fear of what we might do any moment, which temptation might turn out to
be too much, and what circumstance might make perfectly ‘honorable’ people
do utterly dishonorable things. And we have no control over own competence,
our own creativity can be both awesome and awful. For the first time in human
history, we face a wrenching question: what are we all capable of and, even more,
what are we capable of being induced or tempted to do? At the heart of our
gnawing yearning—and gaping shortcoming—is to bridge the chasm between
one man and another. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, “Identify myself with my
fellow, and I feel that I am, so to speak, in him, it is in order not to suffer that
I do not want him to suffer. I am more interested in him for love of myself ”.8
To a large extent, it all comes down to why we have become, in the words of
Jeremy Griffith (Freedom, 2017), extremely tortured, disfigured, soul-dead, and
furiously angry real human beings.
Ezra Pound once pronounced, “All ages are contemporaneous” (The Spirit
of Romance, 1910). Similarly, all serious questions are contemporaneous. And
today’s ‘contemporariness’ is infinitely more complex than the days of Rousseau
or Pound, let alone St. Paul or Sage Vyasa. And that includes a fundamental
change in the content and context of ‘being human’. Historically, we have not
found any ‘serious answers’ for any serious question, for the robust reason that
addressing them requires us to tread the territory of thought beyond thought, a
kind of candid introspection we have been dreading to do. What is strange and
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surprising is that, in our implicit acquiescence of evil as a permanent characteristic
of our finite existence, we have tended to forget the existence of the world of the
‘good within’, what Jack Kornfield calls ‘secret goodness’ (The Wise Heart, 2008).
Why it is ‘secret’ is hard to fathom; indeed, one of the most intriguing and
unexplainable things about the human hallmark is why it takes such a struggle
to show goodness, while it is so common for the human to be gross. So much
so, even when we do good, we rarely feel that good, as much as we don’t feel
bad when we do bad. Fact is, we must be mad about doing good to do good,
but bad we can do with much ease. Why evil is so shameless and good so shy is
hard to understand. It may be because the good we do is subtle, suffused, and
silent, while evil action is direct, stinging, and sharp. And we must never forget
that, as Daniel Deronda (in George Eliot’s 1876 novel by the same name) says,
“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love… and make no effort to
escape from”. And the evil we denounce in our shambolic world is nothing but
our refusal to see it as a reflection of our own self in others. Henry Wood says,
“the highest attainment to be sought is the incapacity to see evil”.9 And, evil
is always only relative to good; but, paradoxically, if we refuse to perceive and
resist it as evil, then it becomes evil absolute and utterly sabotages the very man
who wants to live with it. What is missing is that we inexplicably ignore our
own ordinary goodness; we fail to see that magnanimity is as natural to us as
monstrosity. That is why the lure of evil is so hard to resist. It is also because
it is embedded impersonally in the institutions and conditions of our social,
industrial, technical, and general life.
And then, we have what Herbert Marcuse (1965) once called ‘repressive
tolerance’ in our civic virtue, a tool for maintaining the status quo and the current
class power structure. Evil appears anonymously in our corrosive contemporary
culture not only as injustice, indifference, and intolerance, but even as obscene
affluence in an interpersonal realm; and it appears so insidiously that nobody
can be held directly liable or responsible. And that ‘anonymity’ allows us to do
evil while still feeling good about ourselves. Anyone can be a wolf in a sheep’s
clothing; even more unnerving is how everybody knows that it is a wolf but
pretends not to know. Because we fear what we might actually see. One could
always become the other; one is forever hounded and haunted. Interpersonal and
invisible evil10 has never been so pervasive and penetrative as it has been over the
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past century. It is so perilous that it puts the planet itself on the line. Man has
always struggled with the question of how to feel connected with another man
as a way to stay united, given the fundamental fact that we see, hear, and touch
another person but cannot actually ‘experience the experience’ of that person. As
JK Rowling11 pointed out, “we touch other people’s lives simply by existing”—
how, is the test of our character. We might also add that our existence itself is
made possible by others’ sacrifices. We come into the world separately and go
out separately. The challenge is to ‘internalize’ others in ways that counteract our
proclivity to scapegoating, and satiating our nihilistic and narcissistic impulses.
The gap between ‘we’ and ‘others’ is now a murderous divide. For, that which
we cannot ‘internalize’, we annihilate. But first, we must learn to ‘internalize’
ourselves. For that we must shift our gaze from the distant stars to our deep soul.
Contemporary evil, which is now primarily mediated by and incarnated
through plutocracies, technocracies, bureaucracies, and corporations, far
outweighs the classical evil perpetrated by individual humans, which captures
headlines and breaking news. It has less to do with what we do, and more with how
we live. And it depends on how the deed affects the environment. Nothing can be
deemed moral if it has an adverse impact on the environment. Evil is so detached
from the doer and so deeply impregnated in how we do anything that, as Andrew
Kimbrell (The Human Body Shop, 1993) points out, “The very idea of our society
being characterized by masses of evil people seems somewhat comical”. All in all,
there is a striking paucity of modern Mephistopheleses”.12 It is debatable if our
serial killers and school-shooters and church and mosque-bombers and childrapists
and air-polluters qualify to be ‘modern Mephistopheleses’, or if they come
anywhere close to John Steinbeck’s character Cathy Ames, whom he describes
as a woman “as close to pure evil as one is likely to get this side of hell” (East of
Eden, 1952). But, even if it were not so, we are dangerously drifting to the place
to which Satan’s choice inexorably led in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “All Good to me
is lost… Evil be thou my Good”. It is because evil is our good that even when
we do evil we think we are being good, and, evil “has become the grey eminence
infiltrating all areas of human existence”.13 Still the bottom line is that both good
and evil co-exist with equal legitimacy in life and in nature. It is interesting to
note that in Paradise Lost, Milton establishes good and evil as constantly shifting
forces that both God and Satan seem to mobilize in opposition to each other.
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Some scholars even say that “the conflicting discourse between the two forces
redefines Heaven’s God as a being capable of evil, and Hell’s Satan as a creature
seemingly capable of good”.14
In turn, the moral quandary inherent in the ‘twin-questions’ has gained
added relevance and greater rigor than ever before. Indeed, few actually agonize;
many think that being good is no good for anything good; and being bad is not
bad, certainly better than being dead. Perhaps more than either good or bad, or
rather cutting across both, effectively we are deemed dead to all things but greed.
And we now have an entirely new dimension to good and bad. Unlike in earlier
times, everything man does affects the planet, sadly not for its good. Plunder
and predation of the planet are the bedrock of our civilization to such an extent
that many feel that nothing short of a radical roll back, if you will, can save the
planet. It does not mean we have to turn our backs on industry, agriculture, and
technology and go barefoot or back into the caves. It means that we need to
evolve what