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

written several
millenniums ago that ‘In the Kali Yuga, people will seek only money. Only the
richest will have the power. People without money will be their slaves’. And even
more tellingly, ‘The leaders of the state will no longer protect the people, but
plunder the citizenry through excessive taxation’. There is hardly a moment in
our life when money ceases to be a factor in earning, saving, spending and even
more in thinking. We will have to rack our brains to think of anything bereft of
a money angle. And there is hardly a crime without a money-motive, and money
is a big factor in many suicides, even homicides, that occur these days. It is manThe
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made but it has become the most ‘finite’ of all finite resources and everyone is
short of it, individuals, business, countries and the material world.
Money is hydra-headed, each head sensitive to the purpose and
circumstance. It is salary when an employer compensates you for your work,
wages for your sweat; dowry if a father pays it to get his daughter married; bribe
if it is illegally paid to do a favor; dividend if a company pays it to a shareholder;
interest if a bank pays for keeping your money; donation if it is given to charity;
ransom if given to kidnappers; alimony if it figures in a divorce, and so on. In
multiple ways we discriminate race, caste, color, religion, ethnicity, but they all
vanish if one has ‘enough’ money. It gives respectability to everything we seek,
and every position and power—political, social, economic—comes within reach.
Making money do what we want, and not doing what it tries to make us do is
morality. In reality, man is now marginalizing morality and trying to overcome
mortality. When one does not have ‘money’, the only other alternative, as some
are discovering, is to go back to the body; use it to trade for money to live,
and to ‘make a living’. Mortality has been called the ultimate leveler in human
life; that all men are finally ‘reconciled’ in death. That whatever we achieve or
fail to achieve, rich or poor, powerful or powerless, acclaimed or anonymous,
everyone will end up the same way, become a cold corpse, which the living
hasten to destroy lest it linger and not let us live. Money is now threatening
to undermine that central tenet. If you are really rich you can afford to extend
your life span far more than that of others, if not to become immortal. Money
can make man do anything, even murder one’s own ‘near and dear’, a spouse,
one’s own child, a friend. And money by itself can do almost anything, can
empower a life of dignity, erase social deprivation, even save a life; or make us
greedy and gluttonous, erode sensitivity and compassion. Money and murder are
increasingly getting interconnected, and no ‘relationship’ is immune, intimate or
professional. Spouses have killed each other, children their parents, friends their
friends, business associates their colleagues, and so on, when greed turns deadly.
What are called ‘dowry deaths’ and ‘contract killing’ are murders for money.
The insatiability of money is such that no one feels he has ‘enough’ to satisfy his
desires, dreams, and delights. The ‘limit’ that worries our mind is not things like
‘limits to growth’. Everyone feels ‘limited’ by money, individuals, the ultra-rich
to the dirt-poor, corporations, even nation-states. It is at the heart of every crisis
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we face, environmental, economic, and moral. It is to have ‘more’ money that
we put poison into the air we breathe, into the water we drink, and into the
food we eat, and at the same time to become immortal. Fritjof Capra makes a
telling point when he says, “We accept ever-increasing rates of cancer rather than
investigate how the chemical industry poisons our food to increase its profits”.44
And yet, it is but a tool, an instrument, a means, and a medium, although of late
we have made it the end in itself.
Money occupies our mind but it doesn’t have a mind, at least not yet.
As of now, the master is the mind, what Swami Vivekananda described as a
demon-possessed, scorpion-bitten, drunken monkey. Buddhism uses the
psychological metaphor of ‘monkey-mind’. Adi Sankaracharya, in his famous
poem Bhajagovindam, called it mudhamati, the ‘foolish mind’. It is such a
‘monkey’ that controls our consciousness, and is at the helm of our life. If our
mindset, or as some like to say, ‘mindsight’, remains frozen about the ‘three
Ms’, and if consciousness remains static, then both ‘changes’—consciousness or
contextual—will remain static. Because, if we do not learn to deal with them
differently, one might say ‘spiritually’, then it makes no difference what else we
can do. We must also at once note another dimension. It is that the very place
and position of man in the cosmos has fundamentally changed. The human is no
longer merely another biological being. He is now an ‘ecological serial killer’,45
‘the deadliest force in the annals of biology’,46 a geological force. And humans are
“running geologic history backward, and at high speed”.47 In biologist Edward
Wilson’s words, man is a “geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere
and climate as well as the composition of the world’s fauna and flora”. That is
happening alongside another important ‘happening’. That very force that made
man ‘such a force’ has also biologically enfeebled him, as compared with his
ancestors,48 and the trend appears to be accelerating. For instance, we are told,
today’s ‘children are growing weaker as computers replace outdoor activity’.49
Not only our bodies but our brains too will become weaker with computers
and other gadgets doing much of what we used to do before, and they will
leave us even stupider.50 The irony is that we are trying to become more efficient
‘decision-makers’ and aiming to go ‘beyond the brain’ and, at the same time,
the ‘brain’ has come to the conclusion that being ‘beyond’ in situ is too much
of a bother and, in line with man’s lure of short cuts, it is easier to go external.
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And that also fulfills another craving of the human—the urge to mate or merge
with, or dissolve into something or someone like the divine or the beloved. Now,
we say the divine and the beloved are too troublesome, too opinionated, can
be too demanding, and in any case, life is short and we have no time to waste
on such loony pursuits. As a rebound and as an extension of our materialistic
mindset, that ‘urge’ is manifesting as the machine. For, unlike the ‘beloved’, we
can embrace it without being rebuffed, and unlike the ‘divine’, we can insult it
without inviting its wrath. The ultimate spiritual aim and end of all life, even
creation, is unity, merger, and dissolution, to lose one’s distinctive identity. It
manifests in many ways both spiritually and sensually. Prophets and wise men
aim at ‘dissolution’ to serve humankind. Some call transcendence spiritual
dissolution. The 5th-century Chinese philosopher Lieh-Tzu said that division
and differentiation are the processes by which things are created. Since things
are emerging and dissolving all the time, you cannot specify the point when this
division will stop. Indeed death is dissolution; we dissolve, or merge into the
elements. One such ‘sublime’ experience while we are alive is what we call ‘being
in love’—we say things like ‘I am you, we are the same one’; ‘I am thee also now.
You are me now’. We just want to dissolve, merge or vanish into the one we are
in love with. Man’s ultimate goal is the same: to dissolve into the divine. Indeed
that is the purpose of human birth, which, therefore, makes it very important
not to waste it, or ‘leave it empty-handed’. Modern man, exasperated with his
fellow-humans and disenchanted with the divine, has ‘fallen’ in love with his own
child: the machine, much like Pygmalion, the Greek mythological figure. That
process is called whole brain emulation (WBE) or mind-uploading—simulating
a human brain in a computer with enough detail that the ‘simulation’ becomes, for
all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness. Pope Francis
described this as turning human beings into ‘ghosts trapped inside machines’. The
apprehension that people might actually fall in love with their smart pet appliances
like ‘responsive robots’, with whom or with which they spend far greater amounts of
time each day than with humans, is now being taken seriously by psychologists and
social scientists. Incredible as it may seem, according to one study, men cannot
stay away from their smartphones for more than 21 seconds, while that time-lag is
57 seconds for women. John Lennon once said, “If everyone demanded peace
instead of television sets, then there will be peace”. Now, we should substitute
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‘smartphone’ for a TV set. And we tend to think that peace is for politicians to
worry about, not us. But the truth is that what we ‘demand’ depends on what
happens in the world within.
We need to ponder over where human creativity (technological in
particular) is headed. We have become so addicted to technological ‘appliances’
that life is unthinkable without them. In fact, the aim is to ‘exploit human
vulnerabilities to engineer compulsion’, to create an ‘app that both triggers a
need and provides a momentary solution to it’, to ‘cement into habit as users turn
to your product when experiencing certain internal triggers’.51 The underlying
idea and strategy is that ‘reducing the thinking required to take the next action
increases the likelihood of the desired behavior occurring unconsciously’. Clearly,
machines can never substitute a human partner for the deepest form of biological
love. But given man’s present muddled mindset and disillusionment with
what biological mating and marriage entail—temper tantrums, kids, divorce,
alimony, violence—he might well find that ‘romancing with the machine’ might
be the closest he can get to, to cater to his need for bonding, intimacy, and
companionship. So far, man had no choice, but among the many choices that
technology offers, is this one too, which is to end human monopoly over ‘benign
love’.
Technology is also messing up all the three ‘M’s and pushing humanity
headlong into murky, unchartered waters. Death is thus far the final finality,
and must be dealt with first among the three. It is also at the frontline of the
scientific agenda. It is to confront and defy nature and negate the three things
that nature has ordained for all animate life on earth: decay, disease, and death.
That we cannot escape it is exemplified by the lives of prophets. A particularly
good one is the life of the Buddha. On his way to becoming the Buddha, he
conquered the mighty Mara, which actually means killer, liberating himself from
the frailties and forces within him that rendered him mortal, and yet he too
suffered the pangs of old age, and finally died from disease. Even Lord Krishna,
revered as the complete personification of godhead, died stricken by the arrow of
a hunter due to mistaken identity or, as some say, to pay for an adharmic act in
his previous incarnation as Rama… Science is, in effect, saying that what avatars
and prophets and sages could not surmount, science can. Not only that, we can
have it both ways: we can be both ‘be dead’ and ‘be alive’, and even if a loved
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one is clinically ‘dead’ we can ‘virtually’ keep that person alive in a machine and
be able to interact with him or her, whenever we want! It is also claimed that
“the avatars would be created using a process called ‘photogrammetry’ which
can accurately reconstruct a virtual 3D shape of a human being from existing
photographs and video. Computer voice synthesis will take into account local
and regional accents to deliver a more accurate representation of what they
sounded like. The digital lifeform would also be linked up to social networks and
large databases so they would be kept ‘up to date’ with their relative’s activities
and could communicate with them about their day”.52 All this is still ‘sciencefiction’,
but by now we should be wary of such stuff; they can surprise and show
up. But all this once again raises the question: What constitutes a ‘person’ and
which of that is to be ‘uploaded’? Are we a clump of molecules moving and
interacting in a way to create what we call ‘Homo sapiens’, ‘brain’, ‘personality’,
‘you’, or is there an unknown X-factor? What about consciousness? Will that be
‘transference’ or ‘transformation’?
The Cherokee’s Two Wolves
But no new moral reconstitution will even remotely become probable unless we
go ‘within’ and shift the fluctuating fortunes of the ‘war within’, the greatest, the
longest and the most fateful of all wars. The idea that even as we fight external
wars we ourselves are