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

a war zone, that two sides of our own psyche fight for
supremacy, has long been a part of ancient wisdom and indigenous folklore.
Notable among these is a Cherokee story, in which a grandfather tells his grandson
that inside each of us, a constant battle goes on between two wolves. He says
that one ‘wolf ’ is Evil: it is anger, jealousy, greed, malice, resentment, inferiority,
lies, and ego. The other ‘wolf ’ is Good: it is joy, peace, love, hope, humanity,
kindness, empathy, and truth. Hearing this, the boy ponders for a while and
asks which wolf will eventually win. The grandpa replies, ‘The one you feed’.
In another version, the grandpa says, “If you feed them right both will win”,
because a starving wolf will become more dangerous, but ‘make sure the ‘good
wolf ’ is fed more’. This is how the battle unfolds in our ‘within’. We feed the
‘wolves’ inside us by the way we live, the way we relate with other living beings,
and that in turn, depends on who calls the shots inside us. We must realize that
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every day we make choices, important choices that are liable to be overlooked
as being trivial—and these choices define us; they constitute the ‘feed’ to the
wolves. They are a statement of who we choose to be in this life and what impact
we will have on the world around us. Philosophers like Marcus Cicero put it
differently: “the enemy is within the gates; it is with our own luxury, our own
folly, our own criminality that we have to contend”. We are left bewildered by
our own behavior. We could discuss and debate on moral principles and ethical
objectivity and on how to anchor our conduct, and if that should be the greatest
good of the greatest numbers or by the application of a universal ‘litmus test’,
or by balancing conflicting moral obligations and duties. That is futile as we
have known all along because the methods and means we mobilize for the task
are themselves inadequate, even improper. That is why most of our choices and
decisions are flawed. For, the real ‘choices’ and ‘decisions’ would already have
been made in the cosmos ‘within’ before we get down to it. It is like trying to
put a Band-Aid on an internal bleed, or closing the stable door after the horses
have bolted. If we are to find a way forward and make man a better being and
even to make earth a less endangered planet, we must shift our gaze within and
recognize that the most seminal of all struggles is in our own self. The nearest
yet farthest space is inner space; the most impenetrable barrier is the periphery
of our very body. The tragedy is that we all have the answers to all our questions
within ourselves; it is just that we haven’t learnt how to get in touch yet. It is
like starving with the food we need in a locked room next door, and the key
lost in the ruins nearby. We have to find the lost key or break through the wall.
For that we must ‘go within’. A Buddhist saying goes, ‘Look within, thou art
the Buddha’. Marcus Aurelius said, “Look within. Within is the fountain of the
good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig”. To dig within or, in Yeats’
poetic phrase, ‘entering into the abyss of himself ’, or in the words of Tennyson,
‘temple-cave of thine own self ’, is a recurrent refrain, and a central message in
all religions. Jalal ad-Din Rumi described it as the ‘long journey into yourself ’;
and for the poet-philosopher Iqbal, it was to ‘pass from matter to spirit’. Carl
Jung said, “Your vision becomes clear when you look inside your heart. Who
looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens”. Many simply call it ‘spiritual
journey’, the journey which, as human beings, we are expected to go on, a journey
not to go somewhere but, in Aldous Huxley’s words, “in the dissipation of one’s
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own ignorance concerning one’s self and life”, which is “the finding of God as a
coming to one’s self ”. It is only through such a journey that we can achieve the
greatest of all conquests, the conquest of the self, and the highest of all freedoms,
the freedom of one who has overcome himself. It is only through such a venture
that it will become possible to, as ancient wisdom exhorts us, ‘rouse thyself by
thyself ’. It is only by undertaking, at least consciously choosing to ‘go within’
that we can discover the kind of alchemy we need most of all, the ability to
cleanse our consciousness.
Some evolved souls experience ‘divinity’ by cultivating what has been
called a ‘two-fold existence’. Swami Mukteswar, the guru of Paramahansa
Yogananda, explains that “saints who realize their divinity even while in the flesh
know a similar two-fold existence. Conscientiously engaging in earthly work,
they yet remain immersed in an inward beatitude”. He described the interior of
our being as an ‘Eden within’. It is also the darkest and brightest of places; dark
as it harbors of our negative impulses, and bright as it not only offers a home to
our positive feelings and emotions but also to the Almighty. According to the
Upanishads, transcending the bounds of knowledge into the realm of realization
is the spiritual journey man is born to embark upon. ‘Bounds of knowledge’, in
effect, means overcoming or overpowering the hold of the brain/mind over our
consciousness. This is the trick or prank that nature has played on us. On the one
hand, it has given us the marvel of a brain, which has enabled and empowered
us to outflank, outsmart, and prevail over physically much stronger species. On
the other hand, it has ensured that our overwhelming dependence on this very
‘marvel’ keeps us confined to those very ‘bounds of knowledge’ that we should
cross to fully realize human potential. And, as William James noted, we live ‘halfawake’
and ‘habitually fail to use powers of various sort’.
Mind Over Mind
The key is to go ‘beyond’ our five senses, which, as the scriptures never tire of
telling us, hold us captive. They say that unless we can subdue, if not master, our
senses, we cannot make any significant spiritual advance. Some commentators
say that the secret of the Bhagavad Gita was that Lord Krishna was exhorting
Arjuna to pick up his gandiva, his mighty bow, not so much to fight the Kauravas
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arrayed on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, but actually to fight with his five
‘enemies’ inside. But these five are themselves not free; they are captives of the
mind. The mind is a major constituent of our consciousness. The other major
constituent is heart intelligence. Neuroscientists have recently discovered that
there are over 40,000 nerve cells (neurons) in the heart alone, indicating that
the heart has its own independent nervous system—sometimes called ‘the brain
in the heart’. In addition, the heart has an electromagnetic energy field that is
far greater than that of the brain, and this field can be measured up to 10 feet
beyond the physical body. This provides support for the spiritual teachings that
tell us that humans have energy fields that constantly intermingle with each other,
enabling healing (or negative) thoughts to be extended and exchanged. The heart
is increasingly being seen not only as the organ that keeps us alive but also as the
one whose intelligence is independent of the brain, and the one that keeps us on
the moral path. It is, in fact, the imbalance between the brain and heart that has
warped human personality. The war within is also then a fight between the heart
and brain for control of consciousness. One of the most important challenges
both spiritualism and science are concerned with is how to enhance the role
of heart intelligence and diminish that of the brain/mind. At the same time
research is also underway to boost brain power and to acquire ‘mind control’
(called sama in Sanskrit). While the scriptures have talked of ‘mind-control’ as a
spiritual tool to control one’s own behavior, science is now trying to break into
other people’s minds, to manipulate their thought processes and induce them to
do what others want them to do.
Man has long sought the power of mind over matter. Mark Twain
quipped, “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t
matter”. Now, man is seeking the power of the mind over mind. It is an awesome
power. Politicians, corporations, industrialists, even terrorists want it to achieve
their ends. Politicians want it to govern without dissent, to get elected and reelected.
Corporations and managers want to improve worker productivity and
to earn more profits. Terrorists want to penetrate the minds of their recruits to
turn them into ‘killer robots’. However, we must realize that if mind-power gets
more potent, then the ‘negatives’ will receive more nourishment and become
stronger. But let us not overly get carried away with this dichotomy about the
‘goodness’ of good and the ‘badness’ of evil. The ‘negatives’ are as essential as the
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‘positives’. Indeed we would have been extinct long ago in their total absence. A
lot of people think like Mr. Spock (the half-human, half-Vulcan character of the
television serial Star Trek), that some people become exceptional leaders because
it is their negative side which makes them strong, that their evil side, if you will,
properly controlled and disciplined, is vital to their strength. While clearly it
is our mind-power that drives our lives, we are also told that humans have, or
have had, finer faculties. These are variously called intuition, the sixth sense,
paranormal powers, occult energy, psychic abilities, anomalous experiences, and
so on. Some theosophists say that such powers, latent but now dormant, are not
supernatural or abnormal but natural; and the layer at which we are functioning
instead is subnormal and unnatural. We are below par, below our potential.
They predict that such game-changing capabilities will one day be used as
a natural means of cognition and navigation, and once that happens, it will be a
giant step towards human spiritual transformation. But that depends on the state
of our consciousness. It is also generally believed that the locus of these intuitive
powers is the human heart, which is a tremendous source of intelligence, energy,
and memory independent of the brain. What happened, however, in these
modern times is that as the brain grew bigger and tightened its hold on man, the
heart went into enforced eclipse and became simply a pump that we only want
to keep ticking without ever stopping. That, in turn, has disturbed the inner
equilibrium and strengthened the negative forces in the internal war, which
has corrupted, if not conquered our consciousness. In his book Shambhala: The
Sacred Path of the Warrior, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche says, ‘It is not what you
fight against that matters as much as knowing what is worth fighting for. Wake
up and dream’.
The Quicksand ‘Within’ the War Within
The war within, unlike other wars that end at a certain time with a victor and
a vanquished, is a continuous continuum, and will never come to a definitive
closure. It is a war with millions of mini-wars, or little battles that are fought
every day, every hour or every minute, in which there is a transient winner. Such
is the level of our ignorance that what we are surmising about the war within is
actually internalizing what is happening in the world outside. That is the basis
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for the premise that it is an epic struggle between good and evil. We may not
know much but we do know enough to know that what goes on deep down
inside, shapes what we are, and how we behave, and it has a vital bearing on
what goes on in the world beyond our bodies. It is this war that decides if we will
rise up to our noblest potential or go down to the lowest, meanest depths. What
we call our ‘behavior’ is purely a reflection, indeed a mirror image, of the seesaw
battles with fluctuating fortunes. How we behave, how we act and react are all
mini manifestations of the state of the war at that point and time. We do not see
the battles or the rubble; we don’t feel it or experience it; we hear no rumblings of
guns blazing, or the shouts of the winner or the screams of the loser. Life goes on
with innumerable chores and choices, delights and disappointments, triumphs
and tragedies and all the while we think these are all our doings—of our