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

intelligence; perhaps even the cells
in our body. All ‘intelligences’ are designed to work synergistically for a human
life of harmony. Somewhere, sometime, things went horribly skewed, the mix
got messed up. And the power of ‘rational thinking’, or of the ‘left-brain mode’
of thinking, identified with critical thinking, logical reasoning and objectivity,
has come to dominate, or even monopolize, our conscious lives, at the cost of
other innate but dormant or underutilized capabilities like emotional thought,
intuitive insightfulness, and spiritual awareness. Consequently, man has become
a dysfunctional and destructive being. Unless we can rejig the ‘mix’ and configure
a new blend of our ‘intelligence, we will, as Eckhart Tolle says, “always end up
re-creating the same world, the same evils, the same dysfunction”.
But then the essential point is that we cannot behave like ants or bees
because we are human animals, not eusocial mammals, not even chimps. Just as
we cannot be a tiger or a leopard, so we cannot be an ant or a bee or a butterfly
or a bird. We can certainly learn from the way they submerge or sacrifice their
‘individuality’, and become, to borrow a phrase from René Girard, interdividuals,
for the good of the colony or hive, but we cannot do what a caterpillar can:
become a butterfly. That which is in the lowest, more accurately different, state
of existence, like the mineral, has no right to grumble, saying, “O God, why
have You not given me the vegetable persona?” In the same way, the plant has
no right to complain that it has been deprived of the attributes of the animal
world. And an animal cannot complain of the want of the human qualities.
Every form of life or existence is unique in itself, and has an irreplaceable place
in the theater of creation. In the Bible, it is said, “But who are you, a human
being, to talk back to God?” Shall what is formed say to the one who formed it,
“Why did you make me like this?” Does not the potter have the right to make
out of the same lump of clay some pottery for special purposes and some for
common use? What we should focus upon is how to optimize, harmonize what
we have, and who we are as human animals, to the last detail to achieve the goals
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and guideposts we set ourselves to achieve. We cannot ‘evolve’ into something
like a ‘cell in a giant social body’, from an individual into a colony, with a perfect
‘division of labor’. We cannot, either as individuals or as a species, be any other,
but we must be true to ourselves and be the best we can as we are. But what is
truly, unchangeably, exclusively human ‘capability’? It is difficult to codify as it
is, on the one hand, timeless and, on the other hand, changes from time to time.
And then we have different ‘capabilities’: physical, mental, spiritual and so on.
And it varies from person to person. Given all these difficulties, as a species we
must learn to emulate the behavior of ‘colony organisms’, and drastically reduce
conflict, enhance cooperation, develop and nurture a ‘hive mind’ or collective
consciousness’, a shared identity. Not knowing how to handle conflict has been
the source of strife and sorrow. Conflict is everywhere in nature. Conflict is both
internal and external. There is conflict in our consciousness, which is the war
within. In fact, it is this internal conflict in Arjuna’s consciousness that has given
us the great Bhagavad Gita. Externally, diversity means difference, and difference
leads to disagreement, and disagreement into argument, and argument into
acrimony, and acrimony into anger, and anger into, as the Bhagavad Gita says,
to loss of control over the senses and to ruination. It is self-righteousness, the
I-know-it-all and I-am-right feeling, that is the cause of conflict. And that does
not let us see the other or alternative point of view. That does not let us concede
or compromise or yield. Conflict becomes bitterness, violence, hatred, and war.
Conflict is now embedded in our mindset, now the prism through which we
view everything. Our consciousness itself is in a state of conflict and that is why
we have the war within.
Technology and the ‘War Within’
Whether technology per se is ethically inert or morally malevolent, its power and
potential has other implicit consequences that we barely take note of. The antitechnology
mass murderer Theodore Kaczynski (also known as the ‘Unabomber’)
explained in his manifesto: “Due to improved techniques the elite will have
greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be
necessary, the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the
elite are ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If
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they are humane, they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological
techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct,
leaving the world to the elite”. That scenario is certainly a possibility; so are
potential risks in technological advances and frontier technologies like genetic
re-engineering, nuclear power, and so on. But there are dangers in the current
‘low’ technologies also, indeed even in ‘primitive’ technologies. How we use any
technology, or any technique or tool, depends on who the user is and how it is
harnessed. To be fair, there are a number of thoughtful and spiritual persons who
think that modern science-based technology could do wonders to mankind and
that the much-dreaded ‘marriage’ of man and machine might be for the mutual
good. The Dalai Lama recently quipped, probably in a lighter vein, that he would
not rule out the possibility of one day reincarnating as a computer! He says that
man is also a ‘machine with a consciousness’. Now, if a man-made machine, with
man’s help, acquires something akin to what we describe as ‘consciousness’—
ability to feel emotions, for example—then will it transform into a ‘living entity’
like any of us? The question is not if technology, like everything in the universe
is God’s creation, and therefore spiritual. And not also, as the Dalai Lama says,
that man too is a ‘conscious’ machine. Both assumptions and inferences might
be true or false; it does not matter much. The essential question is: what kind of
‘consciousness’ might it have and how does it get it? If it is from man (probably)
and if its ‘consciousness’ is anything like what man has now (most likely), then
we are doubly-doomed. What kind of ‘machines’ we might make and how we
put them to use all depends on the state of human consciousness, particularly
of those who are on the frontline of scientific research and spiritual search.
We know that technology has not only been the defining force behind the
‘military-industrial complex’, but it has also unrecognizably altered the character
of war and made the enemy-land (there is no such thing as warzone anymore)
into a theater of massacre, an open-ended graveyard, a smoldering giant
burning ghat. Even ‘spirituality’ can be a negative force, if it is practiced by the
wrong people.
Everything we do, even how we harness human creativity, depends on
the state of the ‘war within’. A huge chunk of that creativity is not in the arts or
letters, literature or painting, but in technology. The debate whether technology
is double-edged or not, boon or bane, will never be settled. What is increasingly
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becoming apparent is that human consciousness, at the level at which it is
operating, seems more hospitable to its negative power because consciousness
itself is corrupted. As a result, technology is being put to use for elitist and
divisive and destructive purposes. It is widening the chasm between plutocracy
and the people, the elite and the masses to such an extent that some say that a
no-holds-barred global class struggle is inevitable, spearheaded this time not by
the working class but by the middle class. We are living at a time when serious
people are seriously saying that “there is not a single aspect that doesn’t have
the potential to be totally transformed by these technologies of the future”. The
decisive impact that technology will make on our future hinges on this epic
struggle inside. Our tireless and ceaseless endeavor should be to reinforce and
strengthen the ‘positive’ forces like love, caring, compassion, sharing, humility,
gratefulness, tolerance, and temperance that are caught in an epic struggle in our
consciousness. Some say that the real combatants are gods. They say, “There are
gods at war within each of us. They battle for the throne of our hearts, and much
is at stake”. This is why idolatry is the most discussed problem in the entire Bible.
Behind every such struggle that you and I have is a false god that is winning
the war in our lives. Don’t give in to the myth that gods are only statues that
people of other cultures or people of long ago worshipped. Pleasure, romance,
sex, money, and power are just a few of the gods that vie for our allegiance
in today’s society. Loss of self-control, both as individuals and as a species, has
always been man’s biggest problem, but never more needed or absent than now.
It is at the root of all problems, from casual sex to catastrophic climate change,
gluttony to the greenhouse effect, broken homes to social breakdown. No one
seems to be in control over their lives, emotions, feelings, desires, dreams, and
drives. The less control we have within, the more we need it outside. And that
lack of inner control is at the core of concern about our behavior. But there are
some who worry what might happen if we are able to gain control over ourselves,
that is, if we are able to intervene, meddle, and manipulate what goes on inside
our consciousness. If we are free to make ourselves however we wish to be, if we
are able to modify our motivations, what would we do? If we have the power, on
whose side in the ‘war within’ would we tilt towards? Would we become more
‘humanely’ human or more ‘inhumanly’ human, more compassionate or more
callous?
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The bottom line is that our ‘behavior’—which in practical terms means
the kind of things we do to stay alive, to share the living space on earth with
fellow-beings; to make a living, to amuse and entertain ourselves, to compete
and to progress—defies our claim to be a rational race, or as the species with
a carte blanche direct from God to rule over all life on earth. The irony, and
tragedy, is that no other species and no other man of any other time, with all the
dazzling add-ons at his elbow, is more ‘busy’ than man of this day and age. Yet
his life, after it is done with ‘being busy’, is more barren and bereft of ‘meaning’
than of any one before. Man has long wrestled with the question: Life being
‘given’—a blend of ‘divine beauty’, brutality, and barbarism—what then should
I do with myself? Carl Jung, in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections,
agonized over this question. He wrote, “I know only that I was born and exist,
and it seems to me that I have been carried along. I exist on the foundation of
something I do not know. In spite of all uncertainties, I feel a solidity underlying
all existence and a continuity in my mode of being”. He quotes Lao Tzu, “All
are clear, I alone am clouded”, and interprets it as Lao Tzu being a man with
superior “insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and
who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal
unknowable meaning”. He ends with a hope: “Life is—or has—meaning and
meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and
win the battle”. The battle, or the ‘war’, is in his own being, his ‘within’. If Jung,
with his great insight into the human psyche, was left with nothing more than
‘anxious hope’, what hope do we have?
Many, particularly the very young, often referred to as Gen-Y, are
experiencing the pangs of the terrifying gravity of inner emptiness, the ‘unbearable
lightness’ of heavy hopelessness, the dreary drudgery of ‘making a living’. And
many feel, looking at the coarseness of contemporary society, a numbing sense
of moral despair at the enticing trappings of our soul-less civilization. We are
more on the move than moving towards where it matters. We produce to discard,
and what we consume does no good to anyone. We ‘take’ and ‘take’, and ‘take’
everything that appeals to our senses, give no thought to how what we ‘take’
comes from, from where, and what it entails. If it is in the