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

We want to control
through knowledge, through privilege and position. In every relationship, there
is an element of control. Through control, we exploit each other and it is innate
to every dimension of the human way of life. The fact of the matter is that we
virtually cannot live without exploiting someone or the other sometime or the
other; at least we should not heap humiliation—the feeling of being put down,
made to feel less than one feels oneself to be—not rob them of the dignity,
not to invade and violate their personal space. Deep inside our psyche, almost
everyone harbors ‘humiliation’. Wayne Koestenbaum (Humiliation, 2011) says,
“I have lived with humiliation all my life, as I think all human beings do”. WH
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Auden wrote in his work In Solitude for Company, “Almost all of our relationships
begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or
physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods”.
What Donald Klein calls The Humiliation Dynamic is, in his words, “a pervasive
and all too often destructive influence in the behavior of individuals, groups,
organizations, and nations… from an early age, inescapable”. As Klein puts it, it
is not only the ‘experience’ of humiliation but also the ‘fear of humiliation’ that
dominates human lives. It is implicit in every relationship of mutual dependency.
The fact is that there are many things we do in life which serve no purpose or
self-interest except to humiliate others and get some ‘kick’ out of it. Essentially it
is a show of power, of sadism. It can be belittling and berating and browbeating
of the defenseless. It can be as simple or ‘innocuous’ as raising one’s voice, finding
fault, admonishing, giving a dirty look, a withering glance; anything that hurts or
injures another person’s self-respect and sensitivity is humiliation. And much of
it comes from the near and dear; more from the ‘near’ than the ‘dear’. Prolonged
proximity removes the veneer we hide behind and oftentimes brings out the
worst in us. We become naked not only in the bathroom or bedroom, but also in
the immediacy of intimacy and that can rob one of respect. Power corrupts more
when the other person seems powerless. Imposing our will on anyone, even if for
‘their own good’ can trigger a feeling of humiliation. Gandhi said, “It has always
been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation
of their fellow beings”. But there is a catch here. Sometimes we may be thinking
we are honoring someone by our actions while in fact we are humiliating that
person. Gandhi himself is a paradox. He imposed his will on others including
his wife, and in one instance, coerced her to clean toilets. He might have been
nobly motivated, but was he right to make someone do what they did not want
to do? Perhaps there is no perfect answer. We do impose our will on someone or
the other, sometime or the other, knowingly or unknowingly, for good or bad
reasons. If no one tries to ‘control’ anyone else, does not impose their will on
others, there will be no conflicts, no exploitation, no violence, and no wars. But
that is as much an ideal as a violence-free world. But the difference is that while
violence is inherent in nature, à la the big fish eats the small fish, ‘control’ seems
to be endemic to the human species. Perhaps with few exceptions, other animals
kill their prey primarily for food, not to seek to control or humiliate or hurt for
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their own sake. But ‘exploitation’, like violence, need not be only physical or
materialistic. It can be—indeed it is more—psychological, mental, emotional.
Sexuality, Gender-neutrality, and the War Within
At a fundamental level we are caught between twin ‘realities’; our identification
with our physical self, and our urge to ‘connect’ with other humans. What we
call family, friendship, relationships, and society are means to couple the two.
Our sexuality is another instinctive drive towards the same end. Few areas of
human life appear as confusing, contradictory, and convoluted than sexuality. It
is at once the greatest mystery and the most magical. It is a ‘mystery’, as we really
cannot figure out what God primarily intended it to be, to amuse us or to do His
work of creation. It is ‘magical’ as we cannot decode how such a ‘messy’ act can
yield such ecstasy. It is all around but no one has ‘enough’. It is supposed to ‘free’,
needs no capital or investment, but it exacts a heavy price in every way, and kind,
we get it, on the marital bed or in the marketplace, straight or surreptitious.
Whether sex is like any other drive, desire or attraction, and if not, how it differs,
has long been discussed and debated both scripturally and scientifically. For
example, in Jewish law, sex is not considered shameful, sinful or obscene. Sex is
not thought of as a necessary evil for the sole purpose of procreation. Although
sexual desire comes from the yetzer hara (the evil impulse), it is no more evil
than hunger or thirst, which also come from the yetzer hara. In Hinduism too,
sex is not a taboo but sacred. Not only do many Hindu temples explicitly depict
sex—and the celebrated Kama Sutra is still on the frontline of erotic books—
but even the Upanishads have explicitly referred to it as an act of worship.
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for instance, refers to a woman’s lap as the
‘sacrificial altar’. More mundanely, or as a matter of fact, sex is sometimes
compared to other desires, attractions and basic needs. Marquis de Sade,
from whose name the words sadism and sadist are derived, wrote that ‘sex is
as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to
be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other’. But there are
obvious differences. We do not die if we are deprived of sex for a prolonged
period; but, on the other hand, the sensation of orgasm is a ‘little death’, which
the French call la petite mort.
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Whether it is pristine or profane, passion or instinct or impulse, drive or
urge, it is most creative (creates another human being) and destructive (sexual
jealousy is highly destructive), and acts as a kind of temptation that few can
resist. Even saints and religious men have been seduced by women. Many
powerful people and celebrities have confessed, or were later exposed. Some
highly creative people are known to be heavily sexual, raising the question if
there is any connection. Beside its outward attributes, sexuality is the closest
we can get to erase separateness. It is an unquenchable longing, to unite ‘flesh
and spirit’, to join another human being so intimately and intrusively that at
least momentarily the two become one, and, in so doing, become an instrument
of nature and to give life to another being. Charles Eisenstein says, “when we
humans engage in sexual intercourse, we recover, for a few moments, a state of
being that was once the baseline of existence in a time of greater union and less
separation”. Incidentally, we are now being told that it was not love that led to
sex, and that our sexuality has, literally, if you will, fishy origins, that as far back
as 385 million years ago, armored fish called placoderms, discovered, or stumbled
upon intercourse.60 Whoever might have started it first, after all these millions
of years and billions of copulations and procreations, we still have not figured
out if sex is sacred or simply a skill, whether it is doing god’s work of creation
or merely another bodily function. Sexual behavior is seamless, a driven desire
to ‘unbound’ oneself, to liberate oneself from the confines of one body and one
life. The great paradox of life is that we can go to the moon, cross the stars but
we cannot cross the barrier and boundary of our own body, but much of ‘being
moral’, being caring and compassionate requires precisely that: to go beyond and
beneath our body. And that is what ‘being in love’ means and empowers—to put
another human above us, to subordinate our pleasure and happiness to someone
else’s. Eisenstein says, “When we ‘make love’ we let down our boundaries on
many levels. The euphemism is appropriate, love being nothing other than a
release of the boundaries that separate us from another being”.61
It is the ‘sensual’ version of spiritual longing, for wholeness without
conscious awareness, a sharing of sexual energies to achieve ‘oneness’, and to ensure
the continuum of creation. What sexually we do instinctively and passionately,
we require supreme effort to replicate it in a social, non-sexual setting. When it
comes to sex we are less fastidious of these divisions, barriers, boundaries, and
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borders. All walls that create so much tension, intolerance, violence and hatred
do not matter, or become porous, when it comes to sex. Those whom we consider
‘inferior’, in terms of race, religion or faith, or ethnicity, or social status, whose
men we are prepared to slaughter, are welcome where sex, the most intimate
physical contact, is concerned. In war, men are killed, and women are raped,
and only then killed or held captive. Masters have gone to bed with their slaves,
including the great Thomas Jefferson. No one is an untouchable. Even someone
who is considered an ‘untouchable’, a Sudra in Hinduism, is not untouchable
where sex is involved. In that sense it is a leveler, a unifier. Those with whom we
might not even be willing to share a meal, we do not mind uniting with in bed.
We don’t mind deriving ‘pleasure’ from those we hate. And the ‘sex-goddess’
Marilyn Monroe simplified it “Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature”.
What then really did God/Nature intend? Did it create two sexes
primarily for sex? Could it not have found a more elegant way to tempt man
to multiply himself than virtually creating two ‘sub-species’, who had to spend
much of their lives trying to figure out how to deal, mate, and outflank each
other? Why is it so difficult to complement each other instead of copying? Is
there any hidden agenda? Is sex only heterosexual, as same-sex sex cannot make
babies? Is sex all physical, sensual, and orgasmic? Is it nature’s insurance to ensure
the uninterrupted cycle of creation? What is ‘natural’, or ‘unnatural’ sex? Maybe
nature wanted to have some fun at our expense, creating us individually with a
hidden hunger for unity, and then watching us struggle to satisfy our hunger, in
the process making an ass of ourselves. And to ensure that we never get ‘enough’
of it, or get tired of it, it has invested it with intoxicating recreational pleasure.
And having done that, it felt ‘safe’ enough to link it with procreation, as the
Bible puts it, as the way ‘to multiply’ mankind. Or, is there a more subtle, more
profound purpose beyond our depth in the cosmic scheme of creation? All these
questions are now assuming moral, political, nationalistic, and demographic
overtones. Sex between members of the same gender, long considered as illegal,
illicit, and immoral, are now accepted in many societies through the legalization
of marriage within the same sex, male or female. The question if it is meant
primarily for reproduction or recreation has become a hot button issue in many
advanced countries. On a global scale, it is generally believed that the current
human population of nearly 8 billion is excessive, and that to satisfy our appetite
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for natural resources at the current levels we might well need another earth. But
the very countries that advocate ‘population planning’, a euphemism to pervert,
or drastically reduce, future growth, and to reduce the overall numbers, are
aggressively urging their own people to increase their birth rates.
This issue, along with the climate crisis, dramatically illustrates the
dichotomy between national and global perspectives, that what might be good for
the world might not be good for a country, and when there is a clash the national
need prevails. And it underscores the ills of ‘nationalism’ and the imperative of
a strong and effective global institution whose decisions are mandatory. Many
‘developed’ countries are worried not only about declining birth rates but also
about changes in the ‘sexual-profile’ of their people. While on the one hand,
modern society is sex-suffused, many are starved of sex, which some say is more
than food-starvation. Some talk of ‘an epidemic of sexless marriages’. One
report goes on to say, “In the midst of a sex-saturated culture, overflowing with
dramatic images of the female anatomy, a new phenomenon has developed: men
losing interest