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

larger good should
prevail over the lesser need. That was why the grandsire and ‘godly’ Bhishma,
who was duty-bound, fought for the evil side and justified his own ‘unfair’ defeat
as his penance, and as necessary for the safety of Hastinapura, his motherland.
It was Bhishma, not only Krishna, who could have prevented the war had he
forsaken his vow of obeying whoever sat on the throne of Hastinapura. Bhishma
held his personal honor higher than what was best for society. That was why,
despite being a great man and despite having the gift of choosing his own death,
he had to experience such a painful death, lying on a bed of arrows for 58 days,
with the arrows protruding from his own body. Bhishma’s moral quandary holds
lessons for us. It means in our own daily life, where we all play limited roles, as
employees or workers, in large organizations, we are still morally responsible for
the final outcome, based among others on our own contribution and work. It
means who you work for is as important, if not more, as what you actually do.
In other words, even if you have no control over what you do, whatever you do
in your own narrow niche carries moral accountability.
It was said that where there is dharma there is Krishna, and where Krishna
is there is victory. The Kurukshetra, both in mythology and in the popular mind,
symbolizes the victory of dharma or righteousness and justice over adharma, evil
and injustice. The first verse of the Gita refers to the Kurukshetra as the dharmakshetra,
or ‘the field of dharma’. One wonders how a place of war, bloodshed,
and massacre can be called a holy place. The implication is that nothing is either
good or evil per se, nothing is sacred or sinful on its own. Everything is relative,
contextual; even mass killing. It is the intent and the purpose that determine
what it is. But then, who determines? In the minds of both opponents waging the
war, it was ‘justified’ and ‘necessary’; or else there would have been no war. And it
does mean that at times the ends do justify the means. And Kurukshetra was not
just the location of the brutal carnage. It is also the birthplace of the Bhagavad
Gita, about which the great Adi Sankara said, “From a clear knowledge of the
Bhagavad Gita, all the goals of human existence become fulfilled”. Albert Einstein
said, “I have made the Bhagavad Gita the main source of my inspiration and
guide for the purpose of scientific investigations and formation of my theories”.
In turn, it was expounded by Lord Krishna to help the prince Arjuna to ‘win’ his
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own ‘war within’—between the forces of doubt, despair, demoralization, apathy,
and moral ambivalence, and the forces of resoluteness, decisiveness, ethical duty,
and moral clarity—so that he could wage and win the war between dharma and
adharma, between good and evil, in the external world.
Gandhi called the Gita an “Allegory in which the battlefield is the soul,
and Arjuna, man’s higher impulses struggling against evil”. Swami Vivekananda
further remarked, “This Kurukshetra war is only an allegory. When we sum up
its esoteric significance, it means the war which is constantly going on within
man between the tendencies of good and evil”. We must remember that all the
characters are flawed one way or the other, and the war is not for the triumph of
flawless good over absolute evil, but of the lesser evil over the greater evil. And as
Carl Jung noted, “in the last resort there is no good that cannot produce evil, and
no evil that cannot produce good”. Inside each one of us there is a Kurukshetra;
and all the characters in that epic are also within each of us: a Dhritarashtra
(willfully blinded by moha, undue attachment), a Duryodhana (knowing what
is right, but unable to resist the wrong due to jealousy), a Sakuni (scheming and
trying to settle scores), a Karna (noble at heart, but ruined by misplaced loyalty),
an Arjuna (righteous but wavering), a Dharmaraja (noble but vulnerable), a
Kunti (virtuous but fearful of society), a Draupadi (who was born through fire,
whose humiliations act as a trigger for the battle of Kurukshetra). And perhaps
a mini-Krishna, too. No character is flawless, just as no human can be. Which
particular character, or a mix of characteristics, manifests at what time is hard to
tell. At the end of the Kurukshetra, what remained were the decimated Kauravas,
a despondent Dharmaraja, the bereaved Pandavas, a ‘cursed’ Krishna, and a river
of blood. And Krishna justified all that, and even the use of unfair means, for the
triumph of dharma. It is sometimes said that great wars take place to reduce what
is called ‘bhoobharam’, the burden of Mother Earth. If that be the case, and if a
horrendous war like the Kurukshetra was required then, in the Dwapara Yuga,
what might be needed now, in this Kali Yuga, the most immoral of all yugas, with
most of over 7.7 billion humans choosing the path of preyas (pleasure) over the
path of sreyas (goodness)?
The archetypal meaning is that within each of us a battle rages between
selfish impulses that ignore the claims of justice and justness, and a realization
that ultimately we are all connected in a unity that embraces all humanity and
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the whole world. Arjuna is our conscious mind, which must make the choice
of how we will live. The wicked cousins are our impulses to self-centeredness,
lust for wealth and avarice, and anger and hatred. Krishna is the divine essence
within us, our higher Self, which is always available to rein in the horses of
our feelings and thoughts, and to guide us in the battle of life, if we will only
surrender and seek that help. It tells us that we each have within ourselves the
answers to all our questions and confusions. We only have to call upon that
inner power to discover who we are, what we can trust, and how we should act.
Sri Aurobindo compared Arjuna to a ‘struggling human soul’. The Kurukshetra
must be viewed as a gripping and gory battle between dharma and adharma, good
and righteousness and evil. Just as the Pandavas and Kauravas were first cousins,
so are our inherent ‘tendencies’. Like the Kurukshetra, our ‘war within’ too is
a fratricidal war, both are endogenous and both are legitimate. In the spiritual
sense, as Swami Nikhilananda says, “Arjuna represents the individual soul, and
Sri Krishna the Supreme Soul dwelling in every heart. Arjuna’s chariot is the
body. The blind king Dhritarashtra is the mind under the spell of ignorance, and
his hundred sons are man’s numerous evil tendencies. The battle, a perennial one,
is between the power of good and the power of evil. The warrior who listens to
the advice of the Lord speaking from within will triumph in this battle and attain
the Highest Good”. At the end of the battle, the ‘evil’ Kauravas were defeated and
destroyed and the ‘virtuous’ Pandavas, led by Yudhishthira ascended the throne
of the Hastinapura kingdom. In that battle, the real ‘hero’ or the ‘Sutradhari’ is
Lord Krishna, who, without himself bearing arms guides the Pandavas to victory
through a variety of ruses. How do we apply that principle to our time and age?
We face two moral imperatives. On the one hand we do see raw and ravenous evil
even in our daily lives; on the other hand, our moral choice-making has become
extremely complex with competing priorities and claims: family, professional,
social, national, economic, ecological, religious, and so on. The human mind
has never been good at harmonizing conflicting obligations; it is now all at sea.
The more perilous development is that we are unable even to separate ‘evil’ from
‘good’. Thomas Merton says, “The greatest temptations are not those that solicit
our consent to obvious sin, but those that offer us great evils masking as the
greatest goods”.64 And the ‘self-righteousness’ of individuals, races, religions,
and nations is a primary source of a lot of evil. Our ‘righteousness’ about selfThe
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righteousness is awesome, blinds us to others’ righteousness, and breeds conceit
and callousness and robs us of a robust sense of guilt. We must also not forget
that ‘it is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that lies
in others’. The inference we should draw from our history is that much of evil has
been committed not by those people who wallow in evil, but by those convinced
of their own righteousness and equally of the evil of their victims.
We experience this phenomenon in our own lives. That is how we are
able to carry on with our lives while hurting, humiliating, and trampling over
other people. If we are convinced of the righteousness of our own unrighteous
actions, then we feel no guilt; indeed we think we are the ‘victims’ and the
‘victims’ are our oppressors. The other aspect, often underemphasized, is what
is called ‘institutional evil’, committed by ‘conscientious’ individuals as a part
of or on behalf of, institutions in legitimate discharge of their duties. A recent
post explains: “The institutions seem to be set up to put pressure on underpaid
district managers, to make cheating easy, and to make it easy for the corporations
to turn a blind eye to what’s going on. The culpability of the whole is greater
than the sum of the culpabilities of the parts”.65 A huge slice of contemporary
evil is in this category, and the institution that ranks first is the State itself. The
workplace, more than the home, is the locus of evil, and the institutional evil,
more than the explicit individual evil, is the instrument. Although everyone
condemns ‘evil’ most also agree that an evil-free world is impossible. After his
‘experience with God’, Dr. Eben Alexander writes, “Evil was present in all the
other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts because without it
free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no
forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be.
Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in
the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately
be triumphant”.66
We cannot get rid of ‘evil’. We must live with it in some form or the
other; everyone is capable of some sort of evil sometime or the other. So few
seem capable of declining an ‘invitation of evil’. Evil is not alien to any of us; the
war within is the war between good and evil. All this is a truism but what does
it mean in our daily life? We cannot willingly become an instrument of evil; we
must fight tooth and nail both within and without, not because God wills it but
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because ‘being bad’ doesn’t let us feel ‘good’ about ourselves. As a balance or a
counter we must nurture and cultivate ‘love’ which man is capable of ‘naturally’.
Love is so enchanting that “for the sake of love heaven longs to become earth and
gods to become man”.67 Rudolf Steiner says that “spiritual beings must love; but
only human beings can choose to”. Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search For Meaning)
wrote, “Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core
of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another
human being unless he loves him”. Erich Fromm (The Art of Living, 1956) says,
“Love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone, regardless
of the level of maturity reached by him”. It is an ‘art’ that has to be learnt the
same way any other art has to be. Whether love is an art or science, an emotion
or energy, the fact is applied in daily life extremely narrowly or divisively. Love is
giving, not taking; it is inclusive, not exclusive, and not reciprocal. Much of ‘love’
has come to represent what it is not supposed to be. We love someone but loathe
someone else that person loves; we love our religion but decry another religion;
we love our country but at best we are indifferent to any other country. We ‘love’
humanity but very few people we actually are able to love. That is why there is so
much insensitivity, intolerance and hatred in the world. And that is why evil is
both banal and brazen in our world.
Brazen, stark, direct, revolting evil most of us can and must avoid; but
we must strive ceaselessly to refrain from banal evil. And to be on guard against
what Hannah Arendt wrote about the ‘interdependence of