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

good within is by doing
good in the world. We must always be aware of the fact that everything we do
every day has a twin effect: it affects the world we live in, and acts as ammunition
in the spiritual struggle between, in Steven Pinker’s words, our ‘better angels’ and
‘inner demons’. Third, although difficult to practice, we must strive to fight the
evil, not the evil-doer. One of the problems why evil holds such sway over us is
because we try constantly to explain it away and not fight it effectively. To fight
it effectively does not mean trying to erase or expel it; it means to always retain
an upper hand over the evil within. The outside world merely conforms to the
moral condition of the human spirit. Evil in man is but a reflection of evil in the
world, and vice versa.
Struggle for Supremacy Over Consciousness—the War Within
What we, like many generations before our own time, fail to comprehend
sufficiently is that not only do we harbor both good and evil in our consciousness,
but that these two, along with their allies, are constantly engaged in an epic and
endless struggle for supremacy over our consciousness. What we have failed to
recognize is that this ‘struggle’ is more than conflict or confrontation, even more
than combat; it is analogous to what we characterize as ‘war’. This ‘failure’ has
been our hamartia, our tragic flaw that is responsible for so much that has gone
horribly wrong in human history. We don’t even know when it began—some
say two million years ago, when man became a ‘fully-conscious being’; some
say as recent as three thousand years until the time of Homer’s Iliad. It is one
of those things ‘we do not even know we didn’t know’. Whenever it originated,
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this is an eternal internal war that goes on every minute of our lives. The two
fighting forces are two sides of our own self. No impulse, even evil, in man is
irreclaimable; nothing human is doomed to destruction. Man’s manifest mission
is to reclaim the negative dimension of his own personality. It is this ‘complexity’
that translates as the enigma of the ‘human condition’, and as the capriciousness
of human behavior. No other explanation fully explains, not even, as Jeremy
Griffith says, that it is a “result of us humans becoming conscious and at odds
with our species’ particular cooperative and loving, Edenic, moral instincts”
(Freedom Essay 3: The Explanation of the Human Condition, 2016).
We must upfront recognize that this is not like any other war we fight
in the external world, where we try to vanquish the opponent and emerge
victorious; it is more like a Sisyphean internal struggle—thankless, endless, but
necessary. And we must accept that our act of rolling the boulder up the hill is
to make sure that neither side, not even the evil one, has to lose or get defeated.
What we must focus upon is how to actively intervene and support the righteous
side in this war; that is the only way to solve any problem, to better ourselves and
to grow spiritually. Hiding from or avoiding struggle and conflict will only result
in the triumph of evil. Merely acknowledging and ‘accepting’ that we all have a
‘shadow’ or a ‘dark spot’ or evil within us is not sufficient; it can even embolden
and strengthen that very evil we don’t want to win. We must constantly and
actively ensure that it does not overwhelm the good, and the light within, in the
war. But once we recognize this imperative, many things that made no sense, or
made our heads hang in shame, and the very basis of our erratic behavior, will
fall into place. And ‘blindfolding’ ourselves will no longer be the only way not
to see what makes us sick in our stomach or not to go mad and slaughter each
other just by seeing. But if we don’t make that effort, and continue to deal with
our problems as we have been doing, none of them can be resolved. And if we do,
nothing else would need to be done. It is this war that the Bible alludes to, when
it says, “For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit
what is contrary to the sinful nature. They are in conflict with each other, so that
you do not do what you want”.37 It is this war that Islam alludes to when Prophet
Muhammad says the greatest jihad (struggle/striving) is to battle your own soul,
to fight the evil within. This was the ‘inner battle’ that the American theologian
Thomas Merton had in mind when he said that he ‘felt in his bones that his own
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life constituted a battleground between conflicting interests, warring tendencies,
mutually exclusive selves’. Actually, we don’t battle the evil within. It is the good
within that battles with it. For the ‘we’ in us includes the two sides, the good
and the evil. They ‘battle’ each other, but ‘we’ need both for our wholeness as
humans. That is what is exceptional about this war. We should ceaselessly strive
to ensure dominance of the good in the war, but should never risk the defeat and
destruction of the ‘evil within’. We do not know the beginning, but we do know
that there can be no end. It is a war in which we cannot afford either victory
or defeat. For we need both adversaries, the good and the bad, intuition and
intellect, head and heart, in Jeremy Griffith’s explanation, “instinct and conscious
intellect”, for our very survival. This war goes on unnoticed because no blood or
corpses come out of our body, and we think there is peace within us. This war
provides a plausible platform to many things that baffle us.
Why is our behavior so erratic and at times so appalling? It offers, if not
an answer at least an explanation to the laments of great men like Saint Paul
and Rishi Vyasa, among others. Above all, it lets us hope for a better future,
a more moral man, and a basis to overcome all the problems that torment us.
And, most of all, it gives an answer to the question we all ask: What can I do?
The response is, win your own war within. Anything else is, in the words of the
Danish ‘Tolstoy’, Henrik Pontoppidan, “a lifeless thing—nothing more than a
broom handle, a crutch which might help a soul to forget its lameness for a
while, but could never be a life-affirming construct.”38 Many mystics have long
wondered if some insidious external force is relentlessly impeding their spiritual
sadhana or progress. Traditionally it was blamed on mysterious, malevolent
beings like demons and devils. Now we know that these demons and devils are
within each of us and are engaged in a fierce battle with their opposites. And,
more important, yes, we can make a difference. We have long thought that we
are all born with a permanent package of attributes and traits, some good and the
mostly wicked, and that we have to more or less live with them, in our behavior.
But, no; it doesn’t have to be that way. That is only partially correct.
Recent research is telling us that we can go beyond the grip of the ‘givenat-
birth’, and cultivate, nurture and augment our positive qualities like kindness,
compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude. Cutting across all these is sharing, which
we must remember, is caring. The spirit of sharing could not only make us more
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responsible earthlings, but also enable us to boost the kindred forces in the war
within.
‘Warring’ is part of being human; some say it is a part of how we evolved.
Indeed, man has been at war with life since its inception, and the resultant
struggle is what human society reflects. Many ‘wars’ we have fought before,
including two World Wars, and many civil, ethnic, religious, as well as wars for
independence and for secession. And many we fight now, on social ills like wars
on terrorism, on drugs, on poverty, on discrimination, etc., but this ‘war within’
is the most consequential of all. Our failure to recognize this central reality gives
rise to what in French is called plus ça change, plus c’est la même, why things might
appear to change or improve, but beneath it all they remain just as bad as before.
This is the ‘Mother of all Wars’, the real ‘war to end all wars’. This war offers the
overarching theory we seek to make sense of all that happens in human life that
seems so bizarre and even absurd; why we cannot do things in a way that is so
self-evident. This is the war that determines how we behave and defines who we
are, whether a purely material being or a spiritual being, and if it is a blend of
both, which one will exercise greater influence on how we live. It is an eternal war
because neither of the opposing forces can or will ever be able to, gain ‘victory’
or ‘vanquish’ the other. They are forever related in a state of perennial antithesis,
each one requiring the other. The war is for control of the commanding heights
of our consciousness. And whoever controls consciousness controls everything
else. Everything else is secondary. Whatever happens in the outside war hinges
on the ebbs and flows of this war.
It is hard to understand why we get attracted to the unfamiliar and ignore
the immediate, but that has cost us a lot. Our knowledge of distant worlds—
worlds outside even our galaxy—is increasing day by day, but our awareness
of the world within remains abysmal. And RD Laing noted that “our time has
been distinguished, more than by anything else, by the mastery, the control of
the external world, and by an almost total forgetfulness of the internal world”.39
Scriptures—epistles from the gods—and the holiest of sages have tirelessly told
us that everything we seek is within us; that all power is within. The Bible tells us,
“A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil
man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks
what the heart is full of ”. In other words, you can discipline yourself externally,
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but if you have hate or lust in your heart, you are still in trouble. As Rumi said,
“All inspiration you seek is already within you. Be silent and listen”. Unaware of
the ‘world within’, let alone of this perennial war within, every time a terrible
thing takes place and someone does something abominable, we wonder, ‘why,
why?’, ‘who really are they?’, ‘how could they do such a thing?!’, not realizing
that perhaps those people are acting against their own will, and that their actions
are a reflection of the struggle between the good and evil within their own being.
Many religions tell us that every man is born with both a good and an
evil inclination, and that most men will, at some time in their lives, succumb to
their evil inclination. The traditional Jewish view on this complex subject is welldefined
in rabbinic literature. Man’s inclinations are therefore poised between
good (Yetzer HaTov) and evil (Yetzer HaRa), and he is not compelled towards
either of them. He has the power of choice and is able to choose one or the other
side knowingly and willingly. The yetzer hara is not a demonic force, but rather
man’s misuse of things the physical body needs to survive. In fact, a Jew’s very
purpose in this physical and material world is to ultimately triumph in this epic
battle. Islam too echoes this line of thought. Prophet Muhammad said that ‘the
greatest jihad is to battle your own soul; to fight the evil within yourself ’. This
internal spiritual struggle, in Islam, according to many scholars, is the major
struggle (Al-jihad al-Akbar), higher than the external ‘holy war’. In other words,
jihad also is what we now classify as a war within. If the major war against evil in
Islam is within our soul, the Christian war is a ‘war in heaven’ between God and
the Devil. It is also between flesh and spirit. The Bible says: “Walk by the spirit
and do not gratify the desires of the flesh”. Alyosha of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers
Karamazov changes the scene of action and says that ‘God and the devil are
fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man’, or, more to the point, the
battlefield is our consciousness. Again, this is also the war between the princely
cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, in the Indian epic Mahabharata at
Kurukshetra.
We must understand that all