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

at the same time. There is virtually nothing anyone does
that does not affect other people, locally or globally. While the way we lead our
‘personal’ public lives enables us not only to earn a living, it can impact upon
the safety and quality of life of more people than ever before. The distinction
between public and private life is not unique to modern societies, but the
emergence of new communication media in recent times has altered the very
genre of the public and the private, and of the relations between them. In one
sense, it is a throwback to pre-industrial times, when the locus of human life
was in villages, where everyone knew the morals of everyone else. The world,
in the wake of the digital revolution, has become a virtual world, and is often
described as a global village,69 although the inhabitants do not behave as oldfashioned
villagers. Interdependence is virtual; individuality is actual. This has
huge moral implications. We now have the means to turn sharing into synergy,
but we expend all our energy in trying to prevail, control, and be successful.
Many people prefer to call themselves ‘spiritual’, not necessarily ‘moral’; because
‘spirituality’ is more fuzzy than ‘morality’. A lot of people, particularly the young,
do not know what they want from life, but they do know that ‘this isn’t it’. There
are so many overlapping and contrary strands in contemporary life, and any
process of fashioning a new framework for morality has to be multidisciplinary,
multifaceted, and multipronged. While, traditionally, issues of morality have
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been dealt with by religious leaders, theologians, spiritual masters, and moral
philosophers, the latest advent is science, which is treating this subject as a
‘property of the mind’. According to the neuroscientist Sam Harris (The Moral
Landscape, 2010), “the scientific study of morality is the lever that, if pulled hard
enough, will completely dislodge religion from the firmament of our concerns.
The world religions will land somewhere near astrology, witchcraft, and Greek
mythology on the scrapheap. In their place we will have a thoroughgoing
understanding of human flourishing, which will include even the most rarified
and traditionally ‘spiritual’ states of human consciousness”.70 Such a view is
symptomatic of the problem with science; everything in life and the cosmos is
subsumed and consumed by the brain/mind. If the matter of our moral sense is
the matter of our gray matter, then we come back to where the ‘problem’ begins. It
is our mind that is the mischief-maker, the source of our most vicious streak, and
of what is wrong with us as we are. What we need to do is not try to put our brain
in a coma, or our mind in deep sleep, but to lessen our exclusive dependence on
them as sole sources of cognition, perception, intelligence, memory, and energy.
Instead, we must find ways to awaken our dormant intelligence of the heart,
which we are told, science is increasingly coming to realize is independent of the
brain/mind. It is wrong, and even suicidal, to think, as is being argued by some
neuroscientists, that simply by manipulating our brain, and activating specific
parts of it, we can, as it were, one fine morning, wake up as moral beings; that
we can, by that process, become compassionate and kind, and rid ourselves of
all that mankind has wrought on earth; that we, finally, can usher in the Golden
Age of perfect peace and harmony.
Morality and Mundane Manners
We must also give thought to the issue of habits—good or bad—and morality.
The human is essentially a creature of habit, the routine and the ritual. If we have
‘good’ habits, are we necessarily moral, and if they are ‘bad’, are we necessarily
immoral? By good or bad, we usually refer to things associated with personal
behavior. Most of us are a bundle of good and bad habits. We must first note
that habits are very important in life and at some level, they can be cultivated or
acquired by practice. Some people are, as the lyric goes, ‘sweet on the inside’,71
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and sour outside; some are impeccable outside and malicious inside. What habit
does is to reduce, even eliminate conscious effort; it almost becomes independent
of our volition. We are essentially creatures of habit. In fact, the simplest way to be
good is to make what it takes to be good a habit, if not an addiction. The import
and impact of bad habits is more nuanced. A bad habit might often be bad for
the person concerned, but not always so for others; it might even make a person
a better social being. If someone smokes, gambles, or drinks too much, or is
promiscuous, we say he has bad habits, and if someone is sexually faithful, habitwise
teetotaler, truthful, pious, etc., we tend to applaud him. But experience tells
us it is not as simple as that, perhaps not even totally true. A drunkard can be,
and often is, a good man, not mean-minded, a gentle and giving soul. A pious
person can be perfidious in his dealings with others. It does not necessarily mean
that those who are sober, straight, and simple are evil. Perhaps there is some sort
of connection: maybe the same bunch of genes, or the same slice of brain, that
predispose some towards habits might also make them more likely to be good,
decent, and generous. What it implies is that morality has to be considered not
in the context of who the person is, but in relation to the act and its impact
on society. And personal habits are marginal, though not irrelevant, in judging
the ethics of anyone’s actions. Our moral behavior must be viewed through the
prism of social behavior. Scientist Rupert Sheldrake says, “Habits are subject to
natural selection; and the more often they are repeated, the more probable they
become, other things being equal. Animals inherit the successful habits of their
species as instincts. We inherit bodily, emotional, mental, and cultural habits,
including the habits of our languages.72
The bottom line is behavior; what matters is how we conduct ourselves in
the give-and-take of everyday existence. As the Buddha told us, “However many
holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you
do not act on upon them?” We must also bear in mind some fundamental facts.
No one really knows why humans do what they do. What we do know is that
nothing comes from nothing, nothing is as it seems, nothing goes in vain, and
nobody is a stranger. Without and within are reflections and extensions of each
other. Paramahansa Yogananda says, “Only those who partake of the harmony
within their souls know the harmony that runs through nature. Whosoever lacks
this inner harmony feels also a lack of it in the world. The mind in chaos finds
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chaos all around. How can one know what peace is like if he has never tasted
it? But he who has inner peace can abide in this state even in the midst of outer
discord”.73 But the moot point is that we do not have to fight a ‘war’ for it. Author
Deepak Chopra says, “The secret of inner harmony is that it already exists. You
don’t have to work for it”. We just have to uncover it, remove the façades and
obstacles. What we perceive as behavior often relates to our conduct towards our
fellow men. In fact, it is much more; it includes how we treat other creatures
and also earth. The ancient Jain scripture Acharanga Sutra says, “… A wise man
should not act sinfully towards earth, nor cause others to act so, nor allow others
to act so. He who knows these causes of sin relating to earth, is called a rewardknowing
sage”. One of the great tragedies of the human condition is that our
much-valued intelligence has not been able to grasp the fact that just as we do
not burn the house we live in, so is the case with Planet Earth. Simply calling it
‘Mother’, or ‘sacred’, does not make any difference. If we cannot grasp this selfevident
fact, we do not deserve to boast that we are the highest intelligence in
existence. Whether or not we are bad, we certainly seem mad.
Most of us are not bad but we do behave badly, and we do not know why.
This is the crux of the human condition. The problem is that we want to behave
better without becoming better. Einstein wisely noted, “I must be willing to give
up what I am in order to become what I will be”. We always want to get, not give
up. A creepy crawling caterpillar cannot become a winged, beauteous butterfly
if it wants to retain its multiple legs and just wants to add wings to its body. The
searing sense of not being what we want to be, is not something that harasses
and haunts the lesser man alone. Many great men and saints have rued the reality
that their flesh refuses to follow the requirements of a moral life, and what they
despised they obeyed, and what they yearned to do they were paralyzed from
doing. Our dilemma is two-fold. The first is our inability to do what we want to
do. The second is our inability to refrain from doing what we detest doing. Saint
Paul wrote, in a letter to the Romans, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I
do not want is what I do”. He also lamented, “Wretched man that I am! Who will
set me free from the body of this death… So then, with the mind I myself serve
the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin”.74 Whether behaving badly is
tantamount to sinful behavior or not, the fact is that all religions exhort men to
strive to be good and moral in their earthly conduct. Many religions emphasize
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this aspect. Jainism, for example, includes right conduct (samyak charitra) as
one of the three parts to salvation, called Ratnatraya.75 It is noteworthy that
three of the elements in the Buddha’s Noble Eight-fold Path, Atthangiko maggo,
are right speech, right action, and right effort. And conduct is not the same
as obedience or conformity. Mark Twain said that laws control the lesser man;
conduct controls the greater one. For right conduct, we need right thinking, and
for right thinking we need the right kind of blend in our consciousness.
Kierkegaard wrote that ‘a human being is a synthesis of the infinite and
the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short,
a synthesis’.76 That synthesis, or the melting point, if you will, manifests as
behavior, which is only the external expression of an inner content. Goethe
wrote that ‘behavior is the mirror in which everyone shows their image’; and,
one might also add, our inner space. But not everything that occurs inside
manages to come out; in a war, only the victorious emerge; the casualties do not
count. At the human level, the fight is about our psyche and our behavior. The
Buddha said, “It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles.
Then the victory is yours. It cannot be taken from you, not by angels or by
demons, heaven or hell”. Science can tell us with reasonable certitude what our
gross body consists of, about our internal and external organs, our body parts
and what roles each of them perform separately and in tandem to keep us alive.
But what happens inside is not merely an automatic functioning of these organs
and parts; it is also how all these diffused units manage ‘functional unity’ that,
besides keeping us alive, also influence and impact on how we view and act and
react in the world at large, which is what we do every moment till death releases
us from that chore. We do not know how we choose or decide the way we do,
and life is nothing but myriad, motley choices, mostly minute but life-changing.
We do not know how information is assembled and processed and transformed
into decision. The question that has been asked for thousands of years is: Why
is our behavior so often at variance with what we would like to do? This was
the question Arjuna asked Lord Krishna on the Kurukshetra battlefield in the
Mahabharata.77 This was the question Saint Paul agonizingly asked.78 We know
that our ‘behavior’, even our personality, is an amalgam of apparently unrelated
but actually intertwined factors, but we do not know how they coalesce and
cohere, collide, mix and churn within our bodies.
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Then, why are we so miserable, unhappy, discontented,