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

to create all the happiness we can create and
remove all the suffering we can remove. And that is not a favor to another. For,
in the uplifting words of philosopher Jeremy Bentham, “… for every grain of
enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own
bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings
of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary
of your soul”.81 In other words, helping others by enhancing their happiness and
diminishing their misery is enlightened morality. It helps us to cleanse our own
consciousness, which, in turn, acts as a catalyst for consciousness-change. The
fact is, it is much easier for animals to lead more moral lives than we humans.
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That is because animals cannot but live morally; for us it is huge effort. For them,
there is no need to know right and wrong. For us, knowing by itself does not
meet the need. Human society is far more complex than animal society, and it is
through morality that we try to reconcile the inherent conflict between self and
others, a tool for social order, amity and brotherhood. Society is a conglomerate of
autonomous and self-centered individuals, and if they can manage the conflict in
a spirit of accommodation and sharing then society will be tranquil and peaceful.
For that we have to subordinate what the ancient Greeks called Eudaimonia or
pursuit of personal happiness of an individual to the pursuit of public interest.
But that is not easy because we do not possess any moral safety net, and no
God, no scientific insight can protect us from the forces of immorality and evil.
In fact, these forces have proven much stronger both in the world outside and
the world within. They attack our will to live morally from two fronts. First,
they do not allow us to choose what is right. Second, they do not let us act
on our moral choice. A factor that further muddies the matter is that morality
too, like much else, is contextual and sensitive to the passage of time. And the
passage of time can change the dynamics and the priorities, or make room for
the entry of the new. The moral context influences the moral content, and moral
content must serve the common good. For long, the common good was served
through individual goodness. If individuals are truthful honest, sincere, dutiful,
considerate and conscientious, then ipso facto what is common good becomes
a logical outcome. That is still true but not sufficient. The center of gravity of
modern life has shifted from the personal to interpersonal and private to public,
from home to the workplace. How we conduct ourselves away from home, to
make a living, is now a matter of serious moral concern. In fact, a good deal
of anxiety, stress, and tension is generated in our effort to reconcile our private
persona and our public persona in moral terms.
In very elementary terms, the most important public moral issue, perhaps
of all time, pertains to our own, as a species, moral right to tarry much longer
on this planet. Fact is, we have not conducted ourselves as a responsible species.
We have fallen far short of what is needed to harmonize morality and modernity.
On the other hand, we have been grossly exploitative, rapacious, and predatory.
Sharing the earth with other species is an important human responsibility, and
we have so grievously betrayed that responsibility that our own moral right is
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in question. As a result, life on earth, and earth itself as a planet in the solar
system, is at risk now. This, in fact, is the lethal fallout of the much-talkedabout
advent of the Anthropocene epoch, the recent age of man, which is believed
to have begun around 1950. In such circumstances, what should be our moral
duty and existential response? The morally responsible answer can only be that
if we cannot bring about a fundamental course correction in our mindset and
the whole way of life, then we should hasten our extinction. But that might
not be necessary; course correction is possible if we ensure that the forces of
good, virtue or righteousness gain and keep an upper hand in the endless war
within. If that happens, the very Age of the Anthropocene—the Kali Yuga of
Hinduism and the Iron Age in Greek mythology—could become a time akin to
the Greek Golden Age. We then don’t have to take recourse to desperate measures
like merger with machines or try to be gods because, it would then be said,
mankind lived harmoniously among the gods and interacted with them. And
we will be able to live to a very old age, and when our time gets over, death will
come during sleep without subjecting us to any pain. And, at last, we may even
dare hope that morally contented man might not then even seek immortality,
as a gesture of justice to generations to come and other sentient life awaiting
elevation to become human.

473
Chapter 5
From Death to Immortality
Death, Be Not Proud
Many things in the contemporary world are unsettling, but none more than what we are doing with death. Nothing fascinates us more than death, nothing frightens us more, nothing so certain seems so uncertain, and nothing as near is treated as so remote as death. Central to human thought from time immemorial has been to free himself from that fear, to erase that certainty and play the game of life and death according to his rules, not those of nature. Eternal life, and deliverance from the cycle of death to death that scriptures say ought to be the purpose of earthly life, we now say we want it here and now, not in spirit but in flesh and blood. Man wants to conquer death without really knowing what it is. In so doing, he might be running the risk of doing himself more harm than good by, so to speak, throwing the baby with the bathwater, or worse, by ‘throwing hand grenades to fight house rats’. Is death no different than repositioning molecules on the physical level, and liberating consciousness from a walking cage to one of a free nature? Is it death that holds the meaning of life we seek? Have we got it all wrong? Is death really what we hope life is? Or is death forever an unknowable absolute, a fundamental state? Can it be codified as part of some basic bedrock, a detail of an unknown whole rather than merely a random and meaningless event? The human death rate is cent percent. Yet, that hasn’t stopped us from trying to postpone death or to find ways to reverse it. Even scriptures have told us that life, not death, in fact, is the fundamental condition, the initial stage and an integral part of the entire unified process of human existence. The Bible says, “But when this perishable body will have become imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then what is written will happen: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’”. Death, where is your sting? Hades, where is your victory? Still as living beings, it is death that frames life. The triad of practical questions that often come to mind are: Why must we die? What happens after we die? And how come the certainty of death is so powerless to influence our daily existence? There have been many answers but none that are definitive enough.
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For the first, the obvious answer is because, as Hamlet1 tell us, “Thou know’st
‘tis common; all that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity”. For the
second, the answer is, ‘it depends on which theological faith we follow’. And for
the third, the answer is, ‘it is both banal and profound’. The simple one is ‘to
let you live’; because if death is a factor in everything we do, we will actually do
nothing. In the Indian epic Mahabharata, this subject was alluded to when the
Pandava king Yudhishthira was asked by a yaksha, a celestial being, “What is the
most surprising the most wondrous thing in the world?” Yudhishthira answered,
“Man sees death all around, but behaves as if he is deathless.” Everyone knows
that death is the ultimate fate or truth, but everyone behaves as if that truth does
not apply to his own life. In short, everyone is mortal but he thinks and behaves
as if he alone is immortal. It is that paradox that frames the human condition.
The truth lies in the words of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: “For
the present let us remain keenly suspecting that the longing not to die, the hunger
for personal immortality, the effort whereby we tend to persist indefinitely in our
own being, which is, according to the tragic Jew, our very essence, that this is
the affective basis of all knowledge and the personal inward starting-point of all
human philosophy, wrought by a man and for all men”.2
Yudhishthira’s answer itself was another riddle, a paradox. But what he
did not realize is that that very apparent incongruity—that we will be around
when others, particularly our tormentors and enemies bite the dust—was what
kept peace and order in human society. What modern science is trying to do is to
make immortality not a delusion but an actuality, by technologically empowering
man with the means of dodging death. To make it more personal and tempting,
we are told that if we are alive in 30 years, we’ll be alive in 1,000 years, which
means that at least de facto, if not de jure immortality. Mankind might acquire
the technical capacity to radically extend the human life span, but in a world
like ours, it will not be within the reach of the vast majority. That could disrupt
human society like nothing else before. Not since the time of the hunter-gatherer
in human evolution is human mortality so circumscribed and circumstantial
and unpredictable than at the beginning of the third Christian millennium.
Everything matters; where one is born, where one grows up and goes to work;
how and where one travels; indeed, the smallest detail of life has a bearing on
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475
how one might die. After the thousands of years of ‘progress’, the very symbols
of progress have become symbols of death.
We must remember why mortality is there in the first place in nature. It
is through mortality that nature renews itself. Even the natural length of a species
life span is a vital part of the overall life-balance that sustains biodiversity on
earth. No species has a right to its own life or death. Nature ensures a balance even
between predator and prey. One species seeking to unnaturally disturb it opens
a Pandora’s box, or a can of worms. Apart from upsetting this delicate symmetry
in nature, humanity will get divided into what Yuval Harari calls ‘superhuman
caste’ and the wholly human sub-caste, a perfect recipe for a revolution and a
dystopian horror. The space entrepreneur Elon Musk offers another horror, and
fears that unless artificial intelligence is strictly regulated, we will end up with an
‘immortal’ digital dictator who could forever trap humanity in its grasp. It could
be the most inter-generationally selfish and socially destabilizing and morally
troublesome development. For it is death, rather its impartial inevitability and
across-the-board ambit, that held a cap on its gross injustice, inequity, inequality,
oppression, exploitation. If we truly believe it will be the other way around, that
we will die but the villains in our lives could prolong almost indefinitely, then
the world will witness a kind of violence and vengeance the like of which it has
not seen so far. For, immortality is not impregnability; the immortal sentient
beings may not die, but they can be killed, just like Tolkien’s Elves. Although the
immortality that science is seeking is of a different genre, most people, regardless
of race, religion or culture, tend to believe they don’t ‘dissolve like salt in water’
with death. They believe that a part of themselves, some indelible core, soul,
consciousness or some sort of essence, will endure—through progeny, name,
fame, memory, art, literature—and transcend the body’s death and live forever.
But that is different from what science is focusing upon: the body and brain.
It is also very different from what most religions envision as immortality. For
example, according to the Upanishads, ‘the mortal in whose heart desire is dead
becomes immortal’. The Katha Upanishad says that the mortal in whose heart
the knots of ignorance are untied