The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e reader for manga .TXT) đ
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those who are helpless as easy targets and remove everything from
themâ. It is hard to assess which is a greater tragedyâkilling oneself or others,
when one is down and driven to desperation. The stress and strain of modern life
is enticing some very vulnerable people into embracing necrophilia: love for all
that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction
to death, to suicide, to sadism.43 For far too many people these days, Edna St.
Vincent Millayâs LamentâLife must go on; I forget just whyâis not good enough
to keep them alive. Suicide, even homicide, is alarmingly becoming the preferred
escape from suffering; the only way to terminate an intolerable situation. That is
happening although all religions prohibit it and call it a great sin, and although it
From Death to Immortality
519
attracts terrible punishment. The Garuda Purana, the Hindu text that describes
what happens after death and the soulâs journey, says that those who commit
suicide are stuck in the spirit world for 65,000 earth years. If, as has often been
said, life and suffering are inseparable, the sufferer takes the next logical step and
says, separate them through death and be rid of suffering. The fact of the matter
is that, despite breakthroughs in fields like psychology, the suicidal mindset has
remained impregnable. We can never typecast or stereotype a âsuiciderâ. We will
never know, even if one survives the attempt, if they really thought through the
alternatives and consequences. It doesnât matter how young or old one is. Money
has emerged as a malevolent motivator and a terrible trigger, shattering many a
life and family. The trail of money can be seen in many a suicide and homicide,
even a crime. While the earlier adage was âfrugality is moralityâ, the metaphors of
the modern age are âobscene opulenceâ and ostentatious living. Even Machiavelli
said, âOf mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy
of gainâ.
Through greed we have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit
of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while
their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. That âreal povertyâ is
taking real lives, and mutilating many more. The âdouble-tragedyâ is that, on the
one hand, the difference between life and death in many cases is so little money
and, on the other hand, so many have what it takes to âsaveâ those in need. And
yet, what is even more tragic, those âwho haveâ donât do what needs to be done,
not because they donât want to but because there is no social âconnectivityâ that
brings the âneedyâ and the âwillingâ together in a world which is often called a
âglobal villageâ. One of the urgent tasks in the world is to create the public policy
infrastructure for spreading money evenly; to reverse the flow, which is presently
from the âpoor to the richâ, both from individuals and nations. Needless to say,
a mountain of money, like a mound of candy attracts an army of ants, and also
acts as a trigger for heartburn, envy, and hatred. Like evil, money has acquired
an identity and dynamic of its own, it influences human behavior, for good or
bad. The consequence is that on the âday of judgmentâ or in the reckoning of
Chitragupta, the Hindu celestial record keeper of the earthly doings of all human
beings, one additional question that might be raised to decide our after-life fate
could well be this: how we earned and utilized money while on earth.
The War WithinâBetween Good and Evil
520
We have never been able to come to terms with the certainty of death and
the uncertainty of where, how, and when. For the fact is that âas soon as a being
comes to life, it is old enough to dieâ. We claim, as a mark of our superiority, that
the human is the only animal that knows it must die, but that âknowingâ hasnât
helped much. What âmodern manâ, a term usually used to separate him from
the âprimitive or traditionalâ man, is attempting, is to convert that âcertaintyâ (of
death) into uncertainty, and erase the âuncertaintyâ (of where, how, and when)
altogether. And going for the jugular, as it were, instead of waiting for the call of
death, is calling it to his âaidâ as a route of escape, whenever he feels confused and
cornered, helpless and hapless, restless and rebellious. This âcalling upâ has come to
such a pass that virtually any dispute, disappointment, and despair, even denial,
is now a potential incubator of induced or enforced death. What Walt Whitman
called âa voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and powerâ,44 we
hear all the time, at times as a silent whisper, sometimes as a helpless wail, and
more often as hideous howl. We might, as the âvoiceâ pleads, âbow our facesâ and
âveil our eyesâ but we cannot shy away from the almost daily âdance of deathâ, at
home, at work, on the streets, on the screen, in our otherwise uneventful lives.
Whitman reinforces in this poem the theme that death should not be deemed
as a threat, and urges us to bear in mind the briefness and brittleness of life,
and reminds us that life is time-bound, and to live it to the brim because every
moment is a gift.
The paradox is that while over the past half a century, millions of lives
have certainly been bettered, millions in the material sense, millions more, at the
same time suffer from deep deprivation, dejection, and depression. It is not an
economic or sociological problem, or of upbringing or alienation, or a problem
of youthful disillusionment or disgust with a soulless society. All of them have
something to do with such issues, but more fundamentally something terrible
has snapped in the human consciousness and no one has a clue. We have all,
in different degrees and ways, turned into a âhuman bonsaiâ: potted, trimmed,
controlled, cut to sizeâto suit the taste and temper of human culture. Maybe,
that is the way to contain the human hubris! So forbidding is âlife within a lieâ,
that many, while still bodily breathing feel suffocated, while being mobile feel a
sense of being boxed in, and feel that the only way to break out is destruction,
the most direct way to which is âdeathâ. Many, tragically too often the makers
From Death to Immortality
521
of our future, are breaking the âmirror of the modern manâ even if they know
they are the âmirrorâ itself. In a twisted sense, death (rather fear of it) holds us no
terror. We have both demonized and trivialized it. We âdemonizeâ it by believing
that everything goes up in smoke at death, that it is a bottomless pit into which
we are all thrown, that life is in vain because we die. Death can be a form of
entertainment. Once you cast aside your humanity, it is easy to make fun of the
sounds and faces people make as they die. It is not uncommon to encounter
macabre music lyrics or movie dialogues and blood-and-gore that trivialize
death, such as, âI shot a man in Reno just to watch him dieâ, and âI am a false
prophet, god is a superstition!â
âInduced or enforcedâ deathâ is fast becoming just another option, often
escapist or opportunistic, even the preferred route, to settle scores, disputes,
depression; a hole to hide, as it were, a refuge from alienation, hurt, humiliation
and a way to vent hatred. A time comes in everymanâs life when a certain
single situation or a problem or pain overwhelms everything else, and all other
experiences and aspects of life, however weighty they might be, recede into the
background and we feel utterly helpless, hapless, distraught and despondent.
In most cases we still cling to hope, but in many situations, when people, for
reasons still mysterious, feel bereft of any hope, they come to the determination
that the only way out is to end it all. Then the very prospect of being rid of that
problem becomes more irresistible and alluring than anything else that we value,
like religion, family, friendship, or that we obsessively pursue in life like money,
sex, pleasure, and power. Sometimes, the âproblemâ or the cause of disaffection
is such a trifle that it blows our mind away even to believe that such a thing is
possible within the human consciousness. Whatever is true for suicide equally
fits well with homicide. Indeed, both are the two sides of the same coin. In
one sense, man has taken away the power of life and death from the gods, and
how gods react and how much of the ugly and horrific of what we see around
us, can be explained away. This way only gods can know. As a self-professed
ârationalâ species, one would have thought that since we all meet the same mortal
fate, death would be a unifier. Poet John Donne wrote âAll mankind is of one
author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of
the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so
translatedâŠâ45 Donneâs words cannot be more apt: â⊠as therefore, the bell that
The War WithinâBetween Good and Evil
522
rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation;
so this bell calls us all⊠No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a
piece of the continent, a part of the main⊠Any manâs death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for theeâ. Such is the hold of death, and the lure of life, on
the human mind. Donne underlines two central themes: interconnectedness of
mankind and the common destination of death. Neither of these has taken a
firm foothold in the human consciousness, and human behavior is as though
every man is an island unto himself, and death is what happens to others. From
that mindset to that of a âkillerâ is but a short leap.
Deathâthe Default Mode
Modern science is trying hard to comprehend the basic facts about the cognitive
conditioning of a âkillerâ, but the fact is that the human, at least since the times
of the Old Testament, has always killed himself, and others, in more ways than
one. But what was once a âlast resortâ is now, in a growing number of instances,
an âopening optionâ. While homicide was condemned, suicide was usually
condoned, often viewed as an escape from evil, shame, dishonor or insufferable
sufferance. What is new is the growing ordinariness and the casualness of
both suicide and homicide. Many are turning towards that route as they find
themselves incapable of either accepting or enduring or escaping or transcending
the superficiality, sordidness, coarseness and callousness of modern-day human
life, which largely revolves around the Trimurti, the three gods, of free will, free
choice, and free markets, not only in the economic domain but also in the social
and political spheres. They are no longer on the margins of human life; they
are in the mainstream of normal life, and the seeds are sown deep in our own
consciousness. Too many people too often feel that anything, absolutely anything,
nothing excluded, is better than living through, what to them was an obscenity,
âlifeâ, and coping with what it has come to entail and demandâmake a living,
climb the profession ladder, manage a marriage, raise a family, repair a broken
home, reform a rebellious child, handle spurned love or a jilted lover, keep the
wolf at bay, keep up with the Joneses⊠And they ask if, after all that struggle
and stress, we are anyway destined to end up being âdeadâ, why not advance the
From Death to Immortality
523
deadly date? In his work The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus raised the
mother of all existential questions: Does the realization of the meaninglessness
and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide? He himself answered: âNo. It
requires revoltâ. What he does not clarify is ârevoltâ against what and how? You
cannot ârevoltâ against âmeaninglessnessâ; that itself becomes meaningless. We
have not done well with revolts or with revolutions. They have always been messy
and bloody and have led to greater misery than what we revolted against. Our
love for orderliness, ordinariness, our longing for an unwrinkled life, and our
lust for lasciviousness and luxury abhors the upheaval of what revolt entails, and
devours its idealism and chasteness. Since we do not know what happens next,
the questions remain unanswered. Is suicide running away from responsibilities
or taking up new ones? Is it an escape or an opening, a sacrifice or sacrilege? Is
the world better off with or without us? Are we helping or hindering nature if we
choose to eliminate ourselves?
Morality
themâ. It is hard to assess which is a greater tragedyâkilling oneself or others,
when one is down and driven to desperation. The stress and strain of modern life
is enticing some very vulnerable people into embracing necrophilia: love for all
that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction
to death, to suicide, to sadism.43 For far too many people these days, Edna St.
Vincent Millayâs LamentâLife must go on; I forget just whyâis not good enough
to keep them alive. Suicide, even homicide, is alarmingly becoming the preferred
escape from suffering; the only way to terminate an intolerable situation. That is
happening although all religions prohibit it and call it a great sin, and although it
From Death to Immortality
519
attracts terrible punishment. The Garuda Purana, the Hindu text that describes
what happens after death and the soulâs journey, says that those who commit
suicide are stuck in the spirit world for 65,000 earth years. If, as has often been
said, life and suffering are inseparable, the sufferer takes the next logical step and
says, separate them through death and be rid of suffering. The fact of the matter
is that, despite breakthroughs in fields like psychology, the suicidal mindset has
remained impregnable. We can never typecast or stereotype a âsuiciderâ. We will
never know, even if one survives the attempt, if they really thought through the
alternatives and consequences. It doesnât matter how young or old one is. Money
has emerged as a malevolent motivator and a terrible trigger, shattering many a
life and family. The trail of money can be seen in many a suicide and homicide,
even a crime. While the earlier adage was âfrugality is moralityâ, the metaphors of
the modern age are âobscene opulenceâ and ostentatious living. Even Machiavelli
said, âOf mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy
of gainâ.
Through greed we have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit
of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while
their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. That âreal povertyâ is
taking real lives, and mutilating many more. The âdouble-tragedyâ is that, on the
one hand, the difference between life and death in many cases is so little money
and, on the other hand, so many have what it takes to âsaveâ those in need. And
yet, what is even more tragic, those âwho haveâ donât do what needs to be done,
not because they donât want to but because there is no social âconnectivityâ that
brings the âneedyâ and the âwillingâ together in a world which is often called a
âglobal villageâ. One of the urgent tasks in the world is to create the public policy
infrastructure for spreading money evenly; to reverse the flow, which is presently
from the âpoor to the richâ, both from individuals and nations. Needless to say,
a mountain of money, like a mound of candy attracts an army of ants, and also
acts as a trigger for heartburn, envy, and hatred. Like evil, money has acquired
an identity and dynamic of its own, it influences human behavior, for good or
bad. The consequence is that on the âday of judgmentâ or in the reckoning of
Chitragupta, the Hindu celestial record keeper of the earthly doings of all human
beings, one additional question that might be raised to decide our after-life fate
could well be this: how we earned and utilized money while on earth.
The War WithinâBetween Good and Evil
520
We have never been able to come to terms with the certainty of death and
the uncertainty of where, how, and when. For the fact is that âas soon as a being
comes to life, it is old enough to dieâ. We claim, as a mark of our superiority, that
the human is the only animal that knows it must die, but that âknowingâ hasnât
helped much. What âmodern manâ, a term usually used to separate him from
the âprimitive or traditionalâ man, is attempting, is to convert that âcertaintyâ (of
death) into uncertainty, and erase the âuncertaintyâ (of where, how, and when)
altogether. And going for the jugular, as it were, instead of waiting for the call of
death, is calling it to his âaidâ as a route of escape, whenever he feels confused and
cornered, helpless and hapless, restless and rebellious. This âcalling upâ has come to
such a pass that virtually any dispute, disappointment, and despair, even denial,
is now a potential incubator of induced or enforced death. What Walt Whitman
called âa voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and powerâ,44 we
hear all the time, at times as a silent whisper, sometimes as a helpless wail, and
more often as hideous howl. We might, as the âvoiceâ pleads, âbow our facesâ and
âveil our eyesâ but we cannot shy away from the almost daily âdance of deathâ, at
home, at work, on the streets, on the screen, in our otherwise uneventful lives.
Whitman reinforces in this poem the theme that death should not be deemed
as a threat, and urges us to bear in mind the briefness and brittleness of life,
and reminds us that life is time-bound, and to live it to the brim because every
moment is a gift.
The paradox is that while over the past half a century, millions of lives
have certainly been bettered, millions in the material sense, millions more, at the
same time suffer from deep deprivation, dejection, and depression. It is not an
economic or sociological problem, or of upbringing or alienation, or a problem
of youthful disillusionment or disgust with a soulless society. All of them have
something to do with such issues, but more fundamentally something terrible
has snapped in the human consciousness and no one has a clue. We have all,
in different degrees and ways, turned into a âhuman bonsaiâ: potted, trimmed,
controlled, cut to sizeâto suit the taste and temper of human culture. Maybe,
that is the way to contain the human hubris! So forbidding is âlife within a lieâ,
that many, while still bodily breathing feel suffocated, while being mobile feel a
sense of being boxed in, and feel that the only way to break out is destruction,
the most direct way to which is âdeathâ. Many, tragically too often the makers
From Death to Immortality
521
of our future, are breaking the âmirror of the modern manâ even if they know
they are the âmirrorâ itself. In a twisted sense, death (rather fear of it) holds us no
terror. We have both demonized and trivialized it. We âdemonizeâ it by believing
that everything goes up in smoke at death, that it is a bottomless pit into which
we are all thrown, that life is in vain because we die. Death can be a form of
entertainment. Once you cast aside your humanity, it is easy to make fun of the
sounds and faces people make as they die. It is not uncommon to encounter
macabre music lyrics or movie dialogues and blood-and-gore that trivialize
death, such as, âI shot a man in Reno just to watch him dieâ, and âI am a false
prophet, god is a superstition!â
âInduced or enforcedâ deathâ is fast becoming just another option, often
escapist or opportunistic, even the preferred route, to settle scores, disputes,
depression; a hole to hide, as it were, a refuge from alienation, hurt, humiliation
and a way to vent hatred. A time comes in everymanâs life when a certain
single situation or a problem or pain overwhelms everything else, and all other
experiences and aspects of life, however weighty they might be, recede into the
background and we feel utterly helpless, hapless, distraught and despondent.
In most cases we still cling to hope, but in many situations, when people, for
reasons still mysterious, feel bereft of any hope, they come to the determination
that the only way out is to end it all. Then the very prospect of being rid of that
problem becomes more irresistible and alluring than anything else that we value,
like religion, family, friendship, or that we obsessively pursue in life like money,
sex, pleasure, and power. Sometimes, the âproblemâ or the cause of disaffection
is such a trifle that it blows our mind away even to believe that such a thing is
possible within the human consciousness. Whatever is true for suicide equally
fits well with homicide. Indeed, both are the two sides of the same coin. In
one sense, man has taken away the power of life and death from the gods, and
how gods react and how much of the ugly and horrific of what we see around
us, can be explained away. This way only gods can know. As a self-professed
ârationalâ species, one would have thought that since we all meet the same mortal
fate, death would be a unifier. Poet John Donne wrote âAll mankind is of one
author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of
the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so
translatedâŠâ45 Donneâs words cannot be more apt: â⊠as therefore, the bell that
The War WithinâBetween Good and Evil
522
rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation;
so this bell calls us all⊠No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a
piece of the continent, a part of the main⊠Any manâs death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for theeâ. Such is the hold of death, and the lure of life, on
the human mind. Donne underlines two central themes: interconnectedness of
mankind and the common destination of death. Neither of these has taken a
firm foothold in the human consciousness, and human behavior is as though
every man is an island unto himself, and death is what happens to others. From
that mindset to that of a âkillerâ is but a short leap.
Deathâthe Default Mode
Modern science is trying hard to comprehend the basic facts about the cognitive
conditioning of a âkillerâ, but the fact is that the human, at least since the times
of the Old Testament, has always killed himself, and others, in more ways than
one. But what was once a âlast resortâ is now, in a growing number of instances,
an âopening optionâ. While homicide was condemned, suicide was usually
condoned, often viewed as an escape from evil, shame, dishonor or insufferable
sufferance. What is new is the growing ordinariness and the casualness of
both suicide and homicide. Many are turning towards that route as they find
themselves incapable of either accepting or enduring or escaping or transcending
the superficiality, sordidness, coarseness and callousness of modern-day human
life, which largely revolves around the Trimurti, the three gods, of free will, free
choice, and free markets, not only in the economic domain but also in the social
and political spheres. They are no longer on the margins of human life; they
are in the mainstream of normal life, and the seeds are sown deep in our own
consciousness. Too many people too often feel that anything, absolutely anything,
nothing excluded, is better than living through, what to them was an obscenity,
âlifeâ, and coping with what it has come to entail and demandâmake a living,
climb the profession ladder, manage a marriage, raise a family, repair a broken
home, reform a rebellious child, handle spurned love or a jilted lover, keep the
wolf at bay, keep up with the Joneses⊠And they ask if, after all that struggle
and stress, we are anyway destined to end up being âdeadâ, why not advance the
From Death to Immortality
523
deadly date? In his work The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus raised the
mother of all existential questions: Does the realization of the meaninglessness
and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide? He himself answered: âNo. It
requires revoltâ. What he does not clarify is ârevoltâ against what and how? You
cannot ârevoltâ against âmeaninglessnessâ; that itself becomes meaningless. We
have not done well with revolts or with revolutions. They have always been messy
and bloody and have led to greater misery than what we revolted against. Our
love for orderliness, ordinariness, our longing for an unwrinkled life, and our
lust for lasciviousness and luxury abhors the upheaval of what revolt entails, and
devours its idealism and chasteness. Since we do not know what happens next,
the questions remain unanswered. Is suicide running away from responsibilities
or taking up new ones? Is it an escape or an opening, a sacrifice or sacrilege? Is
the world better off with or without us? Are we helping or hindering nature if we
choose to eliminate ourselves?
Morality
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