The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e reader for manga .TXT) 📖

include the individual’s own well-being, positing that, in point
of fact, most people do not act, even if they do know, in their own interests, and
tend to emphasize the short term over the long term, a premise that is the basis of
much of social legislation. The question is: while legality can, to an extent, serve
both purposes, prevent harm to others, and protect an individual from himself,
what about such ‘behavior’ of the species? Human behavior is now a grave and
growing peril to the lives and interests of other species, in addition to its own.
Albert Schweitzer paraphrased it aptly: “Man has the lost the capacity to foresee
and to forestall. He will end up destroying the earth”. Man is exhibiting three
lethal tendencies: self-absorption, self-righteousness, and self-destruction. All
three are interconnected and interdependent. We are so self-absorbed that every
event in the world and in others’ lives is judged by its effect on us. We are singleminded
to a fault in finding faults in others. Perhaps next only to temptation,
the most ‘tempting’ thing which few can let pass, even if a half-chance comes
along, is not to find fault with others. That is a sign of both insecurity and
hubris, born out of a desire to control. After a while that becomes involuntary,
another habit that looks for openings and opportunities. The truth is, as Rumi
reminds us, “Many of the faults you see in others, dear reader, are your own
nature reflected in them”. Jesus exhorts us, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the
beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote
out of thy brother’s eye”.3 Besides self-righteousness, we are single-minded to a
fault about self-destruction; we leave nothing to chance in our drive to do things
injurious to our well-being. We are, deliberately, and for something as ephemeral
as profit, polluting the air we breathe, the food we eat, the rivers, the oceans, and
filling the air with enough toxic fallout to put poison into our own children’s
bones. The eighteen-fold increase in the global economic output has not only
deepened the divide between the elite and the masses, but also created the present
environmental crisis, potentially cheating our children of their future. We are not
even sparing the mighty oceans. It is said that our oceans are 30% more acidic
than they were a bare thirty years ago. Scientists tell us that ‘just the acidification
of the oceans, by itself, is enough to wipe out life on this planet’. And that the
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acidification of the ocean today is proceeding on a greater and faster basis than
anything that geologists can find in fossil records for the past 65 million years.
Another existential risk, experts tell us, is the “release into the atmosphere of
methane. Its effect on global warming is 23 times more powerful than that of
carbon dioxide, over the course of a century, and even worse in the short term
of about 10 years. The National Science Foundation (USA) has recently warned
that “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the [Arctic] shelf could
trigger abrupt climate warming”.4 As if we haven’t had enough of dire warnings,
we are told that, of all things, jellyfish are ‘taking over the oceans’ which could
accelerate climate change.5
None of such stuff scares us; it causes not a ripple in our smug consciousness,
and nothing nudges us from our frenetic pursuit of the ‘good things of life’. All
those warnings, however prescient or forbidding, might well be addressed to
another species on another planet. It is doubtful if the authors of such reports
themselves make any changes in their daily life. Clearly no other species is so
hell-bent and clear-headed in this ‘death-wish’. Over a million people every year
take their own lives for reasons that are almost funny if only not so deadly;
many, many more make the attempt. The World Health Organization (WHO)
says that over the past 45 years, suicide rates have increased by 60% worldwide.
Suicide is now one of the three leading causes of death among males between the
ages 14 to 45. Children as young as six have reportedly killed themselves. What
we are not sure is if this streak is constitutional or civilizational, a desperate cry
for concern and affection, or some kind of nature’s revenge for our rapacious
and predatory conduct. What can trigger murder or suicide, sadism or savagery,
remains a mystery. While the majority relate to personal problems, frustrations,
and provocations, some arise as reaction to all that is wrong and wretched in
the world. They reflect what Antigone tells the King of Thebes, Creone: “And
if I have to die before my time, well, I count that a gain. When someone has
to live the way I do, surrounded by so many evil things, how can she fail to
find a benefit in death?”6 Every ‘suicider’, potential or actual, might not look
for a benefit in death; but they see no point in prolonging life the way it came
to be. Theories abound, but the truth is that we just do not know why we
go on ‘living’ or when we think ‘enough is enough’. But all this death-wish,
suicidal, and murderous tendencies do not dull our unquenchable hunger for
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immortality, for a life not limited by the body. Man is not content to live within
his ‘natural’ limitations, but at the same time, he is systematically atrophying
what nature has endowed him with. And the ‘mystery’ of what transpires within
our own bodies as we go about living, or rather, dying, is deepening, even as our
lives are turning more and more shallow. We do not know the ‘why’ of many
things and sometimes we ask ‘why’ when it ought to be ‘why not’. Questioning
reality as it appears to be is a human trait. The German mystic Angelus Silesius
wrote, “The rose doth have no why; It blossoms without reason; Forgetful of
itself, oblivious to our vision”.7 It might be ‘oblivious of our vision’, but we do
know that at some deep depth under the largest organ of our physical body, our
skin, there is some sort of melting pot that houses and harbors a host of things
like thoughts, feelings, emotions, instincts, and impulses, but we do not know
how they interface and interact and become understanding, comprehension,
imagination, prejudice, analytical capacity, choice-selection, decision-making,
etc. All those disparate but intertwined things collide, coalesce, and bubble up
and gush out as ‘behavior’. We talk of behavior as if it is some kind of a mystery
wrapped in a riddle, something for psychologists to break their heads about.
There is no unified theory of human behavior but, in practical terms, it is the
way, or ways, we connect with and conduct ourselves relative to other people,
to other creatures, to Mother Earth, to Nature, and to practically everything in
the universe, seen and unseen. Our behavior is embodied in the myriad things
we do in the normal course of every day, at home, at work, on the street, and
as a partner in multiple relationships. The Maitri Upanishad puts the subject in
context: “As one acts and conducts himself, so does he become. The doer of good
becomes good. The doer of evil becomes evil. One becomes virtuous by virtuous
action, bad by bad action”. Perhaps we will never know for sure why man does
evil, which is different from not doing the right thing, but we can say that it is
not at least always. As Plato’s hypothesis implied, “Evil man is evil only through
error, and if one free him from error, one will necessarily make him good”. It
depends on what is meant by ‘evil’ and by ‘error’. Slitting someone’s throat
for not parting with a penny or raping a three-year-old child and strangling
the child thereafter cannot be called an act of ‘error’. But no man is all ‘evil’
or all ‘good’.
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What is important in life is what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’; not who is
right and who is wrong. And if we want to better our behavior, we need to put in
place two things—sincere abhyasa (ceaseless effort) and chitta suddhi (purity of
consciousness)—to ensure that in every circumstance, we ‘give’ more and ‘take’
less. For, every event is an amoral equation, every individual is at best an amoral
‘time bomb’; and every action is a pebble thrown into the cosmic ocean. And
everyone deserves, indeed is entitled, to be treated well, including you by your
own self. However much we might try, there is absolutely nothing we do, or can
do, that does not involve or affect, directly or indirectly, another living being.
We are all fellow-travelers and the safety and salvation of each of us hinges on
the attitude and actions of others. That being the case, all that we need to do,
or try to do to the best of our ability, is to ensure that our inevitable impact on
others’ lives is helpful, at least not hurtful. And if we cannot but hurt someone,
we should ‘make up for it’ by immediately thereafter helping another person.
We are instinctively not much attuned to the happenings within, or to how
our mind or consciousness works, or to whatever that lurks within us—out of
sight, but all in the mind, one might say. We are only concerned about what we
do outside, individually or as a group. But we know that the two—inside and
outside, within and without—are connected, in a sense, mutually dependent and
inseparable. While such a view until recently was the stuff of metaphysics and
mysticism, emerging areas of science are coming round to this line of thought.
As the physicist Jason Dispenza puts it, “We have been conditioned to believe
that the external world is more real than the internal world. This new model of
science says just the opposite. It says that what is happening within us will create
what’s happening outside of us”. The external also influences the internal. Some
scientists say that the neurobiological processes in our brain control our behavior
and some others say that it is ‘microbes residing symbiotically inside our bodies’.
It is as difficult to find a man without vice as it is to find one without any
virtue. What induces us to choose virtue or vice, good or evil is the state of the
‘war within’ at the time of the choice. If we want to be virtuous and moral in our
behavior, we must ensure that the ‘good guy’ inside dominates in the war. If we
were not to default to a selfish stand, as John Rawls8 argued, we normally would,
and change (the ‘biasing of genetic kin’ in the current evolutionary language),
then we need to tilt the scales within. If we were to operationalize Rawls’
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‘difference principle’—that social goods (money, jobs, property) must be equally
spread unless unequal or differential distribution benefits the most marginalized
groups—we have to alter the dynamics of the internal power sharing. Personal
and social transformation go hand in hand. Internal change is not all internal.
What we do, how we live, even whatever we pass through the five ‘gates’ of our
body has a bearing on the internal change. We cannot truthfully and truly better
our behavior unless a similar betterment occurs within. The way to get through is
to adopt the advice of the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu: “The journey of
a thousand miles begins with one step”. That one step is really a twin: intimately
inward; outwardly incremental. In both directions, we need to take several small
steps, so small and so silent that we hardly notice, to shift our gaze from what
we could, to what we can, from what we should not do, to what we ought to do.
At the very outset, we need to will ourselves to be our own objective ‘observer’,
or ‘witness’, consciously review what we do every day, the most routine and
seemingly most mundane things, and see how we can marginally ‘better’ them,
with a wee bit more sensitivity, consideration, and empathy. The synergistic effect
will translate and acquire critical mass, and that, in turn, might seep through our
skin, so to speak, and, over time, change the nature of the ‘change’ within. The
more we change within righteously, the more we will change in what we do, the
faster will be the pace of the internal change.
Despite all that we have accomplished to make morality our default
mode, were are nowhere near what ‘we could become’. There is no point looking
for scapegoats or sacrificial lambs like religion, culture, civilization, technology,
modernity, and so on. They all have had their part,