The War Within - Between Good and Evil by Bheemeswara Challa (e book reader online .txt) 📕

became romanticized’, and the ‘graveyard became the focus of somber
and mournful dispositions relative to death’. With ‘increasing privatization and
institutionalization in the twentieth century, ‘death denial became the reigning
orientation’, which soon gave way to the endeavor of science to conquer death
and make man eternal. The irony is that despite all the ‘accumulated wisdom’
about death, very few actions in life of very few people are influenced by this
knowledge. Such a strong disconnect, it is hard to imagine, is a wholly human
failing. If there is Divine sanction for this amnesia, what was the purpose? It may
be so, because if man truly and wholly believes that he could die any time, he
may lose all interest in life and cease to do his karma and dharma. Without death,
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life can be an endless entrapment and unbearable burden, no end to misery, no
hope of betterment. In fact, it is the definitiveness of death that makes life worth
living. There is life because there is death. It is due to death that man understands
the value of life; it is its task to make man realize and enhance life. Death really
is a gate, not the, “sluice through which the different elements of this world go
as they move from one stage to another in the cosmic evolution of all empirical
reality”.5
Mortality has framed every aspect of human activity and creativity,
and has always been a defining element in literature, poetry, play, drama, art,
religion, philosophy, and science. Mortality, which some say is a gift, while many
consider it a curse, is perceived in multiple ways, as the authentic existential
dilemma, a part of the natural cycle of decay and renewal, a stepping stone to
spiritual self-discovery, a means to find immanent meaning in life. In effect, it has
amounted to be the unknowable center around which our thoughts inescapably,
even morbidly, swirl. As someone succinctly put it, “The question here is, how
do we live? We want to be gods, or at least angels, heroes, or saints. But we are
animals. Plus we don’t want to die, or even admit the possibility of death”.6 But
we still die, lock, stock and barrel. There is nothing we can do about death, but
everything we do has something to do about it. We cannot escape it, but we
cannot also accept it. We feel so impotent, emasculated, embittered, enraged.
Dylan Thomas expressed the mood memorably when he wrote, “Do not go
gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Sacred
texts and seers might say that ‘dark is right’, that is, death is integral to life,
but most men, when that ‘night’ creeps in, are always aghast and not ready to
‘go’ at all.
Becoming a Jellyfish, at the Least a Turtle
The central theme of our great epics and enduring works of literature, like the
Epic of Gilgamesh (Mesopotamia) is the mystery of mortality. King Gilgamesh
attempts to learn the secret of eternal life by undertaking a long and perilous
journey to meet the immortal flood hero, Utnapishtim, who tells Gilgamesh,
“The life that you are seeking you will never find. When the gods created man
they allotted to him death, but life they retained in their own keeping”.7 And
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the epic gives us some wrenching advice, which is music to modern ears: “Fill
your belly; day and night make merry; let days be full of joy; love the child who
holds your hand; let your wife delight in your embrace; for these alone are the
concerns of man”. What Gilgamesh was told was not possible is what is high
on the wish-list of man of this millennium. We take heart from the fact that
it is not ‘unnatural’. For, that which exists already in nature in a lowly creature
cannot be unnatural, or cannot be dismissed as an ‘unreasonable’ aspiration for
the human, the most evolved species. Scientists have discovered that the tiny
‘immortal jellyfish’ has found a way to cheat death by actually reversing its ageing
process. If the jellyfish is injured or sick, it returns to its polyp stage over a threeday
period, transforming its cells into a younger state that will eventually grow
into adulthood all over again. Another case is that of the ‘the slow and steady’
turtle, known to live for centuries; researches have found that their organs don’t
seem to break down over time. It means, literally, that we, as individuals—not as
a species—want to be still walking on earth centuries from now essentially with
the extant body and brain. The single most important truth that has so far stood
the test of time, the substratum of all scriptures, the common thread of all human
thought has been, as Osho puts it, “Death has already happened in birth; there
is no way to transcend it. It is going to happen because it has already happened.
It is only a question of time unfolding. You are rushing towards it each minute”.8
Rabindranath Tagore, in his classic poem Gitanjali, expresses it exquisitely:
“Thou hast made me endless; such is Thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest
again and again; and fillest ever with fresh life”. Scriptures say that the only way
to avoid or escape from death is to avoid or escape from birth. Science says ‘not
necessarily’. Advances in microbiology and genetics seem to indicate that the
prospect of immortality, or at the least, of exponentially increased individual
life spans, is not as far-fetched as earlier believed. If ‘immortality’ means
inability to die; it means inability to actually be killed by anything. That is
not going to happen; no organic body can be indestructible. In fact, beyond a
threshold, say half a millennium, living ‘forever’ has no practical meaning. If the
world comes to an end, can we live thereafter? If we are run over by a train, can
we survive that? If a person wants to end his life, can immortality stop it? Can the
body survive a bullet hit, or being run over by a bus? What about morality and
the rights of the yet-to-be-born, the future generations? Will it stop the human
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reproductive cycle? If everyone becomes old, how would the world be? And what
about other species? If they continue the cycle, will they get an upper hand over
man? If no one ‘dies’, ‘with infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives’, and
everyone ‘alive’ would have had altogether too much of themselves, condemned
to an existence of boredom, déjà vu and will consider lucky in having the chance
to die.9
From time immemorial until even a century ago, questions on issues like
values, morality, God, and death have been the concerns of religion, philosophy,
humanities, and sociology. They defined the parameters and determined the
dynamics of the debate. Such subjects were considered beyond the purview of
the other major player on the human stage, science. All that has changed in
the recent past, and science is beginning to claim that it has answers to such
questions, and that “meaning, values, morality and the good life must relate to
facts about the well-being of conscious creatures—and, in our case, must lawfully
depend upon events in the world and upon states of the human brain”.10 In this
view, the key player is the human brain; which many call the most astounding,
most complicated and sophisticated entity in the known universe, while some
others (David Linden, The Accidental Mind; 2007), describe it as a ‘mouse brain
with extra toppings’, a ‘cobbled together mess’, and say that its design is ‘quirky,
inefficient, and bizarre’. Some11 are now calling it a ‘spiritual organ’. Whether
the human brain is a marvel or a mess, we cannot ignore that there is an emerging
scientific sense that “human experience shows every sign of being determined by
and realized in, states of the human brain”.12 It is a far cry from the pristine days
of Francis Bacon who cautioned about too much admiration for the powers of
the mind and as an extension of science.
There is a certain feeling that the time has come for man to assert his
authenticity; that everything that man has ever sought and thus far failed to
find can be discovered not in the stars or in the laps of gods but in his head,
the brain, culminating in the ability of the human intellect to bridge the gap or
blur the boundary between facts and values, a long sought-after goal of moral
philosophers. The new-found optimism that science can help us become a ‘moral
being’ is based on the finding that “beliefs about facts and beliefs about values
seem to rise from similar processes”, and that “we have a common system for
judging truth and falsity in both domains”.13 Such is the height of hoopla, that
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it is being suggested that “morality should be considered an undeveloped branch
of science”.14 And, that “human knowledge and human values can no longer be
kept apart. The world of measurement and the world of meaning must eventually
be reconciled”.15 In short, what we are being told is that what scriptures and
saints have failed to do—make man an instinctively or intuitively a moral
being—science would now be able to do by simply suitably ‘fixing the brain’ or
by making it ‘smart’. We admiringly say ‘he is so smart’ or ‘so clever’, as a contrast
to ‘he is stupid’. But there are other voices who tell us that, in Chesterton’s words,
“There is no man really clever who has not found that he is stupid”. And there
are some very perceptive people who say that what a man might gain through his
intellect or cleverness, he might lose in his spiritual perception, and that he alone
is a wise man who can conquer his own cleverness. Euripedes said, ‘cleverness is
not wisdom’, and Rumi wrote, “Yesterday I was clever, and so I wanted to change
the world; today I am wise so I am changing myself ”.
As for man’s other aspiration, immunity from death, science is now
trying to achieve, besides physical or biological immortality, another ‘kind’ of
immortality—digital immortality. That is, making permanent what is being
referred to as the ‘online presence personality’, distinct from the physical, to
ensure that our digital ‘footprints’ outlive our physical forms. It is explained
as having the means to store and restore the thousands of trillions of bytes of
information represented in the pattern we call our brain. Ultimately, “softwarebased
humans will be vastly extended beyond the severe limitations of humans as
we know them today. They will live out on the Web, projecting bodies, whenever
they need or want them, including virtual bodies in diverse regions of virtual
reality”.16 It is suggested that it might be possible that our brains and memories
could be transferred—uploaded or downloaded, as the case may be—into a
synthetic medium, that is, we will become ‘immortal’ through a machine. Then
again, we are told that hackers are developing a virus to infect human brains;
that synthetic biology—deliberate creation of living organisms from elementary
materials that are not themselves alive—is accelerating faster than computer
technology, which could be used to control behavior and for bioterrorism. We
also read reports that ‘headless human clones can grow organs in ten years’.
Elsewhere, one tells us that we could have amidst us ‘biological robots’ sooner
than electronics-based robots.17 Yet another says that a ‘crawling bio-robot runs
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on rat heart cells’, which could ‘someday attack human disease’.18 And maybe
soon, mindless ‘human’ robots can be cloned for manual labor or sex slaves? Such
prophecies are usually paraded to demonstrate what man can do to transcend
biology and outsmart nature! There are some who sound a note of caution. In the
words of Prof. Andrew Linzey, Director of Animal Ethics at Oxford University,
“It is morally regressive to create a mutant form of life… scientific fascism”.
How are we supposed to put this in perspective? Should we say it is incredulous,
impossible, or is it the end of the bridge between animal and Overman, with
man being the connecting rope, that Nietzsche talked about? Zarathustra says,
“Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome
man? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you
want to be the ebb of this great flood, and even go back to the beasts rather
than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughing stock or a painful
embarrassment. And man shall be just that to the Overman: a laughing stock
or a painful embarrassment”.19 Is the human organism that nature fashioned as
a part of the living world, his brain and/or body capable of such manipulative,
mechanical metamorphosis? Trouble is that is that human beings are still on the
prehistoric mode—10,000 BCE