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

it
is on the other side. “I could not see to see”, Emily Dickinson mused, imagining
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the moment of death. Ezra Pound famously wrote, “Pull down thy vanity, it is
not man; Made courage, or made order, or made grace; Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down”. Faced with this ‘double-ignorance’—of what life is for and
death amounts to—our mind, true to its nature, comes up with a clever ruse. We
don’t deny death; we just pass the buck, leave it at every other person’s door, not
ours. Not only do we not know why or when or how, but, more fundamentally,
what it amounts to. What Plato said is still true: “No one knows whether death,
which people fear to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good”. That is
because we don’t know the before or the after; we lack perspective. We are all
born one way but die in multiple ways. We don’t know where the Darth Vader
lurks, waiting for the appointed moment to pounce. Incidentally, it is interesting
that the gender of death differs in languages. While the grim reaper, as well is
masculine in English, in Greek mythology, Thanatos is a man but is personified
by Persephone, a woman. In Latin and Italian, death is feminine. Masculine or
feminine, its fatal sting is the same. The messenger and the medium could be a
malicious mosquito—which incidentally kills and maims more people than any
other creature; an estimated half a million each year worldwide—or a murderous
man, or a doomed airplane, or a simple fall in the toilet. Death could be within;
in an innocuous cell or any organ. In fact as we live we die within. Sometimes the
very thing that gives life can kill too. Nature, it seems, has a sense of wry, if not
wicked, humor. A prime example is the most basic of all things: food. Creation
itself began with food. The Taittiriya Upanishad says, “From food indeed all
creatures are born, whatever creatures dwell on earth; by food, again, surely,
they live; then again to the food they go at the end”. Without it, we cannot live;
people in millions die of deprivation of food, starvation. But the irony is that
science tells us that the ‘starvation syndrome’ or ‘calorie-reduction’ is so far the
only known recipe for longevity, if not immortality. For reasons that are unclear,
this ‘caloric restriction’ regimen also postpones the onset of many degenerative
diseases normally associated with ageing. A Nigerian proverb tells us, “The death
that will kill a man begins as an appetite”. We all say, sometime or the other, that
life is transitory, and resonate George Harrison’s lyric (1970), ‘all things must
pass; all things must pass away’. But that does not affect the choices we make. In
fact, we think we are ‘alive’ because we don’t know what being dead is, or could
be. Now we can’t be even certain when someone is truly and irrevocably deemed
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‘dead’. Scientists tell us that the concept of true death is not the same as it was.
It used to be that once you died, you died. Today, we understand that the cells
in your body die hours after your supposed death, and ‘even after you’ve become
a cadaver, you’re still retrievable’. So, it means that we just don’t know when we
are really dead, may still have a chance to ‘wake up to life’ a century or two later
to a new world. The only ‘proof ’ we are alive is that we can walk and wink, speak
and scowl, and because it hurts when we pinch. Research is also under way on
another hair-raising dimension that goes beyond immortality. It is to bring back
the brain-dead or near-dead to life. That truly is terrifying, attendant with scary
side effects like leaving the patient in a state somewhere in between brain-dead
and comatose. ‘Death technology’, we are being enlightened, might even allow
your family to use your data to talk to you online after you die. Interacting
with someone from beyond the grave may no longer be the stuff of science
fiction. Scientists say that it might be possible to make realistic robot clones or
androids that are ‘fully conscious copies’ of our dead, loved ones, or, tangentially,
of anyone we fancy. Or fear. Just as ‘being human’ is not good enough to tell
what happens after we die, similarly we cannot tell what might happen on our
attempt to achieve such goals. Apart from the question who really wants to live
with a simulated-dead one, the fact is that there will be many unforeseeable and
unsettling consequences. Is the risk worth taking?
We think we die only once, but ‘death’ occurs all the time inside each of
us; every minute, 300 million cells in our body ‘die’. According to Dogen Zenji,
the founder of Japanese Soto Zen, Shakyamuni Buddha said that in twenty-four
hours “our life is born and dying, rising and falling, 6,400,099,980 times. So in
one second our life is born and dies around 70,000 times”.22 In another sense
too, we die inside: our sensitivity, our tenderness, our righteous reactions are
smothered to death by our own behavior. Someone once said, “Death is not the
greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live”. That
‘death’ we don’t see but the one we do see everyday does nothing to empower
us to be better prepared to face it when our time comes. It is amazing how
we never allow death to interfere in our daily decision-making. We never ask
ourselves before choosing, ‘What if I am dead tomorrow or the day after?’ And
we never ask, What did the dead lose by dying? How should we live, what must
we do, if we do not fear death and accept it as natural? And what if there is ‘life
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after death’? Whose loss—or whose gain—is it anyway? Our small-mindedness,
short-sightedness, pettiness, squabbling, bouts of irritation, and ‘accursed anger’,
pleasure-in-other’s-pain mindset, do not get dented by the certainty of death. We
erect a firewall between the dynamics of our daily deeds and the fickleness of our
life. In practical terms, what bothers us is not someone ‘being dead’, whatever
it might mean; it is the physical aspect that irks us. It is our inability to relate
with them through our five senses that bothers us. We can no longer feel their
presence; we cannot touch or talk to them; they are no longer there when we need
them; they become faint memories. One of man’s ‘irrational’ longings is to be
remembered, not to be ‘forgotten’ even after he is dead. It is ‘irrational’ because
we have no clue what happens—what, if any, ‘me’ or ‘mine’ lingers after death—
and still we want ‘permanence’ as a memory. But actually we are not content with
remembrance or memory in others’ minds; we want the medium of the physical
body for perpetuity. Sometimes, the bereaved go to psychic ‘mediums’ to talk
through them with their loved-dead, and once they do, or believe that they have
done, they no longer grieve, or even want to talk a second time. We feel okay that
they are ‘okay’, wherever they are.
Missing the ‘Dead’
We might prefer a zombie, or a person in deep coma, as long as he is still ‘alive’,
to a dead person. The Kathopanishad clearly states, “For the soul, there is neither
birth nor death at any time. It does not come into being at any time; it is unborn,
eternal and primeval. It doesn’t die when the body is put to death”. But that kind
of implicit eternity is not what modern man seeks. And that doesn’t give us an
‘alibi’ when someone dies. It is possible that we don’t see, speak to, or even think
of a person for years, and yet when they die, we say we ‘miss him/her’. But do
the dead ‘miss us’, or more likely, feel relieved? Maybe we should worry about
those who are not yet ‘dead’, and stop being insensitive, rude, and indifferent.
When a person dies, we say good things about him/her that we might have never
said when he/she was alive, which they would have been happy to hear. In any
case, we don’t bother about them once the rituals are over. Is it hypocrisy or
magnanimity or pragmatism? In any way we are safe; the dead can’t appreciate or
complain. That is what dying does, brings out the best and worst from us. Is it all
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because we do not know what ‘being dead’ means in relation to ‘being alive’? Is
it some kind of a ‘survival hangover’ from the early times when death was mostly
sudden and unexpected, and ‘being alive’ itself was a cause for celebration? Or, is
it that, even without our being aware, we are ‘happy’ there is one less to compare
and compete with? It is this ‘ignorance’ we must dispel to come to terms with
mortality. The other reason is that the very thought that we live, struggle, fight
so many battles and spend so much time and energy only to lose out and ‘die’ is
unsettling. Man has never accepted mortality; he always waged a war but against
hopeless odds. ‘Absolute acceptance’ would have meant paralyzing life itself.
Man spends all his life between seeing the reality of mortality and stubbornly
unwilling to accept that reality. The modus vivendi he arrives at is to banish that
‘reality’ from his daily life; to put it away at other people’s door; to reject its
immediacy and blur its inevitability. Scriptures have told us to accept gracefully
what life offers, and to turn that acceptance into a dedication to the divine and
utility to fellow humans. Life and death are perceived not as opposites, but as
two sides of human existence. Zen master Dogen Zenji says, “Within death
there is life; within life there is death…. Viewed from one side, it is life; viewed
from the other side, it is death. We are living in each moment and dying in each
moment. Life and death are a moment of arising and a moment of decaying, and
there is death within life and life within death. Both life and death are facts of the
moment. Therefore, life is itself death and death is itself life. The essence of life is
nothing more than the interrelation of life and death”.23 Each of us is a ‘prisoner’
of these two. The question is: What kind of a prisoner do we want to be? We can
either turn the prison into an opportunity to do good, or fret, fume, and make
others’ life hell; it is a choice of disposition. Dogen Zenji continues, “To pursue
life outside the present and to tremble at death outside the present is delusion.
Therefore, when facing death, you should die with thoroughness… It is well to
work with all your effort while you are alive. When you have to die, it is well
to withdraw quickly. We must be true to ourselves here and now”.24 Buddhism
holds that life itself is no-life and death itself is no-death.
We have been reading and hearing all such soaring and thoughtprovoking
statements for ages. Like our basic ‘willful blindness’ about death,
such descriptions about death receive the same treatment. All that makes no
practical difference to our way of life or state of mind, or to our behavior. What
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is new is the entry of science into the fray, echoing similar thoughts. Science is
now telling us that we do not have to ‘accept’ even that physical ‘limitation’;
that man now has the means to achieve, if not life forever, at least the life of
a mini-Methuselah. Science is also now beginning to say that ‘there might
after all be life after death’, and acknowledges that some sort of awareness or
consciousness might well survive at least for a while after a person’s heart and
brain stop functioning. Scientists sum up and say, “Yes, there is life after death
and it looks like this applies to everyone.25 These findings are still tentative, too
early to draw any credible conclusions from. But what if, what if science makes a
major breakthrough to keep man alive for centuries, if not forever? And what if
science develops the technology to establish beyond reasonable doubt that there
is ‘life after death’? Can we then remain ‘human’?
Morbidity and Mortality
As for the ‘dull and dreary’ (in the words of Somerset Maugham) but deadly tryst
we call ‘death’, human thought has never managed to grasp its true meaning and
message. It is too overpowering to be objective; too much of a leap into the void
to be rational. It is