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

not immune
to the crippling ‘fear of failure’. Our reason-centric, “post-modern” culture puts
emphasis on the hedonistic pursuit of happiness, freedom, individuality, and selfcenteredness.
It seeks contentment through achievement, enlightenment through
escapism. In this ‘culture’, ‘failure’ in love becomes the ultimate admission of
incompetence, an unbearable humiliation, a negation of one’s right to be ‘happy’;
an intolerable insult to one’s self-image. Unable to accept the humiliation or digest
the insult, the affected individual turns his revengeful ire onto the subject or object
of his ‘obsession’, and the world at large is held responsible.
While we might still primarily associate ‘obsessive revenge’ with ‘failed
love’, being ‘obsessed’ is almost universal. We are all obsessed at some point by
someone or something—a person, pet, movie star, a guru, a place, love, sex,
guns, sport, a TV show, a gadget… Some obsessions are hidden, we are afraid to
even admit them to ourselves; some, we never tire of dreaming of, whose very
existence makes life worth living, and any burden worth bearing. Obsession can
take different forms with different results to the obsessed and the affected. An
‘obsession’ with God has a different effect than one with a gadget, for example.
Positively, ‘obsession’ can make us focus more, or give us dogged determination.
Negatively, it could blur our moral vision and lead to great destruction. It has
been said that “passion is a positive obsession; obsession is a negative passion”.
While there are myriad personal ‘obsessions’ that consume much of our life, as
a species too our evolution has been defined by the pursuit of many collective
obsessions. Some of these, in no particular order, are God, sex, body, wealth,
death, convenience, comfort, control, fame, food, clothes, shopping. And we are
obsessed with not only what we have—and do not have—but, even more, with
what others have and should not have. Among these, the three that are likely to
align the course of human destiny and the evolution of human consciousness are
the ‘three Ms’—morality, money and mortality.
The Three ‘M’s
On all three fronts, we are in the throes of cathartic convulsion. We associate
human ‘goodness’ with ‘morality’, but on one thing most agree—the ‘difficulty of
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being good’. Whether or not man is a ‘moral animal’, most agree that we are in a
state of moral free fall. Not a day passes without our hearing or reading news that
rudely reinforces this inference. Horrible things are happening so routinely and
repetitively in every part of the world, it makes us wonder whether man has gone
mad or evil has finally triumphed on earth and taken over man, the supposed
regent and agent of God. Now, no one can think and say even to himself “Evil
can’t touch me; I am good and cannot be seduced or tempted or provoked to
do such things”. We cannot, on the one hand, talk of unity and oneness of all,
and then wash our hands off others, who are just like any of us. We must bear
their cross too. As for the second M, we all know, and have been repeatedly
warned about, the corrupting influence of money on the human mind, yet are
unable to escape its clutches due to its pervasive and penetrating place in human
society. Tragically, it seems that money has got into the very make-up of man at
the most elemental level. How often have we seen a child clutching money and
calling it his ‘pocket money’ or simply ‘my money’! An illustration of this point
comes from a letter written by a child to God which reads: “Dear God, If you
give me [a genie lamp like] Aladdin’s, I will give you anything except my money
or my chess set.—Raphael”.8 If a child, still enchantingly innocent, does not
want to exchange ‘his’ money even to God, that speaks greatly about both man
and money. It tells us that money is now not merely currency or a medium of
exchange; it is now part of our DNA; and integrally defines us. Angelic eternal
youth and immortality have long been the elusive human universal aspiration.
But in recent times, science has brought them into the realm of possibility with
consequences too unpredictable for human imagination. The question is, can
humans attain eternal youth and not destroy the planet? And, “can we avoid
the scale of human population growth that would turn us into a seething viral
infection on Earth’s skin that completely destroys it? Or, more likely, us?”9 If
we do achieve outright physical immortality, then “earth will decide she’s had
enough of us, and shrug us off—like the pesky little germs that we are”.10
Not everything ‘alive’ in nature is mortal, although the few life forms
like bacteria that did not and still do not reproduce sexually can be considered
immortal, barring accidental death. So, we do have a ‘precedent’. If ‘primitive’
bacteria can, why not we, the most ‘intelligent’ and innovative life on earth? In
our tumultuous times, it is becoming increasingly difficult for laymen to decide
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how they should react to research on issues like human immortality. Money
has much to do with it. Firstly, money is flowing into attendant research at the
expense of far more important and urgent provision of basic needs for billions of
people. Second, the fruits of that research will not be equally accessible. It is being
openly said that by the year 2050, man can become technologically immortal
but only the rich will be able to afford it. In other words, it will be money which
will be the deciding factor on who has to die and who doesn’t have to, money
being the deciding dice. That, in turn, could create one more source of tension,
friction, and divide, and it could easily reach the boiling point. Already many
are saying that the next apocalypse might be economic, not nuclear; that the
current grotesque global inequality—just eight men own the same wealth as the
poorest half of the world—is unsustainable and morally abhorrent. So offensive
to any semblance of justness, which is central to morality, that not overturning
it is tantamount to inciting evil? But secretly we all want to be, and hope we
will be, sooner than later, one of the one-percent and so we watch and wait for
our day. This along with the large privatizations has fueled the rise of wealth
inequality among individuals. By any reckoning, we are living in the times of
the ultra-rich, a second ‘gilded age’ in which a shimmering surface masks crony
capitalism, serious social problems, and crass corruption. While there can be no
perfect equality in any human institution or relationship in any walk of life, the
present situation in which a CEO earns more than 1000 times his employee
clearly violates every canon of fairness and fair play. But then, whose morality is
it anyway, of the master or slave, of the rich or poor The CEO thinks it is moral
because he has earned it by leading the company, and he has not cheated anyone.
The worker thinks it is obscene because the value of his work for the company
is much more than the glaring gap indicates. But perceptions are important and
there is growing groundswell that that we are at a flash point and, that sooner
than latter the non-rich will revolt and when that happens it could dwarf all
earlier revolutions in its intensity and destruction. Clearly the world needs a
new economy, radically different economy, which some call ‘human economy,
designed for the 99%’, but how to bring it into being without violence and
bloodshed is the moot point. The answer again is the same. We cannot transplant
it externally. The transformation must happen within. Which means winning
the war within.
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Another imponderable is the growing seamlessness between man and
machine and the gnawing sense that the world, perhaps even we, are better off
with machines running the world. If, for example, man and machine become
intelligently indistinguishable, which means that the human population gets
doubled or trebled in terms of brain power and behavior, what kind of world will
this result in? It is being predicted that by the year 2029 machines will pass the
Turing test, that is, they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence.11 Does
that constitute human progress or machines-coming-of-age? Does that pave the
way to the next step of human evolution or are we creating perhaps another kind
of life built on the ruins of human life? Since it affects us and our children’s lives,
shouldn’t we have some say in such matters? The project 2045 Initiative, funded
by Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, aims to create technologies enabling the
transfer of [an] individual’s personality to a more advanced nonbiological carrier,
and extending life, including to the point of immortality. It envisages the mass
production of lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of
the human brain, complete with the particulars of consciousness and personality.
Itskov’s goal is to make “a digital copy of your mind in a nonbiological carrier;
a version of a fully sentient person that could live for hundreds or thousands
of years”.12 Not a virtual but an actual ‘human’ immortality. Avatars, we are
reassured, can have sex as an artificial body can be designed to receive sensations.
Not only that, the project also aims to “actually save lives” and “to help the
disabled, to cure diseases, to create technology that will allow us in the future to
answer some existential questions”. Such as, what is the brain? what is life? what
is consciousness? and, finally, what is the universe?
Money—Maya, Mara, and Moksha
The issue is not whether or not some sort of money is necessary for human life. It
is both necessary and noxious; it depends on how we earn it, how much we retain
of it, and how we disperse and dispose of it. Indeed the discovery or invention
of money has been described as arguably one of the greatest, on par with fire
and the wheel. All religions recognize the need for it, but they also warn us to be
wary of excessive attachment to it. On the one hand, they treat it as a blessing,
a blessing that God wants to bestow upon us in plentitude. On the other hand,
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they describe it as an obstacle to faith, and a mortal menace. At the same time,
scriptures also talk of ‘spiritualized wealth’, and of money as a ‘divine tool’. The
key is to ensure that it flows in the right direction—without stagnating, or being
used for obscene ostentation—and that it is put to use as an instrument to lift
the lives of the impoverished millions dying for want of dignity.
Money that is made at the expense of others gets tainted, because it is
energetically used in an egocentric, selfish way. No money is too small to make
some life-saving difference to someone or the other. One of the purusharthas
(human aspirations) in Hindu philosophy is artha, or material wealth. Artha
means that which is an asset or that which is meaningful. Most important, it
must be acquired or possessed in a dharmic way, which also means not hurting
or harming others and not unjustly depriving others of what is their dharmic
due. The question is what the quest for money makes of us, and what it makes us
do. In its material sense, it provides the wherewithal to enable people, families,
institutions societies, and nations to have the basic material needs of life. Yet,
money and wealth can also offer humanity more than existential value. Rightly
conceived and understood, it can improve the human condition and even bring
joy, beauty, and leisure to life. Lack of money can impoverish life, enfeeble the
body, denude dignity, and make human life a living hell. On the other hand, if
wealth becomes an unprincipled obsession placed above our duties to God and
society, it becomes perverted and devoid of its power for the good. Money in
some form or the other has always been a legitimately important and moral factor
in human life. The Quran says “How excellent wealth is! Through it I protect
my honor and get closer to my Lord”. The Bible does not call money the root of
evil; it is the love of it or obsession with it that leads to evil. What is new is the
preeminence of that very ‘love’ of, or obsession with money in human life, and
its emergence as almost the sole means to achieve all human aims, aspirations,
expectations—prosperity, well-being, security, control, comfort, power, fame, to
be good, even to acquire a good after-life. We can no longer ignore money in
any serious reflection of anything human—politics or philosophy, economics
or ecology, science or spiritualism, morality or evil, mortality or immortality.
The villain is not money, it is the mind.