Food for thought

There is no gainsaying that hate has increased in the world despite the increase in the comfort levels of us all. Homo sapiens, we the humans, have come a long way from the Stone Age when they were nomads and were startled when rocks collided and led to fire, the first human discovery. And then, when they had problems taking huge loads across those rugged and hostile terrains, they came across the idea of wheel, the first human invention. Now, after all these years of struggle, when humans have achieved almost everything except perhaps the enigma called God – even here physicists are trying their level best by dint of their sophisticated theories like String, Chaos, and many a field theory – what has besmirched the march of human civilization is hate, resulting in violence.

We’ve become a very violent species on earth. Remember, animals don’t kill their brethren, except when there’s a scarcity of food, or perhaps when the need for procreation prepares the male animal to befriend a female during mating season when rivalry is at its peak. That’s called animal instinct. And that’s natural too. That’s the Law of Nature, if one would call it so. But we, as humans, are distinct in the sense that we have the privilege of the Faculty of Reason. We’re an intelligent species. And so we deploy reason. We’ve emotions too. And that’s why we’re capable of being emotional in such a varied manner – with our anger, our laugh, our tears, our many frustrations, our angst, and what not. But have we ever thought why we’re breeding hate across ourselves when we could have loved each other and helped ourselves towards a beautiful planet?

The root cause is anger. But what’s anger in the first place? According to modern psychology interspersed with the wisdom of Eastern Mysticism, anger is a result of our suffering. We suffer in one way or the other despite the best of comforts we have, and despite, of course, all the wealth we have at our disposal. Strangely, we don’t realize that our suffering is as natural as our breath is! The moment we’re born, we suffer – the passage of a child through her mother’s birth canal to come to an outer world is a huge suffering, and any psychologist can tell you that. It’s a transformative experience – from one level of consciousness to another – quite like madness; as one of the most influential psychiatrists of the 20th century, Prof RD Laing, said, “madness is a sane response to an insane world”. All of this means we suffer in one way or the other, but since we’re incapable of realizing the truth of our suffering, we become angry and begin to ventilate our anger through varied means. The result is violence. And our violence-psychology is unceasing because our anger is directionless even as we feel that we’re angry because we’ve a reason to be angry. It’s a paradox, but only apparently. The truth lies somewhere else.

The truth, in fact, is that we’re angry and so we cause violence on others because we’ve anger in us – that is, anger is our feature. Hadn’t anger been within us, we wouldn’t have been angry at all. It’s all within. It’s our inner universe.

Therefore, we must admit that even as we’ve marched too far and too high scientifically and technologically – and with this, philosophically too – the fact remains that we’re still primitive psychologically because we’ve failed to embark on an inner journey. This journey is of spirituality, quite distinct from what one calls ‘religion’. One of the giants in the history of Indian psycho-spirituality, J Krishnamurti (who spent decades in the West preaching the truth about human existence and had the likes of David Bohm, a celebrated particle physicist, as one of his disciples), said that truth is a pathless land, and no man come to it through any dogma, creed, caste, or religion. We must try to understand this fact of life and rise above our parochial worldviews so that this precious planet of ours can mutate to a paradise.

The cure to all evils is simple then: Let’s abandon that terrible thing called anger, which we can, and let’s help shape a heaven here. Is it impossible?