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The Lord accepts the sin and the virtue
of none; because knowledge is veiled by Ignorance, mortal men are deluded.
Gita. V. 15.
They live according to another idea of self than the reality, deluded,
attached, expressing a falsehood, - as if by an enchantment they see
the false as the true.
Maitrayani Upanishad. VII. 10.
They live and move in the Ignorance and go round and round, battered
and stumbling, like blind men led by one who is blind.
Mundaka Upanishad. I. 2. 8.
One whose intelligence has attained to Unity, casts away from him
both sin and virtue.
Gita. II. 50.
He who has found the bliss of the Eternal is afflicted no more by
the thought, “Why have I not done the good? Why have I done evil?”
One who knows the self extricates himself from both these things.
Taittiriya Upanishad. II. 9.
These are they who are conscious of the much falsehood in the world;
they grow in the house of Truth, they are the strong and invincible
sons of Infinity.
Rig Veda. VII. 60. 5.
The first and the highest are truth; in the middle there is falsehood,
but it is taken between the truth on both sides of it and it draws its
being from the truth. [Sri Aurobindo's Note: The truth of the physical
reality and the truth of the spiritual and superconscient reality. Into
the intermediate subjective and mental realities which stand between
them, falsehood can enter, but it takes either truth from above or truth
from below as the substance out of which it builds itself and both are
pressing upon it to turn its misconstructions into truth of life and
truth of spirit.]
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. V. 5. 1.
If Ignorance is in its nature a self-limiting knowledge
oblivious of the integral self-awareness and confined to an exclusive
concentration in a single field or upon a concealing surface of cosmic
movement, what, in this view, are we to make of the problem which most
poignantly preoccupies the mind of man when it is turned on the mystery
of his own existence and of cosmic existence, the problem of evil? A
limited knowledge supported by a secret All-Wisdom as an instrument
for working out within the necessary limitations a restricted world-order
may be admitted as an intelligible process of the universal Consciousness
and Energy; but the necessity of falsehood and error, the necessity
of wrong and evil or their utility in the workings of the omnipresent
Divine Reality is less easily admissible. And yet if that Reality is
what we have supposed it to be, there must be some necessity for the
appearance of these contrary phenomena, some significance, some function
that they had to serve in the economy of the universe. For in the complete
and inalienable self-knowledge of the Brahman which is necessarily all-knowledge,
since all this that is is the Brahman, such phenomena cannot have come
in as a chance, an intervening accident, an involuntary forgetfulness
or confusion of the Consciousness-Force of the All-Wise in the cosmos
or an ugly contretemps for which the indwelling Spirit was not
prepared and of which it is the prisoner erring in a labyrinth with
the utmost difficulty of escape. Nor can it be an inexplicable mystery
of being, original and eternal, of which the divine All-Teacher is incapable
of giving an account to himself or to us. There must be behind it a
significance of the All-Wisdom itself, a power of the All-Consciousness
which permits and uses it for some indispensable function in the present
workings of our self-experience and world-experience. This aspect of
existence needs now to be examined more directly and determined in its
origins and the limits of its reality and its place in Nature.
This problem may be taken up from three points of view, - its relation
to the Absolute, the supreme Reality, its origin and place in the cosmic
workings, its action and point of hold in the individual being. It is
evident that these contrary phenomena have no direct root in the supreme
Reality itself, there is nothing there that has this character; they
are creations of the Ignorance and Inconscience, not fundamental or
primary aspects of the Being, not native to the Transcendence or to
the infinite power of the Cosmic Spirit. It is sometimes reasoned that
as Truth and Good have their absolutes, so Falsehood and Evil must also
have their absolutes, or, if it is not so, then both must belong to
the relativity only; Knowledge and Ignorance, Truth and Falsehood, Good
and Evil exist only in relation to each other and beyond the dualities
here they have no existence. But this is not the fundamental truth of
the relation of these opposites; for, in the first place, Falsehood
and Evil are, unlike Truth and Good, very clearly results of the Ignorance
and cannot exist where there is no Ignorance: they can have no self-existence
in the Divine Being, they cannot be native elements of the Supreme Nature.
If, then, the limited Knowledge which is the nature of Ignorance renounces
its limitations, if Ignorance disappears into Knowledge, evil and falsehood
can no longer endure: for both are fruits of unconsciousness and wrong
consciousness and, if true or whole consciousness is there replacing
Ignorance, they have no longer any basis for their existence. There
can therefore be no absolute of falsehood, no absolute of evil; these
things are a by-product of the world-movement: the sombre flowers of
falsehood and suffering and evil have their root in the black soil of
the Inconscient. On the other hand, there is no such intrinsic obstacle
to the absoluteness of Truth and Good: the relativity of truth and error,
good and evil is a fact of our experience, but it is similarly a by-product,
it is not a permanent factor native to existence; for it is true only
of the valuations made by the human consciousness, true only of our
partial knowledge and partial ignorance.
Truth is relative to us because our knowledge is surrounded by ignorance.
Our exact vision stops short at outside appearances which are not the
complete truth of things, and, if we go deeper, the illuminations we
arrive at are guesses or inferences or intimations, not a sight of indubitable
realities: our conclusions are partial, speculative or constructed,
our statement of them, which is the expression of our indirect contact
with the reality, has the nature of representations or figures, word-images
of thought-perceptions that are themselves images, not embodiments of
Truth itself, not directly real and authentic. These figures or representations
are imperfect and opaque and carry with them their shadow of nescience
or error; for they seem to deny or shut out other truths and even the
truth they express does not get its full value: it is an end or edge
of it that projects into form and the rest is left in the shadow unseen
or disfigured or uncertainly visible. It might almost be said that no
mental statement of things can be altogether true; it is not Truth bodied,
pure and nude, but a draped figure, - often it is only the drapery that
is visible. But this character does not apply to truth perceived by
a direct action of consciousness or to the truth of knowledge by identity;
our seeing there may be limited, but so far as it extends, it is authentic,
and authenticity is a first step towards absoluteness: error may attach
itself to a direct or identical vision of things by a mental accretion,
by a mistaken or illegitimate extension or by the mind's misinterpretation,
but it does not enter into the substance. This authentic or identical
vision or experience of things is the true nature of knowledge and it
is self-existent within the being, although rendered in our minds by
a secondary formation that is unauthentic and derivative. Ignorance
in its origin has not this self-existence or this authenticity; it exists
by a limitation or absence or abeyance of knowledge, error by a deviation
from truth, falsehood by a distortion of truth or its contradiction
and denial. But it cannot be similarly said of knowledge that in its
very nature it exists only by a limitation or absence or abeyance of
ignorance: it may indeed emerge in the human mind partly by a process
of such limitation or abeyance, by the receding of darkness from a partial
light, or it may have the aspect of ignorance turning into knowledge;
but in fact, it rises by an independent birth from our depths where
it has a native existence.
Again, of good and evil it can be said that one exists by true consciousness,
the other survives only by wrong consciousness: if there is an unmixed
true consciousness, good alone can exist; it is no longer mixed with
evil or formed in its presence. Human values of good and evil, as of
truth and error, are indeed uncertain and relative: what is held as
truth in one place or time is held in another place or time to be error;
what is regarded as good is elsewhere or in other times regarded as
evil. We find too that what we call evil results in good, what we call
good results in evil. But this untoward outcome of good producing evil
is due to the confusion and mixture of knowledge and ignorance, to the
penetration of true consciousness by wrong consciousness, so that there
is an ignorant or mistaken application of our good, or it is due to
the intervention of afflicting forces. In the opposite case of evil
producing good, the happier and contradictory result is due to the intervention
of some true consciousness and force acting behind and in spite of wrong
consciousness and wrong will or it is due to the intervention of redressing
forces. This relativity, this mixture is a circumstance of human mentality
and the workings of the Cosmic Force in human life; it is not the fundamental
truth of good and evil. It might be objected that physical evil, such
as pain and most bodily suffering, is independent of knowledge and ignorance,
of right and wrong consciousness, inherent in physical Nature: but,
fundamentally, all pain and suffering are the result of an insufficient
consciousness-force in the surface being which makes it unable to deal
rightly with self and Nature or unable to assimilate and to harmonise
itself with the contacts of the universal Energy; they would not exist
if in us there were an integral presence of the luminous Consciousness
and the divine Force of an integral Being. Therefore the relation of
truth to falsehood, of good to evil is not a mutual dependence, but
is in the nature of a contradiction as of light and shadow; a shadow
depends on light for its existence, but light does not depend for its
existence on the shadow. The relation between the Absolute and these
contraries of some of its fundamental aspects is not that they are opposite
fundamental aspects of the Absolute; falsehood and evil have no fundamentality,
no power of infinity or eternal being, no self-existence even by latency
in the Self-Existent, no authenticity of an original inherence.
It is no doubt a fact that once truth or good manifests, the conception
of falsehood and evil becomes a possibility; for whenever there is an
affirmation, its negation becomes conceivable. As the manifestation
of existence, consciousness and delight made the manifestation of non-existence,
inconscience, insensibility conceivable and, because conceivable, therefore
in a way inevitable, for all possibilities push towards actuality until
they reach it, so is it with these contraries of the aspects of the
Divine Existence. It may be said on this ground that these opposites,
since they must be immediately perceivable by the manifesting Consciousness
on the very threshold of manifestation, can take rank as implied absolutes
and are inseparable from all cosmic existence. But it must first be
noted that it is only in cosmic manifestation that they become possible;
they cannot pre-exist in the timeless being, for they are incompatible
with the unity and bliss that are its substance.
In cosmos also they cannot come into being except by a limitation of
truth and good into partial and relative forms and by a breaking up
of the unity of existence and consciousness into separative consciousness
and separative being. For where there is oneness and complete mutuality
of consciousness-force even in multiplicity and diversity, there truth
of self-knowledge and mutual knowledge is automatic and error of self-ignorance
and mutual ignorance is impossible. So too where truth exists as a whole
on a basis of self-aware oneness, falsehood cannot enter and evil is
shut out by the exclusion of wrong consciousness and wrong will and
their dynamisation of falsehood and error. As soon as separateness enters,
these things also can enter; but even this simultaneity is not inevitable.
If there is sufficient mutuality, even in the absence of an active sense
of oneness, and if the separate beings do not transgress or deviate
from their norms of limited knowledge, harmony and truth can still be
sovereign and evil will have no gate of entry. There is, therefore,
no authentic inevitable cosmicity of falsehood and evil even as there
is no absoluteness; they are circumstances or results that arise only
at a certain stage when separativeness culminates in opposition and
ignorance in a primitive unconsciousness of knowledge and a resultant
wrong consciousness and wrong knowledge with its content of wrong will,
wrong feeling, wrong action and wrong reaction. The question is at what
juncture of cosmic manifestation the opposites enter in; for it may
be either at some stage of the increasing involution of consciousness
in separative mind and life or only after the plunge into inconscience.
This resolves itself into the question whether falsehood, error, wrong
and evil exist originally in the mental and vital planes and are native
to mind and life or are proper only to the material manifestation because
inflicted on mind and life there by the obscurity arising from the Inconscience.
It may be questioned too whether, if they do exist in supraphysical
mind and life, they were original and inevitable there; for they may
rather have entered in as a consequence or a supraphysical extension
from the material manifestation. Or, if that is untenable, it may be
that they arose as an enabling supraphysical affirmation in the universal
Mind and Life, a precedent necessity for their appearance in that manifestation
to which they more naturally belong as an inevitable outcome of the
creative Inconscience.
It was for a long time held by the human mind as a traditional knowledge
that when we go beyond the material plane, these things are found to
exist there also in worlds beyond us. There are in these planes of supraphysical
experience powers and forms of vital mind and life that seem to be the
prephysical foundation of the discordant, defective or perverse forms
and powers of life-mind and life-force which we find in the terrestrial
existence. There are forces, and subliminal experience seems to show
that there are supraphysical beings embodying those forces, that are
attached in their root-nature to ignorance, to darkness of consciousness,
to misuse of force, to perversity of delight, to all the causes and
consequences of the things that we call evil. These powers, beings or
forces are active to impose their adverse constructions upon terrestrial
creatures; eager to maintain their reign in the manifestation, they
oppose the increase of light and truth and good and, still more, are
antagonistic to the progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness
and divine existence. It is this feature of existence that we see figured
in the tradition of the conflict between the Powers of Light and Darkness,
Good and Evil, cosmic Harmony and cosmic Anarchy, a tradition universal
in ancient myth and in religion and common to all systems of occult
knowledge.
The theory of this traditional knowledge is perfectly rational and verifiable
by inner experience, and it imposes itself if we admit the supraphysical
and do not cabin ourselves in the acceptation of material being as the
only reality. As there is a cosmic Self and Spirit pervading and upholding
the universe and its beings, so too there is a cosmic Force that moves
all things, and on this original cosmic Force depend and act many cosmic
Forces that are its powers or arise as forms of its universal action.
Whatever is formulated in the universe has a Force or Forces that support
it, seek to fulfil or further it, find their foundation in its functioning,
their account of success in its success and growth and domination, their
self-fulfilment or their prolongation of being in its victory or survival.
As there are Powers of Knowledge or Forces of the Light, so there are
Powers of Ignorance and tenebrous Forces of the Darkness whose work
is to prolong the reign of Ignorance and Inconscience. As there are
Forces of Truth, so there are Forces that live by the Falsehood and
support it and work for its victory; as there are powers whose life
is intimately bound up with the existence, the idea and the impulse
of Good, so there are Forces whose life is bound up with the existence
and the idea and the impulse of Evil. It is this truth of the cosmic
Invisible that was symbolised in the ancient belief of a struggle between
the powers of Light and Darkness, Good and Evil for the possession of
the world and the government of the life of man; - this was the significance
of the contest between the Vedic Gods and their opponents, sons of Darkness
and Division, figured in a later tradition as Titan and Giant and Demon,
Asura, Rakshasa, Pisacha; the same tradition is found in the Zoroastrian
Double Principle and the later Semitic opposition of God and his Angels
on the one side and Satan and his hosts on the other, - invisible Personalities
and Powers that draw man to the divine Light and Truth and Good or lure
him into subjection to the undivine principle of Darkness and Falsehood
and Evil. Modern thought is aware of no invisible forces other than
those revealed or constructed by Science; it does not believe that Nature
is capable of creating any other beings than those around us in the
physical world, men, beasts, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, germs
and animalculae. But if there are invisible cosmic forces physical in
their nature that act upon the body of inanimate objects, there is no
valid reason why there should not be invisible cosmic forces mental
and vital in their nature that act upon his mind and his life-force.
And if Mind and Life, impersonal forces, form conscious beings or use
persons to embody them in physical forms and in a physical world and
can act upon Matter and through Matter, it is not impossible that on
their own planes they should form conscious beings whose subtler substance
is invisible to us or that they should be able to act from those planes
on beings in physical Nature. Whatever reality or mythical unreality
we may attach to the traditional figures of past human belief or experience,
they would then be representations of things that are true in principle.
In that case the first source of good and evil would be not in terrestrial
life or in the evolution from the Inconscience, but in Life itself,
their source would be supraphysical and they would be reflected here
from a larger supraphysical Nature.
This is certain that when we go back into ourselves very deep away from
the surface appearance, we find that the mind, heart and sensational
being of man are moved by forces not under his own control and that
he can become an instrument in the hands of Energies of a cosmic character
without knowing the origin of his actions. It is by stepping back from
the physical surface into his inner being and subliminal consciousness
that he becomes directly aware of them and is able to know directly
and deal with their action upon him. He grows aware of interventions
which seek to lead him in one direction or another, of suggestions and
impulsions which had disguised themselves as original movements of his
own mind and against which he had to battle. He can realise that he
is not a conscious creature inexplicably produced in an unconscious
world out of a seed of inconscient Matter and moving about in an obscure
self-ignorance, but an embodied soul through whose action cosmic Nature
is seeking to fulfil itself, the living ground of a vast debate between
a darkness of Ignorance out of which it emerges here and a light of
Knowledge which is growing upwards towards an unforeseen termination.
The Forces which seek to move him, and among them the Forces of good
and evil, present themselves as powers of universal Nature; but they
seem to belong not only to the physical universe, but to planes of Life
and Mind beyond it.
The first thing that we have to note of importance to the problem preoccupying
us is that these Forces in their action seem often to surpass the measures
of human relativity; they are in their larger action superhuman, divine,
titanic or demoniac, but they may create their formations in him in
large or in little, in his greatness or his smallness, they may seize
and drive him at moments or for periods, they may influence his impulses
or his acts or possess his whole nature. If that possession happens,
he may himself be pushed to an excess of the normal humanity of good
or evil; especially the evil takes forms which shock the sense of human
measure, exceed the bounds of human personality, approach the gigantic,
the inordinate, the immeasurable. It may then be questioned whether
it is not a mistake to deny absoluteness to evil; for as there is a
drive, an aspiration, a yearning in man towards an absolute truth, good,
beauty, so these movements, - as also the transcending intensities attainable
by pain and suffering, - seem to indicate the attempt at self-realisation
of an absolute evil.
But the immeasurable is not a sign of absoluteness: for the absolute
is not in itself a thing of magnitude; it is beyond measure, not in
the sole sense of vastness, but in the freedom of its essential being;
it can manifest itself in the infinitesimal as well as in the infinite.
It is true that as we pass from the mental to the spiritual, - and that
is a passage towards the absolute, - a subtle wideness and an increasing
intensity of light, of power, of peace, of ecstasy mark our passing
out of our limitations: but this is at first only a sign of freedom,
of height, of universality, not yet of an inward absoluteness of self-existence
which is the essence of the matter. To this absoluteness pain and evil
cannot attain, they are bound to limitation and they are derivative.
If pain becomes immeasurable, it ends itself or ends that in which it
manifests, or collapses into insensibility or, in rare circumstances,
it may turn into an ecstasy of Ananda. If evil became sole and immeasurable,
it would destroy the world or destroy that which bore and supported
it; it would bring things and itself back by disintegration into non-existence.
No doubt the Powers that support darkness and evil attempt by the magnitude
of their self-aggrandisement to reach an appearance of infinity, but
immensity is all they can achieve and not infinity; or, at most, they
are able to represent their element as a kind of abysmal infinite commensurate
with the Inconscient, but it is a false infinite. Self-existence, in
essence or by an eternal inherence in the Self-existent, is the condition
of absoluteness: error, falsehood, evil are cosmic powers, but relative
in their nature, not absolute, since they depend for existence on the
perversion or contradiction of their opposites and are not like truth
and good self-existent absolutes, inherent aspects of the supreme Self-existent.
A second point of questioning emerges from the evidence given for the
supraphysical and pre-physical existence of these dark opposites: for
that suggests that they may be after all original cosmic principles.
But it is to be noted that their appearance does not extend higher than
the lower supraphysical life-planes; they are “powers of the Prince
of Air”, - air being in the ancient symbolism the principle of
life and therefore of the mid-worlds where the vital principle is predominant
and essential. The adverse opposites are not, then, primal powers of
the cosmos, but creations of Life or of Mind in life.
Their supraphysical aspects and influences on earth-nature can be explained
by the co-existence of worlds of a descending involution with parallel
worlds of an ascending evolution, not precisely created by earth-existence,
but created as an annexe to the descending world-order and a prepared
support for the evolutionary terrestrial formations; here evil may appear,
not as inherent in all life, but as a possibility and a pre-formation
that makes inevitable its formation in the evolutionary emergence of
consciousness out of the Inconscient. However this may be, it is as
an outcome of the Inconscience that we can best watch and understand
the origin of falsehood, error, wrong and evil, for it is in the return
of Inconscience towards Consciousness that they can be seen taking their
formation and it is there that they seem to be normal and even inevitable.
The first emergence from the Inconscient is Matter, and in Matter it
would seem that falsehood and evil cannot exist, because both are created
by a divided and ignorant surface consciousness and its reactions. There
is no such active surface organisation of consciousness, no such reactions
in material forces or objects: whatever indwelling secret consciousness
there may be in them seems to be one, undifferentiated, mute; inertly
inherent and intrinsic in the Energy that constitutes the object, it
effectualises and maintains the form by the silent occult Idea in it,
but is otherwise self-rapt in the form of energy it has created, uncommunicating
and inexpressive. Even if it differentiates itself according to the
form of Matter in a corresponding form of self-being, [rupam rupam pratirupo
babhuva, in Katha Upanishad, II. 2. 9.], there is no psychological organisation,
no system of conscious actions or reactions. It is only by contact with
conscious beings that material objects exercise powers or influences
which can be called good or evil: but that good or evil is determined
by the contacted being's sense of help or harm, of benefit or injury
from them; these values do not belong to the material object but to
some Force that uses it or they are created by the consciousness that
contacts it. Fire warms a man or burns him, but that is as involuntarily
he meets it or voluntarily uses it; a medicinal herb cures or a poison
kills, but the value of good or evil is brought into action by the user:
it is to be observed too that a poison can cure as well as kill, a medicine
kill or harm as well as cure or benefit. The world of pure Matter is
neutral, irresponsible; these values insisted on by the human being
do not exist in material Nature: as a superior Nature transcends the
duality of good and evil, so this inferior Nature falls below it. The
question may begin to assume a different aspect if we go behind physical
knowledge and accept the conclusions of an occult inquiry, - for here
we are told that there are conscious influences that attach themselves
to objects and these can be good or evil; but it might still be held
that this does not affect the neutrality of the object which does not
act by an individualised consciousness but only as it is utilised for
good or for evil or for both together: the duality of good and evil
is not native to the material principle, it is absent from the world
of Matter.
The duality begins with conscious life and emerges fully with the development
of mind in life; the vital mind, the mind of desire and sensation, is
the creator of the sense of evil and of the fact of evil. Moreover,
in animal life, the fact of evil is there, the evil of suffering and
the sense of suffering, the evil of violence and cruelty and strife
and deception, but the sense of moral evil is absent; in animal life
there is no duality of sin or virtue, all action is neutral and permissible
for the preservation of life and its maintenance and for the satisfaction
of the life-instincts. The sensational values of good and evil are inherent
in the form of pain and pleasure, vital satisfaction and vital frustration,
but the mental idea, the moral response of the mind to these values
are a creation of the human being. It does not follow, as might be hastily
inferred, that they are unrealities, mental constructions only, and
that the only true way to receive the activities of Nature is either
a neutral indifference or an equal acceptance or, intellectually, an
admission of all that she may do as a divine or a natural law in which
everything is impartially admissible. That is indeed one side of the
truth: there is an infrarational truth of Life and Matter which is impartial
and neutral and admits all things as facts of Nature and serviceable
for the creation, preservation or destruction of life, three necessary
movements of the universal Energy which are all connectedly indispensable
and, each in its own place, of equal value. There is too a truth of
the detached reason which can look on all that is thus admitted by Nature
as serviceable to her processes in life and matter and observe everything
that is with an unmoved neutral impartiality and acceptance; this is
a philosophic and scientific reason that witnesses and seeks to understand
but considers it futile to judge the activities of the cosmic Energy.
There is too a suprarational truth formulating itself in spiritual experience
which can observe the play of universal possibility, accept all impartially
as the true and natural features and consequences of a world of ignorance
and inconscience or admit all with calm and compassion as a part of
the divine working, but, while it awaits the awakening of a higher consciousness
and knowledge as the sole escape from what presents itself as evil,
is ready with help and intervention where that is truly helpful and
possible. But, nonetheless, there is also this other middle truth of
consciousness which awakens us to the values of good and evil and the
appreciation of their necessity and importance; this awakening, whatever
may be the sanction or the validity of its particular judgments, is
one of the indispensable steps in the process of evolutionary Nature.
But from what then does this awakening proceed? what is it in the human
being that originates and gives its power and place to the sense of
good and evil? If we regard only the process, we may agree that it is
the vital mind that makes the distinction. Its first valuation is sensational
and individual, - all that is pleasant, helpful, beneficial to the life-ego
is good, all that is unpleasant, malefic, injurious or destructive is
evil. Its next valuation is utilitarian and social: all that is considered
helpful to the associated life, all that it demands from the individual
in order to remain in association and to regulate association for the
best maintenance, satisfaction, development, good order of the associated
life and its units, is good; all that has in the view of the society
a contrary effect or tendency is evil. But thinking mind then comes
in with its own valuation and strives to find out an intellectual basis,
an idea of law or principle, rational or cosmic, a law of Karma perhaps
or an ethical system founded on reason or on an aesthetic, emotional
or hedonistic basis. Religion brings in her sanctions; there is a word
or law of God that enjoins righteousness even though Nature permits
or stimulates its opposite, - or perhaps Truth and Righteousness are
themselves God and there is no other Divinity. But, behind all this
practical or rational enforcement of the human ethical instinct, there
is a feeling that there is something deeper: all these standards are
either too narrow and rigid or complex and confused, uncertain, subject
to alteration by a mental or a vital change or evolution; yet it is
felt that there is a deeper abiding truth and something within us that
can have the intuition of that truth, - in other words, that the real
sanction is inward, spiritual and psychic. The traditional account of
this inner witness is conscience, a power of perception in us half mental,
half intuitive; but this is something superficial, constructed, unreliable:
there is certainly within us, though less easily active, more masked
by surface elements, a deeper spiritual sense, the soul's discernment,
an inborn light within our nature.
What then is this spiritual or psychic witness or what is to it the
value of the sense of good and evil? It may be maintained that the one
use of the sense of sin and evil is that the embodied being may become
aware of the nature of this world of inconscience and ignorance, awake
to a knowledge of its evil and suffering and the relative nature of
its good and happiness and turn away from it to that which is absolute.
Or else its spiritual use may be to purify the nature by the pursuit
of good and the negation of evil until it is ready to perceive the supreme
good and turn from the world towards God, or, as in the Buddhistic ethical
insistence, it may serve to prepare the dissolution of the ignorant
ego-complex and the escape from personality and suffering. But also
it may be that this awakening is a spiritual necessity of the evolution
itself, a step towards the growth of the being out of the Ignorance
into the truth of the divine unity and the evolution of a divine consciousness
and a divine being. For much more than the mind or life which can turn
either to good or to evil, it is the soul-personality, the psychic being,
which insists on the distinction, though in a larger sense than the
mere moral difference. It is the soul in us which turns always towards
Truth, Good and Beauty, because it is by these things that it itself
grows in stature; the rest, their opposites, are a necessary part of
experience, but have to be outgrown in the spiritual increase of the
being. The fundamental psychic entity in us has the delight of life
and all experience as part of the progressive manifestation of the spirit,
but the very principle of its delight of life is to gather out of all
contacts and happenings their secret divine sense and essence, a divine
use and purpose so that by experience our mind and life may grow out
of the Inconscience towards a supreme consciousness, out of the divisions
of the Ignorance towards an integralising consciousness and knowledge.
It is there for that and it pursues from life to life its ever-increasing
upward tendency and insistence; the growth of the soul is a growth out
of darkness into light, out of falsehood into truth, out of suffering
into its own supreme and universal Ananda.
The soul's perception of good and evil may not coincide with the mind's
artificial standards, but it has a deeper sense, a sure discrimination
of what points to the higher Light and what points away from it. It
is true that as the inferior light is below good and evil, so the superior
spiritual light is beyond good and evil; but this is not in the sense
of admitting all things with an impartial neutrality or of obeying equally
the impulses of good and evil, but in the sense that a higher law of
being intervenes in which there is no longer any place or utility for
these values. There is a self-law of supreme Truth which is above all
standards; there is a supreme and universal Good inherent, intrinsic,
self-existent, self-aware, self-moved and determined, infinitely plastic
with the pure plasticity of the luminous consciousness of the supreme
Infinite.
If, then, evil and falsehood are natural products of the Inconscience,
automatic results of the evolution of life and mind from it in the processus
of the Ignorance, we have to see how they arise, on what they depend
for their existence and what is the remedy or escape. In the surface
emergence of mental and vital consciousness from the Inconscience is
to be found the process by which these phenomena come into being.
Here there are two determining factors, - and it is these that are the
efficient cause of the simultaneous emergence of falsehood and evil.
First, there is an underlying, a still occult consciousness and power
of inherent knowledge, and there is also an overlying layer of what
might be called indeterminate or else ill-formed stuff of vital and
physical consciousness; through this obscure difficult medium the emerging
mentality has to force its way and has to impose itself on it by a constructed
and no longer an inherent knowledge, because this stuff is still full
of nescience, heavily burdened and enveloped with the inconscience of
Matter. Next, the emergence takes place in a separated form of life
which has to affirm itself against a principle of inanimate material
inertia and a constant pull of that material inertia towards disintegration
and a relapse into the original inanimate Inconscience. This separated
life-form has also to affirm itself, supported only by a limited principle
of association, against an outside world which is, if not hostile to
its existence, yet full of dangers and on which it has to impose itself,
conquer life-room, arrive at expression and propagation, if it wishes
to survive. The result of an emergence of consciousness in these conditions
is the growth of a self-affirming vital and physical individual, a construction
of Nature of life and matter with a concealed psychic or spiritual true
individual behind it for which Nature is creating this outward means
of expression. As mentality increases, this vital and material individual
takes the more developed form of a constantly self-affirming mental,
vital and physical ego. Our surface consciousness and type of existence,
our natural being, has developed its present character under the compulsion
of these two initial and basic facts of the evolutionary emergence.
In its first appearance consciousness has the semblance of a miracle,
a power alien to Matter that manifests unaccountably in a world of inconscient
Nature and grows slowly and with difficulty. Knowledge is acquired,
created out of nothing as it were, learned, increased, accumulated by
an ephemeral ignorant creature in whom at birth it is entirely absent
or present only, not as knowledge, but in the form of an inherited capacity
proper to the stage of development of this slowly learning ignorance.
It might be conjectured that consciousness is only the original Inconscience
mechanically recording the facts of existence on the brain-cells with
a reflex or response in the cells automatically reading the record and
dictating their answer; the record, reflex, response together constitute
what appears to be consciousness. But this is evidently not the whole
truth, for it might account for observation and mechanical action, -
although it is not clear how an unconscious record and response can
turn into a conscious observation, a conscious sense of things and sense
of self, - but does not credibly account for ideation, imagination,
speculation, the free play of intellect with its observed material.
The evolution of consciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for
unless there is already a concealed consciousness in things with its
inherent and native powers emerging little by little. Further, the facts
of animal life and the operations of the emergent mind in life impose
on us the conclusion that there is in this concealed consciousness an
underlying Knowledge or power of knowledge which by the necessity of
the life-contacts with the environment comes to the surface.
The individual animal being in its first conscious self-affirmation
has to rely on two sources of knowledge. As it is nescient and helpless,
a small modicum of uninformed surface consciousness in a world unknown
to it, the secret Conscious-Force sends up to this surface the minimum
of intuition necessary for it to maintain its existence and go through
the operations indispensable to life and survival. This intuition is
not possessed by the animal, but possesses and moves it; it is something
that manifests of itself in the grain of the vital and physical substance
of consciousness under pressure of a need and for the needed occasion:
but at the same time a surface result of this intuition accumulates
and takes the form of an automatic instinct which works whenever the
occasion for it recurs; this instinct belongs to the race and is imparted
at birth to its individual members. The intuition, when it occurs or
recurs, is unerring; the instinct is automatically correct as a rule,
but can err, for it fails or blunders when the surface consciousness
or an ill-developed intelligence interferes or if the instinct continues
to act mechanically when, owing to changed circumstances, the need or
the necessary circumstances are no longer there.
The second source of knowledge is surface contact with the world outside
the natural individual being; it is this contact which is the cause
first of a conscious sensation and sense-perception and then of intelligence.
If there were not an underlying consciousness, the contact would not
create any perception or reaction; it is because the contact stimulates
into a feeling and a surface response the subliminal of a being already
vitalised by the subconscious life-principle and its first needs and
seekings that a surface awareness begins to form and develop. Intrinsically
the emergence of a surface consciousness by force of life contacts is
due to the fact that in both subject and object of the contact consciousness-force
is already existent in a subliminal latency: when the life-principle
is ready, sufficiently sensitive in the subject, the recipient of the
contact, this subliminal consciousness emerges in a response to the
stimulus which begins to constitute a vital or life mind, the mind of
the animal, and then, in the course of the evolution, a thinking intelligence.
The secret consciousness is rendered into surface sensation and perception,
the secret force into surface impulse.
If this underlying subliminal consciousness were to come itself to the
surface, there would be a direct meeting between the consciousness of
the subject and the contents of the object and the result would be a
direct knowledge; but this is not possible, first, because of the veto
or obstruction of the Inconscience and, secondly, because the evolutionary
intention is to develop slowly through an imperfect but growing surface
awareness. The secret consciousness-force has therefore to limit itself
to imperfect renderings in a surface vital and mental vibration and
operation and is forced by the absence, holding back or insufficiency
of the direct awareness to develop organs and instincts for an indirect
knowledge.
This creation of an external knowledge and intelligence takes place
in an already prepared indeterminate conscious structure which is the
earliest formation on the surface. At first this structure is only a
minimum formation of consciousness with a vague sensational perception
and a response-impulse; but, as more organised forms of life appear,
this grows into a life-mind and vital intelligence largely mechanical
and automatic in the beginning and concerned only with practical needs,
desires and impulses. All this activity is in its initiation intuitive
and instinctive; the underlying consciousness is translated in the surface
substratum into automatic movements of the conscious stuff of life and
body: the mind-movements, when they appear, are involved in these automatisms,
they occur as a subordinate mental notation within the predominant vital
sense-notation. But slowly mind starts its task of disengaging itself;
it still works for the life-instinct, life-need and life-desire, but
its own special characters emerge, observation, invention, device, intention,
execution of purpose, while sensation and impulse add to themselves
emotion and bring a subtler and finer affective urge and value into
the crude vital reaction. Mind is still much involved in life and its
highest purely mental operations are not in evidence; it accepts a large
background of instinct and vital intuition as its support, and the intelligence
developed, though always growing as the animal life-scale rises, is
an added superstructure.
When human intelligence adds itself to the animal basis, this basis
still remains present and active, but it is largely changed, subtilised
and uplifted by conscious will and intention; the automatic life of
instinct and vital intuition diminishes and cannot keep its original
predominant proportion to the self-aware mental intelligence. Intuition
becomes less purely intuitive: even when there is still a strong vital
intuition, its vital character is concealed by mentalisation, and mental
intuition is most often a mixture, not the pure article, for an alloy
is added to make it mentally current and serviceable. In the animal
also the surface consciousness can obstruct or alter the intuition but,
because its capacity is less, it interferes less with the automatic,
mechanical or instinctive action of Nature: in mental man when the intuition
rises towards the surface, it is caught at once before it reaches and
is translated into terms of mind-intelligence with a gloss or mental
interpretation added which conceals the origin of the knowledge. Instinct
also is deprived of its intuitive character by being taken up and mentalised
and by that change becomes less sure, though more assisted, when not
replaced, by the plastic power of adaptation of things and self-adaptation
proper to the intelligence. The emergence of mind in life brings an
immense increase of the range and capacity of the evolving consciousness-force;
but it also brings an immense increase in the range and capacity of
error. For evolving mind trails constantly error as its shadow, a shadow
that grows with the growing body of consciousness and knowledge.
If in the evolution the surface consciousness were always open to the
action of intuition, the intervention of error would not be possible.
For intuition is an edge of light thrust out by the secret Supermind,
and an emergent Truth-Consciousness, however limited, yet sure in its
action, would be the consequence. Instinct, if it had to form, would
be plastic to the intuition and adapt itself freely to evolutionary
change and the change of inner or environing circumstance. Intelligence,
if it had to form, would be subservient to intuition and would be its
accurate mental expression; its brilliancy would perhaps be modulated
to suit a diminished action serving as a minor, not, as it is now, a
major function and movement, but it would not be erratic by deviation,
would not by its parts of obscurity sink into the false or fallible.
But this could not be, because the hold of Inconscience on the matter,
the surface substance, in which mind and life have to express themselves,
makes the surface consciousness obscure and unresponsive to the light
within; it is impelled moreover to cherish this defect, to substitute
more and more its own incomplete but better grasped clarities for the
unaccountable inner intimations, because a rapid development of the
Truth-Consciousness is not the intention in Nature. For the method chosen
by her is a slow and difficult evolution of Inconscience developing
into Ignorance and Ignorance, forming itself into a mixed, modified
and partial knowledge before it can be ready for transformation into
a higher Truth-Consciousness and Truth-Knowledge. Our imperfect mental
intelligence is a necessary stage of transition before this higher transformation
can be made possible.
There are, in practical fact, two poles of the conscious being between
which the evolutionary process works, one a surface nescience which
has to change gradually into knowledge, the other a secret Consciousness-Force
in which all power of knowledge is and which has slowly to manifest
in the nescience. The surface nescience full of incomprehension and
inapprehension can change into knowledge because consciousness is there
involved in it; if it were intrinsically an entire absence of consciousness,
the change would be impossible: but still it works as an inconscience
trying to be conscious; it is at first a nescience compelled by need
and outer impact to feeling and response and then an ignorance labouring
to know.
The means used is a contact with the world and its forces and objects
which, like the rubbing of tinders, creates a spark of awareness; the
response from within is that spark leaping out into manifestation. But
the surface nescience in receiving the response from an underlying source
of knowledge subdues and changes it into something obscure and incomplete;
there is an imperfect seizure or a misprision of the intuition that
answers to the contact: still by this process an initiation of responsive
consciousness, a first accumulation of ingrained or habitual instinctive
knowledge begins, and there follows upon it first a primitive and then
a developed capacity of receptive awareness, understanding, reply of
action, previsional initiation of action, - an evolving consciousness
which is half-knowledge, half-ignorance. All that is unknown is met
on the basis of what is known; but as this knowledge is imperfect, as
it receives imperfectly and responds imperfectly to the contacts of
things, there can be a misprision of the new contact as well as a misprision
or deformation of the intuitive response, a double source of error.
It is evident, in these conditions, that Error is a necessary accompaniment,
almost a necessary condition and instrumentation, an indispensable step
or stage in the slow evolution towards knowledge in a consciousness
that begins from nescience and works in the stuff of a general nescience.
The evolving consciousness has to acquire knowledge by an indirect means
which does not give even a fragmentary certitude; for there is at first
only a figure or a sign, an image or a vibration physical in character
created by contact with the object and a resulting vital sensation which
have to be interpreted by mind and sense and turned into a corresponding
mental idea or figure. Things thus experienced and mentally known have
to be related together; things unknown have to be observed, discovered,
fitted into the already acquired sum of experience and knowledge. At
each step different possibilities of fact, significance, judgment, interpretation,
relation present themselves; some have to be tested and rejected, others
accepted and confirmed: to shut out error is impossible without limiting
the chances of acquisition of knowledge. Observation is the first instrument
of the mind, but observation itself is a complex process open at every
step to the mistakes of the ignorant observing consciousness; misprision
of the fact by the senses and the sense-mind, omission, wrong selection
and putting together, unconscious additions made by a personal impression
or personal reaction create a false or an imperfect composite picture;
to these errors are added the errors of inference, judgment, interpretation
of facts by the intelligence: when even the data are not sure or perfect,
the conclusions built on them must also be insecure and imperfect.
Consciousness in its acquisition of knowledge proceeds from the known
to the unknown; it builds a structure of acquired experience, memories,
impressions, judgments, a composite mental plan of things which is of
the nature of a shifting and ever modifiable fixity. In the reception
of new knowledge, what comes in to be received is judged in the light
of past knowledge and fitted into the structure; if it cannot properly
fit, it is either dovetailed in anyhow or rejected: but the existing
knowledge and its structures or standards may not be applicable to the
new object or new field of knowledge, the fitting may be a misfitting
or the rejection may be an erroneous response. To misprision and wrong
interpretation of facts, there is added misapplication of knowledge,
miscombination, misconstruction, misrepresentation, a complicated machinery
of mental error. In all this enlightened obscurity of our mental parts
a secret intuition is at work, a truth-urge that corrects or pushes
the intelligence to correct what is erroneous, to labour towards a true
picture of things and a true interpretative knowledge. But intuition
itself is limited in the human mind by mental misprision of its intimations
and is unable to act in its own right; for whether it be physical, vital
or mental intuition, it has to present itself in order to be received,
not nude and pure, but garbed with a mental coating or entirely enveloped
in an ample mental vesture; so disguised, its true nature cannot be
recognised and its relation to mind and its office are not understood,
its way of working is ignored by the hasty and half-aware human intelligence.
There are intuitions of actuality, of possibility, of the determining
truth behind things, but all are mistaken by the mind for each other.
A great confusion of half-grasped material and an experimental building
with it, a representation or mental structure of the figure of self
and things rigid and yet chaotic, half formed and arranged, half jumbled,
half true, half erroneous, but always imperfect, is the character of
human knowledge.
Error by itself, however, would not amount to falsehood; it would only
be an imperfection of truth, a trying, an essay of possibilities: for
when we do not know, untried and uncertain possibilities have to be
admitted and, even if as a result an imperfect or inapt structure of
thought is built, yet it may justify itself by opening to fresh knowledge
in unexpected directions and either its dissolution and rebuilding or
the discovery of some truth it concealed might increase our cognition
or our experience. In spite of the mixture created the growth of consciousness,
intelligence and reason could arrive through this mixed truth to a clearer
and truer figure of self-knowledge and world-knowledge. The obstruction
of the original and enveloping inconscience would diminish, and an increasing
mental consciousness would reach a clarity and wholeness which would
enable the concealed powers of direct knowledge and intuitive process
to emerge, utilise the prepared and enlightened instruments and make
mind-intelligence their true agent and truth-builder on the evolutionary
surface.
But here the second condition or factor of the evolution intervenes;
for this seeking for knowledge is not an impersonal mental process hampered
only by the general limitations of mind-intelligence: the ego is there,
the physical ego, the life-ego bent, not on self-knowledge and the discovery
of the truth of things and the truth of life, but on vital self-affirmation;
a mental ego is there also bent on its own personal self-affirmation
and largely directed and used by the vital urge for its life-desire
and life-purpose. For as mind develops, there develops also a mental
individuality with a personal drive of mind-tendency, a mental temperament,
a mind-formation of its own. This surface mental individuality is egocentric;
it looks at the world and things and happenings from its own standpoint
and sees them not as they are but as they affect itself: in observing
things it gives them the turn suitable to its own tendency and temperament,
selects or rejects, arranges truth according to its own mental preference
and convenience; observation, judgment, reason are all determined or
affected by this mind-personality and assimilated to the needs of the
individuality and the ego. Even when the mind aims most at a pure impersonality
of truth and reason, a sheer impersonality is impossible to it; even
the most trained, severe and vigilant intellect fails to observe the
twists and turns it gives to truth in the reception of fact and idea
and the construction of its mental knowledge. Here we have an almost
inexhaustible source of distortion of truth, a cause of falsification,
an unconscious or half-conscious will to error, an acceptance of ideas
or facts not by a clear perception of the true and the false, but by
preference, personal suitability, temperamental choice, prejudgment.
Here is a fruitful seed-plot for the growth of falsehood or a gate or
many gates through which it can enter by stealth or by an usurping but
acceptable violence. Truth too can enter in and take up its dwelling,
not by its own right, but at the mind's pleasure.
In the terms of the Sankhya psychology we can distinguish three types
of mental individuality, - that which is governed by the principle of
obscurity and inertia, first-born of the Inconscience, tamasic;
that which is governed by a force of passion and activity, kinetic,
rajasic; that which is cast in the mould of the sattwic
principle of light, harmony, balance.
The tamasic intelligence has its seat in the physical mind: it is inert
to ideas, - except to those which it receives inertly, blindly, passively
from a recognised source or authority, - obscure in their reception,
unwilling to enlarge itself, recalcitrant to new stimulus, conservative
and immobile; it clings to its received structure of knowledge and its
one power is repetitive practicality, but it is a power limited by the
accustomed, the obvious, the established and familiar and already secure;
it thrusts away all that is new and likely to disturb it.
The rajasic intelligence has its main seat in the vital mind and is
of two kinds: one kind is defensive with violence and passion, assertive
of its mental individuality and all that is in agreement with it, preferred
by its volition, adapted to its outlook, but aggressive against all
that is contrary to its mental ego-structure or unacceptable to its
personal intellectuality; the other kind is enthusiastic for new things,
passionate, insistent, impetuous, often mobile beyond measure, inconstant
and ever restless, governed in its idea not by truth and light but by
the zest of intellectual battle and movement and adventure.
The sattwic intelligence is eager for knowledge, as open as it can be
to it, careful to consider and verify and balance, to adjust and adapt
to its view whatever confirms itself as truth, receiving all that it
can assimilate, skilful to build truth in a harmonious intellectual
structure: but, because its light is limited, as all mental light must
be, it is unable to enlarge itself so as to receive equally all truth
and all knowledge; it has a mental ego, even an enlightened one, and
is determined by it in its observation, judgment, reasoning, mental
choice and preference.
In most men there is a predominance of one of these qualities but also
a mixture; the same mind can be open and plastic and harmonic in one
direction, kinetic and vital, hasty and prejudiced and ill-balanced
in another, in yet another obscure and unreceptive. This limitation
by personality, this defence of personality and refusal to receive what
is unassimilable, is necessary for the individual being because in its
evolution, at the stage reached, it has a certain self-expression, a
certain type of experience and use of experience which must, for the
mind and life at least, govern nature; that for the moment is its law
of being, its dharma. This limitation of mind-consciousness by personality
and of truth by mental temperament and preference must be the rule of
our nature so long as the individual has not reached universality, is
not yet preparing for mind-transcendence. But it is evident that this
condition is inevitably a source of error and can at any moment be the
cause of a falsification of knowledge, an unconscious or half-wilful
self-deception, a refusal to admit true knowledge, a readiness to assert
acceptable wrong knowledge as true knowledge.
This is in the field of cognition, but the same law applies to will
and action. Out of ignorance a wrong consciousness is created which
gives a wrong dynamic reaction to the contact of persons, things, happenings:
the surface consciousness develops the habit of ignoring, misunderstanding
or rejecting the suggestions to action or against action that come from
the secret inmost consciousness, the psychic entity; it answers instead
to unenlightened mental and vital suggestions, or acts in accordance
with the demands and impulsions of the vital ego.
Here the second of the primary conditions of the evolution, the law
of a separate life-being affirming itself in a world which is not-self
to it, comes into prominence and assumes an immense importance. It is
here that the surface vital personality or life-self asserts its dominance,
and this dominance of the ignorant vital being is a principal active
source of discord and disharmony, a cause of inner and outer perturbations
of the life, a mainspring of wrong-doing and evil. The natural vital
element in us, in so far as it is unchecked or untrained or retains
its primitive character, is not concerned with truth or right consciousness
or right action; it is concerned with self-affirmation, with life-growth,
with possession, with satisfaction of impulse, with all satisfactions
of desire. This main need and demand of the life-self seems all-important
to it; it would readily carry it out without any regard to truth or
right or good or any other consideration: but because mind is there
and has these conceptions, because the soul is there and has these soul-perceptions,
it tries to dominate mind and get from it by dictation a sanction and
order of execution for its own will of self-affirmation, a verdict of
truth and right and good for its own vital assertions, impulses, desires;
it is concerned with self-justification in order that it may have room
for full self-affirmation. But if it can get the assent of mind, it
is quite ready to ignore all these standards and set up only one standard,
the satisfaction, growth, strength, greatness of the vital ego. The
life-individual needs place, expansion, possession of its world, dominance
and control of things and beings; it needs life-room, a space in the
sun, self-assertion, survival. It needs these things for itself and
for those with whom it associates itself, for its own ego and for the
collective ego; it needs them for its ideas, creeds, ideals, interests,
imaginations: for it has to assert these forms of I-ness and my-ness
and impose them on the world around it or, if it is not strong enough
to do that, it has at least to defend and maintain them against others
to the best of its power and contrivance. It may try to do it by methods
it thinks or chooses to think or represent as right; it may try to do
it by the naked use of violence, ruse, falsehood, destructive aggression,
crushing of other life-formations: the principle is the same whatever
the means or the moral attitude.
It is not only in the realm of interests, but in the realm of ideas
and the realm of religion that the vital being of man has introduced
this spirit and attitude of self-affirmation and struggle and the use
of violence, oppression and suppression, intolerance, aggression; it
has imposed the principle of life-egoism on the domain of intellectual
truth and the domain of the spirit. Into its self-affirmation the self-asserting
life brings in hatred and dislike towards all that stands in the way
of its expansion or hurts its ego; it develops as a means or as a passion
or reaction of the life-nature cruelty, treachery and all kinds of evil:
its satisfaction of desire and impulse takes no account of right and
wrong, but only of the fulfilment of desire and impulse. For this satisfaction
it is ready to face the risk of destruction and actuality of suffering;
for what it is pushed by Nature to aim at is not self-preservation alone,
but life-affirmation and life-satisfaction, formulation of life-force
and life-being.
It does not follow that this is all that the vital personality is in
its native composition or that evil is its very nature. It is not primarily
concerned with truth and good, but it can have the passion for truth
and good as it has, more spontaneously, the passion for joy and beauty.
In all that is developed by the life-force there is developed at the
same time a secret delight somewhere in the being, a delight in good
and a delight in evil, a delight in truth and a delight in falsehood,
a delight in life and an attraction to death, a delight in pleasure
and a delight in pain, in one's own suffering and the suffering of others,
but also in one's own joy and happiness and good and the joy and happiness
and good of others. For the force of life-affirmation affirms alike
the good and the evil: it has its impulses of help and association,
of generosity, affection, loyalty, self-giving; it takes up altruism
as it takes up egoism, sacrifices itself as well as destroys others;
and in all its acts there is the same passion for life-affirmation,
the same force of action and fulfilment. This character of vital being
and its trend of existence in which what we term good and evil are items
but not the mainspring, is evident in subhuman life; in the human being,
since there a mental, moral and psychic discernment has developed, it
is subjected to control or to camouflage, but it does not change its
character. The vital being and its life-force and their drive towards
self-affirmation are, in the absence of an overt action of soul-power
and spiritual power, Atmashakti, Nature's chief means of effectuation,
and without its support neither mind nor body can utilise their possibilities
or realise their aim here in existence. It is only if the inner or true
vital being replaces the outer life-personality that the drive of the
vital ego can be wholly overcome and the life-force become the servant
of the soul and a powerful instrumentation for the action of our true
spiritual being.
This then is the origin and nature of error, falsehood, wrong and evil
in the consciousness and will of the individual; a limited consciousness
growing out of nescience is the source of error, a personal attachment
to the limitation and the error born of it the source of falsity, a
wrong consciousness governed by the life-ego the source of evil.
But it is evident that their relative existence is only a phenomenon
thrown up by the cosmic Force in its drive towards evolutionary self-expression,
and it is there that we have to look for the significance of the phenomenon.
For the emergence of the life-ego is, as we have seen, a machinery of
cosmic Nature for the affirmation of the individual, for his self-disengagement
from the indeterminate mass substance of the subconscient, for the appearance
of a conscious being on a ground prepared by the Inconscience; the principle
of life-affirmation of the ego is the necessary consequence. The individual
ego is a pragmatic and effective fiction, a translation of the secret
self into the terms of surface consciousness, or a subjective substitute
for the true self in our surface experience: it is separated by ignorance
from other-self and from the inner Divinity, but it is still pushed
secretly towards an evolutionary unification in diversity; it has behind
itself, though finite, the impulse to the infinite. But this in the
terms of an ignorant consciousness translates itself into the will to
expand, to be a boundless finite, to take everything it can into itself,
to enter into everything and possess it, even to be possessed if by
that it can feel itself satisfied and growing in or through others or
can take into itself by subjection the being and power of others or
get thereby a help or an impulse for its life-affirmation, its life-delight,
its enrichment of its mental, vital or physical existence.
But because it does these things as a separate ego for its separate
advantage and not by conscious interchange and mutuality, not by unity,
life-discord, conflict, disharmony arise, and it is the products of
this life-discord and disharmony that we call wrong and evil.
Nature accepts them because they are necessary circumstances of the
evolution, necessary for the growth of the divided being; they are products
of ignorance, supported by an ignorant consciousness that founds itself
on division, by an ignorant will that works through division, by an
ignorant delight of existence that takes the joy of division. The evolutionary
intention acts through the evil as through the good; it has to utilise
all because confinement to a limited good would imprison and check the
intended evolution; it uses any available material and does what it
can with it: this is the reason why we see evil coming out of what we
call good and good coming out of what we call evil; and, if we see even
what was thought to be evil coming to be accepted as good, what was
thought to be good accepted as evil, it is because our standards of
both are evolutionary, limited and mutable. Evolutionary Nature, the
terrestrial cosmic Force, seems then at first to have no preference
for either of these opposites, it uses both alike for its purpose. And
yet it is the same Nature, the same Force that has burdened man with
the sense of good and evil and insists on its importance: evidently,
therefore, this sense also has an evolutionary purpose; it too must
be necessary, it must be there so that man may leave certain things
behind him, move towards others, until out of good and evil he can emerge
into some Good that is eternal and infinite.
But how is this evolutionary intention in Nature to fulfil itself, by
what power, means, impulsion, what principle and process of selection
and harmonisation? The method adopted by the mind of man through the
ages has been always a principle of selection and rejection, and this
has taken the forms of a religious sanction, a social or moral rule
of life or an ethical ideal. But this is an empirical means which does
not touch the root of the problem because it has no vision of the cause
and origin of the malady it attempts to cure; it deals with the symptoms,
but deals with them perfunctorily, not knowing what function they serve
in the purpose of Nature and what it is in the mind and life that supports
them and keeps them in being. Moreover, human good and evil are relative
and the standards erected by ethics are uncertain as well as relative:
what is forbidden by one religion or another, what is regarded as good
or bad by social opinion, what is thought useful to society or noxious
to it, what some temporary law of man allows or disallows, what is or
is considered helpful or harmful to self or others, what accords with
this or that ideal, what is prompted or discouraged by an instinct which
we call conscience, - an amalgam of all these viewpoints is the determining
heterogeneous idea, constitutes the complex substance of morality; in
all of them there is the constant mixture of truth and half-truth and
error which pursues all the activities of our limiting mental Knowledge-Ignorance.
A mental control over our vital and physical desires and instincts,
over our personal and social action, over our dealings with others is
indispensable to us as human beings, and morality creates a standard
by which we can guide ourselves and establish a customary control; but
the control is always imperfect and it is an expedient, not a solution:
man remains always what he is and has ever been, a mixture of good and
evil, sin and virtue, a mental ego with an imperfect command over his
mental, vital and physical nature.
The endeavour to select, to retain from our consciousness and action
all that seems to us good and reject all that seems to us evil and so
to re-form our being, to reconstitute and shape ourselves into the image
of an ideal, is a more profound ethical motive, because it comes nearer
to the true issue; it rests on the sound idea that our life is a becoming
and that there is something which we have to become and be. But the
ideals constructed by the human mind are selective and relative; to
shape our nature rigidly according to them is to limit ourselves and
make a construction where there should be growth into larger being.
The true call upon us is the call of the Infinite and the Supreme; the
self-affirmation and self-abnegation imposed on us by Nature are both
movements towards that, and it is the right way of self-affirmation
and self-negation taken together in place of the wrong, because ignorant,
way of the ego and in place of the conflict between the yes and the
no of Nature that we have to discover. If we do not discover that, either
the push of life will be too strong for our narrow ideal of perfection,
its instrumentation will break and it will fail to consummate and perpetuate
itself, or at best a half result will be all that we shall obtain, or
else the push away from life will present itself as the only remedy,
the one way out of the otherwise invincible grasp of the Ignorance.
This indeed is the way out usually indicated by religion; a divinely
enjoined morality, a pursuit of piety, righteousness and virtue as laid
down in a religious code of conduct, a law of God determined by some
human inspiration, is put forward as a part of the means, the direction,
by which we can tread the way that leads to the exit, the issue. But
this exit leaves the problem where it was; it is only a way of escape
for the personal being out of the unsolved perplexity of the cosmic
existence. In ancient Indian spiritual thought there was a clearer perception
of the difficulty; the practice of truth, virtue, right will and right
doing was regarded as a necessity of the approach to spiritual realisation,
but in the realisation itself the being arises to the greater consciousness
of the Infinite and Eternal and shakes away from itself the burden of
sin and virtue, for that belongs to the relativity and the Ignorance.
Behind this larger truer perception lay the intuition that a relative
good is a training imposed by World-Nature upon us so that we may pass
through it towards the true Good which is absolute. These problems are
of the mind and the ignorant life, they do not accompany us beyond mind;
as there is a cessation of the duality of truth and error in an infinite
Truth-Consciousness, so there is a liberation from the duality of good
and evil in an infinite Good, there is transcendence.
There can be no artificial escape from this problem which has always
troubled humanity and from which it has found no satisfying issue. The
tree of the knowledge of good and evil with its sweet and bitter fruits
is secretly rooted in the very nature of the Inconscience from which
our being has emerged and on which it still stands as a nether soil
and basis of our physical existence; it has grown visibly on the surface
in the manifold branchings of the Ignorance which is still the main
bulk and condition of our consciousness in its difficult evolution towards
a supreme consciousness and an integral awareness. As long as there
is this soil with the unfound roots in it and this nourishing air and
climate of Ignorance, the tree will grow and flourish and put forth
its dual blossoms and its fruit of mixed nature.
It would follow that there can be no final solution until we have turned
our inconscience into the greater consciousness, made the truth of self
and spirit our life-basis and transformed our ignorance into a higher
knowledge. All other expedients will only be makeshifts or blind issues;
a complete and radical transformation of our nature is the only true
solution.
It is because the Inconscience imposes its original obscurity on our
awareness of self and things and because the Ignorance bases it on an
imperfect and divided consciousness and because we live in that obscurity
and division that wrong knowledge and wrong will are possible: without
wrong knowledge there could be no error or falsehood, without error
or falsehood in our dynamic parts there could be no wrong will in our
members; without wrong will there could be no wrong-doing or evil: while
these causes endure, the effects also will persist in our action and
in our nature. A mental control can only be a control, not a cure; a
mental teaching, rule, standard can only impose an artificial groove
in which our action revolves mechanically or with difficulty and which
imposes a curbed and limited formation on the course of our nature.
A total change of consciousness, a radical change of nature is the
one remedy and the sole issue.
But since the root of the difficulty is a split, limited and separative
existence, this change must consist in an integration, a healing of
the divided consciousness of our being, and since that division is complex
and many-sided, no partial change on one side of the being can be passed
off as a sufficient substitute for the integral transformation.
Our first division is that created by our ego and mainly, most forcefully,
most vividly by our life-ego, which divides us from all other beings
as not-self and ties us to our ego-centricity and the law of an egoistic
self-affirmation. It is in the errors of this self-affirmation that
wrong and evil first arise: wrong consciousness engenders wrong will
in the members, in the thinking mind, in the heart, in the life-mind
and the sensational being, in the very body-consciousness; wrong will
engenders wrong action of all these instruments, a multiple error and
many-branching crookedness of thought and will and sense and feeling.
Nor can we deal rightly with others so long as they are to us others,
beings who are strangers to ourselves and of whose inner consciousness,
soul-need, mind-need, heart-need, life-need, body-need we know little
or nothing. The modicum of imperfect sympathy, knowledge and good-will
that the law, need and habit of association engender, is a poor quantum
of what is required for a true action. A larger mind, a larger heart,
a more ample and generous life-force can do something to help us or
help others and avoid the worst offences, but this too is insufficient
and will not prevent a mass of troubles and harms and collisions of
our preferred good with the good of others. By the very nature of our
ego and ignorance we affirm ourselves egoistically even when we most
pride ourselves on selflessness and ignorantly even when we most pride
ourselves on understanding and knowledge. Altruism taken as a rule of
life does not deliver us; it is a potent instrument for self-enlargement
and for correction of the narrower ego, but it does not abolish it nor
transform it into the true self one with all; the ego of the altruist
is as powerful and absorbing as the ego of the selfish and it is often
more powerful and insistent because it is a self-righteous and magnified
ego. It helps still less if we do wrong to our soul, to our mind, life
or body with the idea of subordinating our self to the self of others.
To affirm our being rightly so that it may become one with all is the
true principle, not to mutilate or immolate it. Self-immolation may
be necessary at times, exceptionally, for a cause, in answer to some
demand of the heart or for some right or high purpose but cannot be
made the rule or nature of life; so exaggerated, it would only feed
and exaggerate the ego of others or magnify some collective ego, not
lead us or mankind to the discovery and affirmation of our or its true
being. Sacrifice and self-giving are indeed a true principle and a spiritual
necessity, for we cannot affirm our being rightly without sacrifice
or without self-giving to something larger than our ego; but that too
must be done with a right consciousness and will founded on a true knowledge.
To develop the sattwic part of our nature, a nature of light, understanding,
balance, harmony, sympathy, good-will, kindness, fellow-feeling, self-control,
rightly ordered and harmonised action, is the best we can do in the
limits of the mental formation, but it is a stage and not the goal of
our growth of being. These are solutions by the way, palliatives, necessary
means for a partial dealing with this root difficulty, provisional standards
and devices given us as a temporary help and guidance because the true
and total solution is beyond our present capacity and can only come
when we have sufficiently evolved to see it and make it our main endeavour.
The true solution can intervene only when by our spiritual growth we
can become one self with all beings, know them as part of our self,
deal with them as if they were our other selves; for then the division
is healed, the law of separate self-affirmation leading by itself to
affirmation against or at the expense of others is enlarged and liberated
by adding to it the law of our self-affirmation for others and our self-finding
in their self-finding and self-realisation. It has been made a rule
of religious ethics to act in a spirit of universal compassion, to love
one's neighbour as oneself, to do to others as one would have them do
to us, to feel the joy and grief of others as one's own; but no man
living in his ego is able truly and perfectly to do these things, he
can only accept them as a demand of his mind, an aspiration of his heart,
an effort of his will to live by a high standard and modify by a sincere
endeavour his crude ego-nature. It is when others are known and felt
intimately as oneself that this ideal can become a natural and spontaneous
rule of our living and be realised in practice as in principle.
But even oneness with others is not enough by itself, if it is a oneness
with their ignorance; for then the law of ignorance will work and error
of action and wrong action will survive even if diminished in degree
and mellowed in incidence and character. Our oneness with others must
be fundamental, not a oneness with their minds, hearts, vital selves,
egos, - even though these come to be included in our universalised consciousness,
- but a oneness in the soul and spirit, and that can only come by our
liberation into soul-awareness and self-knowledge. To be ourselves liberated
from ego and realise our true selves is the first necessity; all else
can be achieved as a luminous result, a necessary consequence.
That is one reason why a spiritual call must be accepted as imperative
and take precedence over all other claims, intellectual, ethical, social,
that belong to the domain of the Ignorance. For the mental law of good
abides in that domain and can only modify and palliate; nothing can
be a sufficient substitute for the spiritual change that can realise
the true and integral good because through the spirit we come to the
root of action and existence.
In the spiritual knowledge of self there are three steps of its self-achievement
which are at the same time three parts of the one knowledge.
The first is the discovery of the soul, not the outer soul of thought
and emotion and desire, but the secret psychic entity, the divine element
within us. When that becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously
the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments,
we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true
delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its
luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness.
Even within the obscure workings of the Ignorance we have then a witness
who discerns, a living light that illumines, a will that refuses to
be misled and separates the mind's truth from its error, the heart's
intimate response from its vibrations to a wrong call and wrong demand
upon it, the life's true ardour and plenitude of movement from vital
passion and the turbid falsehoods of our vital nature and its dark self-seekings.
This is the first step of self-realisation, to enthrone the soul, the
divine psychic individual in the place of the ego.
The next step is to become aware of the eternal self in us unborn and
one with the self of all beings. This self-realisation liberates and
universalises; even if our action still proceeds in the dynamics of
the Ignorance, it no longer binds or misleads because our inner being
is seated in the light of self-knowledge.
The third step is to know the Divine Being who is at once our supreme
transcendent Self, the Cosmic Being, foundation of our universality,
and the Divinity within of which our psychic being, the true evolving
individual in our nature, is a portion, a spark, a flame growing into
the eternal Fire from which it was lit and of which it is the witness
ever living within us and the conscious instrument of its light and
power and joy and beauty. Aware of the Divine as the Master of our being
and action, we can learn to become channels of his Shakti, the Divine
Puissance, and act according to her dictates or her rule of light and
power within us. Our action will not then be mastered by our vital impulse
or governed by a mental standard, for she acts according to the permanent
yet plastic truth of things, - not that which the mind constructs, but
the higher, deeper and subtler truth of each movement and circumstance
as it is known to the supreme knowledge and demanded by the supreme
will in the universe.
The liberation of the will follows upon the liberation in knowledge
and is its dynamic consequence; it is knowledge that purifies, it is
truth that liberates: evil is the fruit of a spiritual ignorance and
it will disappear only by the growth of a spiritual consciousness and
the light of spiritual knowledge. The division of our being from the
being of others can only be healed by removing the divorce of our nature
from the inner soul-reality, by abolishing the veil between our becoming
and our self-being, by bridging the remoteness of our individuality
in Nature from the Divine Being who is the omnipresent Reality in Nature
and above Nature.
But the last division to be removed is the scission between this Nature
and the Supernature which is the Self-Power of the Divine Existence.
Even before the dynamic Knowledge-Ignorance is removed, while it still
remains as an inadequate instrumentation of the spirit, the supreme
Shakti or Supernature can work through us and we can be aware of her
workings; but it is then by a modification of her light and power so
that it can be received and assimilated by the inferior nature of the
mind, life and body. But this is not enough; there is needed an entire
remoulding of what we are into a way and power of the divine Supernature.
The integration of our being cannot be complete unless there is this
transformation of the dynamic action; there must be an uplifting and
change of the whole mode of Nature itself and not only some illumination
and transmutation of the inner ways of the being.
An eternal Truth-Consciousness must possess us and sublimate all our
natural modes into its own modes of being, knowledge and action; a spontaneous
truth-awareness, truth-will, truth-feeling, truth-movement, truth-action
can then become the integral law of our nature.
Sri Aurobindo
in SABCL volume 19, "The Life Divine
- Book 2 Part 2: The Knowledge and the Spiritual Evolution" pages
596-632
published by Sri
Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA
or
Lotus Light
Publications U.S.A.
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