Chapter
VII
Standards of
Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
THE knowledge on
which the doer of works in Yoga has to found all his action and development has
for the keystone of its structure a more and more concrete perception of unity,
the living sense of an all-pervading oneness; he moves in the increasing
consciousness of all existence as an indivisible whole: all work too is part of
this divine indivisible whole. His personal action and its results can no longer
be or seem a separate movement mainly or entirely determined by the egoistic
“free” will of an individual, himself separate in the mass. Our works are part
of an indivisible cosmic action; they are put or, more accurately, put
themselves into their place in the whole out of which they arise and their
outcome is determined by forces that overpass us. That world action in its vast
totality and in every petty detail is the indivisible movement of the One who
manifests himself progressively in the cosmos. Man too becomes progressively
conscious of the truth of himself and the truth of things in proportion as he
awakens to this One within him and outside him and to the occult, miraculous and
significant process of its forces in the motion of Nature. This action, this
movement, is not confined even in ourselves and those around us to the little
fragmentary portion of the cosmic activities of which we in our superficial
consciousness are aware; it is supported by an immense underlying environing
existence subliminal to our minds or subconscious, and it is attracted by an
immense transcending existence which is superconscious to our nature. Our
action arises, as we ourselves have emerged, out of a universality of which we
are not aware; we give it a shape by our personal temperament, personal mind
and will of thought or force of impulse or desire; but the true truth of
things, the true law of action exceeds these personal and human formations.
Every standpoint,
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every man-made rule of
action which ignores the indivisible totality of the cosmic movement, whatever
its utility in external practice, is to the eye of spiritual Truth an imperfect
view and a law of the Ignorance.
Even when we
have arrived at some glimpse of this idea or succeeded in fixing it in our
consciousness as a knowledge of the mind and a consequent attitude of the soul,
it is difficult for us in our outward parts and active nature to square accounts
between this universal standpoint and the claims of our personal opinion, our
personal will, our personal emotion and desire. We are forced still to go on
dealing with this indivisible movement as if it were a mass of impersonal
material out
of which we, the ego,
the person, have to carve something according to our own will and mental
fantasy by a personal struggle and effort. This is man’s normal attitude
towards his environment, actually false because our ego and its will are creations
and puppets of the cosmic forces and it is only when we withdraw from ego into
the consciousness of the divine Knowledge-Will of the Eternal who acts in them
that we can be by a sort of deputation from above their master. And yet is this
personal position the right attitude for man so long as he cherishes his
individuality and has not yet fully developed it; for without this view-point
and motive-force he cannot grow in his ego, cannot sufficiently develop and
differentiate himself out of the subconscious or half-conscious universal
mass-existence.
But the hold
of this ego-consciousness upon our whole habit of existence is difficult to
shake off when we have no longer need of the separative, the individualistic
and aggressive stage of development, when we would proceed forward from this
necessity of littleness in the child-soul to unity and universality, to the
cosmic consciousness and beyond, to our transcendent spirit-stature. It is
indispensable to recognise clearly, not only in our mode of thought but in our
way of feeling, sensing, doing, that this movement, this universal action is
not a helpless impersonal wave of being which lends itself to the will of any
ego according to that ego’s strength and insistence. It is the movement of a
cosmic Being who is the Knower of his field, the steps of a Divinity who is the
Master of his own progressive force of action. As the move-
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ment is one and
indivisible, so he who is present in the movement is one, sole and indivisible.
Not only all result is determined by him, but all initiation, action and process
are dependent on the motion of his cosmic force and only belong secondarily and
in their form to the creature.
But what then
must be the spiritual position of the personal worker? What is his true
relation in dynamic Nature to this one cosmic Being and this one total
movement? He is a centre only – a centre of differentiation of the one personal
consciousness, a centre of determination of the one total movement; his
personality reflects in a wave of persistent individuality the one universal
Person, the Transcendent, the Eternal. In the Ignorance it is always a broken
and distorted reflection because the crest of the wave which is our conscious
waking self throws back only an imperfect and falsified similitude of the
divine Spirit. All our opinions, standards, formations, principles are only
attempts to represent in this broken, reflecting and distorting mirror
something of the universal and progressive total action and its many-sided
movement towards some ultimate self-revelation of the Divine. Our mind
represents it as best it can with a narrow approximation that becomes less and
less inadequate in proportion as its thought grows in wideness and light and
power; but it is always an approximation and not even a true partial figure.
The Divine Will acts through the aeons to reveal progressively not only in the
unity of the cosmos, not only in the collectivity of living and thinking
creatures, but in the soul of each individual something of its divine Mystery
and the hidden truth of the Infinite. Therefore there is in the cosmos, in the
collectivity, in the individual, a rooted instinct or belief in its own
perfectibility, a constant drive towards an ever increasing and more adequate
and more harmonious self-development nearer to the secret truth of things. This
effort is represented to the constructing mind of man by standards of
knowledge, feeling, character, aesthesis and action, – rules, ideals, norms and
laws that he essays to turn into universal Dharmas.
* *
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If we are to
be free in the spirit, if we are to be subject only to the supreme Truth, we
must discard the idea that our mental or moral laws are binding on the Infinite
or that there can be anything sacrosanct, absolute or eternal even in the highest
of our existing standards of conduct. To form higher and higher temporary
standards as long as they are needed is to serve the Divine in his world march;
to erect rigidly an absolute standard is to attempt the erection of a barrier
against the eternal waters in their outflow. Once the nature-bound soul
realises this truth, it is delivered from the duality of good and evil. For good
is all that helps the individual and the world towards their divine fullness,
and evil is all that retards or breaks up that increasing perfection. But since
the perfection is progressive, evolutive in Time, good and evil are also
shifting quantities and change from time to time their meaning and value. This
thing which is evil now and in its present shape must be abandoned was once
helpful and necessary to the general and individual progress. That other thing
which we now regard as evil may well become in another form and arrangement an
element in some future perfection. And on the spiritual level we transcend even
this distinction; for we discover the purpose and divine utility of all these
things that we call good and evil. Then have we to reject the falsehood in them
and all that is distorted, ignorant and obscure in that which is called good no
less than in that which is called evil. For we have then to accept only the
true and the divine, but to make no other distinction in the eternal processes.
To those who
can act only on a rigid standard, to those who can feel only the human and not
the divine values, this truth may seem to be a dangerous concession which is
likely to destroy the very foundation of morality, confuse all conduct and establish
only chaos. Certainly, if the choice must be between an eternal and unchanging
ethics and no ethics at all, it would have that result for man in his
ignorance. But even on the human level, if we have light enough and flexibility
enough to recognise that a standard of conduct may be temporary and yet
necessary for its time and to observe it faithfully until it can be replaced by
a better, then we suffer no such loss, but lose only the fanaticism of an
imperfect and intolerant virtue. In its place we gain openness
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and a power of continual
moral progression, charity, the capacity to enter into an understanding
sympathy with all this world of struggling and stumbling creatures and by that
charity a better right and a greater strength to help it upon its way. In the
end where the human closes and the divine commences, where the mental
disappears into the supramental consciousness and the finite precipitates
itself into the infinite, all evil disappears into a transcendent divine Good
which becomes universal on every plane of consciousness that it touches.
This, then,
stands fixed for us that all standards by which we may seek to govern our
conduct are only our temporary, imperfect and evolutive attempts to represent
to ourselves our stumbling mental progress in the universal self-realisation towards
which Nature moves. But the divine manifestation cannot be bound by our little
rules and fragile sanctities; for the consciousness behind it is too vast for
these things. Once we have grasped this fact, disconcerting enough to the
absolutism of our reason, we shall better be able to put in their right place
in regard to each other the successive standards that govern the different
stages in the growth of the individual and the collective march of mankind. At
the most general of them we may cast a passing glance. For we have to see how
they stand in relation to that other standardless spiritual and supramental
mode of working for which Yoga seeks and to which it moves by the surrender of
the individual to the divine Will and, more effectively, through his ascent by
this surrender to the greater consciousness in which a certain identity with the
dynamic Eternal becomes possible.
* *
There are
four main standards of human conduct that make an ascending scale. The first is
personal need, preference and desire; the second is the law and good of the
collectivity; the third is an ideal ethic; the last is the highest divine law
of the nature.
Man starts on
the long career of his evolution with only the first two of these four to
enlighten and lead him; for they constitute the law of his animal and vital
existence, and it is as the
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vital and physical
animal man that he begins his progress. The true business of man upon earth is
to express in the type of humanity a growing image of the Divine; whether knowingly
or unknowingly, it is to this end that Nature is working in him under the thick
veil of her inner and outer processes. But the material or animal man is
ignorant of the inner aim of life; he knows only its needs and its desires and
he has necessarily no other guide to what is required of him than his own
perception of need and his own stirrings and pointings of desire. To satisfy
his physical and vital demands and necessities before all things else and, in
the next rank, whatever emotional or mental cravings or imaginations or dynamic
notions rise in him must be the first natural rule of his conduct. The sole
balancing or overpowering law that can modify or contradict this pressing
natural claim is the demand put on him by the ideas, needs and desires of his
family, community or tribe, the herd, the pack of which he is a member.
If man could
live to himself, – and this he could only do if the development of the
individual were the sole object of the Divine in the world, – this second law
would not at all need to come into operation. But all existence proceeds by the
mutual action and reaction of the whole and the parts, the need for each other
of the constituents and the thing constituted, the interdependence of the group
and the individuals of the group. In the language of Indian philosophy the
Divine manifests himself always in the double form of the separative and the
collective being, vyaşţi, samaşţi. Man, pressing after the
growth of his separate individuality and its fullness and freedom, is unable to
satisfy even his own personal needs and desires except in conjunction with
other men; he is a whole in himself and yet incomplete without others. This
obligation englobes his personal law of conduct in a group-law which arises
from the formation of a lasting group-entity with a collective mind and life of
its own to which his own embodied mind and life are subordinated as a
transitory unit. And yet is there something in him immortal and free, not bound
to this group-body which outlasts his own embodied existence but cannot outlast
or claim to chain by its law his eternal spirit.
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In itself
this seemingly larger and overriding law is no more than an extension of the
vital and animal principle that governs the individual elementary man; it is
the law of the pack or herd. The individual identifies partially his life with
the life of a certain number of other individuals with whom he is associated by
birth, choice or circumstance. And since the existence of the group is
necessary for his own existence and satisfaction, in time, if not from the
first, its preservation, the fulfilment of its needs and the satisfaction of
its collective notions, desires, habits of living, without which it would not
hold together, must come to take a primary place. The satisfaction of personal
idea and feeling, need and desire, propensity and habit has to be constantly
subordinated, by the necessity of the situation and not from any moral or
altruistic motive, to the satisfaction of the ideas and feelings, needs and
desires, propensities and habits, not of this or that other individual or
number of individuals, but of the society as a whole. This social need is the
obscure matrix of morality and of man’s ethical impulse.
It is not
actually known that in any primitive times man lived to himself or with only
his mate as do some of the animals. All record of him shows him to us as a
social animal, not an isolated body and spirit. The law of the pack has always overridden
his individual law of self-development; he seems always to have been born, to
have lived, to have been formed as a unit in a mass. But logically and
naturally from the psychological view-point the law of personal need and desire
is primary, the social law comes in as a secondary and usurping power. Man has
in him two distinct master impulses, the individualistic and the communal, a
personal life and a social life, a personal motive of conduct and a social
motive of conduct. The possibility of their opposition and the attempt to find
their equation lie at the very roots of human civilisation and persist in other
figures when he has passed beyond the vital animal into a highly individualised
mental and spiritual progress.
The existence
of a social law external to the individual is at different times a considerable
advantage and a heavy disadvantage to the development of the divine in man. It
is an advantage at first when man is crude and incapable of self-control and
self-
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finding, because it
erects a power other than that of his personal egoism through which that egoism
may be induced or compelled to moderate its savage demands, to discipline its
irrational and often violent movements and even to lose itself sometimes in a
larger and less personal egoism. It is a disadvantage to the adult spirit ready
to transcend the human formula because it is an external standard which seeks
to impose itself on him from outside, and the condition of his perfection is
that he shall grow from within and in an increasing freedom, not by the
suppression but by the transcendence of his perfected individuality, not any
longer by a law imposed on him that trains and disciplines his members but by
the soul from within breaking through all previous forms to possess with its
light and transmute his members.
* *
In the
conflict of the claims of society with the claims of the individual two ideal
and absolute solutions confront one another. There is the demand of the group
that the individual should subordinate himself more or less completely or even lose
his independent existence in the community, the smaller must be immolated or
self-offered to the larger unit. He must accept the need of the society as his
own need, the desire of the society as his own desire; he must live not for
himself but for the tribe, clan, commune or nation of which he is a member. The
ideal and absolute solution from the individual’s standpoint would be a society
that existed not for itself, for its all-overriding collective purpose, but for
the good of the individual and his fulfilment, for the greater and more perfect
life of all its members. Representing as far as possible his best self and
helping him to realise it, it would respect the freedom of each of its members
and maintain itself not by law and force but by the free and spontaneous consent
of its constituent persons. An ideal society of either kind does not exist
anywhere and would be most difficult to create, more difficult still to keep in
precarious existence so long as individual man clings to his egoism as the
primary motive of existence. A general but not complete domination of
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the society over the
individual is the easier way and it is the system that Nature from the first
instinctively adopts and keeps in equilibrium by rigorous law, compelling
custom and a careful indoctrination of the still subservient and ill-developed
intelligence of the human creature.
In primitive
societies the individual life is submitted to rigid and immobile communal
custom and rule; this is the ancient and would-be eternal law of the human pack
that tries always to masquerade as the everlasting decree of the Imperishable,
eşa dharmah sanātanah. And the ideal is not dead in the human mind;
the most recent trend of human progress is to establish an enlarged and
sumptuous edition of this ancient turn of collective living towards the
enslavement of the human spirit. There is here a serious danger to the integral
development of a greater truth upon earth and a greater life. For the desires
and free seekings of the individual, however egoistic, however false or
perverted they may be in their immediate form, contain in their obscure shell
the seed of a development necessary to the whole; his searchings and stumblings
have behind them a force that has to be kept and transmuted into the image of
the divine ideal. That force needs to be enlightened and trained but must not
be suppressed or harnessed exclusively to society’s heavy cart-wheels.
Individualism is as necessary to the final perfection as the power behind the
group-spirit; the stifling of the individual may well be the stifling of the
god in man. And in the present balance of humanity there is seldom any real
danger of exaggerated individualism breaking up the social integer. There is
continually a danger that the exaggerated pressure of the social mass by its
heavy unenlightened mechanical weight may suppress or unduly discourage the
free development of the individual spirit. For man in the individual can be
more easily enlightened, conscious, open to clear influences; man in the mass
is still obscure, half-conscious, ruled by universal forces that escape its
mastery and its knowledge.
Against this
danger of suppression and immobilisation Nature in the individual reacts. It
may react by an isolated resistance ranging from the instinctive and brutal
revolt of the criminal to the complete negation of the solitary and ascetic. It
may
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react by the assertion
of an individualistic trend in the social idea, may impose it on the mass
consciousness and establish a compromise between the individual and the social
demand. But a compromise is not a solution; it only salves over the difficulty
and in the end increases the complexity of the problem and multiplies its
issues. A new principle has to be called in other and higher than the two
conflicting instincts and powerful at once to override and to reconcile them.
Above the natural individual law which sets up as our one standard of conduct
the satisfaction of our individual needs, preferences and desires and the
natural communal law which sets up as a superior standard the satisfaction of
the needs, preferences and desires of the community as a whole, there had to
arise the notion of an ideal moral law which is not the satisfaction of need
and desire, but controls and even coerces or annuls them in the interests of an
ideal order that is not animal, not vital and physical, but mental, a creation
of the mind’s seeking for light and knowledge and right rule and right movement
and true order. The moment this notion becomes powerful in man, he begins to
escape from the engrossing vital and material into the mental life; he climbs
from the first to the second degree of the threefold ascent of Nature. His
needs and desires themselves are touched with a more elevated light of purpose
and the mental need, the aesthetic, intellectual and emotional desire begin to
predominate over the demand of the physical and vital nature.
* *
The natural
law of conduct proceeds from a conflict to an equilibrium of forces, impulsions
and desires; the higher ethical law proceeds by the development of the mental
and moral nature towards a fixed internal standard or else a self-formed ideal
of absolute qualities, – justice, righteousness, love, right reason, right
power, beauty, light. It is therefore essentially an individual standard; it is
not a creation of the mass mind. The thinker is the individual; it is he who
calls out and throws into forms that which would otherwise remain subconscious
in the amorphous human whole. The moral striver is also the individual;
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self-discipline, not
under the yoke of an outer law, but in obedience to an internal light, is
essentially an individual effort. But by positing his personal standard as the
translation of an absolute moral ideal the thinker imposes it, not on himself
alone, but on all the individuals whom his thought can reach and penetrate. And
as the mass of individuals come more and more to accept it in idea if only in
an imperfect practice or no practice, society also is compelled to obey the new
orientation. It absorbs the ideative influence and tries, not with any striking
success, to mould its institutions into new forms touched by these higher
ideals. But always its instinct is to translate them into binding law, into
pattern forms, into mechanic custom, into an external social compulsion upon
its living units.
For, long
after the individual has become partially free, a moral organism capable of
conscious growth, aware of an inward life, eager for spiritual progress,
society continues to be external in its methods, a material and economic
organism, mechanical, more intent upon status and self-preservation than on
growth and self-perfection. The greatest present triumph of the thinking and
progressive individual over the instinctive and static society has been the
power he has acquired by his thought-will to compel it to think also, to open itself
to the idea of social justice and righteousness, communal sympathy and mutual
compassion, to feel after the rule of reason rather than blind custom as the
test of its institutions and to look on the mental and moral assent of its
individuals as at least one essential element in the validity of its laws.
Ideally at least, to consider light rather than force as its sanction, moral
development and not vengeance or restraint as the object even of its penal
action, is becoming just possible to the communal mind. The greatest future
triumph of the thinker will come when he can persuade the individual integer
and the collective whole to rest their life-relation and its union and
stability upon a free and harmonious consent and self-adaptation, and shape and
govern the external by the internal truth rather than to constrain the inner
spirit by the tyranny of the external form and structure.
But even this
success that he has gained is rather a thing in potentiality than in actual
accomplishment. There is always
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a disharmony
and a discord between the moral law in the individual and the law of his needs
and desires, between the moral law proposed to society and the physical and
vital needs, desires, customs, prejudices, interests and passions of the caste,
the clan, the religious community, the society, the nation. The moralist erects
in vain his absolute ethical standard and calls upon all to be faithful to it
without regard to consequences. To him the needs and desires of the individual
are invalid if they are in conflict with the moral law, and the social law has
no claims upon him if it is opposed to his sense of right and denied by his
conscience. This is his absolute solution for the individual that he shall
cherish no desires and claims that are not consistent with love, truth and
justice. He demands from the community or nation that it shall hold all things
cheap, even its safety and its most pressing interests, in comparison with
truth, justice, humanity and the highest good of the peoples.
No individual
rises to these heights except in intense moments, no society yet created
satisfies this ideal. And in the present state of morality and of human
development none perhaps can or ought to satisfy it. Nature will not allow it,
Nature knows that it should not be. The first reason is that our moral ideals
are themselves for the most part ill-evolved, ignorant and arbitrary, mental
constructions rather than transcriptions of the eternal truths of the spirit.
Authoritative and dogmatic, they assert certain absolute standards in theory,
but in practice every existing system of ethics proves either in application unworkable
or is in fact a constant coming short of the absolute standard to which the
ideal pretends. If our ethical system is a compromise or a makeshift, it gives
at once a principle of justification to the further sterilising compromises
which society and the individual hasten to make with it. And if it insists on
absolute love, justice, right with an uncompromising insistence, it soars above
the head of human possibility and is professed with lip homage but ignored in
practice. Even it is found that it ignores other elements in humanity which
equally insist on survival but refuse to come within the moral formula. For
just as the individual law of desire contains within it invaluable elements of
the infinite whole which have to be protected against
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the tyranny of the
absorbing social idea, the innate impulses too both of individual and of
collective man contain in them invaluable elements which escape the limits of
any ethical formula yet discovered and are yet necessary to the fullness and harmony
of an eventual divine perfection.
Moreover,
absolute love, absolute justice, absolute right reason in their present
application by a bewildered and imperfect humanity come easily to be
conflicting principles. Justice often demands what love abhors. Right reason dispassionately
considering the facts of nature and human relations in search of a satisfying
norm or rule is unable to admit without modification either any reign of
absolute justice or any reign of absolute love. And in fact man’s absolute
justice easily turns out to be in practice a sovereign injustice; for his mind,
one-sided and rigid in its constructions, puts forward a one-sided partial and
rigorous scheme or figure and claims for it totality and absoluteness and an
application that ignores the subtler truth of things and the plasticity of
life. All our standards turned into action either waver on a flux of
compromises or err by this partiality and unelastic structure. Humanity sways
from one orientation to another; the race moves upon a zigzag path led by
conflicting claims and, on the whole, works out instinctively what Nature
intends, but with much waste and suffering, rather than either what it desires
or what it holds to be right or what the highest light from above demands from the
embodied spirit.
* *
The fact is
that when we have reached the cult of absolute ethical qualities and erected
the categorical imperative of an ideal law, we have not come to the end of our
search or touched the truth that delivers. There is, no doubt, something here that
helps us to rise beyond limitation by the physical and vital man in us, an
insistence that overpasses the individual and collective needs and desires of a
humanity still bound to the living mud of Matter in which it took its roots, an
aspiration that helps to develop the mental and moral being in us: this new
sublimating element has been therefore an acquisition of great importance; its
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workings have marked a
considerable step forward in the difficult evolution of terrestrial Nature. And
behind the inadequacy of these ethical conceptions something too is concealed
that does attach to a supreme Truth; there is here the glimmer of a light and
power that are part of a yet unreached divine Nature. But the mental idea of
these things is not that light and the moral formulation of them is not that
power. These are only representative constructions of the mind that cannot
embody the divine spirit which they vainly endeavour to imprison in their
categorical formulas. Beyond the mental and moral being in us is a greater
divine being that is spiritual and supramental; for it is only through a large
spiritual plane where the mind’s formulas dissolve in a white flame of direct
inner experience that we can reach beyond mind and pass from its constructions
to the vastness and freedom of the supramental realities. There alone can we
touch the harmony of the divine powers that are poorly mispresented to our mind
or framed into a false figure by the conflicting or wavering elements of the moral law. There
alone the unification of the transformed vital and physical and the illumined
mental man becomes possible in that supramental Spirit which is at once the
secret source and goal of our mind and life and body. There alone is there any
possibility of an absolute justice, love and right – far other than that which
we imagine – at one with each other in the light of a supreme divine knowledge.
There alone can there be a reconciliation of the conflict between our members.
In other
words there is, above society’s external law and man’s moral law and beyond
them, though feebly and ignorantly aimed at by something within them, a larger truth
of a vast unbound consciousness, a law divine towards which both these blind
and gross formulations are progressive faltering steps that try to escape from
the natural law of the animal to a more exalted light or universal rule. That
divine standard, since the godhead in us is our spirit moving towards its own
concealed perfection, must be a supreme spiritual law and truth of our nature.
Again, as we are embodied beings in the world with a common existence and
nature and yet individual souls capable of direct touch with the Transcendent,
this supreme truth of ourselves must have a
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double character. It
must be a law and truth that discovers the perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of
a great spiritualised collective life and determines perfectly our relations
with each being and all beings in Nature’s varied oneness. It must be at the
same time a law and truth that discovers to us at each moment the rhythm and
exact steps of the direct expression of the Divine in the soul, mind, life,
body of the individual creature.¹ And we find in experience that this supreme
light and force of action in its highest expression is at once an imperative
law and an absolute freedom. It is an imperative law because it governs by
immutable Truth our every inner and outer movement. And yet at each moment and
in each movement the absolute freedom of the Supreme handles the perfect plasticity
of our conscious and liberated nature.
The ethical
idealist tries to discover this supreme law in his own moral data, in the inferior
powers and factors that belong to the mental and ethical formula. And to
sustain and organise them he selects a fundamental principle of conduct essentially
unsound and constructed by the intellect, utility, hedonism, reason, intuitive
conscience or any other generalised standard. All such efforts are foredoomed
to failure. Our inner nature is the progressive expression of the eternal
Spirit and too complex a power to be tied down by a single dominant mental or moral
principle. Only the supramental consciousness can reveal to its differing and
conflicting forces their spiritual truth and harmonise their divergences.
The later
religions endeavour to fix the type of a supreme truth of conduct, erect a
system and declare God’s law through the mouth of Avatar or prophet. These
systems, more powerful and dynamic than the dry ethical idea, are yet for the
most part no more than idealistic glorifications of the moral principle
sanctified by religious emotion and the label of a superhuman origin. Some,
like the extreme Christian ethic, are rejected by Nature because they insist
unworkably on an impracticable absolute rule. Others prove in the end to be
evolutionary compromises and become obsolete in the march of Time. The true
divine
¹ Therefore
the Gita defines “Dharma”, an expression which means more than either religion
or morality, as action controlled by our essential manner of self-being.
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law, unlike these mental
counterfeits, cannot be a system of rigid ethical determinations that press
into their cast-iron moulds all our life-movements. The Law divine is truth of
life and truth of the spirit and must take up with a free living plasticity and
inspire with the direct touch of its eternal light each step of our action and
all the complexity of our life issues. It must act not as a rule and formula
but as an enveloping and penetrating conscious presence that determines all our
thoughts, activities, feelings, impulsions of will by its infallible power and
knowledge.
The older
religions erected their rule of the wise, their dicta of Manu or Confucius, a
complex Shastra in which they attempted to combine the social rule and moral
law with the declaration of certain eternal principles of our highest nature in
some kind of uniting amalgam. All three were treated on the same ground as
equally the expression of everlasting verities, sanātana dharma. But two of these elements are evolutionary
and valid for a time, mental constructions, human readings of the will of the
Eternal; the third, attached and subdued to certain social and moral formulas,
had to share the fortunes of its forms. Either the Shastra grows obsolete and
has to be progressively changed or finally cast away or else it stands as a rigid
barrier to the self-development of the individual and the race. The Shastra
erects a collective and external standard; it ignores the inner nature of the
individual, the indeterminable elements of a secret spiritual force within him.
But the nature of the individual will not be ignored; its demand is inexorable.
The unrestrained indulgence of his outer impulses leads to anarchy and
dissolution, but the suppression and coercion of his soul’s freedom by a fixed
and mechanical rule spells stagnation or an inner death. Not this coercion or
determination from outside, but the free discovery of his highest spirit and
the truth of an eternal movement is the supreme thing that he has to discover.
The higher
ethical law is discovered by the individual in his mind and will and psychic
sense and then extended to the race. The supreme law also must be discovered by
the individual in his spirit. Then only, through a spiritual influence and not by
the mental idea, can it be extended to others. A moral law can be
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imposed as a rule or an
ideal on numbers of men who have not attained that level of consciousness or
that fineness of mind and will and psychic sense in which it can become a reality
to them and a living force. As an ideal it can be revered without any need of
practice. As a rule it can be observed in its outsides even if the inner sense
is missed altogether. The supramental and spiritual life cannot be mechanised
in this way, it cannot be turned into a mental ideal or an external rule. It
has its own great lines, but these must be made real, must be the workings of
an active Power felt in the individual’s consciousness and the transcriptions
of an eternal Truth powerful to transform mind, life and body. And because it
is thus real, effective, imperative, the generalisation of the supramental consciousness
and the spiritual life is the sole force that can lead to individual and
collective perfection in earth’s highest creatures. Only by our coming into
constant touch with the divine Consciousness and its absolute Truth can some
form of the conscious Divine, the dynamic Absolute, take up our earth-existence
and transform its strife, stumbling, sufferings and falsities into an image of
the supreme Light, Power and Ananda.
The
culmination of the soul’s constant touch with the Supreme is that self-giving which
we call surrender to the divine Will and immergence of the separated ego in the
One who is all. A vast universality of soul and an intense unity with all is the
base and fixed condition of the supramental consciousness and spiritual life.
In that universality and unity alone can we find the supreme law of the divine
manifestation in the life of the embodied spirit; in that alone can we discover
the supreme motion and right play of our individual nature. In that alone can
all these lower discords resolve themselves into a victorious harmony of the
true relations between manifested beings who are portions of the one Godhead
and children of one universal Mother.
* *
All conduct
and action are part of the movement of a Power, a Force infinite and divine in
its origin and secret sense and will even though the forms of it we see seem
inconscient or
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ignorant, material,
vital, mental, finite, which is working to bring out progressively something of
the Divine and Infinite in the obscurity of the individual and collective
nature. This power is leading towards the Light, but still through the
Ignorance. It leads man first through his needs and desires; it guides him next
through enlarged needs and desires modified and enlightened by a mental and
moral ideal. It is preparing to lead him to a spiritual realisation that
overrides these things and yet fulfils and reconciles them in all that is
divinely true in their spirit and purpose. It transforms the needs and desires
into a divine Will and Ananda. It transforms the mental and moral aspiration
into the powers of Truth and Perfection that are beyond them. It substitutes
for the divided straining of the individual nature, for the passion and strife
of the separate ego, the calm, profound, harmonious and happy law of the universalised
person within us, the central being, the spirit that is a portion of the
supreme Spirit. This true Person in us, because it is universal, does not seek
its separate gratification but only asks in its outward expression in Nature
its growth to its real stature, the expression of its inner divine self, that
transcendent spiritual power and presence within it which is one with all and
in sympathy with each thing and creature and with all the collective
personalities and powers of the divine existence, and yet it transcends them
and is not bound by the egoism of any creature or collectivity or limited by
the ignorant controls of their lower nature. This is the high realisation in
front of all our seeking and striving, and it gives the sure promise of a
perfect reconciliation and transmutation of all the elements of our nature. A
pure, total and flawless action is possible only when that is effected and we
have reached the height of this secret Godhead within us.
The perfect
supramental action will not follow any single principle or limited rule. It is
not likely to satisfy the standard either of the individual egoist or of any
organised group-mind. It will conform to the demand neither of the positive
practical man of the world nor of the formal moralist nor of the patriot nor of
the sentimental philanthropist nor of the idealising philosopher. It will
proceed by a spontaneous outflowing from the summits in the totality of an
illumined and uplifted being, will
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and knowledge and not by
the selected, calculated and standardised action which is all that the
intellectual reason or ethical will can achieve. Its sole aim will be the
expression of the divine in us and the keeping together of the world and its progress
towards the Manifestation that is to be. This even will not be so much an aim
and purpose as a spontaneous law of the being and an intuitive determination of
the action by the Light of the divine Truth and its automatic influence. It
will proceed like the action of Nature from a total will and knowledge behind
her, but a will and knowledge enlightened in a conscious supreme Nature and no
longer obscure in this ignorant Prakriti. It will be an action not bound by the
dualities but full and large in the spirit’s impartial joy of existence. The
happy and inspired movement of a divine Power and Wisdom guiding and impelling
us will replace the perplexities and stumblings of the suffering and ignorant
ego.
If by some
miracle of divine intervention all mankind at once could be raised to this
level, we should have something on earth like the Golden Age of the traditions,
Satya Yuga, the Age of Truth or true existence. For the sign of the Satya Yuga is
that the Law is spontaneous and conscious in each creature and does its own
works in a perfect harmony and freedom. Unity and universality, not separative
division, would be the foundation of the consciousness of the race; love would
be absolute; equality would be consistent with hierarchy and perfect in
difference; absolute justice would be secured by the spontaneous action of the
being in harmony with the truth of things and the truth of himself and others
and therefore sure of true and right result; right reason, no longer mental but
supramental, would be satisfied not by the observation of artificial standards
but by the free automatic perception of right relations and their inevitable
execution in the act. The quarrel between the individual and society or
disastrous struggle between one community and another could not exist: the
cosmic consciousness imbedded in embodied beings would assure a harmonious diversity
in oneness.
In the actual
state of humanity, it is the individual who must climb to this height as a
pioneer and precursor. His isolation will necessarily give a determination and
a form to his outward activities that must be quite other than those of a con-
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sciously divine
collective action. The inner state, the root of his acts, will be the same; but
the acts themselves may well be very different from what they would be on an
earth liberated from ignorance. Nevertheless his consciousness and the divine mechanism
of his conduct, if such a word can be used of so free a thing, would be such as
has been described, free from that subjection to vital impurity and desire and
wrong impulse which we call sin, unbound by that rule of prescribed moral formulas
which we call virtue, spontaneously sure and pure and perfect in a greater
consciousness than the mind’s, governed in all its steps by the light and truth
of the Spirit. But if a collectivity or group could be formed of those who had reached
the supramental perfection, there indeed some divine creation could take shape;
a new earth could descend that would be a new heaven, a world of supramental
light could be created here amidst the receding darkness of this terrestrial ignorance.
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