Chapter
IV
Standards
of Conduct and Spiritual Freedom
Since
perfection is progressive, good and evil are shifting quantities
and change from time to time their meaning and value.
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 erectoin of a barrier against the eternal waters
in their outflow. Once the nature-bound soul realizes 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 we have 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 recognize 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 openess
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-realization 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 Yoga13 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.
Four
main principles successively govern human conduct.The first
two are personal need and the good of the collectivity.
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 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.
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 fulfillment
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.
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 civilization and persist in other
figures when he has passed beyond the vital animal into a highly
individualized mental and spiritual progress.
The existence of a social law external to the individual is
at different times a considerable advantage and a 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-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.
A
conflict is born of the opposition of the two instinctive tendencies
which govern human action: the individualist and the communal
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 realize 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.
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.
In
order to settle this conflict, a new principle comes in, other
and higher than the two conflicting instincts,and aiming both
to override and to reconcile them. This third principle is
the ethical ideal.
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 ont 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 . . .
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; 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 mechanical,
more intent upon status and self-preservation than on growth
and self-perfection. The greatest 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
conflicts do not subside; they seem rather to multiply.Moral
laws are arbitrary and rigid; when applied to life,they are
obliged to come to terms with it and end in compromises which
deprive them of all power.
But even this success that he has gained is rather a thing in
potentiality than in actual accomplishment. There is always 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.
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 sterilizing
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 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.
Behind
the ethical law, which is a false image, a greater truth of
a vast consciousness without fetters unveils itself,the supreme
law of our divine nature. It determines perfectly our relations
with each being and with the totality of the universe, and
it also reveals the exact rhythm of the direct expression of
the Divine in us.It
is the fourth and supreme principle of action, which is at
the same time imperative law and absolute freedom.
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 . . . And behind the inadequacy of these
ethical conceptions something too is concealed that does attach
to s 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 yet individual souls capable of direct touch with
the Transcendent, this supreme truth of ourselves must have a
double character. It must be a law and truth that discovers the
perfect movement, harmony, rhythm of a great spiritualized 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. 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.
Chapter
5
