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Mater
Dolorosa SUFFERING, Distress and Death today hold the earth in
thrall. And yet can there be any other issue in temporal life? That seems to be
the ineluctable fate for mankind. Ages ago it was declared, the wages of sin is
death. Doubters ask, however, if sinners alone
suffered, one would not perhaps mind; but along with sinners why should
innocents, nay even the virtuous, pass under the axe? What sins indeed babes
commit? Are the sins of the fathers truly visited upon coming generations? A
queer arrangement, to say the least, if there is a wise and just and benevolent
God! Yes, how many honest people, people who strive to live piously, honestly
and honourably, according to the law of righteousness, fail to escape! All
equally undergo the same heavy punishment. Is it not then nearer the truth to
say that a most mechanical Nature, a mere gamble of chance, a statistical
equation, as mathematicians say, moves the destiny of creatures and things in
the universe, that there is nowhere a heart or consciousness in the whole
business? Some believers in God or in the Spirit admit
that it is so. The world is the creation of another being, a not-God, a
not-Spirit –whether Maya or Ahriman or the Great Evil. One has simply to forget the world, abandon
earthly existence altogether as a nightmare. Peace, felicity one can possess
and enjoy-but not here in this vale of tears, anityam asukham lokam imam, but elsewhere beyond. Is that the whole truth? We, for ourselves,
do not subscribe to this view. Truth is a very complex entity, the universe a
mingled strain. It is not a matter of merely sinners and innocents that we have
to deal with. The problem is deeper and more fundamental. The whole question
is,-where, in which
Page-110 world, on which level of consciousness do we
stand, and, what is more crucial, how much of that consciousness is dynamic and
effective in normal life. If we are in the ordinary consciousness and live
wholly with that consciousness, it is inevitable that, being in the midst of
Nature's current, we should be buffeted along, the good and the evil, as we
conceive them to be, befalling us indiscriminately. Or, again, if we happen to
live in part or even mainly in an inner or higher consciousness, more or less
in a mood of withdrawal from the current of life allowing the life movements to
happen as they list, then too we remain, in fact, creatures and playthings of
Nature and we must not wonder if, externally, suffering becomes the badge of
our tribe. And yet the solution need not be a total
rejection and transcendence of Nature. For what is ignored in this view is
Nature's dual reality. In one form, the inferior (apara), Nature means the Law of Ignorance – of pain and misery
and death; but in another form, the superior (para), Nature's is the Law of Knowledge, that is to say, of
happiness, immunity and and immortality, not elsewhere in another world and in
a transcendent consciousness, but here below on the physical earth in a
physical body. The whole question then is this-how far has
this Higher Nature been a reality with us, to what extent do we live and move
and have our being in it. It is when the normal existence, our body, our life
and our mentality have all adopted and absorbed the substance of the Higher
Prakriti and become it, when all the modes of Inferior Prakriti have been
discarded and annihilated, or rather, have been purified and made to grow into
the modes of the Higher Prakriti, that our terrestrial life can become a thing
of absolute beauty and perfect perfection. If, on the contrary, any part of us belongs
to the Inferior Nature, even if the larger part dwells in some higher status of
Nature, even then we are not immune to the attacks that come from the inferior
Nature. Those whom we usually call pious or virtuous or honest have still a
good part of them imbedded in the Lower Nature, in various degrees they are yet
its vassals; they owe allegiance to the three gunas, be it even to sattwa – sattwa
is also a movement in Inferior Nature; Page-111 they are not free. Has not Sri Krishna said: Traigunyavisaya veda nistraigunyo
bhavarjuna¹? only thing we must remember is that freedom from the
gunas does not necessarily mean an absolute cessation of the play of Prakriti.
Being in the gunas we must know how to purify and change them, transmute them
into the higher and divine potentials. This is a counsel of perfection, one would
say. But there is no other way out. If humanity is to be saved, if it is at all
to progress, it can be only in this direction. Buddha's was no less a counsel
of perfection. He saw the misery of man, the three great maladies inherent in
life and his supreme compassion led him to the discovery of a remedy, a radical
remedy, – indeed it could remove the malady altogether, for it removed the
patient also. What we propose is, in this sense, something less drastic. Ours
is not a path of escape, although that too needs heroism, but of battle and conquest
and lordship. It is not to say that other remedies – less
radical but more normal to human nature – cannot be undertaken in the meanwhile.
The higher truths do not rule out the lower. These too have their place and
utility in Nature's integral economy. An organisation based on science and
ethicism can be of help as a palliative and measure of relief; it may be even
immediately necessary under the circumstances, but however imperative at the
moment it does not go to the root of the matter. ¹ “The
action of the three gunas is the subject matter of the veda: but do thou become
free from the triple guna, O Arjuna.”
– The
Gita,
II.45 Page-112
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