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Vengeance is Mine
ONE who seeks to live in God's consciousness cannot take the law into his own hands; he must leave it all to God. When he takes up the self-appointed task of remedying the situation, "resisting evil" as Christ termed it, he invites resistance from the other side which takes up its own counter-measures. The principle of revanche or vendetta, practised by nations and families, has not been a success, as history has amply proved. It is a seesaw movement, a vicious circle without issue. Not only so, the movement gathers momentum and increases in violence and confusion the farther it proceeds on its career. That is why Christ uttered his warning: and Buddha too declared that enmity cannot be appeased by enmity, it can be appeased only by the want of enmity. The truth is true not only in respect of two enemy forces of the same quality and on the same plane, but also with regard to the antagonism between higher and lower forces, between Good and Evil.
Do we then propose taking it all lying down, it may be
asked? Is martyrdom then our ideal? Not so, for we do not believe
that evil forces can be appeased or conquered or transformed by
yielding to them, letting them free to have their own way. Otherwise
Krishna would not have enjoined. and inspired (almost incited) Arjuna
to enter on a bloody battle. Still forces, whether good or bad, are
conquered or quelled or transformed truly and permanently by forces
that belong not to the same level of being or consciousness, but to a
higher one. Instead of working in a parallelogram of forces, we must
take recourse, as it were, to a pyramid of forces. We know of the
ideal of soul-force standing against and seeking to persuade or
peacefully subdue brute force. It is not an
Page – 384 impossibility; only we must be able really to get to the true soul and not a semblance or substitute of it. The true soul is .man's spiritual or divine being – the consciousness in which man is one in substance and nature with God. It is not a mere thought formation, a mental and moral ideal. The only force that can succeed against a lower or undivine force is God's own force – and the success can be complete and absolute by the calling in or intervention of God's force in its highest status. Anything less than that will be no more than a temporary lull or adjustment. The world is not changed in spite of many efforts, because man is always taking to human means, he is not allowing God to do God's work, but putting his own individual initiative in God's place, taking perhaps God's name on the lips with a secret, unconscious feeling that unless he himself does something nothing will be done – kartÄhamiti manyate. Human means may achieve at its best a compromise, but no permanent solution: it is often the beginning of a worse situation, a greater disharmony and conflict – peace, it has been said, is only a preparation for war. That vicious circle can be and has to be cut by the razor-blade consciousness of the aspirant to life divine who by the clear and tranquil energy of his tapas can call down a divine interference in mortal affairs. The right attitude, then, for a sadhak who has to live dangerously in the world of today is to rise above the turmoils that surge around, to lift the consciousness to a serener height and aspire wholly towards the help and guidance from above, not to be moved by the blast that passes but hold himself firmly anchored upon the rock of ages, the Divine Grace. It is only then that the question can come of actually taking part in the battle of life – for it is then that you can act as God's agent or instrument. If you have to take to the field of actual battle you must first receive God's commission (chaprash – as Ramakrishna called it), even as Arjuna did. Page – 385
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