-087_The Moral and the Spiritual

Is there anything essentially wrong, evil in its very being and nature? Some religious traditions say, there is: Satan is such a thing, Ahriman is such a thing, and what else is maya or mara?

However that may be, the sense of something essentially wrong is the fount and origin of the moral sense. The moral sense stems from and lives on the sense of sin and guilt.

The sense of sin is the fundamental inspiration behind some religious disciplines, even the sense of something irrevocably bad or something irreparable; for that gives a stronger impetus, a more dynamic urge to the spur of the religious consciousness. The sense of something irreparable, a final doom, has before it the vision of an eternal hell, the Lord of hell and his hosts and his captives. Upon this basic picture of Hell has loomed out Dante's vision of Paradise.

The Indian consciousness did not consider anything essentially evil, anything irrevocably and eternally condemned to perdition. Even the Asura, the anti-Divine is viewed, in the last analysis of things, also as an aspect, a formation of the Divine himself. Diti and Aditi are sisters, twin aspects of the same Supreme Being. All the legends in narrating the life history of the Asura describe his end as a submission to the Divine Will and a merging in Him. An entire life of bitter hostility culminates in the same degree of love for the Divine. The process of enmity seems to have a deeper occult  meaning conducive to the more perfect union with the Divine. We know in Savitri how Sri Aurobindo speaks of Death as only a mask of Immortality.

In fact, evil, as we usually know it, as human mind construes it, is only a misplacement of a thing, a thing not in its place  –  a thing need not be essentially wrong, it is wrong because it  

is not in its right place. Even things considered reprehensible by the moral sense are not so when they are viewed from another standpoint.

The moral consciousness seeks to rescue man from the animal consciousness. Its effort is to be delivered from the inferior vital instincts and rise to something higher, genuinely human. It does that or tries to do that by cultivating a feeling of repulsion, even of horror towards things that are sought to be rejected, cast out. The feeling of repulsion, of revulsion and horror, is indispensable to the growth and maintenance of the moral feeling.

    The Indian discipline, on the other hand, teaches that to rise to a higher state of consciousness one need not have, one must not have, any feeling of revulsion or hatred. There is no such thing as saintly hatred. One must be free from attachment to the movements of inferior nature, one must cultivate detachment from them, but not necessarily through hatred or horror. The spiritual discipline bases itself upon a sense of perfect equality.

When you have hatred or horror for a thing it means you are on the same plane with it, your consciousness is level with the consciousness of the opposite feelings. You have to rise above the status of the lower nature and this can be done only by a calm detachment, a quiet withdrawal. One need not entertain repulsion or hatred for animal life in order to rise superior to it, one automatically rises superior to it when one links oneself to the higher status, when one is imbued with the superior consciousness. The animal consciousness is not a wrong consciousness in itself, it is a life of the animal; the human consciousness may regard it as such and may still discover a superior consciousness looking at the movements of the lower world dispassionately, indifferently, or even appreciatively, for a thing of beauty is there even in the animal life, for the Divine is everywhere.

The moral impulse is towards a self-exceeding but this self-exceeding, I have said, is to be done in perfect equanimity, in absolute detachment and indifference. To rise in consciousness, from the physical and animal to the divine, means, of course, abandoning the inferior, reaching the higher: but 'inferior' does not mean something low, something to be

despised and reviled, but simply something to be passed over, transcended. And the ideal would be not only to surpass but to find out a secret parallelism between the two, discover the seed of the higher embedded even in the lower. The Indian discipline, including the school that advocates total rejection of the lower and enjoins simple detachment and separation, does not approve of any feeling of contempt or disgust.

   The states of being or consciousness from the animal, or down from Matter itself up to the Supreme – abrahmastamba – constitute what is called a hierarchy. Hierarchy means a structure rising upward tier upon tier, step by step: it is a scale, as it were, of increasing values, only the values are not moral, they indicate only a measure, a neutral measure respecting position or a kind of mass content. As in a building where brick is laid upon brick, or stone upon stone, the one laid above is not superior to the one laid below; the terms inferior and superior indicate only the simple position of the objects. Even the system of the four social orders in ancient" India was originally such a hierarchy. The higher and lower orders did not carry any moral appreciation or depreciation. The four orders placed one above the other schematically denote only the respective social functions classified according to the nature of each, even as the human body represents such a hierarchy, rising from the feet at the bottom towards the head at the top. This is to say all objects and movements in nature are right when they are confined each to its own domain, following its own dharma of that domain. Thus one can be perfectly calm and at ease witnessing the catastrophies and cataclysms in nature, for one knows it is the dharma of material nature. Man terms them disasters for he judges them according to his own convenience. Even so, one should not be perturbed at the wild behaviour–man calls it wild – of wild animals. Likewise the gods in their sovereign tranquillity smile at the crudeness and stupidities of human beings. One has to lift oneself up, withdraw and stand high above all that one wishes to surpass and look at it, with a benign godly smile.

The world is a gradation of developing consciousness, of growing states or status of being. There is a higher and lower level in point of the measure of consciousness but that involves no moral judgement: the moral judgement is man's; it is  

man's, one might almost say, idiosyncracy, that is to say, a notion that is a prop to help him mount the ladder. Though it might be necessary at a certain stage, in certain circumstances, it is not a universal or ineluctable law, not even in his personal domain. The growing consciousness is like the growing tree rising upward first into a trunk, then spreading out into branches, into twigs and tendrils, then in flowers and finally, in fruits. These are mounting grades of growth, but the growth above is not superior to the growth below. It is a one unified whole and each portion has its own absolute value, beauty and utility.

The modern mind has forgotten this lesson. It is terribly moral – I say moral, not immoral – Its immorality has found play, has almost been cultured so that its moral sense may remain intact. Its dislike and even abhorrence for things it chooses to call immoral is the ransom it pays for rescuing its sense of morality, and paradoxically this very abhorrence for unholy things has pushed it all the more into their grasp. This is the characteristic turn or twist of the modern consciousness, the perversity unkl1own to the ancient 'sinners'. Perversity means, you yield, not only yield, but take delight in the thing you dislike, detest or abhor even. In the vein of St. Augustine who said "I believe because it is impossible", 1 the modern consciousness says: I love because I hate.                                                                 

A strange fascination for the forbidden fruit has gripped the modern mentality and the most significant part of the thing is that the forbidding comes from within oneself, not from any authority outside – It is self-forbidden. We are reminded here of the Kantian moral absolute – the categorical imperative. This is a gospel based upon the Christian and Semitic tradition, polished by the Greek (that is, Socratic) touch, quickened and sharpened by the intellectual and social stress of European Culture. India admitted no such moral absolute or mental categorical imperative. The urge of her spiritual consciousness was always to go beyond, beyond the dualities, beyond the trinities (the three gunas ) - all mental or scriptural rules and regulations. For her there is only one absolute – the transcendent, the Supreme Divine himself – the Brahman, nothing else, netaram.

¹ Credo quia impossibile is actually a phrase of Tertullian vide his De Carne Christi, V – though often ascribed to St. Augustine

The Indian spiritual consciousness considers the secular distinction of good and evil as otiose: both are maya, there must neither be attachment to the Good, nor repulsion from Evil, the two, dwandwas, belong to the same category of relativity, that is, unreality.

Indian artists and poets were steeped in that tradition, wholly inspired by that spirit. Orthodox morality often wonders, is even shocked at the frankness, the daring nonchalance in Indian art creations , – a familiar prudery would call it shamelessness and even vulgarity, but to the Indian view, 'the Brahmin and the cow and the elephant' are of equal value and merit. The movement conventional morality calls 'libidinous' has a nobler name in Indian tradition: it is adirasa, the first or primary delight of existence. As I have said, the modern consciousness finds it a horror and is therefore all the more fascinated by it and dives into it head foremost.

To cure the modern malady we have to go back again to something of the ancient mentality. We have to cultivate a consciousness, now forgotten and alienated but once natural to the human mind, the consciousness and status of a transcendence built with the sense of absolute calm, an equality, all serene and all englobing, that is God's consciousness.