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		<b><font face="Times New Roman"><i>The Moral and the Spiritual</i> </font>
		</b></p>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">&nbsp;</p>

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<font face="Times New Roman">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 <i>maya</i></font>

<font face="Times New Roman">or <i>mard?</i> </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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. Did 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 <i>Savitri</i> how Sri Aurobindo speaks of Death as only a mask of
Immortality.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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</font>
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Page 152<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">is not in its right place. Even things considered reprehensible
by the moral sense<b> </b> are not so when they are viewed from
another standpoint.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.                          </font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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</font>
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Page 153<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The states of being or consciousness from the animal, or
down from Matter itself up to the Supreme—<i>abrahmastamba—
</i>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 <i>right</i> 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.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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</font>&nbsp;
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Page 154<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">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,<b> 
</b>in<b> 
</b>fruits. These are mounting grades of growth, but the growth above
is not <i>superior</i> to the growth below. It is a one unified whole
and each portion has its own absolute value, beauty and utility.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 unknown 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 &quot;I believe because it is impossible&quot;,1 the modern
consciousness says: I love because I hate.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 v 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 <i>gunas)—</i>all mental or scriptural rules and
regulations. For her there is only one absolute—the transcendent, the Supreme Divine himself—the Brahman, nothing</font>&nbsp;
<font face="Times New Roman">else, <i>netaram.</i></font>

		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
&nbsp;<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman" size="2"><sup>1</sup> <i>Credo quia impossibile</i> is actually a phrase of Tertullian vide his <i>De Came
Christi, V—</i>though often ascribed to St. Augustine</font>
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Page 155<hr>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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, <i>dwandwas,</i> belong to the same category of
relativity, that is, unreality.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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 <i>adirasa,</i> 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.</font>

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<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 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.</font>
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