<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>16 .htm</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=windows-1252">
</head>
<body>

<table border="0" width="100%" cellpadding="6" style="border-collapse: collapse">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<p align="center" style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0">
<b>
<font face="Times New Roman"><i>Towards a New Ideology</i> </font>

		</b>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">&nbsp;</p>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">INDIA must evolve her own political and social ideology; she
must discover and establish in this domain also, as in<b> 
</b>all<b> 
</b>others that concern her collective life, her own genius and
rule. This is what Swaraj really means and demands.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Russia has her Sovietic Communism, Germany, for the
present at least, her Nazidom, Italy her totalitarian Fascism, old England her 
Parliamentarianism and France her Bureau
cratism; each nation finds the norm and scheme of self-rule
that suits its temperament and character and changes and
modifies that also in its own characteristic manner. Even so
India must find her own scheme of Swarajya. If she is to live
and be great and contribute something to the enrichment
and glory of human civilisation, she must look to herself,
enter into herself and know and bring out what lies there
buried. It is a grievous blunder to try to transplant a Mussolinian or Leninian or a Hitlerian gospel on an Indian soil'.
It is not desirable nor is it truly possible.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; If, however, we take a right about turn and look away
from the West to the Far East, we already see in Japan a
different type of national self-government. It is based on an
altogether different basis which may appear even novel to
the modern and rationalistic European mentality. I am referring to the conception of duty which moulds and upholds
the Japanese body politic and body social, as opposed to the
conception of right obtaining royal rule in the Occident.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The distinction between the attitudes that underlie these
two conceptions was once upon a time greatly stressed by
Vivekananda, who was the first to strike two or three major
chords that were needed to create the grand symphony of
the Indian Renaissance. It is true Europe too had her Mazzini</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 136<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">whose scheme of a new humanity was based on the conception of the <i>duties</i> of man. But his was a voice in the wilderness
and he was not honoured in his own country.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The malady of the modern age springs precisely from this
poisonous source, viz., it views man as a bundle of rights and
its problem of social organisation is the problem of safeguarding
and, if possible, even of increasing individual and collective
rights. Thus came into being the competitive society—a society
necessarily red in tooth and claw like Nature.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Vivekananda pointed .out that one should rather think of
one's duties, how best to accomplish them and leave the&nbsp;
rights to take care of themselves. Such an attitude would give a man the correct 
outlook, the correct poise, the correct inspiration in living the collective life. Instead of each one
demanding and claiming what one regards as one's dues and
consequently scrambling and fighting for them (and most
often not getting them or getting at a ruinous expense—what<br>
made Arjuna cry, &quot;What shall I do with the kingdom and all
if in gaining it I lose everything that makes it worth having?&quot;)
if one were content with knowing one's duty and doing it
with a single mind, not only would there be peace and amity
on earth, but also none would be deprived of anything that
is really due to him.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; It may be answered that there does not seem to be any
special virtue in the word &quot;duty&quot;; for, the crimes committed
under that ensign are not less numerous or violent than those
inspired by the ideal of Rights. It was once considered in
some religions to be the duty of the faithful to kill or coerce
or convert as many as possible of another faith; it was the
bounden duty of the good shepherd to burn and flay -the
heretic. And in recent times the ceremony of &quot;purge&quot; bespeaks of the same compulsion of the sense of duty in the
consciousness of modern Messiahs. But the true name of the&nbsp;
thing in all these cases is not duty, <i>but fanaticism.</i></font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; For fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with
itself; but duty proper, the genuine form of it is something
give than to demand, it is less easily provoked to aggression
and battle. Even so, it may be claimed on behalf of Right
that the right hand of Right is not likely to do harm, for it</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 137<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">is then another name for liberty, it means the freedom<b> 
</b>to<b> 
</b>live one's life unhampered without infringing on an equal
facility for others to do the same. But the whole difficulty</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">comes in precisely with regard to the frontier of each other's
sphere of rights. It is easy to declare the principle, but to
tarry it out in life and action is a different matter. The line</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">of demarcation between one's own rights and the rights of 
another is always indeterminate and indefinable. In establishing and maintaining one's rights there is always the possibility,
even the certainty of &quot;frontier incidents&quot;, of encroaching upon</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">other's rights. Liberty, alone and by itself, is not a safe guide</font>&nbsp;<font face="Times New Roman">therefore so much stress is being laid nowadays upon' discipline and obedience in modern ideologies.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But perhaps the real truth of the matter here is that all 
these terms—liberty or right or even duty—are mental conceptions. They are indeed ideals, that is to say, made of
the stuff of ideas and do not always coincide with the deeper
realities of life and hence are not able to produce the perfect
and durable harmony among warring members whether in
the individual or in the collective life.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We had in India a fairer word than &quot;duty&quot;, a deeper and
more luminous mantra: it is <i>dharma.</i> The expression has certainly
'&quot;fallen on evil days and on evil tongues&quot;; it smells today of
mediaevalism and obscurantism and whatever is not &quot;forward&quot;
and &quot;radical&quot;. Still we hark back to it: it is high time that
we should resuscitate the old word mantra—in spite of its
musty covering, it carries the purest nugget of gold.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Indeed, Right, Duty and Dharma are three terms that
represent the three stages of an ascending consciousness in
its play of forces. At the base and beginning the original and
primary state of consciousness is dominated by the mode of
inertia <i>(tamos),</i> in that state things are an inchoate mass and
are simply jumbled together; they are moved and acted upon
helplessly by forces that are outside them. A rise in the scale of
growth and evolution occurs when things begin to be
organised, that is to say, differentiated and coordinated. And
this means at the outset the self-assertion of each and every
unit, the claim and the right of the individual to be itself first
and foremost. It is a necessary development, for it signifies
the growth of self-conscious units out of a general, unconsciousness. </font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 138<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">It is the appearance of <i>rajas,</i> the mode of life and
activity. Right belongs to this field and level: it is the lever
that serves to bring out the individual nuclei from a general
formlessness, it is the force that crystallises and organises the
separative centres for separate fulfilment in life. And naturally
it is the field also of competition and conflict. This is a stage and
has to be transcended, from the domain of differentiation and
contrariety one has to rise to the domain of co-ordination and
co-operation. Here comes in the concept of duty which seeks to remedy the ills of the modus of rights in two ways, first, by
replacing the movement of taking by that of giving, orienting
the consciousness from the sense of self-sufficiency and self-
importance towards that of submission and humbleness;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">secondly, by the recognition of the just rights of others also
against one's own. Duty represents the mode of sattwa in action.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; But the conception of duty too has its limitations. Even apart
from the misuses of the ideal to which we have already referred,
the ideal itself, is of the mental plane; it is more or less an act
of mental will that seeks to impose a rule of co-operation upon the mutually excluding and conflicting entities. The result is
bound to be imperfect and precarious. For mind force, although
it can exercise some kind of control over the life forces, cannot
altogether master them, and eradicate even the very seeds of
conflict that breed naturally in that field. The sense of duty
raises the consciousness to the mode of <i>sattwa; sattwa</i> holds <i>rajas</i> in check, but is unable to eliminate wholly the propensities and impulses of aberration ingrained in <i>rajas,</i> cannot
radically purify or transfigure it.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We have to rise above <i>rajas</i> and <i>sattwa</i> to enter a domain
where one meets the source of inevitable harmony, where the
units without losing their true self and nature and returning
to the undifferentiated primordial mass, fulfil themselves and
are yet held together in a rich and faultless symphony. This is
Dharma, that which holds together. Dharma means the law
of one's soul. And when each soul follows its own law and line
of life, there cannot be any conflict; for the essence and sub-<br>
stance of the soul is made of unity and harmony. The souls
move like the planetary bodies, each in its own orbit, and,
because they do not collide or clash, all together creating the
silent music of the spheres.</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 139<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; This then is the basis upon which the new society and
humanity have to be built up, if we want to have a life on earth
really worth living. Individuals have to find out their real
being and nature and embody that in life. Individuals will
associate and combine and form groups in response to the urge
and. impetus of a group harmony that seeks expression and
embodiment.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The system of <i>varnas</i> and <i>ashramas</i> of ancient India—even
if it be supposed that it never existed actually in its purest
ideal form—serves as a graphic example of how man as a social
being should create and organise his existence in order that that existence 
might be rendered as perfect and integrally sound as things can be. That system 
we hold forth as only an illustration; we do not mean that it is a pattern of 
life that should be or could be implanted on our present day social circumstances. These are certainly very different and demand different
groupings and hierarchies that must naturally grow out of
them.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;It should be noted that in contemporary life stress is laid
upon one side, one part and one- function of human nature
which cover only a superficial—however useful and necessary—
area. Man is not a political animal (even in the Aristotelian
sense); and it is an error to say that he is an economic animal. These notions 
divide man's integral being into various sectional views only; they seek to cut out and suppress all other
members excepting the favoured one. The politically militant
bourgeois ideal of the Nazi or the Fascist and the economically
militant ideal of the proletarian are equally guilty of this lapse.
Even the ideal of man as a rational being does not go far
enough to be able to save man and mankind. All of them evoke
conflict, some deliberately, and the resolution of the conflict
ends in suppression, amputation and atrophy.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; We have to recognise that man, in his individual as well as in
his collective being, is a complex entity, not something simple
and one-dimensional. The healthy growth of himself and his
society means a simultaneous development on many lines, all
moving together in concord and harmony. And this movement
of all-harmony can be found only when the movements are
initiated from the very source of harmony which is the soul.
Certain soul-principles that seek expression in lif)&nbsp; today that</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 140<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">are necessary to the age or to the coming age, have to be
recognised and each given a field and a scope. That should be
the basis of social groupings. And a composite variety of group-
ing with strands and strata, each expressing a particular mode
of being of the one group-soul—which in its turn is an aspect
of the Vishva Purusha in his play—is the ideal pattern of social
organisation. What exactly the lines of grouping would be
need not and perhaps cannot be settled now; a certain preliminary growth and change of consciousness in man is necessary
before anything definite and precise can be foreseen as to the
form and schema that consciousness will manifest and lay out.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Still some kind of hierarchy seems to be the natural and
inevitable form of collective life. A dead level, however high
that may possibly be, appears to be rather a condition of <i>malaise</i> and not that of a stable equilibrium. The individual
man cannot with impunity be brains alone—he becomes then
what is called &quot;a barren intellectualist&quot;, &quot;an ineffectual angel&quot;;</font>

<font face="Times New Roman">nor can he rest satisfied with being a mere hewer of wood and
drawer of water—he is no more than a bushman then. Like-
wise a society cannot be made of philosophers alone, nor can
it be a monolithic construction of the proletariat and nothing
but the proletariat—if the proletariat choose to remain literally
proletarian. As the body individual is composed of limbs that
rise one upon another from the inferior to the superior, even so
a healthy body social also should consist of similar hierarchical
ranges. Only this distinction should not mean—and it does not
necessarily mean—a difference in moral values, as it was
pointed out long ago by Aesop in his famous fable. The distinction is functional—and spiritual. In the spirit, all differences
and distinctions are based upon and are instinct with an
inviolable and inalienable unity, even identity. Differences
here do not mean invidious distinction, they are not the sources
of inequality, conflict, strife, but make for a richer harmony, a
greater organisation.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; However the crucial point arises here—how is the collective
life, the group existence to be made soul-conscious? One can
understand the injunction upon individuals to seek and find
their souls; but how can a society be expected to act from its
soul and according to the impulsions of its soul ? And then, has
a collectivity at all a soul ? What is usually spoken of as the</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 141<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">group-houl does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an
euphemism for herd instinct, the flair of the pack.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; The real truth is that a group has the soul—the spiritual
being—that is put into it. How can that be done? It is done by the individual, in and through the individual. Not a single
individual perhaps, but a few, a select body, a small minority
who by their conscious will and illumined endeavour form the
strong nucleus that builds up automatically and inevitably the
larger organisation instinct with its spirit and dharma. In fact
all collective organisations are made in the same way. The form
that a society takes is given to it by the ideology of one man or
of a few men. All depends upon the truth and reality, the depth
and fecundity of the inspiration and vision, whether it will last
a day or be the eternal law of life, whether it will be a curse for
mankind or work for its supreme good. Naturally, the higher
the aim, the more radical the remedy envisaged, the greater the
difficulty that has to be surmounted. An aggregate always tends&nbsp; to live and move on a lower level of consciousness than the
individual's. It is easy to organise a society on forces and passions that belong to the lower nature of man—although it can
be questioned whether such a society will last very long or
conduce to the good or happiness of man.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; On the other hand, although difficult, it may not prove
impossible to cast the nature, character and reactions of the
aggregate into the mould prepared out of spiritual realities by
those who have realised and lived them. Some theocratic social
organisations, at least for a time, during the period of their
apogee illustrate the feasibility of such a consummation. Only,
in the present age, when all foundations seem to be shaking,
when all principles on which we stood till now are crumbling
down, when even fundamentals—those that were considered
as such—can no more give assurance, well, in such a revolutionary age, one has perforce to be radical and revolutionary
to the extreme: we have to go deep down and beyond, beyond
the shifting sands of more or less surface realities to the un -shaking bed-rock, the rock of ages. And that is nothing but
the truth of the soul, the realities of the Spirit.</font>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; And India is pre-eminently fitted to discover this pattern of
spiritual values and demonstrate how our normal life—individual and collective—can be moulded and built according to</font>&nbsp;
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">
Page 142<hr>

<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="justify">
<font face="Times New Roman">that pattern. It has been India's special concern throughout
the millenaries other history to know and master the one thing
needful <i>(tamevaikam janatha atmanam anya vaco vimuncatha),</i> knowing which one knows all 
<i>(tasmin vijnate sarvam vijnatam).</i> She
has made countless experiments in that line and has attained
countless achievements. Her resurgence can be justified and
can be inevitable only if she secures the poise and position which
will enable her to impart to the world this master secret of
life, this art of a supreme <i>savoir vivre.</i> A new India in the old way
of the nations of the world, one more among the already too
many has neither sense nor necessity. Indeed, it would be the
denial of what her soul demands and expects to be achieved
and done.</font>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="center">Page 143</p>
		<hr>
		<p style="line-height: 150%; margin-top:0; margin-bottom:0" align="right"><b><font size="2"><a href="-00_Contents">
			<span style="text-decoration: none">HOME</span></a></font></b></td>
	</tr>
	</table>
</body>
</html>