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	<TITLE>Towards a New Ideology
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<FONT face="Times New Roman"><B><font size="4">Towards
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</B></FONT><FONT face="Times New Roman,sans-serif"><B><font size="4">a New Ideology</font></B></FONT></p>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>INDIA
must evolve her own political and social ideology; she must discover
and establish in this domain also, as in all others that concern her
collective life, her own genius and rule. This is what Swaraj really
means and demands.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Russia has her Sovietic Communism, Germany, for the
present at least, her Nazidom, Italy her totalitarian Fascism, old
England her Parliamentarianism and France her Bureaucratism; 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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">civilisation</SPAN>,
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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">moulds</SPAN> and upholds
the Japanese body politic and body social, as opposed to the
conception of right obtaining royal rule in the Occident.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page -253</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>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
<SPAN LANG="en-GB">honoured</SPAN> in his own country.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organisation</SPAN> 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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Vivekananda pointed out that one should rather think of</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>one's
duties, how best to accomplish them and leave the 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
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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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; be-speaks of the same compulsion of the
sense of duty in the consciousness of modern Messiahs. But the true
name of the thing in all these cases is not duty, but <I>fanaticism.</I></FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>For fanaticism may be defined as duty running away with
itself; but duty proper, the genuine form of it is something
self-poised, its natural and inherent tendency being rather to 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><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page - 254</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>is
then another name for liberty, it means the freedom to live one's
life unhampered without infringing on an equal facility for others to
do the same. But the whole difficulty comes in precisely with regard
to the frontier of each other's sphere of rights. It is easy to
declare the principle, but to carry it out in life and action is a
different matter. The line of demarcation between one's own rights
and the rights of another is always indeterminate and indefinable. In
estabilshing and maintaining one's rights there is always the
possibility, even the certainty of &quot;frontier incidents&quot;, of
encroaching upon other's rights. Liberty, alone and by itself, is not
a safe guide - therefore so much stress is being laid nowadays upon
discipline and obedience in modern ideologies.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">mediaevalism</SPAN> 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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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>(tamas); </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 Drganised, 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>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page-255</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=3>It is the appearance of <I>rajas, </I>the mode of life and</FONT></P>
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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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">crystallises</SPAN> and <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organises</SPAN>
the separative <SPAN LANG="en-GB">centres</SPAN> for separate
<SPAN LANG="en-GB">fulfilment</SPAN> 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; 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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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 kin5f. 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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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, <SPAN LANG="en-GB">fulfil</SPAN>
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 substance 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><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page-256</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>The system of <I>varnas </I>and <I>ashram as </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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organise</SPAN> 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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">favoured</SPAN>
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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>We have to <SPAN LANG="en-GB">recognise</SPAN> 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 life today that</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page- 257</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>are
necessary to the age or to the coming age, have to be <SPAN LANG="en-GB">recognised</SPAN>
and each given a field and a scope. That should be the basis of
social groupings. And a composite variety of grouping 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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organisation.</SPAN>
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 layout.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>Still some kind of hierarchy seems to<I> </I>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; ; 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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organisation.</SPAN></FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page- 258</FONT></P>
<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>group-soul
does not seem to be anything spiritual; it is an euphemism for herd
instinct, the flair of the pack.</FONT></P>
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<FONT SIZE=3>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 <SPAN LANG="en-GB">endeavour</SPAN>
form the strong nucleus that builds up automatically and inevitably
the larger <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organisation</SPAN> instinct with its
spirit and dharma. In fact all collective <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organisations</SPAN>
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 to live and move on a lower level of consciousness than
the individual's. It is easy to <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organise</SPAN> 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>
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<FONT SIZE=3>On the other hand, although difficult, it may not prove
impossible to cast the nature, character and reactions of the
aggregate into the <SPAN LANG="en-GB">mould</SPAN> prepared out of
spiritual realities by those who have <SPAN LANG="en-GB">realised</SPAN>
and lived them. Some theocratic social <SPAN LANG="en-GB">organisations</SPAN>,
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. </FONT>
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<FONT SIZE=3>And India is pre-eminently fitted to discover this
pattern of spiritual values and demonstrate how our normal life<font face="Times New Roman">–</font>individual 
and collective <font face="Times New Roman">–</font> can be moulded and built according
to</FONT><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page -259</FONT><BR>
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<P ALIGN=JUSTIFY style="line-height: 150%; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><FONT SIZE=3>that
pattern. <SPAN STYLE="font-weight: medium">It</SPAN><B> </B>has been
India's special concern throughout the millenaries of her history to
know and master the one thing needful <I>(tamevaikam j<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">a</FONT>natha
<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">a</FONT>tm<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">a</FONT>nam
any<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">a</FONT> vaco vimu<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">ñ</FONT>catha),
</I>knowing which one knows all <I>(tasmin vij<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">ña</FONT>te
sarvam vij<FONT FACE="Luxi Serif">ña</FONT>tam). </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><BR>
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<FONT SIZE=2>Page -260</FONT></P>
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