that I have given elsewhere: "Morality is the Science of harmonious
relations between intelligent beings." There is no morality for the
mineral; there is no morality for the vegetable; there is no morality
for the animal. Those are in the group under evolutionary law which
compels them to go forward by the tremendous struggle for existence. By
that struggle certain qualities are evolved--the qualities which are
the bases of the humanity which is to be born into the world. There is
a stage where there is no morality; where the creature is not immoral,
but, is not-moral, is unmoral--without morality. He has not reached
the stage where conscious obedience to law is possible for him; and
so, as he is without the knowledge of good and evil, you cannot claim
from him obedience to a law of Right and Wrong. Not only so, but taking
that as our first point--that there is a stage where morality cannot
exist because of the want of self-consciousness--the next point that
you must realise, in establishing a Science of Morality, is a clear
understanding of the meaning of the word "law". Now "law" may be a
command made by a human legislature, or made arbitrarily by the ruler
of a Nation, changeable, therefore, with an arbitrary penalty attached
to its transgression. But the moral law, like all laws of Nature,
is not a command either to do, or not to do. It is a declaration of
conditions which produce certain definite results. Chemical law does
not tell you, you _must_ put hydrogen and oxygen together and produce
water. You may produce water or not as you like; you are perfectly free
to make it or not to make it; but the law is that if you put hydrogen
and oxygen together at a certain temperature under a certain pressure,
then you must produce water. It is a statement of conditions, followed
by unchangeable result. A law of Nature, therefore, is not violable.
You cannot change it. Nothing can prevent the formation of water, if
only the conditions for its production are present. Nothing can ever
produce water unless the conditions for its production are present.
You cannot change it; that is a law. But, according to your knowledge
of law is your freedom in a realm of law. The ignorant man goes about
in Nature buffeted by her laws, crushed by some, helped by others; to
him the happenings are matters of chance, for he knows not the laws
amid which he lives. Cabined, crippled, rendered helpless, he stands
before an inexorable Nature, and knows not how, or whither, he should
move. But the man of knowledge, knowing the laws around him, walks
with perfect freedom in a realm of law; he balances one law against
another, he utilises laws that help, he neutralises laws that oppose
him, and in proportion to his knowledge is his freedom; for, as it has
well been said: "Nature is conquered by obedience." Obeying, he is
free. Now the moral law is a natural law, not an artificial one. It is
an expression, as are all the laws of Nature, of Īshvara, who is the
life, the sustenance, of His Universe. The moral law cannot be broken;
the moral law cannot be changed; it is the will of God in Evolution;
and, by that alone may Right and Wrong be tested. That is Right which
helps evolution forward; that is Wrong which opposes the Divine Will
in Evolution. There is your standard, or canon, of Right and Wrong.
Oh! you say, that is not a rough and ready definition, or standard.
No; it requires knowledge. And so the Ṛṣhis, the great Teachers, have
given certain commands--morals to be followed by the ignorant, based
on the one supreme law of conformity to the Divine Will in Evolution.
We are told by Vyāsa: "To do good to another is Right; to do evil to
another is Wrong." We are told by the Christ: "Do unto others as ye
would that they should do to you." But take those two moral commands,
and see whether under all circumstances they should be obeyed. As a
rough rule of conduct--yes; for the masses of people--yes; but can a
King obey Christ's command, or a Judge "do unto others as" he "would
that they should do unto" him? When he has a murderer before him in
the dock, and he sits to administer the law of the land, may he say:
"I must do to the murderer as I would that he should do to me, and I
must not sentence him to punishment because I would not wish to be
so sentenced"? All these general commands as to action are limited in
their scope, are modified by surrounding conditions, depend on the
position of the person. You and I have no right to lock up in a room
another person because he has injured us; but the Judge has the duty
of locking him up, if he has transgressed the law of the land and
prison is the appointed punishment. Another precept was given by a very
practical man, Confucius. He was asked: "How shall we behave? What word
is there which defines our duty? shall we return good for evil, as the
great Sage Lâo-tsze has declared?" And Confucius, being a practical
statesman, answered: "Is not 'Reciprocity' such a word? If you return
good for evil, with what will you recompense good? Recompense good
with good, and evil with justice." Now there you have the law of the
State. The law of forgiveness, the law of returning good for evil, is
the law for the man aspiring to lead a spiritual life. It is a duty on
the Path of Holiness; it is a duty of one aspiring to become a Saint or
a Yogī. It is the law for the individual conduct which raises the man
from the brute to the God; but for the State, that is not the law. For
the Nation, the stage of evolution has not yet been reached which can
return good for evil, and allow an enemy to overrun the country and to
have his will upon the people.
And so, in dealing with morality, as in dealing with every Science, you
must use your brains as well as your emotions, and you must judge the
consequence of actions in order to guide your path.
Looking then at it in this way, we must see what "evolution" means. It
means that at first progress is secured by inviolable laws of Nature,
that press upon a whole class. As I said, the mineral, the vegetable,
the animal, they cannot resist the law; they cannot evade it; they
are compelled by an inner instinct to conform themselves to the law
of their nature, imprinted upon them by the hand of Īshvara Himself,
and so you have no mental struggle. The wild beast in the forest, he
develops keenness, swiftness, shrewdness, cunning, because without
them, he perishes. When you come to the savage, the law of evolution
is very much the same. The savage is without the knowledge of good
or of evil, and that is recognised everywhere. Most of you will know
the Jewish legend, how God created a man and a woman and placed them
in a garden, so that they might enjoy the fruit of every tree in the
garden save the one tree that was forbidden, the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. Then comes in the curious point that God gives His
creatures a command: "You shall not eat of that tree"; but, having no
knowledge of good and evil, they could not know that disobedience was
evil and that obedience was good; and, as the fruit was attractive
and desirable, they ate and gained the knowledge, which they had been
forbidden to acquire. And so you have the curious condition that the
"fall of man" is brought about by his ignorance of Right and Wrong; he
does the Wrong unconsciously, and so gains the knowledge of distinction
between good and evil. Now while it would be a terrible injustice that
their ignorance should be counted as a sin, for which any of us, their
descendants, should perish everlastingly, yet if you look on the story
as a symbolical representation of fact, it becomes most illuminative
and helpful. For the first stage in the emergence of the human race
from the innocence and the ignorance of the animal and the animal-man
lies in the experience of good and of evil, which brings happiness in
assonance with the law and unhappiness in discord with the law. The
savage knows no Right or Wrong. You remember the most typical case of
the Missionary, who wanted to point out to an Australian savage that he
should not, when he was hungry, have eaten his wife. He was short of
food, the poor man, and was very very hungry; his wife was the handiest
form of food; he killed her and ate her. "Oh!" but said the Missionary:
"That was very wrong," and as there was no word in the savage's
language for "wrong," he said: "That was not good." "I assure you,"
said the innocent savage, "she was very good." There was no idea there
of any "good" except physical gratification, and as the flesh of the
wife stilled the hunger of the man, "she was very good," he answered.
Now there was no Right or Wrong there. The man was unmoral; he only
knew the gratification of his own desires; he followed them blindly;
but that, as with Adam and Eve, was the road to progress. He would want
his wife presently, and he would miss her. The gratification of hunger
was a momentary pleasure, but the presence of the wife was a continual
help and service. And so, presently, that man would think that it was
a mistake to kill her: "I had better have been hungry for a few more
hours, and have kept my wife." And the first idea dawns upon him that
the gratification of a momentary want is not the path to a lasting
happiness. Both are temporary, of course, but one is longer than the
other. Now the first lessons of the savage come along that line. The
white man gives the savage drink; the savage likes it; he gets drunk;
but he finds in the morning that he has a very bad headache; if the
attraction of the drink is greater than the fear of headache, he goes
on drinking and drinking, until he dies perhaps in delirium tremens.
And looking at it all, after death, the savages profit by that; and
they say: "This drink makes us ill; this drink shortens our life; this
drink brings unhappiness at last"; and they learn after very many such
experiences that intoxication is Wrong; but they cannot learn this
without the experience. They cannot gain knowledge without knowing the
pair of opposites, one of which is good and the other evil; and all
the first evolution of the savage depends on his gathering experience,
which shows him that going with the law of health means happiness in
the physical sense, going against it means unhappiness. Now the savage
takes a very long time to learn this. But he is not left, as I pointed
out to you yesterday, only to the gathering of experience. Some wise
man, the Founder of a religion, or nowadays a Christian or Musalmān
Missionary, says: "Don't touch drink; it will make you miserable."
He breaks the command. How many Hinḍūs, how many Musalmāns to-day,
forbidden by their religions to take strong drink, break the religious
command and suffer thereby. How many Princes of Rājpuṭāna have died
in middle age owing to excessive drinking; so that you find a number
of young Princes succeeding to the gadi, their fathers having fallen
victims to the curse of European drink. The old Princes in Rājpuṭāna,
Musalmān and Hinḍū, are the men who have followed the law of their
religion, and have abstained from strong drink. Is that not a lesson to
the younger men who follow them? You can see the result of the lesson
in the improved temperance of the younger generation of Indian Princes
to-day. They have learnt the lesson by the experience of others,
instead of by the bitter fruit of experience in themselves.
For the elders who have died, not only is there the command given by a
religion, but there is the experience on the other side of death. Now
of all the miseries which can follow a man into the world after death,
of all the miseries, the results of drink are perhaps almost the most
terrible. There is a constant craving, for not in the physical body but
in the senses of the Sūkṣhma Sharīra, lie the craving, the desire, the
longing for sensual gratification; and, if a man has been drunken, if
he has been profligate in his life, he finds himself tortured on the
other side of death by the drink he cannot enjoy, by the craving of the
sex instinct which he cannot gratify. Torn by the agony of longing,
frustrated by the impossibility of gratification, there is branded
on that soul, as with a red-hot iron: "It is foolish to yield to
gratification that brings about the misery that now I am suffering." He
has to starve out the craving by non-satisfaction, and the agonies of
starvation are his doom. And so is impressed on the lasting memory of
the man the knowledge that suffering follows on the undue gratification
of the passions of the body. That comes back in the next life--or after
many lives--that comes back in an innate distaste for this form of
sense-gratification. You say: "Would it not have been better that he
should have been spared this long experience?" Nay, it would not have
been better; for you are only finally rid of a craving, when you cease
to desire that which gratifies it; and the teaching of pain kills the
_desire_, whereas the enforced abstinence, not killing the desire,
would ever leave you a prey to the possibility of temptation. That is
why the striking of the transgressor by the disregarded law, is the
veriest mercy in the long life of Man.
Most of you have been evolved without craving for drink; most of you,
if you have touched it, have thrown it aside as distasteful. It has no
power over you; it has no attraction for you; you turn away from it
with disgust, as that which cannot tempt; and the only way of reaching
that point is to have had experience of the evil, and to know that it
is the womb of pain. Now out of this grows one great lesson for those
of you who are more advanced. You know that sometimes, you who are
fathers and mothers, you know that against all precept, against all
training, against all prayer, your son goes wrong. You have told him:
"My boy, to give way to passion is ruinous"; you have told him: "If you
yield, you will suffer in your manhood." He disregards your prayer; he
disregards your commands; the wild youth goes on; he will have his way.
In that moment of parental agony, in that moment of despair, remember
that doctrine of the Omnipresence of God that I spoke of in the first
discourse: "If I go down into hell, behold, thou art there also," and
realise that God--who loves your child more than you can love, more
wisely as well as more intensely--has allowed that soul to go down into
hell in order that He may meet him there in his degradation and his
agony, and teach him by the lesson of pain, when he would not learn by
the lesson of precept, that there is a law that none may disregard and
live in happiness. For God is the Pain that comes to the transgressor
from the disregarded law, as He is the Bliss that comes to the man who
is in harmony with law.
Now if you realise these great truths, you will understand how morality
must change with the upward evolution of the individual man. When
you see wrong-doing in the undeveloped, when you see evil in the
savage--whether the savage who is an anachronism in civilised society,
or the savage who in his own native conditions--you will realise that
that man is only beginning to learn the lessons of morality, and must
learn them by dashing himself against the laws he knows not. And so,
gradually, he grows out of the unmoral state into the beginning of
the moral state, when he knows a little distinction between Right and
Wrong, and often chooses the Wrong, because of the temporary pleasure
that the yielding to the Wrong affords. And then he has the lesson I
have just spoken of, until, within his innermost nature, he has branded
the evil to be avoided. Now it is no merit to any one of us that we do
not murder a man. We do not want to do so, because we have done it very
often in the past, and have found that the fruit thereof was pain. We
do not want to do it now, and the not wanting to do a particular wrong
is the proof of moral growth. I know how often we are inclined to say:
"Oh! How admirable is the man who struggles against evil." Yes. It is
admirable for a man to struggle against temptation, to see him fighting
against his lower nature. He is a hero in the struggle. But greater
than the man who struggles is the man who has transcended the struggle,
and who does the Right naturally, because he loves the Law and feels
no inclination to turn towards wrong. That is not so often remembered.
The man who has conquered in past lives, the man who has risen above
the temptations that his younger brother struggles against, he is at
a higher stage of evolution, for he chooses with full conviction the
concord with the will of God. That means that the Divine Will in his
own Spirit is emerging, and that quality, the Divine Will in the man,
is the sign of approaching Liberation.
Come to another point, where you do not know in a particular case,
what is Right and what is Wrong. To the more developed man, it is no
longer a conflict between the "Right and Wrong" that he knows. It is a
conflict between two duties, and he does not know whether of the twain
is the one that he should follow. There you come to the agony of the
opening Spirit, the unfolding God within, who is faced by two paths,
and knows not which is the right one. Some arguments on one side, some
arguments on the other. "Which of the two paths shall I take? How may
I know what is the will of God?" That is the agony of the Soul whose
will is set to the Right, but who does not know the Right under the
conditions which surround him. What does it mean? It means that he
lacks experience. For Conscience, that which tells you "this is Right,
that is Wrong," is only the accumulated experience of your past, which
has registered certain facts in the nature that you bring into the
world with you as that fruit of experience. You have murdered--you have
suffered; you are born with the instinct that murder is wrong. You have
robbed--you have suffered; you are born with the instinct that theft is
wrong. That does not exist in the savage. Take a savage child, and you
will find that your precepts carry him up to a certain point, and you
can go no further. You can awaken in him the result of past experience,
but you cannot give him a Conscience, an experience, which he has
not yet acquired. But you, you have a great fund of Conscience, a
compelling voice, which says: "kill not," "steal not," "don't give way
to lust which injures another"; you take it for granted that is Right,
and that knowledge is the outcome of your past experience. But now, you
do not know what is Right and what is Wrong. Why? Because, you have not
had the experience to enable you to judge in a new condition, to enable
you to see the Right in an environment that you have not been in
before. When a fresh step forward is to be taken, when a new knowledge
is to be gained, what shall you do? You have to act. First, use your
best intelligence; think as far as you can. Then try to put aside the
bias which the inner desire is apt to imprint upon your thinking.
Try to put aside all questions of personal gain, all questions of
personal loss, everything which makes you more inclined to take one
path or the other. It is a difficult thing to do, and it implies
considerable training before you can thus neutralise the inner desires
of your nature. Do your best; and then having used your intelligence,
having put aside your desires, try, in that tranquillity of mind and
senses, lifting up your heart to God, or Master, to see which is the
higher path. Sometimes an inner voice will whisper to you and give you
guidance; sometimes a Ḍeva may help you and suggest the better path;
sometimes you are left to find your own way. Having done your best,
decide; and when you have decided, act; for you have done all you can.
Then watch the results; see what is the outcome of your decision;
and you will discover by that outcome whether you judged rightly or
wrongly. If you judged wrongly, do not regret. You did your best, and
you have gained a new experience by the blunder, and it will help you
in the future. If you have done right, you are stronger for the future;
you have solved a new problem and gained a new knowledge. Sometimes
you may come to a point in your evolution, where you have to face
the question of following your conviction of the inner law of Right
against every impulse that presses you to take a lower path. You have
grown to the point where new ideals attract. You have begun to realise
that the claim of humanity is greater than the claim of individuals
with whom you are connected. You have come to the point to which all
must come, to the point where to follow the Right is martyrdom, and
where to follow the Wrong is easy and is regarded as praiseworthy by
those around you. My Brother, if you have come to that point, be glad
with exceeding joy; for it means that you have gone beyond the normal
evolution of your race, and that which is Right to the men and women
around you has become Wrong to you, who have caught a glimpse of a
higher law. And then, surely comes the question: "Will you stand by
the fruit of your glimpse, alone, unhelped, unsupported, unregarded?
Will you follow Conscience that bids you take the path alone, or
will you follow the voice of the multitude, still at a lower range
of evolution?" It is the choice of the Hero; it is the choice of the
Martyr. Better to die, you will feel, than to bow to a lower law than
that which your Spirit has learnt to recognise. To tell a lie is to be
debased; to tell a lie is to lose the vision of Truth; to tell a lie
is to put a bandage round your eyes, and to refuse to see that which
is already glimpsed. And if for you it is easier to face calumny,
ostracism, the cold shoulder of friends, the hatred of Governments,
and, if against all these things, you say: "It is easier to suffer than
to lie," then you are taking your place amidst earth's Heroes, and you
are serving your day and generation. But make no mistake; the choice is
not as easy as it seems. The worst enemy of the martyr and the hero is
the inner enemy, not the outer--the love that pleads with you to falter
in your duty; worse than all, the inner doubt. "Can I really be Right,
when every one around me tells me I am Wrong? Can I alone see what
ought to be done? All these good men and women, honourable, faithful,
good citizens of the world, tell me that I am mistaken and headlong.
Is it not conceit, is it not vanity, to set my solitary choice against
the wisdom of the aged, against the experience of my time?" Ah! that is
a worse enemy than any outside pressure, for the outer you can resist,
but the inner saps the very essence of your strength; the time comes
when you are able to say: "Right or Wrong, whether it leads me to
heaven or to hell, I follow the Inner Voice, which is the best guide I
have; and, if it leads me wrong to-day, I shall know the Right by my
blunder to-morrow." I know that means courage beyond the normal, but
that is the courage that the Martyrs have shown, and posterity rewards
them, if contemporaries destroy them. For it is true, as Giordano
Bruno said, going to the stake: "To know how to die in one century is
to live for all centuries to come." And so, again, he taught what he
called "the heroic life". "It is better to try nobly and to fail, than
ignobly not to try at all." That is the great inspiration for those who
have caught a glimpse of the higher. Follow your own higher, whatever
it may be, and whithersoever it may lead you; for the inspiration comes
from the highest yet manifest within you, and not to follow it is to
be a traitor to the Truth you see. Thus, by study of the Divine Will
in Evolution, by trying to see where one stands in the long climbing
upwards, every man ultimately, must be the supreme and final judge of
Right and Wrong for himself.
But remember: you should not blame your neighbour because he does
not see with your eyes. You should not despise those who think you
are wrong, but weigh their blame, and see how much of reason there
is therein. Remember also that in this struggle upwards, full weight
should be given to the experience of the race as well as to your own.
You should not despise nor flout those laws which keep the mass of
the people in the path of decency and of good citizenship, and you
should remember the warning of Shrī Kṛṣhṇa, so pre-eminently wise:
"The standard that the wise man sets, by that the people go." To take
your own road alone means a tremendous responsibility, as well as an
act of heroism, for others may follow, unknowing, where you have
deliberately chosen your path. Others less prepared by self-discipline
and training may rush in after you where you have opened the gateway;
and so, in your action, by which the blind must judge you, you must
consider your circumstances as well as your vision of the Best. Only
when to yield is treason to the Highest in you, should you set yourself
alone against the world. "Tangled," said Shrī Kṛṣhṇa, "Tangled is
the path of action," and that is true. Therefore you must develop your
intellect; therefore you must train your will; therefore you must try
to illuminate your judgment; no headlong, thoughtless action must be
taken on the first impulse towards an unaccustomed path.
There is one thing that I have often said, and that I will here repeat,
especially for my younger friends, whom I welcome to our meetings here.
I would say to them: If you want advice, and ask: "Shall I disobey the
customary law, and go my own way?"--then wait. The wanting of advice is
the sign that the Spirit in you has not yet spoken with the compelling
voice that you ought to obey. I have had boys come to me and say:
"Shall I disobey my father? this refusal to obey seems to be the right
path." My answer invariably has been: "My boy, if you are doubtful, as
you must be since you ask me, then obey your father and mother, and see
what the result is; for, when the Spirit speaks, no outside advice is
wanted." The great decisions of the Spirit are made in solitude, and
they are not made by the advice of man. If you want others to support
you, if you want the opinion of others to buttress you up, then the
chances are, when the moment of stress comes upon you, you will quiver,
you will say to your adviser: "Oh! you have advised me to do this; see
what trouble it has brought, and I must suffer for it." And so, I have
never advised, nor will advise, a great act of sacrifice. O crowd of
thoughtful men and women, I say to you: "Choose your highest and follow
it unflinchingly." But if any one of you comes to me and says: "Shall I
sacrifice this? shall I sacrifice that? shall I disregard the other?"
I say: "My friends, the decision is with you and not with me. Your own
conscience must guide you. Your own intelligence must direct you. As
I cannot suffer for you, I will not advise." For one has no right to
impose upon another a sacrifice one is willing to face for one's self.
I know my own strength and weakness. I am accustomed by many lives of
aspiration to judge what path I shall follow. But shall I follow the
path that I see to be Right for me, the path of suffering, and invite
others to enter on it, who may not be prepared to face the pain? No;
the decision towards pain must be made by the open vision of the one
who affronts the suffering; otherwise, in the stress of the agony he
may wish he had chosen the easier and the smoother path. The pioneer
must know his strength; the pioneer must be ready for the stones that
pierce his feet, for the thorns that tear his flesh. Let no weakling
enter on the path of that higher, more strenuous, endeavour. We want
pioneers. But we want pioneers of courage, of heart, of strength, of
endurance, that no danger can daunt, that no peril can paralyse. Only
such are worthy to come into the ranks of the pioneers, who make the
path along which humanity shall march in days to come. And if you say
to me: "Why should we go? Why should we suffer that others may tread
smooth? Why should our flesh be torn that others may walk in ease?"--my
answer is: "Unless the Spirit is so unfolded in you that the path of
progress is to you the path of happiness, so that when the feet are
bleeding, when the flesh is tortured, you can look up with a smile and
say: 'Lord, I have come to do Thy will'; until the path to you is the
only path of happiness, you had better tread the accustomed ways of the
men and women around you."
For there is a time in evolution, when all wish for aught the world can
give has vanished from the human Spirit; when there is no desire for
aught save that God's will may be done on earth, as it is done in the
higher realms of wisdom; when to be allowed to suffer in order that
that Will may be done is a joy beyond all earthly joy, is a delight
beyond anything that the world can give. Realise that the Martyr and
the Hero die, because death is the most joyous thing that they can
meet, knowing that by their death the world's progress is improved.
Unless you feel this in you, then travel along the road that for you
is Right; for the consent of the intelligence, the consent of the
conscience, the realisation of God, these alone are the strength of the
Hero; these, in the midst of the very flames of martyrdom, enable him
to smile with joy, for vision of the future that he sees.
BROTHERHOOD
FRIENDS:
We have arrived now at the last of the four Convention Lectures, and I
will ask you to recall for a moment the path that we have trodden on
these three days.