* * * * *
It would seem that Good and Evil are not inherent in things themselves,
but in the uses to which those things are put by us. They are
conditions of manifestation. Many things commonly called immoral
are consequences of the unjust laws of man, of egotistic social
institutions: such things are not immoral _per se_, but relatively so.
They are only immoral in point of time. There are others whose evil
consists in the base use to which higher forces are put, or to which
Life--which is sacred--is put, so that here also evil does not inhere
in them, but in ourselves; in our misuse of noble instruments in lower
work. Nor does evil inhere in us, but in our ignorance; it is one of
the great illusions of Nature. All these illusions cause the soul to
experience in matter until it has consciously learned every part: then
it must learn to know the whole and all at once, which it can only do
by and through reunion with Spirit; or with the Supreme, with the Deity.
If we take, with all due reverence, so much of the standpoint of the
Supreme as our finite minds or our dawning intuition may permit, we
feel that he stands above unmoved by either Good or Evil. Our good
is relative, and evil is only the limitation of the soul by matter.
From the material essence of the Deity all the myriad differentiations
of Nature (Prakriti, cosmic substance), all the worlds and their
correlations are evolved. They assist the cyclic experience of the
soul as it passes from state to state. How, then, shall we say
that any state is evil in an absolute sense? Take murder. It seems
an evil. True, we cannot _really_ take life, but we can destroy a
vehicle of the divine Principle of Life and impede the course of a
soul using that vehicle. But we are more injured by the deed than any
other. It is the fruit of a certain unhealthy state of the soul. The
deed sends us to hell, as it were, for one or more incarnations; to
a condition of misery. The shock, the natural retribution, our own
resultant Karma, both the penalties imposed by man and that exacted by
occult law, chasten and soften the soul. It is passed through a most
solemn experience which had become necessary to its growth and which
in the end is the cause of its additional purification. In view of
this result, was the deed evil? It was a necessary consequence of the
limitations of matter; for had the soul remained celestial and in free
Being, it could not have committed murder. Nor has the immortal soul,
the spectator, any share in the wrong; it is only the personality, the
elementary part of the soul, which has sinned. All that keeps the soul
confined to material existence is evil, and so we cannot discriminate
either. The only ultimate good is Unity, and in reality nothing but
that exists. Hence our judgments are in time only. Nor have we the
right to exact a life for a life. "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord
(Law); I will repay." We become abetters of murder in making such human
laws. I do not say that every experience must be gone through bodily,
because some are lived out in the mind. Nor do I seek to justify any.
The only justification is in the Law.
The innocent man unjustly murdered is rewarded by Karma in a future
life. Indeed, any man murdered is reimbursed, so to say; for while that
misfortune sprang from his Karma, occult law does not admit of the
taking of life. Some men are the weapons of Karma in their wrong-doing,
but they themselves have appointed this place to themselves in their
past.
The Great Soul needed just that body, whatever the errors of its
nature, or its physical environment, and to disappoint the soul is
a fearful deed for a man. For it is only man, only the lower nature
under the influence of Tamas (the quality of darkness), which feels
the impulse to take life, whether in human justice, for revenge, for
protection, or so on. "The soul neither kills nor is killed." What we
know as ourselves is only the natural man, the lower principles and
mind, presided over by the false consciousness. Of the soul we have but
brief and partial glimpses--in conscience or intuition--in our ordinary
state. There are, of course, psychic and spiritual states in which
more is known. Thus nature wars against nature, always for the purpose
of bringing about the purification and evolution of the soul. Nature
exists only for the purpose of the soul. If we think out the subject
upon these lines, we can at least see how rash we should be to conclude
that any deed was unmixed evil, or that these distinctions exist in the
Absolute. It alone is; all else is phenomenal and transitory; these
differences disappear as we proceed upward. Meanwhile we are to avoid
all these immoral things and many others not so regarded by the crowd
at all, but which are just as much so because we know to what increased
ignorance and darkness they give rise through the ferment which they
cause in the nature, and that this impedes the entrance of the clear
rays of Truth.
I doubt that the soul knows the moral or immoral. For just consider for
a moment the case of a disembodied soul. What is sin to it when freed
from that shell--the body? What does it know then of human laws or
moralities, or the rules and forms of matter? Does it even see them?
What lewdness can it commit? So I say that these moralities are of this
plane only, to be heeded and obeyed there, but not to be postulated
as final or used as a balance to weigh the soul which has other laws.
The free soul has to do with essences and powers all impersonal; the
strife of matter is left behind. Still higher and above as within all,
the passionless, deathless spirit looks down, knowing well that, when
the natural has once again subsided into its spiritual source, all
this struggle and play of force and will, this waxing and waning of
forms, this progression of consciousness which throw up coming clouds
and fumes of illusion before the eye of the soul, will have come to an
end. Even now, while we cannot master these high themes, we can have a
patient trust in the processes of evolution and the Law, blaming and
judging no man, but living up to our highest intuitions ourselves. _The
real test of a man is his motive_, which we do not see, nor do his acts
always represent it.