The whole problem of Ethics becomes easy when we realise that it is the ideal that creates the distinction between right and wrong. An individual knows that he must do certain things and avoid doing certain things in order to achieve his ideal. Some actions are wrong and some right with respect to every ideal and, therefore, every ideal prescribes its own ethical code or law.

 

There are as many systems of morality as there are ideals and each system must be considered as correct relatively to the ideal of which it is the product. The moral systems of Machiavelli and Lenin which we dislike are really demanded by the ideals of these philosophers—the State in the case of one and Communism in the case of the other. Because their ideals are wrong, the moral systems resulting from them are also wrong. Since there is one ideal that is right, there is one ethical system that is right. The law of the Right Ideal is the Right Ethical Law and all other ethical laws are wrong.

 

Whether an ideal is right or wrong, its law is followed by a person willingly and easily on account of the force of the ideal’s love, and the greater his love for the ideal the easier it is for him to act morally in relation to it. Moral action requires an effort of the will only when another impulse is competing with the ideal and absorbing a portion of the self’s love. A person who is swayed by an intense love for an ideal feels an irresistible impulse to act morally in relation to that ideal. The moral law of a wrong ideal has no permanent value since the ideal on which it is based is itself transitory. While every other code of morality is followed only for the sake of the ideal that creates it, the law of the Right Ideal is followed not only for the sake of the ideal but also for its own sake, since, unlike all other moral systems, it is a part of the urge of the self and, when obeyed, gives satisfaction by itself. It is a part of our nature. It is based on the attributes of self. Because self is Beauty, all attributes that are attractive to us or that we love and admire at our best, are the attributes of self. They can be described by one word, Beauty. All actions to which these attributes apply, according to the judgment of the acting self, are moral and the reverse are immoral. These attributes belong to the World-Self in their perfection and to the human self to the extent to which they can be revealed through the growth of self-consciousness.

 

The moral law of the Right Ideal, being the law of self, is the deepest nature and the innermost desire of human consciousness. It appeals to our nature, has a permanent value and, therefore, it alone deserves the name of the Moral Law. Since it is determined by the nature of the self, it has nothing to do with the utilitarian, biological, empirical, socialistic or other external, artificial or materialistic standards of morality. Every other system of morality besides it has its source in one of the wrong ideals, comes into conflict with our nature and fails to give us the fullest satisfaction, although we may continue to follow it even willingly for the sake of the ideal we may have set before us.

 

When a person having a wrong ideal wants to follow the Moral Law it is very difficult for him to do so in spite of the fact that there is in his nature an urge pressing him towards it. The reason is that the love of the wrong ideal interferes with and perverts his moral judgments so that his effort to act morally does no more than produce an action which is required by the wrong ideal, although he must persuade himself as well as others to believe that it is perfectly moral. The love of the wrong ideal that sways him exposes him to an error of judgment. He misinterprets the Moral Law under its influence whether he knows it or not. If we assume that good character depends upon the observance of the Law of the Right Ideal, then it is impossible to expect a really good character from a man who is devoid of a strong love for his Creator. In the case of such a man there is always some other love impairing the validity of his moral judgments and undermining the nobility of his character, although he is generally unconscious of this fact. This explains why persons having different ideals give different meanings to justice and morality and become ready to take up arms against each other sincerely in the name of justice or morality. A person following a wrong law cannot derive full moral satisfaction from his actions because his moral actions are determined by his wrong love and come into conflict with the urge of his nature. He is immoral although the society may declare him to be innocent and may even praise him for his actions, because he is not obeying the law within.

 

Only that person whose ideal is the Right Ideal is free to act morally. Every other person is led away from the path of morality, whether he means it or not, by the force of his wrong love. Even in the case of the Right Ideal the moral judgments of different persons may vary because all may not have an equal realisation of the ideal’s beauty. Correct moral judgments are possible only at a high stage of the development of self-consciousness. At lower stages of self-consciousness the moral judgments of persons are marred by impulses which still remain unconquered.

 

The extent to which the moral judgment of a person may be right depends upon the strength of his love for the Right Ideal or, which comes to the same thing, upon the strength of the impulses which interfere with the impulse for the Right Ideal. If our love of the Right Ideal is strong enough to defeat all other impulses, then our moral judgments will be correct. Also, in this case, it will be easier to act up to those judgments. As long as our love for the Right Ideal remains weak, other impulses besides those of the ideal must continue to influence our judgments and impair their validity.

 

A strict adherence to the moral code is an essential condition of any progress of self-consciousness by means of worship in the manner outlined in the previous chapter. The reason is that the self evolves by the continuous growth and constant strengthening of love, and love grows and gains in strength by expression in all possible ways. To express it only in worship at certain hours of the day or night and not in our actions which occupy the greater portion of our time is a case of mutual contradiction. In so far as our actions in our daily life are not being determined by the love of the Right Ideal, they are surely being determined by the love of a wrong ideal, which is having expression and, therefore, growing and gaining in strength at the expense of the Right Love. Thus in the absence of moral action, worship must have the opposite result. A man who offers regular prayers but does not submit to strict ethical discipline is like a man who travels for two hours in one direction and for ten hours in the opposite direction. He must ever recede farther and farther from his destination. Only that person can maintain and add to the benefit derived from regular prayers in the form of a growing self-consciousness who leads a strictly moral life. Like worship, moral action is an expression of love as well as a means of its growth. Both worship and moral action are aspects or forms of love. They are methods of seeking Beauty. Each one of these two forms of love supports the other. A man who loves his Creator must love His qualities and, therefore, he will not only worship Him but also express His qualities in action. In other words, he will lead a moral life.

 

Wrong impulses continue to exist side by side with the impulse for the Right Ideal always. In the earlier stages of the growth of self-consciousness they are very powerful and often compete successfully with the impulse for the Right Ideal. Therefore, even a sincere and devoted worshipper finds it difficult to submit himself to a strict moral discipline in the beginning. But even a small amount of initial success which the self is able to achieve in its moral efforts adds immensely to the benefit it would have derived from mere worship; it raises the level of its self-consciousness and thereby makes further moral effort easier. As the self gains in self-consciousness by the mutual support and co-operation of worship and moral action in this way, moral action becomes ever easier and easier for it, till when the highest stage of self-consciousness is reached it finds that its impulse for moral action has become irresistible. Worship and moral action going hand in hand lead to an ever greater and greater evolution of the self. Very soon in the course of its progress the self attains to a personal experience that the Moral Law is not an imposition from outside but it is the desire of its own real nature. At this stage the self regains itself completely ; its qualities are unveiled and begin to shine in their full splendour. At this stage the self does not obey the moral law but the moral law obeys the self, that is, whatever the self does out of its own most cherished and irresistible desire is perfectly in accordance with the Moral Law. This is the state of that perfect liberation and highest evolution of the self which it is possible for it to achieve in its individual capacity. But the worship or the moral action of the self does not stop here. The self needs to maintain the state of its highest evolution by continued worship and constant moral action. The light that it has kindled within must be protected so that it may spread to the rest of humanity and thereby gain further in brilliance itself. Moral action may be defined briefly as action which is intended to help evolution in the individual and the society directly and consciously.

 

A mere idea is not an ideal. An ideal is that idea which commands the greatest amount of the self’s love. Many of us have a definite idea of a Creator but it is rarely our ideal. The idea of a Creator is raised to the position of an ideal only when it has succeeded in attaching to itself more of the love of the self than any other idea is having. This difficult task is accomplished by means of worship and moral action going hand in hand. The task is difficult because long before we can have any clear idea of a Creator we have already attached ourselves to many wrong ideals and followed their laws long enough to develop wrong habits of action. Thus the self’s love is occupied and is no longer available for the Right Ideal. Wrong Ideals hold the field, having established themselves firmly on wrong habits of action which serve them continuously. If, in this state, the self were to abandon all wrong ideals at once, it would get suddenly a fuller view of the beauty of the Right Ideal. Its love would take a sudden leap which will facilitate its progress for the future. This does happen sometimes in the case of a great misfortune when it appears to a man that all his companions have deserted him and, in his despair, he returns to his Creator for help and consolation. But generally the process of the growth of true love is gradual. It grows by encroaching slowly upon the existing wrong loves and strengthens itself gradually at their expense. As the true love develops by persistent worship and moral effort in the manner described above, it gains in power, and the wrong loves and the habits formed under their influence are gradually weakened and worn out and ultimately eradicated. A love, whether right or wrong, is not one love but a system of loves. Whatever object helps a love becomes an object of love itself.

 

The force of habit is very great. Wrong habits continue to operate in spite of us and interfere with the development of right habits consistent with the Right Ideal. Bad habits cannot be counteracted by suppressing them. There is only one way in which we can get rid of them and that is by fostering good habits. In this way they are thrown into disuse and die out, of their own accord. That explains why religion which sets an ideal before us also prescribes a form or a system of regular ceremonies with which many people identify the essence of religion itself. The form is intended to inculcate a set of habits consistent with the law of the Right Ideal. From one point of view it is a means to an end. It protects the spirit of religion (which is the love of the Right Ideal) by not only eradicating habits inconsistent with it but also by making their future growth impossible. It helps to concentrate our attention on the ideal every moment of our life owing to the strict discipline imposed by it. From another point of view it is not only a means to an end but also an end in itself since it is based on that law which is a part of the urge of the self and strict obedience to it facilitates the growth of self-consciousness, as we shall have occasion to note further on.

 

The moral law or the law of the Right Ideal is the deepest nature and the innermost desire of man. It is the road along which nature means evolution to proceed. It is the path along which we can get freedom and progress. We are never acting freely and usefully unless we are acting morally. Moral action is life enjoying freedom and seeking more freedom. Morality is the light of the world. It is the torch that lights the only road leading to progress and prosperity. Without it we are lost in darkness, groping for our path without finding it, colliding with serious obstacles and risking our life and safety itself. If we neglect it individually or collectively we can do so at our own cost, at the price of stagnating and perishing.

 

Immorality is the morality prescribed by wrong ideals. It is due in very many cases to the disproportionate importance we attach to the desires of instincts which rise in the form of one ideal or another disguised and even spiritualised and sanctified by erroneous judgments of the self. The desires of instincts are not directly our own desires. They are the desires of the animal in us and we have to use them as means to achieve our own ends as human beings. We have evolved in our present form in order to rule and enslave them and give them their proper place and not in order to be ruled or enslaved by them. If they have the better of us, we lose our freedom, stagnate and cease to progress and evolve and above all run the risk of perishing. The history of evolution is a proof of the fact that life has no use for that part of it which does not evolve. It discards it and leaves it to perish. It is true that on the whole life is ultimately going to win in spite of all our errors but, on our own part, we shall deserve miseries and extinction if we do not join as helpful servants in the aspirations of life. Life which does not grow is face to face with death. We can escape stagnation and death by living and living is only moral living. Every other way of life is merely a struggle with death in which we can win only by coming back to the moral path as soon as possible. We may prolong the struggle by persisting in the path of immorality or else cut it short by taking refuge with morality, but if we choose the former alternative we should know the consequences involved.

 

Those of us who want to rebel against the Moral Law in order to be happy, end by being miserable. We cannot break the Moral Law with impunity. The reason is that it is not an external imposition of a cruel society or a conventional religion. It is an internal pressing demand of our nature. It is a biological necessity of a higher order. It is written, not on the tablets of stone, but on the tablets of the hearts. The functions of the self, no less than the functions of the body, are subject to immutable laws of Nature. To maintain the fitness, the completeness and the growth of the body is the natural urge of the organism. When we satisfy it, the result is health. To maintain the fitness, the completeness and the growth of the self is the natural urge of consciousness. When we satisfy it, the result is happiness. The rules of health are not easier to observe than the rules of happiness, but we strictly follow the former and lightly treat the latter. The reason is that while we have understood the former, we have not yet understood the latter. Nature, however, accepts no plea of ignorance while enforcing its punishments.

 

It is a characteristic of moral action that it is due to a free, unrestrained choice or judgment of the self. The self has to make its own judgments of the attributes of Beauty at every occasion. It cannot borrow the judgments of others. The higher the stage of its self-consciousness, the greater the validity of its moral judgments. No objective standard of morality is possible or serviceable because it is consciousness alone that can know its own law. Since moral action is free action, to have an outside standard whether it is biological, religious, social or utilitarian is to enslave the self and to stop its evolution. Restraint is the negation of freedom and, therefore, of morality. All activity of the self is free activity. Moral action will not satisfy the urge of the self; in fact, it will not be moral at all, if it is not the result of free choice. Moral action is inseparable from intention which indicates the actual direction of the moral effort of the self. No action is moral without the intention to make it moral. An apparently moral action devoid of good intentions is immoral and, conversely, an apparently immoral action caused by really right intentions is moral.

 

The moral judgments of people are sometimes in extreme conflict. In the recent World-War all parties seemed to be sincerely fighting for justice. The cause of such errors is that we expect ourselves to behave morally without possessing a strong love of the Right Ideal from which alone the Moral Law is derived. In the absence of the Right Ideal a person is bound to have a wrong ideal, and however much he may try to be moral, the influence of his wrong love must continually mar the validity of his moral judgments. His justice comes to have a different meaning in spite of his efforts. It is not the justice demanded by the Right Ideal but a different kind of justice which is required by his wrong love. There are as many varieties of justice as there are ideals wrong or right. It is difficult to convince a person who loves a wrong ideal that his justice is not justice. He has always a number of arguments in support of his moral decisions, although deep down in his heart there lurks a dissatisfaction with them which he succeeds in suppressing partially or completely for some time. But although such a dissatisfaction may be suppressed completely for some time, it cannot be removed entirely. It must make its appearance sooner or later. Our moral decisions are determined by our loves and hates, by our ideals and not by reason. In order to overcome our wrong loves and wrong desires and to enable the self to make valid moral judgments it is necessary to develop a strong love for the Right Ideal. Only a person possessing a high degree of self-consciousness can behave morally. In case the self is in the earlier stages of its growth, many desires and impulses which are not its own will interfere with its moral judgments and impair their correctness. If, on the other hand, it has attained to a high standard of self-consciousness, its moral desire will be strong enough to know itself and to free itself from other desires which will not rule it, but which, on the other hand, it will be able to rule powerfully. Its judgments will be correct.

 

Here we come across a difficulty. There can be no morality without a high degree of self-consciousness and a high degree of self-consciousness cannot be achieved without a strict moral life. How can we break this circle? If nature wants to help evolution it must certainly provide a solution for this difficulty and it does provide it in the form of that highly misunderstood phenomenon which is known as prophethood. A prophet is a rare personality who rises to a high degree of self-consciousness by a special favour of Nature and is able to know and teach mankind the law of self. If we follow him faithfully and strictly we, too, can acquire a high standard of self-consciousness along with a first hand knowledge of the distinction between right and wrong. This looks like submitting to an objective and external standard of morality. But really the standard of morality prescribed by the prophet is not external to the self. It conforms to the innermost desire of our nature. It is our own standard which we love to follow of our own free choice in the long run. No doubt, we but vaguely understand this inner desire in the beginning and submit to the prophet’s code with a feeling of compulsion and restraint, but this feeling is only temporary. When obedience to the prophet has enabled us to advance sufficiently in our self-consciousness we discover the meaning of the ethical code or the moral law on which it is based. The inner urge of our nature comes into its own and begins to press itself, so that we no longer follow the moral law under a feeling of restraint but as our own most cherished desire and as a source of joy and pleasure. As long as the follower of a prophet does not reach a stage of development where his moral actions become not only free from all sense of compulsion or restriction but where they also appear to result from an irresistible desire in this way, he remains very low in the scale of self-consciousness and his moral actions cannot be strictly designated as moral. Moral action is a free activity of the self.

 

It remains to be considered how far reason can help us in our moral judgments. Owing to the teachings of Aristotle we have been making too much of reason so far. Aristotle was enamoured of the excellence of human rationality and believed that the exercise of reason was the highest good which man could indulge in. He worked out a system of Ethics based on reason, which was a sort of a rationalised mean between extremes. But his rational code laid down that some men should be subjected to slavery in order that some others may be able to exercise their reason. When the reasoning powers of Aristotle, the worshipper of reason, could not guide him to see that it was wrong to treat a part of humanity as cattle, whose reason can we depend upon to make a correct distinction between right and wrong? In modern times Hitler also believed in the slavery of some men in order to make possible for the superior German race to apply themselves to scientific research. The ideal of Aristotle was reason and the ideal of Hitler was the German race. Both had wrong ideals and, therefore, the judgments of both were incorrect. True Love alone is the source of all knowledge of right and wrong.

 

Man is a creature of impulse and reason is a servant of impulses. Whenever we act, we act under the influence of the impulse that happens to be the strongest at the time and reason helps this impulse to satisfy itself by action.. Moral action has its source in the impulse for Beauty or the impulse for the Right Ideal. If the impulse for the ideal is rightly directed, reason will serve us rightly, otherwise it will serve us wrongly. In order to make correct moral judgments, we need, as mentioned already, to strengthen the impulse or the love for the Right Ideal. What is known as the victory of reason over impulse is really the victory of one impulse over another. Reason itself never seeks to conquer our impulses. It prefers always to serve them and never to be ruled by them. Reason is not an urge for action, although it may awaken, guide or direct an urge. Reason in itself fails to create an obligation although the arguments may be very convincing.

 

According to McDougall, the “instincts are the bases from which the character and will of individuals and nations gradually develop under the guidance of the intellectual faculties.”

 

In our view the will and character of persons have their source in the urge of the self for the ideals which is separate from the urge of instincts and rules the instincts. The strength of will or character of an individual is in proportion to his ability to oppose, dominate and rule the instinctive impulses for the sake of the ideal. An ideal is not a magical transformation of instincts achieved “under the guidance of the intellectual faculties” but it is due to our direct judgment of Beauty as a result of the self’s function of loving. Instincts perform in man no more than a biological function as they do in the animal. Reason is no doubt an additional qualification of man which the animal does not possess, but the higher activities of man which are peculiar to him are not caused by reason guiding his instinctive impulses. Reason guides our instinctive impulses to their ends, but it cannot create new impulses nor can it modify, improve or change the nature of the existing ones. It is the servant of impulses and not their master. Man has another additional qualification besides reason which alone is the source of his will, character or ethical behaviour, and it is the impulse for the ideal. It is higher and stronger than the instinctive impulses and rules them. It is not the creation of reason but has its own independent existence. All impulses including the impulse for the ideal require the help of reason to guide them to their ends but this guidance cannot transform our lower instinctive impulses into higher ones.

 

An ideal is a direct judgment of Beauty. This judgment is the function of self as a whole. It is accomplished by means of feeling, intuition, faith or direct vision. In what way then does reason guide the impulse for the ideal? It guides this impulse by stimulating its direct vision of Beauty to some extent. Reason examines the parts of objects and ideas and the self takes help from reason in this sense that as parts of new wholes come to light, the self makes new judgments of wholes. Thus reason gives a direction to the urge for the ideal to some extent. But if the self should stick only to the part revealed by reason, it will never know the whole which it needs so much to know. The self cannot afford to follow reason too closely as the information of reason is too insufficient for its purpose. Our ideal is never a rationally understood reality. Rationality sees only a part of it while the whole is seen by intuition or direct vision.

 

The self may be compared to a man with bandaged eyes left to grope his way towards a particular room in a big house already familiar to him to some extent. As he feels with his hands the walls, the doors, the enclosures of passages and other such marks in the course of his walk, he can picture to himself completely the part of the house he has reached at any time. His hands enable him to see only a part of his surroundings, that part which he actually embraces in darkness but the complete guidance is supplied to him by his imagination which recalls the full picture of every part of the house that he visits. Reason is to us like the groping hands of the man revealing to him only certain marks of his passage and intuition, feeling or faith like his imagination by means of which he is able to picture the whole of his surroundings. Just as the cause of the bandaged man’s helpful imagination is his previous familiarity with the house, so the cause of our intuition or direct judgment is our innate desire for Beauty.

 

The function of reason is to dissect and analyse into parts. Beauty can be felt and appreciated as a whole but cannot be analysed into its constituents; it has no constituents; it is a single indivisible whole. Reason examines only the parts of the whole that we feel, appreciate or apprehend by direct vision but it cannot grasp the whole which is always more than the sum total of its parts examined by reason. Reason helps us to improve our idea of Beauty because it reveals parts of new wholes and thus enables us to intuit or vision new wholes. What we feel, love, praise or admire is always much more than what we can prove by reason, i.e. mathematically.

 

This view is supported by a recent development of psychology known as the Gestalt or the Configuration psychology. The Gestalt school of psychology emphasises the point that the human mind is concerned with knowing “wholes” or “totalities” which can be known only by “intuition” or “direct vision”.

 

The question is sometimes asked: which of the three faculties of man—will, intuition and reason—is more important than the others? Will at the human level of life is no other than the urge for an ideal. Intuition is the light by which this urge is able to see its object as a whole. Reason is a faculty which serves intuition by guiding it to some of the parts of the whole that is needed by it. Intuition and reason are both parts of will and not apart from will. Will at the human stage of evolution is gifted with a quality of intuition which can appreciate the beauty of an idea which is always a whole and with a quality of reason which can serve intuition in the efficient performance of this function.

 

Reason helps intuition to grasp a whole, while it discerns only a part of this whole itself. It acts as a servant of intuition always, whether it is rationalising the impulse for the ideal (which it does quite sincerely) or whether it is assisting this impulse to reach its end or whether it is guiding it towards a higher beauty or a higher ideal. The cause of our intuition which looks around for wholes is our innate desire for Beauty, which is a whole and which can only be felt or intuited. This desire attracts us towards and impels us to strive for the achievement or realisation of an object or an idea that is a whole or completes a whole and repels us from an object or an idea that is not a whole or does not fit into or does not complete a whole. The whole towards which we are attracted derives its wholeness or beauty from our desire for Beauty, or from our ideal. In the animal the desire for Beauty is fixed and automatic and takes the form of instincts. Our attraction for a whole is accompanied by an effort. The effort is directed to bridge the gap between the situation as it is and the situation as it should be which constitutes a pattern or a whole created by our love for the ideal and its requirements. That is why what is a “whole” to one man is not a “whole” to another man who has a different ideal or to the same man under a different set of circumstances suggesting different requirements of the ideal. Thus the same object may be hated by us under one set of circumstances and may be loved by us under different circumstances. As a matter of fact when the circumstances change the object is also changed, because the meaning that we give to it is no longer the same. Whenever objects and ideas acquire a halo of Beauty they do so from our changing ideals or from our innate desire for Beauty interpreted to the best of our knowledge from time to time. It is the beauty of the ideal that is reflected in the object or the idea we love or admire as the light of the sun is reflected in the moon. Nothing, however, is really beautiful or lovable except the Right Ideal. Wrong Ideals appear beautiful to us because we mistake them for it.

 

Reason can give us no knowledge without feeling. We know only what we feel. All knowledge is the knowledge of the self. Therefore, all knowledge is of the nature of feeling or emotion. We know objects and ideas other than the self in order to know the self in relation to them. Since the knowledge of the self is the knowledge of Beauty it can only take the form of a feeling or an emotion. Even the statement: “Two plus two is equal to four,” is a feeling. This statement is a truth, a harmony or a beauty which we can only feel. We know it as a truth only when we are able to contemplate or feel its harmony or beauty as a whole. This contemplation or feeling is itself outside the scope of reason, although reason may guide us to it. All mathematical or scientific knowledge is a series of such felt harmonies or beauties. If a piece of knowledge as a whole may be measured by the number 100, then even if reason enables us to see ninety-eight parts of it, it must leave out 2 parts to be supplied by feeling, to complete the whole that we are able to call knowledge. The remaining two parts are extremely important because without them the activity of reason would be useless and would bring us no knowledge whatsoever. The reason is that the word “knowledge” is to be used for something that can be represented by the number 100 and not for what may be represented by the number 98. What reason leaves to feeling or rather what feeling takes from reason is sometimes more and sometimes less. In the case of mathematics and the exact sciences feeling takes a lot from reason. In the case of philosophy and speculative sciences reason does not come so close to feeling, although it gives a spur or a push to it or attempts to justify it. In the case of art, feeling is left almost entirely to itself.

 

Most of our knowledge of men and things which is the basis of our actions and which is of a vital importance to us in our daily life is anything but mathematical or scientific. It is based on direct vision or intuition. It is a kind of knowledge in which feeling plays the principal role. It is impossible for a man, who insists on mathematical or scientific knowledge in every thing, to live on this earth for a single moment. In the case of knowledge that is based on feeling mainly, we may require a lengthy and difficult process of reasoning for one man and a very short and simple one for another in order to convince each of the same truth. The reasons that suffice for one man in proof of the same reality may not suffice for another man who may go on doubting it. This is so because knowledge is settled by feeling or sensitiveness and not by reason. A man who is gifted with a good deal of sensitiveness or the faculty of direct vision may believe in a truth even if reason proves ten percent of it and a man who lacks the faculty of direct vision or sensitiveness may not believe the same truth even if reason proves ninety percent of it.

 

While reason can give us no knowledge without the final judgment of feeling, feeling may give us knowledge without calling in the aid of reason. There are occasions when we acquire knowledge with the help of feeling alone and make no use of reason whatsoever, for example, when we know a picture or a symphony to be admirable and beautiful without arguing or proving its beauty.

 

Every whole is discovered by the searching activity of feeling spurred and guided by reason, and after the discovery is made what we remember as the basis of action or further reasoning is feeling and not the reasoning that brought it about. When we are reasoning we are dealing with the relations of wholes in order to discover a bigger whole in which these wholes appear as parts. The bigger wholes discovered in this way may be dealt with by reason at a future occasion from the point of view of their relation within another still bigger whole and so on.

 

When we act, we act under the influence of the impulse that appears to us to be the strongest. Reason discovers this impulse and its end and serves it to reach this end.

 

Supposing there is a man who is compelled by hunger to steal some bread which happens to be within reach. He will reason in order to find out whether he will not be discovered and beaten. If his detection is likely and he thinks he can wait for food for a little while more, the impulse of fear will be stronger than the impulse for food. If he is extremely hungry he will argue and convince himself that he will not be detected. His reason will be under the influence of his stronger impulse. Our reason justifies the things that we want to do. When our desire to do something is very strong we reason out things so as to justify our action. Even a man who is very intelligent and learned will commit an error in such a case. His error will be due not to a weak reasoning power or lack of intelligence or knowledge but to the strength of his wrong desire. On the other band, when a wrong desire is comparatively weak a less intelligent or less educated man will be able to control it. We cannot say, therefore, that one man—the former—behaved unintelligently and the other—the latter—acted intelligently. Each man obeyed his stronger impulse. It is a different matter that the stronger desire was right in the case of one and wrong in the case of the other.

 

In the above example there is a conflict between two instinctive desires, the desire for food and the desire to escape punishment. In this conflict the stronger instinctive desire defeated the weaker one and had its way. But we must not forget that in any case the conquering desire which determines the action actually is ultimately dominated by the impulse for the ideal. To say that one instinctive desire may be stronger than the other has no meaning in the case of man. Ultimately, the strength of every instinctive desire in the human being is fixed by the desire for the ideal. In the above case the instinct of escape seems to be stronger than that of hunger, because the ideal permits it to be as strong as it is. But sometimes the ideal may reduce the strength of this impulse so much that a soldier intoxicated with the love of his country may stand firm in the battlefield in the midst of exploding shells in order to defend his country.

 

No instinctive impulse can have its way unless it has the sanction or the co-operation of the impulse for the ideal. Every such impulse is satisfied to the extent to which the ideal wants it. When the ideal appears to have been defeated by a desire of the instinct it is due to the fact that the avowed ideal of a person ceases to be his ideal for some time, i.e. it fails to attract a sufficient amount of the self’s love and the urge for the ideal finds an outlet in the instinctive desire itself. But an instinctive impulse satisfied at the expense of a weak ideal of perfection, makes a man miserable afterwards. The reason is that the attraction of the instinctive desire and the satisfaction derived from it are not permanent and a man very soon begins to feel that he has obstructed the satisfaction of his desire for Beauty by satisfying his instinctive impulse. He feels inferior and guilty because that which, according to him, was conducive to happiness has not been achieved. Such slips can be avoided by strengthening the love for the ideal but we cannot strengthen this love unless the ideal is really worthy of love. Any doubt about its beauty or perfection would make love an impossibility. The ideal should lose no battle because every victory gained by it makes it stronger and capable of winning more victories and every defeat suffered by it makes it weaker and prone to be defeated again. Every battle lost by the Right Ideal is a battle won by a wrong ideal; it helps a wrong love at the expense of the Right Love. That we feel miserable after our ideal of perfection has lost an inner battle, is a proof that the desire for perfection is a part of our nature.

 

In the above example, supposing the man finds that there is absolutely no chance of his being detected or beaten and yet he refuses to satisfy his hunger by stealing because he thinks it is unbecoming of him to steal bread. He prefers to die rather than steal. Here we see more clearly than in the previous case the urge for the ideal controlling and dominating the urge of instincts. In this case, since the ideal does not accord sanction to the urge of the instinct, the latter cannot have its way. When the ideal impulse is stronger than the instinctive impulse, it can have its own way easily. The impulse to run away in face of danger will be overcome by a person who has a higher ideal than the mere protection of his life, at a time when his ideal will require him to overcome it. This we have seen in the example of a soldier who sticks to his post in the battlefield in spite of immediate danger to his life. If he runs away from the battlefield it will be due to the fact that the impulse for the ideal in his case has found expression in the desire to save his life or, which is the same thing, the desire for the ideal has lost a share of the self’s love to the benefit of the desire to live, making the latter far stronger than the former. The impulse for the ideal has changed its object. A person’s ideal at any time is that idea which attracts him more than all other ideas at that time. Thus it is ultimately the urge for the ideal that reason serves and justifies.

 

The modification of an instinctive impulse, whenever it occurs in the human being, is due to the impulse for the ideal.

 

When a person is angry his first impulse is to express his anger in a crude form, to abuse or even to beat the person causing the anger. But if he is a cultured man, on thinking and reasoning, his first impulse is modified and the person expresses his anger by means of, say, a mild suggestive remark which he considers sufficient for his purpose. It appears to us as if the modification has been caused by reason but as a matter of fact it is the impulse for the ideal that has modified it. The person wants to behave as a respectable and civilized man. He has a certain standard of behaviour which is a part of his ideal. Reason has simply helped the impulse for the ideal to see its way, so that it was able to assert itself over the instinct of pugnacity and modify its expression. When a hungry man does not beg or steal but strives to earn his bread by honourable means, it is not on account of reason but on account of the fact that he has a certain ideal which checks and makes impossible in his case a low manner of satisfying his instinct for food. Reason serves his impulse for the ideal and enables it to see that stealing or begging cannot satisfy it. Another person whose ideal is lower than that of this man will not mind stealing or begging and reason would serve him to see how best be can beg or steal. It is the urge of the self, therefore, that modifies the urge of instinct and not reason, as McDougall has imagined. Reason serves and justifies the strongest impulse in us and that impulse is the impulse for the ideal, whatever object the ideal may be or whatever the idea in which the impulse for the ideal may be having an expression.

 

When the impulse for the ideal is rightly directed we act rightly and our reasoning is right. When it is wrongly directed we act wrongly and our reasoning is wrong.

 

In order to act rightly we need to direct our impulse for the ideal to the Right Ideal and to strengthen it as much as possible. Moral judgments are judgments of Beauty. The Beautiful is the Good, as Plato rightly believes. These judgments have their source in the love of the Right Ideal; the stronger our love for it, the more valid our judgments.

 

The automatism or the compulsion of instincts serves a very useful purpose by forcing the attention of the self to the business of maintaining the body and sparing it from the task of deciding and choosing at the proper time to act with a view to satisfying the needs of the body. The instinct, by functioning as an automatic signal of danger to the body, calls attention of the urge of the self to a duty which is its own, and when the signal is once given it remains for the self to see up to what extent it should respond to it so as to leave a perfectly free passage for itself, that is, whether its duty, consistent with its own expression, is to satisfy the whole demand of the instinct or a part of it or nothing of it, or  whether it should satisfy it more than the instinct really, i.e. biologically, demands. In the last case the instinctive desire itself becomes the ideal of the self.

 

But although the compulsion of instincts is extremely useful, generally, it is nevertheless a disadvantage in this respect that on account of it our instinctive desires are strong rivals of our ideals (of course, when the instinctive desire itself is not the ideal) in the initial stage of the development of the ideal’s love and the urge of the self has to struggle very hard for its own expression. But as the love of the ideal develops, the impulses of instincts become weaker and weaker as compared with it and the ideal is able to assert itself more and more easily. It is extremely necessary, therefore, that we try to increase our love for the ideal to such an extent that no instinctive desire is able to compete with it in spite of its natural advantage. If we fail to do so, the result will be that when the critical moment of the ideal’s struggle with the instinctive desire will come, the ideal will be worsted in the battle and will become still weaker.

 

Can we develop and strengthen the love of the ideal at all? How can we develop it, if we can? What is the source of those further additions to the ideal’s love which are made to it when love is growing?

 

These questions may be answered as follows:

 

There is, as we shall study in one of the chapters that follow, an immense store of love in our subconscious mind which lies in reserve for our ideal. If it were possible for the ideal to acquire and monopolise the whole of this love (and the ideal must try to monopolise it as it is really meant for it), the force of the instinctive desires must sink into insignificance as compared with its own force, and all the instinctive desires must become its most willing servants. This store of love in the form of a surging tumultuous sea of energy is consciousness itself. It is the human self. Only a small part of this luminous essence, the consciousness, is shining above the unconscious level ordinarily. This part is always looking around for Beauty like the periscope of an immersed submarine searching for its target. As soon as a suitable object of Beauty is discovered by it, it forms an initial attachment to it which goes on developing gradually if the object is really beautiful and worthy of love till the whole of the submerged consciousness, rising above the surface bit by bit, becomes attached to it. All our activities and all our restlessness in life are due to the force of love in the subconscious mind which remains unused by the ideal. It is unattached and therefore, yearns for Beauty and struggles to reach it, pressing us, goading us towards it, and making us restless always. It is this force which is the urge of the self. Peace of mind or happiness is the good fortune of those persons alone who have managed to connect the whole of this love with the beauty of their ideal.

 

This connection develops gradually and can be achieved by two methods—firstly, the contemplation of the ideal’s beauty and, secondly, action for the ideal. In the case of the Right Ideal these two methods are expressed by two words which are, unfortunately, very much misunderstood in the modern age, I mean prayers and morality. Prayer or worship means simply the contemplation of the beauty of consciousness (the source of all Beauty) which naturally involves an attitude of submission on account of the attraction for Beauty that results from it. Morality means to act in the service of the Right Ideal. The love of no ideal, whether it is right or wrong, can develop without contemplation of one form or another and action to suit it. Since every human being must love an ideal there is no escape from either worship or moral action for any human being. But a man may choose the worship or moral action consistent with one ideal and reject that consistent with another. All advocates of wrong ideals suggest some forms of worship and lay down some laws of ethics suitable to their ideals. The preserved dead body of Lenin and the pictures and statues of the leaders of Communism scattered throughout Russia are simply aids to the contemplation of the beauty of the communists’ ideal intended to keep alive and develop the love of their followers. Books, periodicals, lectures, public functions and demonstrations, in fact, all forms of education in the larger sense of the word, become aids to contemplation. Contemplation stimulates consciousness to search for Beauty. At the same time it is itself the search for Beauty being an activity of consciousness.

 

All feeling of Beauty developed by contemplation, that is, all the love acquired in this way, is finally tested by action. We love an ideal and feel its beauty only to the extent to which we act for it. If we do not contemplate we cannot act, if we do not act we have lost the benefits of contemplation. Contemplation and action must go hand in hand in order to develop the ideal’s love, in order to attach the whole of the love of self to Beauty. Action for the ideal means struggle with the compulsion of instincts which is very hard in the beginning but which becomes easier and easier as love develops. The more we struggle against the instincts, the greater is the development of our love. We must, therefore, jump at whatever opportunities of struggling with our instinctive desires we can find because every advantage that the ideal secures in this struggle will make it stronger for the next battle, and will make the instinctive desire weaker as a rival to it, and that is the only way in which we can hope to make the ideal strong. If we cannot find such opportunities in the ordinary course of things we must create them. This explains why some religions suggest fasting or celibacy or impose other hardships of the body as a measure of discipline. Their object is not so much to curb the instinctive desires as to develop the ideal’s love by giving it the opportunities of effort and struggle against them. It is not the number and duration of such practices, primarily, that is important, but their result which should be the growth of love.

 

When the ideal loses a battle against an instinctive desire, the urge of the self is forced to express itself in the latter. But in such a case the action by means of which we satisfy the instinctive desire does not give us either a complete or a permanent satisfaction. The reason is that, although for the time being—and this is the cause of the ideal’s defeat—the whole of Beauty is imagined to reside in the object of the instinctive desire, yet we do feel unconsciously that there was something, some element or quality of Beauty in the ideal, which does not exist in this object and which, if pursued, would have made the self completely happy. We suppress the desire for that something in the course of the act but when the act is over we become conscious of having lost it and consequently feel miserable. Extreme cases of this pulling of the self by two desires, known technically as a conflict or a dissociation of the mind, results in nervous diseases which the psychoanalyst claims to cure. Enough has been said so far to show that the cause of all such diseases is our inability to increase and develop the love of our ideal. That the ultimate cause of all such ailments is not the urge of sex, as Freud has imagined, will be shown in the chapter on psychoanalysis.

 

By far the most important condition of the development of the ideal’s love to an extent which makes it far stronger than any of the instinctive desires, or to an extent to which it is possible for it to develop is that the ideal itself should be a perfection of Beauty; it should conform completely to our inner criterion of Beauty —in brief it should be the Right Ideal. The love of a wrong ideal too develops by means of contemplation and action but there is a limit to its development, beyond which these two instruments of development, instead of adding to the ideal’s love, help to reveal the elements of ugliness that it contains. Thus they are valuable even in the case of a wrong love but only up to a certain extent.

 

There is no doubt that when we love an ideal, whether it is right or wrong, we attribute to it all the qualities of consciousness, all the qualities that we desire, but we cannot be deceived for long. If there is any part of our inner criterion which the ideal is unable to satisfy and we become conscious of it, the self refuses to attach itself to it. As long as we love a wrong ideal, some dissatisfaction with it lurks in our mind in a suppressed condition and it must come to the surface sooner or later. This dissatisfaction, moreover, though concealed in the unconscious, interferes with the continued growth of the ideal’s love, so that the whole of the store of the self’s love can never be attached to a wrong ideal; some portion of it must always remain unused causing us an unconscious discontent  which must rise to the surface of consciousness ultimately. Our suppressed doubts about the perfection of a wrong ideal are based on our inner criterion of Beauty and on account of the unfailing operation of this criterion we must become conscious of the elements of ugliness that it happens to contain, sooner or later, and must give it up. When people love wrong ideals they do so in proportion to their capacity to be deceived and their capacity to be deceived is in proportion to their desire for Beauty.

 

It is the best man who best loves his ideal whether the ideal is right or wrong. But a wrong love cannot achieve the intensity of the right love. Doubt is the enemy of love. If we doubt the perfection of an ideal even unconsciously (and we do so when the ideal is wrong and incapable of satisfying our inner criterion of Beauty), we cannot love it as fully and as constantly as we need to love an ideal because unconscious, suppressed doubts which hamper the growth of love become ultimately conscious and known in the course of contemplation and action. The Right Ideal is the only ideal that contains intrinsic beauty, that is capable of attaching the whole of the self’s love to itself and that can be loved constantly. Conversely, when the Right Ideal is unable to attach the whole of the self’s love to itself we can be sure that we have lost the appreciation or realisation of an aspect of its Beauty, have allowed it to get mixed up in our mind with some elements of wrong or ugliness and thus to deteriorate into a wrong ideal. As soon as we are able to get a full vision of its beauty again, our love for it must increase again and must go on increasing till it has reached its maximum limit. Absence of the full vision of the ideal’s beauty is at the bottom of it, whenever we are unable to act for the Right Ideal in opposition to our instinctive desires in spite of our avowed desire to serve it. A mere desire for service is not enough. We must have a strong love for the ideal in order to be able to serve it, a love which makes service, action and sacrifice irresistible, and this is certainly possible if all the love in store with the self and meant for the ideal is utilised by the ideal. There is no other remedy for a weak love except contemplation and action, that is, worship and ethical discipline going hand in hand. We must pray and endeavour to act rightly in order to be able to act rightly.

 

Reason is our guide for action only in an indirect way because it can do no more than serve a higher guide which is intuition or feeling. We are directly guided in our actions only by feeling. When we think we are being guided by reason, we are really conscious of the help our intuition is taking from reason. When intuition or faith stimulated by reason, more or less, has made us familiar with the Right Ideal as an ideal that responds to our inner desire for Beauty, to some extent, we can add to our knowledge of Beauty further by means of regular prayers. Then, all the knowledge of Beauty, all the love that we require, can come to us directly by means of worship supported by action. Worship is the expression of the existing feeling of Beauty leading to a still greater realisation of Beauty. Reason will, no doubt, still serve the ideal as an aid to the contemplation of its beauty or as a guide to our moral judgments when the quality of its service, as mentioned already, will depend upon the strength of our love for the ideal or the standard of our self-consciousness. But reason in the service of the Right Ideal is not an adequate aid to contemplation. The most adequate form of contemplation is praying. It is by worship, that is, by direct contemplation and by action and not by reason, that we can increase our love quickly and to the maximum limit. Even when reason is helping us to know Beauty, it is not serving us directly, but it is only helping our intuition, faith or feeling. What is fundamental and indispensable for the evolution of consciousness is contemplating, feeling and loving. Reason, all by itself, can give us no knowledge of Beauty and hence no knowledge whatsoever. Even scientific and mathematical knowledge is the result of feeling aided by reason.

 

It is very unfortunate that most of us want to know by reason what only feeling or love can make known to us. We need the knowledge of the self, we need, that is, to feel and love. We should pray and thus feel and love directly instead of depending upon the extremely inadequate help of reason to make us feel and love. It is impossible to demonstrate logically the beauty of a picture to a man who does not contemplate it and is, therefore, unable to appreciate it. We cannot argue with the man to convince him that the picture is beautiful; we can only tell him to see the picture and appreciate it. So we can know consciousness by contemplating its Beauty, i.e. by praying. Some people, when asked to pray in order to be able to know consciousness, demand a completely rational and logical knowledge of consciousness, before praying. But no rational or logical knowledge of Beauty is possible. As we cannot see the sun with a candle, so we cannot understand Beauty with the help of logic or reason. We can only feel it or love it and the capacity to feel and love can be enlarged by worship and action and not by arguing or reasoning.

 

We argue, criticise and question only as long as we are unable to feel the Beauty of consciousness to the fullest extent. When we have acquired all the knowledge of Beauty that we want, we enjoy a peace of mind and a satisfaction which makes all questions and criticisms impossible. Doubting and questioning means seeking, and seeking is due to the unsatisfied craving of love for Beauty residing in the unconscious mind. A man who has satisfied that love completely, a man who has obtained all that his nature demands can seek nothing. He is convinced, calm and contended. A conviction of having known something which includes all knowledge fills his mind. That is why all the prophets and saints, the greatest teachers of humanity, have made direct appeals to believe, obey and act instead of giving logical, philosophical and scientific discourses in proof of the truths taught by them. That is why we should refrain from making too logical an approach to the language of books revealed to these prophets if we want to understand their meaning rightly, the sort of approach, for example, we are accustomed to make to the language of books written by our intellectual geniuses. Their words, unlike the words of scholars, express an emotion or a feeling as a whole and do not enunciate logically defended propositions arranged and demonstrated in a logical order. The reason is that they have grasped the whole truth which only feeling or love could reach, and to prove it rationally would be to detract from its value, to change it into a falsehood. Absence of a logically well-defended philosophy and strictly logical arrangement of ideas is one of the signs by which we can recognize a really revealed book. The highest knowledge, the knowledge of Reality, that is, does not admit of a total intellectual or mathematical proof. This is in fact true of all knowledge. The present book as a rational expression of my feeling can never do justice to the whole of my feeling and to the extent to which it depends upon mere rationality it is imperfect, because, although its arguments may be highly convincing it must leave much that is improved and unexplained from the point of view of mathematical precision. This must apply to every philosophical interpretation of the Universe that has been attempted so far, or may be attempted in future.

 

The source of morality is our attraction for Beauty. The greater our love for Beauty or for the Right Ideal, the nearer are our actions to the attributes of Beauty and the higher is the standard of our morality. All the attributes of consciousness have an attraction for us and by acting morally, i.e. in the service of the Right Ideal, we express those attributes and make them our own; we approach nearer to the Creator as well as to ourselves.

 

Love is the central or the principal attribute of consciousness. All its other attributes become manifest in loving and because of loving. This is true of the Divine Self as well as of the human self. Consciousness, wherever it is, loves an ideal. The ideal of the human self is the Divine Self and the ideal of the Divine Self is the perfect man, that is to say, a perfect society which has yet to make its appearance as a result of the gradual creation and evolution of the Universe. Both the human self and the Divine Self are loving and seeking each other. Consciousness created the Universe out of love for its ideal, and all its attributes are expressed in and, because of its creative activity, stimulated by love. The Divine Self is Love because It loves an Ideal which is the human self. It is Beauty because the human self loves It. It is Creativeness because It acts for and realizes an ideal. It is Truth because It is the only reality that we are seeking. That Goodness is also a quality of consciousness like Love, Beauty, Power, Truth and Creativeness, follows similarly from the fact that Consciousness has an ideal which necessitates an ethical law. The ideal requires action and action has to follow a certain law in order to achieve its purpose. The moral actions of the Creator, which means all actions in His case, are rooted in His love for the ideal. The creative activity of Consciousness is manifested in the form of attraction and repulsion. It is attracted to those actions which are capable of realising the beauty of Its ideal and is repelled from the reverse. Thus in creating the Universe from moment to moment Consciousness is expressing all Its attributes.

 

In the case of the human self, too, all the attributes of consciousness are expressed in loving and because of loving. Our moral actions, like the moral actions of the Creator, are rooted in the love of the ideal. In order to achieve our ideal we feel attracted towards certain acts and feel repelled from certain others. When we love the Right Ideal we act for it and thereby indulge in a moral and creative activity in which we express all the qualities of consciousness. Some of these qualities are more visible in some actions than in others. You can express no quality of consciousness without expressing all its other qualities more or less, because all qualities of consciousness are inclusive of one another. Both in the case of the Divine Self and the human self to have an ideal is to love, and to love is to act and to act is to create, to display beauty, to feel attraction, to feel repulsion, to assert power, to be good or moral, to know Truth and to be known as truth, in short to express all the qualities of consciousness.

 

The Ethical Law of the Divine Self is the same as the Ethical Law of the human self because the object of both is the same, that is, the creation and evolution of the Universe which means the creation and evolution of the self. The evolution of the Universe in the form of a flow of feeling or a current of consciousness evolving itself and going back to its source through the working of the double principle of attraction and repulsion may be compared to an artist’s production of a picture.

 

What happens when a real artist paints a picture, say, when a Leonardo paints a Madonna?

 

The artist has never in his mind an exact copy of what he desires to create. If he were to have it, he would not be an artist but only a copyist. He would not be a creator but only an imitator. Creation is free activity following only a desire for Beauty. The artist has what we call an inspiration. There is a sort of a tide of feeling in his mind, the experience of a love of something unknown which is within his mind, and which he wants to express. He feels the love of a beauty which he has yet to create. He has a feeling of separation from that beauty as if it is something different from him but really it is not different from him but a part of him. The sense of separation, however, stimulates his desire to reach it.

 

The beauty that the artist feels is his ideal, the realization of which follows a process of evolution. The tide in his mind results in an outflow of a current of feeling or thought as water wells out of a fountain on account of its own inner pressure. The feeling realises itself gradually in the growing picture. The picture evolves bit by bit coming nearer and nearer to the impression of the artist. The picture becomes perfect when the feeling is expressed and realised completely. It becomes perfect in proportion as it approaches the original feeling. The stages through which the picture evolves are stages in the creative activity of the artist. As the lines and shades begin to spread themselves on the paper or canvas, the desire of the artist pushes them forward to an ever greater and greater complication and organization so as to bring them nearer and nearer to its own realisation. The desire evolves the picture to its end of perfection. In fact, it is the desire itself that takes the form of the lines and curves of the picture. The lines and curves have no meaning apart from the desire. They are created and evolved, changed and modified by the desire to suit itself. They represent the artist’s desire. The feeling of the artist has certain potentialities which unroll themselves in the picture, in its lines and curves.

 

In his effort to express himself the artist goes on choosing certain lines and curves and rejecting certain others. He judges some of them to be suitable to his purpose and others as unsuitable to it. We may say that he follows a certain moral code in the preparation of his picture. His choice follows the principle of attraction and repulsion causing him to prefer some lines and curves and to reject others throughout till the picture is complete. The cause of his choice and his judgment is his feeling of Beauty, his desire which is expressing itself in his creative activity. Choice is indispensable to, nay, it is what constitutes, his creative activity. Creation is an act of simultaneous preference and rejection. It is a process of loving and hating at the same time. All creation, whether it is divine or human, takes the form of a search for some beloved.

 

As the picture approaches the impression, the feeling or the desire of the artist, it comes to have and to reflect, more and more, of the artist in it. Although the picture is separate and different from the artist, it is in a way the artist himself because we can see the artist in the picture.

 

The artist’s ideal is the perfection of the picture or, what is the same thing, his ideal is the perfect realisation of his own feeling of Beauty in the picture. This ideal causes the movement or the activity of his self. The ideal realised in the form of the picture is outside the self and yet it is not outside it but within it. The picture comes from within but as it approximates more and more to the internal impression, it returns more and more to its source. The nearer it is to its source in its qualities, the more highly evolved and the more perfect it is. The self of the artist has a feeling of incompleteness without his ideal and this feeling drives him towards it. The ideal is a part of his self; that is why the self is attracted towards it. Attraction means the search for completeness. When the self is realising its ideal it may appear to us to be moving towards something outside it, but really it is moving towards itself, towards something which is within it. The activity of the self is like an arrow which, although shot from the bow, is yet ever approaching the bow.

 

The artist’s attraction for his ideal of Beauty, which is the picture, starts a creative activity which brings him nearer and nearer to it. But attraction cannot be imagined apart from repulsion. His activity involves at each step a choice or a judgment resulting in the preference of those lines and curves that are favourable to his purpose and the rejection of those that are unfavourable to it. Attraction and repulsion both guide his creative activity. It is not only he who is attracted towards certain lines and curves and repelled from certain others but, in a way, the lines and curves too have an attraction or an affinity for certain other lines and curves which fit in with them and a repulsion from others which do not suit them. Thus, in a way, the picture too participates in the activity of the artist. It collaborates with him in order to reach its own perfection. Its collaboration is, however, derived from the activity of the artist. The picture is in a sense alive and borrows its life from the artist. It represents his living desire. The real existence of the picture is in the artist’s self and not on the paper. The picture on the paper is a reflection or a projection of the living reality which is in the mind of the artist. The picture is alive because it is a part of the artist’s self, which is life. It is, moreover, alive in proportion as it is true to its source in the self, in that part of the self which is evolving the picture. The picture is feeling, it is consciousness, life.

 

Not only do all the qualities of the artist’s self, that is, Love, Beauty, Power, Creativeness, Truth and Goodness (Morality), find an expression and exercise in his creation of the picture but the picture too is endowed more and more with the qualities of consciousness as it approaches its source. The emotion in the artist’s mind is expressed in the picture. The picture, if it is perfect, represents the living desire of the artist. It is as alive and conscious as the artist himself. As the picture approaches perfection, the impression of the artist becomes clearer and clearer to him so that he has to make less and less effort to complete it. This means that the picture itself gains in affinity for its own perfection. It acquires a greater and greater attraction for suitable lines and curves and, thereby, in a way, takes the burden of the artist more and more upon itself; it is able to collaborate with the artist more and more. We may say that as the picture nears perfection it gains not only in life but also in freedom to move towards its own perfection. Our freedom as well as our life is in proportion to our love for perfection. Freedom and life are really two different names for one and the same thing. We live in the exact degree in which we are free and vice versa. We must remember in this connection again that the real picture and the real lines and curves are in the self of the artist and are, therefore, alive and active.

 

Although the artist may not depict on the paper actually all the lines and curves that are unfavourable to his purpose, yet they exist in his mind and cause that judgment and that choice which constitute his creative activity itself. Wherever there is attraction, repulsion also must be there. Attraction leads to movement and movement implies two directions, one towards the destination and the other away from it and opposite to it. Unless an object has left some distance behind itself, it has not moved forward. Without repulsion there would be no attraction and without attraction and repulsion both operating simultaneously there would be no choice, no movement, no creation. The artist cannot desire, choose or create without attracting and repelling so that attraction and repulsion exhibit themselves as qualities of his feeling. The choice of the artist from moment to moment is a proof that the material that he prefers and the material that he rejects at every step must both be existent in his mind. What the artist rejects is present latently in his consciousness and comes relatively to the forefront at the time of choice. It rises from a depth to a comparatively higher level. At the end of every choice, that is, every act of creation, he has to make a fresh choice which means that new matter comes into existence or rather rises to the surface of his mind out of which he has to sift that which is favourable to his purpose from that which is unfavourable to it. To create is, therefore, to bring both the desirable and the undesirable to the forefront and to sift the desirable from the undesirable. The nearer a possibility is to the desirable, the nearer it is to the focus of attention. In creation attention follows the desirable and the beautiful.

 

In the case of the divine artist, however, all the possibilities of creation out of which a sifting has to be made take a material form and all the lines and curves, the discarded as well as the favoured ones, become visible because for the Divine Self to think is to bring into existence. All life that proves favourable to the scheme of evolution is retained, preserved and evolved and all life that is unfavourable to it is allowed to perish sooner or later as irrelevant to the picture. The perfect man, the real picture in the Divine Mind which the Divine Self intends to create, alone is immortal.

 

To continue the analogy of the human artist, his inspiration creates, so to say, two opposite charges of feeling, one on his ideal of Beauty, his picture of the future, and the other on his own self, so that both attract each other. The picture seeks its source in the artist’s self, that is, the impression in his mind, in order to come into its own and the artist’s self seeks its ideal of Beauty in the form of the picture without which it feels incomplete and towards which it is, therefore, attracted. The picture and the artist both feel incomplete without each other and, therefore, seek each other. There is, however, no fundamental incompleteness on either side. The picture still enfolded is already complete in the artist’s mind and the artist’s ideal is already a part of his self although the self regards it as different from itself for the time being, which explains its attraction and approach towards it. Because it is in the self as well as outside it, two opposite charges of feeling come to exist side by side in the creating self of the artist by virtue of his inspiration or vision of Beauty, almost in the same way in which they may exist in a metallic ball in which electricity has been induced by, say, a positively charged glass rod held close to it. The rod induces an opposite charge, in this case a negative one, on the part of the ball nearer to it on account of its attraction for the charge on the rod and a similar charge on the part away from it, on account of its repulsion from the rod. Thus the positive charge is in the ball as well as outside it as the ideal is in the self as well as outside it. The rod attracts the ball as the ideal attracts the self.

 

Each one of us, too, is an artist like the Divine Self making the picture of his own life. We are creators and we are creating ourselves out of ourselves as the artist who paints a picture creates himself out of himself. We have a desire for Beauty and that desire we are trying to realise and satisfy always. We are always choosing, i.e. preferring some actions to others on account of our desire for Beauty and the need to satisfy it. There are certain things which, we imagine, complete the picture and there are others that appear to us to mar it; we are always loving and choosing the former and hating and rejecting the latter. This constitutes the art of living. We are good artists of the picture of our life only if we choose rightly, but we cannot choose rightly unless we have an intense passion for the Right Ideal. If we develop this passion, we shall love and act what the Creator loves and acts and we shall choose what the Creator chooses. In the analogy of picture and the artist, the picture, we said, gains in life as well as freedom to make itself. But supposing whatever life and freedom it achieves at any stage of its evolution is such that, on account of it, it can really add to itself some lines and curves in order to complete itself. Of course, it will improve itself in this way with the help of the life-force of the artist that it has come to make its own. Then it will evolve and reach perfection only if it uses the freedom and the life that it has acquired, to carry out the desire of the artist and follow the impression in his mind. If it does not follow the same ethical code and does not choose the same lines and curves which the artist would choose himself, it will spoil itself and will fail to share the beauty which is in the mind of the artist, i.e. the beauty of his impression. The ethical code for the picture and the artist is the same. Both desire the same result—the perfection of the picture. If the picture wants to achieve perfect beauty it must attract those very lines and curves to which the artist would be attracted himself. The picture, the real picture, we must recall, is helping its own evolution. The real picture is in the mind of the artist. It is alive and is sharing the creative activity of the artist. It is actually creating itself out of itself by efforts which are its own from one point of view and those of the artist from another point of view.

 

Such is the case with the human self too. The Divine Self and the human self follow the same Ethical Law, because they desire the same result —the perfection of man. Any freedom, life or power that the human self has achieved should be utilised to achieve more freedom or, which is the same thing, more life, more beauty and more perfection. Conscious obedience to the Right Ethical Law is necessary if we want to march forward on the high road of progress. Just as the creation or the evolution of the picture is the self-realisation of the artist as well as of the picture, so the creation or the evolution of the Universe is the self-realisation of the Divine Consciousness as well as of the human consciousness.

 

The inspiration of the Divine Artist, like that of the human artist, resulted in an ideal of Beauty, the love or the attraction for which started the activity which brought the Universe into existence. The evolving man is a meaning in the mind of the Creator as the growing picture is a meaning in the mind of the artist. The whole picture in the Creator’s mind has not yet evolved. The evolving picture of the Universe or the personality of the human social individual of the earth, the creation and evolution of which began as a diffusion of cosmic rays in a distant past, is yet imperfect, as a part of it yet exists in the mind of the Creator and has to be realised in actual creation. We are to collaborate with the World-Self in this creation. We may say that the Universe bears a charge of feeling opposite to that of the Creating Self so that it is attracted towards its source and wants to go back to it. It is, therefore, evolving gradually like the picture through the creative activity of the Divine Self following a desire for Beauty, expressed in attraction and repulsion. In this way it is approaching closer and closer to its original in the Divine Consciousness. Attraction for what was favourable to the ideal implied a repulsion from what was unfavourable to it and, therefore, these two principles of attraction and repulsion expressed themselves as qualities of consciousness. They remained operative throughout in the evolution of the Universe in the past and must continue to operate in future. The whole Universe is an activity of the forces of attraction and repulsion. All attraction or repulsion in the Universe has its source in the attraction of World-Consciousness for Its ideal of Beauty, the perfect man of the future.

 

This principle of attraction which, of course, includes repulsion constitutes the Divine Ethical Law or the Law of the Right Ideal, which is observed by the whole Universe, by matter, by the animal and by man alike. The attraction for the source of consciousness is present in everything in the Universe from the tiny electron to the highest embodiments of creation, the saints and prophets. It is shared by all forms of matter, by all varieties of animals and by all human beings. At each stage of life’s development it takes a form which corresponds to that stage. It carries forward the process of evolution through every stage changing its own form at every step in a manner suitable to the needs of evolution. The evolution of the Universe is only the evolution of the forms of this attraction. In the material stage it changed from the attraction of the opposite charges of electricity observed in protons and electrons to the attraction of gravity and all those forms of affinities which we call the physical laws. It helped evolution in this stage by changing and preparing matter into a form suitable for the appearance of the animal life. In the animal stage it emerged in the form of instincts and continued to change till all the instincts were developed. In this stage it continued to evolve the animal into a form suitable for the appearance of man till man actually came into existence. In the human stage it takes the form of a free and direct attraction for Beauty or Consciousness and continues to change its character becoming more and more perfect with the growth of love or the development of self-consciousness. That the Moral Law is changing in character and evolving itself also in the human stage of evolution, is clear from the fact that our standards of ethical behaviour differ at different stages of self-consciousness. They grade upwards from the lowest to highest levels of self-consciousness. The actual, practical ethical code of a highly self-conscious man is superior to that of a man in the earlier stages of his self-consciousness. The double principle of attraction and repulsion will help evolution in the human stage of life too by evolving the human being into a new kind of life in which his self-consciousness will achieve its highest development. If we observe the Moral Law consciously, we shall reach our perfection, otherwise the principle of repulsion in the Universe will cast us away and the principle of attraction will favour, preserve and evolve that part of human life which follows this law.

 

The analysis of the creative activity of the human self-consciousness, given in the example of the artist and the picture above, illustrates several points of the relationship between the Creator and the Universe (Man). To love an ideal and to act for its realization, expressing all the attributes of Love (e.g. Creativeness, Power, Goodness, Beauty, Truth, etc) in the process of its realisation is a quality of self-consciousness whether it is human or divine. As the ideal of the artist is the perfect picture which he desires to create, so the ideal of the Creator is the perfect Universe (Man) which he is creating and evolving every moment. Self-Consciousness means consciousness which is conscious of itself, and it can be conscious of itself, of its qualities and capacities, only with reference to something other than itself and that something is conceived by it in the form of an ideal of Beauty which it sets out to achieve. But since self-consciousness alone is Beauty and nothing beautiful and worthy of love can possibly exist outside itself, it sees its own beauty in the mirror of its ideal, its ideal is its own image, it is the loving and the creating self-consciousness itself in miniature. Thus self-consciousness by its very nature divides itself into two parts, the knower and the known, the Lover and the Beloved,. the Creator and the Creation, the Seeker and the Sought. These two parts of self-consciousness are separate and yet not separate from each other; they are distinguishable and yet belong to a single indivisible personality. They are, moreover, not separate compartments of the same mind but each of them is the whole mind. The stream of consciousness evolving the picture is not the person of the artist but only his desire or will; yet the will of the artist, through which he exercises all his qualities and attributes, is the artist himself acting in the picture. Similarly, the current of consciousness evolving the Universe is not the person of the Creator but only His desire or will; yet the will of the Creator which operates all His qualities and attributes is He Himself, acting in the Universe. In spite of this, however, we can identify neither the artist with the picture nor the Creator with the Universe, since as the artist can create many pictures, so the Creator can create innumerable worlds. This resolves the problem of the transcendence and the immanence of the Creator in the Universe.

 

A self-consciousness is something which is capable of projecting itself beyond itself into a created and being-created otherness which is no other than itself and nothing beyond itself, without altering or diminishing itself or losing its oneness or uniqueness in the least. There is nothing in the material world which can be compared to self-consciousness in this quality. We may imagine a sun which sheds its rays far and wide into space without losing any of its energy or brilliance but a sun of this kind is not possible.

 

The fact of evolution, namely, that the Universe is being created by an unbroken, gradual and progressive evolutionary process (even if Science had nothing to say in support of it), follows from the very nature of self-consciousness which has one ideal at a time and resorts to a constant creative activity (like a chain in which every link leads to another) for its realization. Every creative act of self-consciousness, whether divine or human, is, in its actual unfoldment a single, indivisible whole which is internally consistent and in which every part supports and completes the rest. The creative act of the Divine Self-Consciousness which is unfolding itself before us in the shape of this Universe, is also a single indivisible whole of the same kind. This is what creates a unity and a uniformity of design and purpose in the Universe and makes Science and Philosophy possible. All sciences and all departments of philosophy belong to a single integrated whole of knowledge and, therefore, should be expected to explain each other.

 

The Creator creates freely whatever he loves to create consistently with his ultimate purpose. He does not follow any preconceived laws but only his own desire for Beauty. It is we who read or discover laws and principles at all levels of creation— the physical, the biological and the psychological levels—and record them in our books of Science and Philosophy. The source of all these laws is nothing but the Creator’s desire to create. That is why Science has not been able to explain the final cause of even a single law out of the innumerable laws that it has discovered. As a matter of fact, no law of Nature has any cause except the will of the Creator itself. As soon as the Creator wills an object it comes into existence and as soon as he wills it to change in a particular manner it changes accordingly, and this gives rise to the laws of Science. Before water had come into existence no scientist (if a scientist had existed at that time) could have predicted that oxygen and hydrogen will combine in a particular proportion to form water. The fact is that they form water for no other reason except this that the Creator has willed it to be so. The will of the Creator is the cause of every new step in the evolution of the Universe, as the will of the artist is the cause of every new step in the evolution of the picture. The inability of the scientists to trace the achievements of evolution to previous causes has taken the shape of a new theory of evolution which is known as the theory of emergent evolution.

 

The Divine Self-Consciousness wills and acts with a perfect freedom for the realisation of Its ideal and so does the human self-consciousness, which is an image of the Divine Self-Consciousness and shares with It all Its attributes including Its attribute of free-will. When we choose a line of action, we no doubt take into consideration all the limitations of our circumstances and surroundings, but the fact that we, after considering everything, reject all courses of action except one, of our own free choice, is a proof that our wills are free. There can be no greater evidence than that of our own experience, leading to a firm conviction, to prove that we choose our decisions and actions whether right or wrong with perfect freedom. But this freedom, although absolutely perfect and real, is not our own ; it is borrowed from the Creator; it is the freedom of the Creator emerging in the shape of our own freedom. Hence from one point of view it is our own freedom and from another point of view it is the freedom of the Creator.

 

Our free activity is also the free activity of the Creator. Both as the free activity of the Creator and our own free activity it is either relevant to the purpose of the Creator as the artist of the Universe, or irrelevant to it. If it is relevant, it means that we have used our freedom rightly and our actions belong to that lot which go to complete the picture of the Universe as it is in the mind of the Creator. Hence the free creative activity of the Divine Self favours them and makes them the object of His love along with their human agents. This is our reward for having used our freedom rightly. If, however, it is irrelevant to the purpose of the Creator it means that we have misused our freedom and made our actions to deviate from the path along which evolution is to proceed. In such a case our actions meet with an ultimate failure and bring us bitter disappointments and grievous calamities. The reason is that they belong to that lot which the free creative activity of the Divine Self has to reject and discard alongwith their human agents in order to bring the picture of the Universe to a perfection. This is how we pay for having made a wrong use of our freedom.

 

However, as the self-consciousness of an individual evolves and his knowledge of the ideal of the Creator, which is at the same time his own ideal, develops, the chance for him to act wrongly becomes less and less till ultimately it disappears entirely. Thus the only way to share successfully the purpose of the Creator in our own lives and to avoid our failures, disappointments and miseries is to rise continuously to higher and higher levels of self-consciousness by (a) acting morally and (b) contemplating regularly the Beauty of the Creator.