{"id":103,"date":"2013-07-13T01:25:56","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:25:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=103"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:25:56","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:25:56","slug":"20-karma-and-justice-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/01-sabcl\/16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16\/20-karma-and-justice-vol-16-the-supramental-manifestation-volume-16","title":{"rendered":"-20_Karma and justice.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n
\n

\n
\nKarma
\nand Justice<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n
\n <\/font><\/span>            
\n<\/span>W<\/font><\/span><\/b>HAT<\/font> are the lines of
\nKarma? What is the intrinsic character and active law of this energy of the soul
\nand its will and development of consequence? To ask that question is to ask what
\nis the form taken here by the dynamic meaning of our existence and what the
\ncurves of guidance of its evolving self-creation and action. And such a question
\nought not to be answered in a narrow spirit or under the obsession of some
\nsingle idea which does not take into account the many-sidedness and rich
\ncomplexity of this subtle world of Nature. The law of Karma can be no rigid and
\nmechanical canon or rough practical rule of thumb, but rather its guiding
\nprinciple should be as supple a harmonist as the Spirit itself whose will of
\nself-knowledge it embodies and should adapt itself to the need of
\nself-development of the variable individual souls who are feeling their way
\nalong its lines towards the right balance, synthesis, harmonics of their action.
\nThe karmic idea cannot be – for spirit and not mind is its cause – a cosmic
\nreflection of our limited average human intelligence, but rather the law of a
\ngreater spiritual wisdom, a means which behind all its dumb occult appearances
\nembodies an understanding lead and a subtle management towards our total
\nperfection.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nThe
\nordinary current conception of law of Karma is dominantly ethical, but ethical
\nin no very exalted kind. Its idea of Karma is a mechanical and materialistic
\nethics, a crudely exact legal judgment and administration of reward and
\npunishment, an external sanction to virtue and prohibition of sin, a code, a
\nbalance. The idea is that there must be a justice governing the award of
\nhappiness and misery on the earth, a humanly intelligible equity and that the
\nlaw of Karma represents it and gives us its formula. I have done so much good, punya<\/i>.
\nIt is my capital, my accumulation and balance. I must have it paid it out to me
\nin so much coin of prosperity, the legal currency of this sovereign and divine
\nThemis, or why on earth should I at all do good?<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 162<\/p>\n

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\n
\n<\/div>\n

I
\nhave done so much evil. That too must come back to me in so much exact and
\naccurate punishment and misfortune. There must be so much outward suffering or
\nan inward suffering caused by outward event and pressure; for if there were not
\nthis physically sensible, visible, inevitable result, where would be any
\navenging justice and where could we find any deterrent sanction in Nature
\nagainst evil? And this award is that of an exact judge, a precise administrator,
\na scrupulous merchant of good for good and evil for evil who has learned nothing
\nand will never learn anything of the Christian or Buddhistic ideal rule, has no
\nbowels of mercy or compassion, no forgiveness for sin, but holds austerely to an
\neternal Mosaic law, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, a full, slow or swift, but
\nalways calm and precisely merciless lex talionis<\/i>.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nThis
\ncommercial and mathematical accountant is sometimes supposed to act with a
\nstartling precision. A curious story was published the other day, figuring as a
\nfact of contemporary occurrence, of a rich man who had violently deprived
\nanother of his substance. The victim is born as the son of the oppressor and in
\nthe delirium of a fatal illness reveals that he has obliged his old tyrant and
\npresent father to spend on him and so lose the monetary equivalent of the
\nproperty robbed minus a certain sum, but that sum must be paid now, otherwise –
\nthe debt is absolved and as the last pice is expended, the reborn soul departs,
\nfor its sole object in taking birth is satisfied, accounts squared and the
\nspirit of Karma content. That is the mechanical idea of Karma at its acme of
\nsatisfied precision. At the same time the popular mind in its attempt to combine
\nthe idea of a life beyond with the notion of rebirth, supposes a double prize
\nfor virtue and a double penalty for transgression. I am rewarded for my good
\ndeeds in heaven after death until the dynamic value of my virtue is exhausted
\nand I am then reborn and rewarded again materially on earth. I am punished in
\nhell to the equivalence of my sins and again punished for them in another life
\nin the body. This looks a little superfluous and a rather redundant justice,
\nand, even, the precise accountant becomes very like an unconscionable hundred
\npet cent usurer. Perhaps it may be said that beyond earth it is the soul that
\nsuffers \u2013 for<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 163
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n

\n<\/div>\n

purification,
\nand here the physical being – as a concession to the forces of life and the
\nsymmetry of things: but still it is the soul that thus pays double in its subtle
\nexperience and in its physical incarnation.
\n  <\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

The
\nstrands of our nature which mix in this natural but hardly philosophic
\nconception, have to be disentangled before we can disengage the right value of
\nthese ideas. Their first motive seems to be ethical, for justice is an ethical
\nnotion; but true ethics is Dharma, the right fulfilment and working of the
\nhigher nature, and right action should have right motive, should be its own
\njustification and not go limping on the crutches of greed and fear. Right done
\nfor its own sake is truly ethical and ennobles the growing spirit; right done in
\nthe lust for a material reward or from fear of the avenging stripes of the
\nexecutioner or sentence of the judge, may be eminently practical and useful for
\nthe moment, but it is not in the least degree ethical, but is rather a lowering
\nof the soul of man; or at least the principle is a concession to his baser
\nanimal and unspiritual nature. But in natural man, born before the higher dharma
\nand more potent and normal as a motive to action, come two other very insistent
\nthings, k<\/i><\/span>\u00e3ma, artha<\/span><\/i>,
\ndesire and pleasure of enjoyment with its corresponding fear of suffering, and
\ninterest of possession, acquisition, success with its complementary pain of
\nlacking and frustration, and this is what governs most prominently the normal
\nbarbaric or still half barbaric natural man. He needs, to some not small extent
\nif he is to conform his close pursuit of desire and interest to the ethical
\nstandard, a strict association or identity of result of virtue with some getting
\nof his interest and pleasure and result of sin with some loss of materially or
\nvitally desirable things and the infliction of mental, vital or physical pain.
\nHuman law proceeds on this principle by meeting the grosser more obvious
\noffences with punishment and avenging pain or loss and on the other hand
\nassuring the individual in some degree of the secure having of his legitimate
\npleasure and interest if he observes the legal rule. The cosmic law is expected
\nby the popular theory of Karma to deal with man on his own principle and do this
\nvery thing with a much sterner and more unescapable firmness of application and
\nautomatic necessity of consequence.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 164<\/p>\n

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\n
\n<\/div>\n

The
\ncosmic Being must be then, if this view is to hold, a sort of enlarged divine
\nHuman or, we might say, a superior anthropoid Divine, or else the cosmic Law a
\nperfection and magnitude of human methods and standards, which deals with man as
\nhe is accustomed to deal with his neighbour, – only not with a rough partial
\nhuman efficacy, but either a sure omniscience or an unfailing automatism.
\nWhatever truth there may be behind that notion, this is not likely to be an
\nadequate account of the matter. In actual life, if we put aside the rebirth
\ntheory, there are traces of this method, but it does not work out with any
\nobservable consistency, – not even if we accept an unsatisfactory and hardly
\njust vicarious punishment as part of the scheme. What surety have we, then, of
\nits better or its faultless working out in rebirth except for some similar
\npartial signs and indications and, to fill in the blanks, our general sense of
\nthe fitness of things? And again where does the true nature of ethics come in in
\nthis scheme? That more elevated action, it would almost seem, is an ideal
\nmovement of less use for the practical governance of life than as one part of a
\npreparation for a fourth and last need of man, his need of spiritual salvation,
\nand salvation winds up finally our Karma and casts away the economy along with
\nthe very thought and will of life. Desire is the law of life and action and
\ntherefore of Karma. To do things above the material level for their own sake and
\ntheir pure right or pure delight is to head straight towards the distances of
\nheaven or the silence of the Ineffable. But this is a view of the meaning of
\nexistence against which it is time for the higher seeing mind and being of man
\nto protest and to ask whether the ways of the Spirit in the world may not be
\ncapable of a greater, nobler and wiser significance.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nBut
\nstill, since the mind of man is part of the universal mind and reflects
\nsomething of it in a however broken or as yet imperfect and crookedly seeing
\nfashion, there may well be something of a real truth behind this view, though it
\nis not likely to be the whole or the well understood truth. There are some
\ncertain or probable laws of the universal working which are relevant to it and
\nmust enter into the account. First, it is sure that Nature has laws of which the
\nobservance leads to or helps well-being and of which the violation imposes
\nsuffering; but all of them cannot<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 165<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

be
\ngiven a moral significance. Then there is the Certainty that there must be a
\nmoral law of cause and consequence in the total web of her weaving and this we
\nwould perhaps currently put into the formula that good produces good and evil
\nevil, which is a proposition of undoubted truth, though also we see in this
\ncomplicated world that evil comes out of what we hold to be good, and again out
\nof evil disengages itself something that yet turns to good. Perhaps our system
\nof values is too rigidly precise or too narrowly relative; there are subtle
\nthings in the totality, minglings, interrelations, cross-currents, suppressed or
\nhidden significances which we do not take into account. The formula is true, but
\nis not the whole truth, at least as now understood in its first superficial
\nsignificance.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nAnd,
\nat any rate, in the ordinary notion of Karma we are combining two different
\nnotions of good. I can well understand that moral good does or ought to produce
\nand increase moral good and moral evil to farther and to create moral evil. It
\ndoes so in myself. The habit of love confirms and enhances my power of love; it
\npurifies my being and opens it to the universal good. The habit of hatred, on
\nthe contrary, corrupts my being, fills it with poison, with bad and morbid toxic
\nmatter, and opens it to the general power of evil. My love ought also by a
\nprolongation or a return to produce love in others and my hatred to give rise to
\nhatred; that happens to a certain, a great extent, but it need not be and is not
\nan invariable or rigorous consequence; still we may well see and believe that
\nlove does throw out widening ripples and helps to elevate the world while hatred
\nhas the opposite consequence. But what is the necessary connection between this
\ngood and evil on the one hand and on the other pleasure and pain? Must the
\nethical power always turn perfectly into some term of kindred hedonistic result?
\nNot entirely; for love is a joy in itself, but also love suffers; hatred is a
\ntroubled and self-afflicting thing, but has too its own perverse delight of
\nitself and its gratifications; but in the end we may say that love, because it
\nis born of the universal Delight, triumphs in its own nature and hatred because
\nit is its denial or perversion, leads to a greater sum of misery to myself as to
\nothers. And of all true moral good and real evil this may be said that the one
\ntends towards some<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 166<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

supreme
\nRight, the rtam of the Vedic Rishis, the highest law of a highest Truth of our
\nbeing and that Truth is the door of the spirit’s Ananda, its beatific nature,
\nthe other is a missing or perversion of the Right and the Truth and exposes us
\nto its opposite, to false delight or suffering. And even in the perplexed steps
\nof life some reflection of this identity must emerge.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nThis
\ncorrespondence is, still, more essentially true in the inner field, in the
\nspiritual, mental and emotional result and reaction of the good or the evil or
\nof the effects of its outgoing action. But where is the firm link of
\ncorrespondence between the ethical and the more vital and physical hedonistic
\npowers of life? How does my ethical good turn into smiling fortune, crowned
\nprosperity, sleek material good and happiness to myself and my ethical evil into
\nfrowning misfortune, rugged adversity, sordid material ill and suffering, – for
\nthat is what the desire soul of man and the intelligence governed by it seem to
\ndemand, – and how is the account squared or the transmutation made between these
\ntwo very different energies of the affirmation and denial of good? We can see
\nthis much that the good or the evil in me translates itself into a good or an
\nevil action which among other things brings about much mental and material
\nhappiness and suffering to others, and to this outgoing power and effect there
\nought to be an equal reaction of incoming power and effect, though it does not
\nseem to work itself out immediately or with any discoverable exactness of
\ncorrespondence. There does still appear to be a principle of rebound in Nature;
\nour action has in some degree the motion of recoil of the boomerang and cycles
\nback towards the will that has cast it on the world. The stone we hurl rashly
\nagainst the universal Life is cast back at us and may crush, maim or injure our
\nown mental and physical being. But this mechanical rebound is not the whole
\nprinciple of Karma. Nor is Karma wholly a mixed ethical-hedonistic order in its
\ntotal significance, for there are involved other powers of our consciousness and
\nbeing. Nor is it, again, a pure mechanism which we set going by our will and
\nhave then helplessly to accept the result; for the will which produced the
\neffect, can also intervene to modify it. And, above all, the initiating and
\nreceiving consciousness can change the values and utilities of the reactions and
\nmake<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 167<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

another
\nthing of life than this automatic mechanism of fateful return or retribution to
\nthe half-blind embodied actor in a mute necessity of rigorous law of Nature.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nThe
\nrelation of our consciousness and will to Karma is the thing upon which all the
\nsubtler lines of action and consequence must depend; that connexus must be the
\nhinge of the whole significance. The dependence of the pursuit of ethical values
\non a sanction by the inferior hedonistic values, material, vital and lower
\nmental pleasure, pain and suffering, appeals strongly to our normal
\nconsciousness and will; but it ceases to have more than a subordinate force and
\nfinally loses all force as we grow towards greater heights of our being. That
\ndependence cannot then be the whole or the final power or guiding norm of Karma.
\nThe relation of will to action and consequence must be cast on more subtle and
\nliberal lines. The universal Spirit in the law of Karma must deal with man in
\nthe lower scale of values only as a part of the transaction and, as a concession
\nto man’s own present motives. Man himself puts these values, makes that demand
\nfor pleasure and prosperity and dreads their opposites, desires heaven more than
\nhe loves virtue, fears hell more than he abhors sin, and while he does so, the
\nworld-dispensation wears to him that meaning and colour. But the Spirit of
\nexistence is not merely a legislator and judge concerned to maintain a standard
\nof legal justice, to dole out deterrents and sanctions, rewards and penalties,
\nferocious pains of hell, indulgent joys of paradise. He is the Divine in the
\nworld, the Master of a spiritual evolution and the growing godhead in humanity.
\nThat godhead grows however slowly beyond the dependence on the sanctions of
\npleasure and pain. Pain and pleasure govern our primary being and in that
\nprimary scale pain is Nature’s advertisement of things we should avoid, pleasure
\nher lure to things she would tempt us to pursue. These devices are first
\nempirical tests for limited objects; but as I grow, I pass beyond their narrower
\nuses. I have continually to disregard Nature’s original warnings and lures in
\norder to get to a higher nature. I have to develop a nobler spiritual law of
\nKarma.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\n This
\nwill be evident if we consider our own greater motives of action. The pursuit of
\nTruth may entail on me penalties and<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 168<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

sufferings;
\nthe service of my country or the world may demand from me loss of my outward
\nhappiness and good fortune or the destruction of my body; the increase of my
\nstrength of will and greatness of spirit may be only possible by the ardours of
\nsuffering and the firm renunciation of joys and pleasures. I must still follow
\nafter Truth, I must do the service to my race my soul demands from me; I must
\nincrease my strength and inner greatness and must not ask for a quite irrelevant
\nreward, shun penalty or make a bargain for the exact fruits of my labour. And
\nthat which is true of my action in the present life, must be equally true of my
\nconnected action and self-development through many births. Happiness and sorrow,
\ngood fortune and ill-fortune are not my main concern whether in this. birth or
\nin future lives, but my perfection and the higher good of mankind purchased by
\nwhatever suffering and tribulation. Spinoza’s dictum that joy is a passage to a
\ngreater perfection and sorrow a passage to a lesser perfection is a much too
\nsummary epigram. Delight will be indeed the atmosphere of perfection and attends
\ntoo even the anguish of our labour towards it, but first a higher delight which
\nhas often much trouble for its price, and afterwards a highest spiritual Ananda
\nwhich has no dependence on outward circumstances, but rather is powerful to
\nnew-shape their meanings and transform their reactions. These things may be
\nabove the first formulation of the world-energy here, may be influences from
\nsuperior planes of the universal existence, but they are still a part of the
\neconomy of Karma here, a process of the spiritual evolution in the body. And
\nthey bring in a higher soul-nature and will and action and consequence, a higher
\nrule of Karma.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

         
\nThe
\nlaw of Karma is therefore not simply an extension of the human idea of practical
\njustice into future births and a rectification there of the apparent injustice
\nof life. A justice or rather a justness there must be in all the workings of the
\nworld-energy; Nature certainly seems to be scrupulous in her measures. But in
\nthe life of man there are many factors to be taken into the reckoning; there are
\ntoo stages, grades, degrees. And on a higher step of our being things do not
\nlook the same nor are quite the same as on a lower grade. And even in the first
\nnormal scale there are many factors and not only the ethical-hedonistic
\nstandard.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 169<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n<\/div>\n

If
\nit is just that the virtuous man should be rewarded with success and happiness
\nand the wicked man punished with downfall and pain at some time, in some life,
\non earth or in heaven or in hell, it is also just that the strong man should
\nhave the reward of his cultivated strength, the intellectual man the prize of
\nhis cultivated skill, the will that labours in whatever field the fruit of its
\neffort and its works. But it does not work rightly, you say, not morally, not
\naccording to the ethical law? But what is right working in this connection of
\nwill and action and consequence? I may be religious and honest, but if I am
\ndull, weak and incompetent? And I may be selfish and impious, but if I have the
\nswift flame of intellect, the understanding brain, the skill to adapt means to
\nends, the firm courageous will fixed on its end? I have then an imperfection
\nwhich must impose its consequences, but also I have powers which must make their
\nway. The truth is that there are several orders of energy and their separate
\ncharacteristic working must be seen, before their relations can be rightly discovered in the harmonies of Nature. A complex web is what we have to unravel.
\nWhen we have seen the parts in the whole, the elements and their affinities in
\nthe mass, then only can we know the lines of Karma.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

\nPage
\n\u2013 170<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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