{"id":3055,"date":"2013-07-13T01:45:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3055"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:45:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:45:40","slug":"17-the-suprarational-good-vol-25-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/03-cwsa\/25-the-human-cycle\/17-the-suprarational-good-vol-25-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-17_The Suprarational Good.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tChapter XV <\/font> <\/b><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe Suprarational Good <\/font><\/b> <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tW<\/font>E BEGIN<\/b> to see, through the principle and law of our religious being, through the principle and law of our
\n aesthetic being, the universality of a principle and law
\nwhich is that of all being and which we must therefore hold steadily in view in regard to all human activities. It rests on a
\ntruth on which the sages have always agreed, though by the intellectual thinker it may be constantly disputed. It is the truth
\nthat all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind and above
\nourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth which we glimpse through religion, lies concealed behind all life;
\nit is the great secret of life, that which it is in labour to discover and to make real to its self-knowledge. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThe seeking for God is also, subjectively, the seeking for our highest, truest, fullest, largest self. It is the seeking for a
\nReality which the appearances of life conceal because they only partially express it or because they express it from behind veils
\nand figures, by oppositions and contraries, often by what seem to be perversions and opposites of the Real. It is the seeking for
\nsomething whose completeness comes only by a concrete and all-occupying sense of the Infinite and Absolute; it can be established in its integrality only by finding a value of the infinite in all finite things and by the attempt
\n\t\t\t\u2014 necessary, inevitable, however
\nimpossible or paradoxical it may seem to the normal reason \u2014 to raise all relativities to their absolutes and to reconcile their
\ndifferences, oppositions and contraries by elevation and sublimation to some highest term in which all these are unified. Some
\nperfect highest term there is by which all our imperfect lower terms can be justified and their discords harmonised if once we
\ncan induce them to be its conscious expressions, to exist not for themselves but for That, as contributory values of that highest
\n \t\t\tTruth, fractional measures of that highest and largest common
\n\t\t\tmeasure.  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 146<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

A One there is in which all the entangled discords of
\nthis multiplicity of separated, conflicting, intertwining, colliding ideas, forces, tendencies, instincts, impulses, aspects, appearances which we call life, can find the unity of their diversity, the harmony of their divergences, the justification of their claims, the
\ncorrection of their perversions and aberrations, the solution of their problems and disputes. Knowledge seeks for that in order
\nthat Life may know its own true meaning and transform itself into the highest and most harmonious possible expression of a
\ndivine Reality. All seeks for that, each power feels out for it in its own way: the infrarational gropes for it blindly along the line
\nof its instincts, needs, impulses; the rational lays for it its trap of logic and order, follows out and gathers together its diversities, analyses them in order to synthetise; the suprarational gets behind and above things and into their inmost parts, there to
\ntouch and lay hands on the Reality itself in its core and essence and enlighten all its infinite detail from that secret centre.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tThis truth comes most easily home to us in Religion and in Art, in the cult of the spiritual and in the cult of the beautiful,
\nbecause there we get away most thoroughly from the unrestful pressure of the
\n\t\t\toutward appearances of life, the urgent siege of its necessities,
\n\t\t\tthe deafening clamour of its utilities. There we are not compelled
\n\t\t\tat every turn to make terms with some gross material claim, some
\n\t\t\tvulgar but inevitable necessity of the hour and the moment. We have
\n\t\t\tleisure and breathing-time to seek the Real behind the apparent: we
\n\t\t\tare allowed to turn our eyes either away from the temporary and
\n\t\t\ttransient or through the temporal itself to the eternal; we can draw
\n\t\t\tback from the limitations of the immediately practical and re-create
\n\t\t\tour souls by the touch of the ideal and the universal. We begin to
\n\t\t\tshake off our chains, we get rid of life in its aspect of a
\n\t\t\tprison-house with Necessity for our jailer and utility for our
\n\t\t\tconstant taskmaster; we are admitted to the liberties of the soul;
\n\t\t\twe enter God’s infinite kingdom of beauty and delight or we lay
\n\t\t\thands on the keys of our absolute self-finding and open ourselves to
\n\t\t\tthe possession or the adoration of the Eternal. There lies the
\n\t\t\timmense value of Religion, the
\nimmense value of Art and Poetry to the human spirit; it lies in their immediate power for inner truth, for self-enlargement, for
\nliberation. <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 147<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tBut in other spheres of life, in the spheres of what by an irony
\nof our ignorance we call especially practical life, \u2014 although, if the Divine be our true object of search and realisation, our
\nnormal conduct in them and our current idea of them is the very opposite of practical,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 we are less ready to recognise the
\nuniversal truth. We take a long time to admit it even partially in theory, we are seldom ready at all to follow it in practice. And
\nwe find this difficulty because there especially, in all our practical life, we are content to be the slaves of an outward Necessity and
\nthink ourselves always excused when we admit as the law of our thought, will and action the yoke of immediate and temporary
\nutilities. Yet even there we must arrive eventually at the highest truth. We shall find out in the end that our daily life and our
\nsocial existence are not things apart, are not another field of existence with another law than the inner and ideal. On the
\ncontrary, we shall never find out their true meaning or resolve their harsh and often agonising problems until we learn to see
\nin them a means towards the discovery and the individual and collective expression of our highest and, because our highest,
\ntherefore our truest and fullest self, our largest most imperative principle and power of existence. All life is only a lavish and
\nmanifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt is in our ethical being that this truest truth of practical life, its real and highest practicality becomes most readily apparent.
\nIt is true that the rational man has tried to reduce the ethical life like all the rest to a matter of reason, to determine its nature,
\nits law, its practical action by some principle of reason, by some law of reason. He has never really succeeded and he never can
\nreally succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences of the intellect building elegant and empty constructions with
\nwords and ideas, mere conventions of logic and vamped-up syntheses, in sum, pretentious failures which break down at the first
\nstrenuous touch of reality. Such was that extraordinary system of utilitarian
\n\t\t\tethics discovered in the nineteenth century \u2014 the great century of
\n\t\t\tscience and reason and utility \u2014 by one of its most positive and
\n\t\t\tsystematic minds and now deservedly discredited.  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 148<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

Happily, we need now only smile at its shallow pretentious
\nerrors, its substitution of a practical, outward and occasional test for the inner, subjective and absolute motive of ethics, its
\nreduction of ethical action to an impossibly scientific and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive enough
\nto the reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole instinct and intuition of the ethical being. Equally false
\nand impracticable are other attempts of the reason to account for and regulate its principle and phenomena,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 the hedonistic
\ntheory which refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the mind in good or the sociological which supposes ethics
\nto be no more than a system of formulas of conduct generated from the social sense and a ruled direction of the social impulses
\nand would regulate its action by that insufficient standard. The ethical being escapes from all these formulas: it is a law to itself
\nand finds its principle in its own eternal nature which is not in its essential character a growth of evolving mind, even though
\nit may seem to be that in its earthly history, but a light from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine.\n\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNot that all these errors have not each of them a truth behind their false constructions; for all errors of the human reason are
\nfalse representations, a wrong building, effective misconstructions of the truth or of a side or a part of the truth. Utility is a
\nfundamental principle of existence and all fundamental principles of existence are in the end one; therefore it is true that the
\nhighest good is also the highest utility. It is true also that, not any balance of the greatest good of the greatest number, but simply
\nthe good of others and most widely the good of all is one ideal aim of our outgoing ethical practice; it is that which the ethical
\nman would like to effect, if he could only find the way and be always sure what is the real good of all. But this does not help to
\nregulate our ethical practice, nor does it supply us with its inner principle whether of being or of action, but only produces one
\nof the many considerations by which we can feel our way along  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 149<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\nthe road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility, must be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall into
\nthe hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose whole method is alien to the ethical. Moreover, the standard of utility,
\nthe judgment of utility, its spirit, its form, its application must vary with the individual nature, the habit of mind, the outlook
\non the world. Here there can be no reliable general law to which all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such as
\nit is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can ethics at all or ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one
\nsafe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good
\nand to govern by that his conduct. He may err, but he will be on his right road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be
\nfaithful to the law of his nature. The saying of the Gita is always true; better is the law of one’s own nature though ill-performed,
\ndangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is
\nthe pursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tNeither is its law the pursuit of pleasure high or base, nor
\nself-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle or even spiritual. It is true, here too, that the highest good is both in its nature and
\ninner effect the highest bliss. Ananda, delight of being, is the spring of all existence and that to which it tends and for which
\nit seeks openly or covertly in all its activities. It is true too that in virtue growing, in good accomplished there is great pleasure and
\nthat the seeking for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of virtue. But for practical purposes this is
\na side aspect of the matter; it does not constitute pleasure into a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary, virtue comes to the
\nnatural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature and is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification of strength
\nby suffering. We do not embrace that pain and struggle for the pleasure of the pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for that
\nhigher strenuous delight, though it is felt by the secret spirit in us, is not usually or not at first conscious in the conscient normal
\npart of our being which is the field of the struggle.   <\/p>\n

\n

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\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

The action
\nof the ethical man is not motived by even an inner pleasure, but by a call of his being, the necessity of an ideal, the figure of an
\nabsolute standard, a law of the Divine. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn the outward history of our ascent this does not at first
\nappear clearly, does not appear perhaps at all: there the evolution of man in society may seem to be the determining cause of his
\nethical evolution. For ethics only begins by the demand upon him of something other than his personal preference, vital pleasure
\nor material self-interest; and this demand seems at first to work on him through the necessity of his relations with others, by the
\nexigencies of his social existence. But that this is not the core of the matter, is shown by the fact that the ethical demand does not
\nalways square with the social demand, nor the ethical standard always coincide with the social standard. On the contrary, the
\nethical man is often called upon to reject and do battle with the social demand, to break, to move away from, to reverse the
\nsocial standard. His relations with others and his relations with himself are both of them the occasions of his ethical growth;
\nbut that which determines his ethical being is his relations with God, the urge of the Divine upon him whether concealed in his
\nnature or conscious in his higher self or inner genius. He obeys an inner ideal, not an outer standard; he answers to a divine law
\nin his being, not to a social claim or a collective necessity. The ethical imperative comes not from around, but from within him
\nand above him. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIt has been felt and said from of old that the laws of right, the
\nlaws of perfect conduct are the laws of the gods, eternal beyond, laws that man is conscious of and summoned to obey. The age
\nof reason has scouted this summary account of the matter as a superstition or a poetical imagination which the nature and
\nhistory of the world contradict. But still there is a truth in this ancient superstition or imagination which the rational denial of
\nit misses and the rational confirmations of it, whether Kant’s categorical imperative or another, do not altogether restore. If
\nman’s conscience is a creation of his evolving nature, if his conceptions of ethical law are mutable and depend on his stage of
\nevolution, yet at the root of them there is something constant in  <\/p>\n

\n

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\n

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\nall their mutations which lies at the very roots of his own nature and of world-nature. And if Nature in man and the world is in
\nits beginnings infra-ethical as well as infrarational, as it is at its summit supra-ethical as well as suprarational, yet in that infraethical there is something which becomes in the human plane of being the ethical, and that supra-ethical is itself a consummation
\nof the ethical and cannot be reached by any who have not trod the long ethical road. Below hides that secret of good in all things
\nwhich the human being approaches and tries to deliver partially through ethical instinct and ethical idea; above is hidden the
\neternal Good which exceeds our partial and fragmentary ethical conceptions. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tOur ethical impulses and activities begin like all the rest in the infrarational and take their rise from the subconscient.
\nThey arise as an instinct of right, an instinct of obedience to an ununderstood law, an instinct of self-giving in labour, an
\ninstinct of sacrifice and self-sacrifice, an instinct of love, of selfsubordination and of solidarity with others. Man obeys the law
\nat first without any inquiry into the why and the wherefore; he does not seek for it a sanction in the reason. His first thought
\nis that it is a law created by higher powers than himself and his race and he says with the ancient poet that he knows not
\nwhence these laws sprang, but only that they are and endure and cannot with impunity be violated. What the instincts and
\nimpulses seek after, the reason labours to make us understand, so that the will may come to use the ethical impulses intelligently
\nand turn the instincts into ethical ideas. It corrects man’s crude and often erring misprisions of the ethical instinct, separates
\nand purifies his confused associations, shows as best it can the relations of his often clashing moral ideals, tries to arbitrate and
\ncompromise between their conflicting claims, arranges a system and many-sided rule of ethical action. And all this is well, a
\nnecessary stage of our advance; but in the end these ethical ideas and this intelligent ethical will which it has tried to train to its
\ncontrol, escape from its hold and soar up beyond its province. Always, even when enduring its rein and curb, they have that
\ninborn tendency.  <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 152<\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

For the ethical being like the rest is a growth and a seeking towards the absolute, the divine, which can only be attained
\nsecurely in the suprarational. It seeks after an absolute purity, an absolute right, an absolute truth, an absolute strength, an absolute love and self-giving, and it is most satisfied when it can get them in absolute measure, without limit, curb or compromise,
\ndivinely, infinitely, in a sort of godhead and transfiguration of the ethical being. The reason is chiefly concerned with what it best
\nunderstands, the apparent process, the machinery, the outward act, its result and effect, its circumstance, occasion and motive;
\nby these it judges the morality of the action and the morality of the doer. But the developed ethical being knows instinctively
\nthat it is an inner something which it seeks and the outward act is only a means of bringing out and manifesting within ourselves
\nby its psychological effects that inner absolute and eternal entity. The value of our actions lies not so much in their apparent nature
\nand outward result as in their help towards the growth of the Divine within us. It is difficult, even impossible to justify upon
\noutward grounds the absolute justice, absolute right, absolute purity, love or selflessness of an action or course of action; for
\naction is always relative, it is mixed and uncertain in its results, perplexed in its occasions. But it is possible to relate the inner
\nbeing to the eternal and absolute good, to make our sense and will full of it so as to act out of its impulsion or its intuitions
\nand inspirations. That is what the ethical being labours towards and the higher ethical man increasingly attains to in his inner
\nefforts. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tIn fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and
\nevil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according to the standards of the world,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 those are only crude appearances,
\n\t\t\t\u2014 it is an attempt to grow into the divine nature. Its parts of purity are an aspiration towards the inalienable purity of God’s
\nbeing; its parts of truth and right are a seeking after conscious unity with the law of the divine knowledge and will; its parts of
\nsympathy and charity are a movement towards the infinity and universality of the divine love; its parts of strength and manhood
\nare an edification of the divine strength and power.<\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 153 <\/p>\n

\n

<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t That is the
\nheart of its meaning. Its high fulfilment comes when the being of the man undergoes this transfiguration; then it is not his actions
\nthat standardise his nature but his nature that gives value to his actions; then he is no longer laboriously virtuous, artificially
\nmoral, but naturally divine. Actively, too, he is fulfilled and consummated when he is not led or moved either by the infrarational
\nimpulses or the rational intelligence and will, but inspired and piloted by the divine knowledge and will made conscious in
\nhis nature. And that can only be done, first by communication of the truth of these things through the intuitive mind as it
\npurifies itself progressively from the invasion of egoism, selfinterest, desire, passion and all kinds of self-will, finally through
\nthe suprarational light and power, no longer communicated but present and in possession of his being. Such was the supreme
\naim of the ancient sages who had the wisdom which rational man and rational society have rejected because it was too high
\na truth for the comprehension of the reason and for the powers of the normal limited human will too bold and immense, too
\ninfinite an effort. <\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tTherefore it is with the cult of Good, as with the cult of
\nBeauty and the cult of the spiritual. Even in its first instincts it is already an obscure seeking after the divine and absolute; it aims
\nat an absolute satisfaction, it finds its highest light and means in something beyond the reason, it is fulfilled only when it finds
\nGod, when it creates in man some image of the divine Reality. Rising from its infrarational beginnings through its intermediate
\ndependence on the reason to a suprarational consummation, the ethical is like the aesthetic and the religious being of man a
\nseeking after the Eternal.   <\/p>\n

\n

\n\t\t\tPage \u2013 154<\/font><\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chapter XV   The Suprarational Good   WE BEGIN to see, through the principle and law of our religious being, through the principle and law…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25-the-human-cycle","wpcat-58-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3055\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}