{"id":3503,"date":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","date_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/?p=3503"},"modified":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","modified_gmt":"2013-07-13T01:48:59","slug":"17-the-suprarational-good-vol-the-human-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worksofthemotherandsriaurobindo.org\/index.php\/01-works-of-sri-aurobindo\/02-other-editions\/the-human-cycle\/17-the-suprarational-good-vol-the-human-cycle","title":{"rendered":"-17_The Suprarational Good.htm"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\n\n
\n

\n
\nCHAPTER XV <\/font><\/p>\n

<\/b><\/p>\n

\nTHE SUPRARATIONAL GOOD<\/b><\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

<\/b><\/p>\n

\n <\/p>\n

\nW<\/font>E<\/b> BEGIN to see, through the principle and law of our
\nreligious being, through the principle and law of our aesthetic
\nbeing, the universality of a principle and law which is that of all
\nbeing and which we must therefore hold steadily in view in
\nregard to all human activities. It rests on a truth on which the
\nsages have always agreed, though by the intellectual thinker it
\nmay be constantly disputed. It is the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest
\nReality secret within, behind and above ourselves and things,
\na seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth which we glimpse
\nthrough religion, lies concealed behind all life; it is the great
\nsecret of life, that which it is in labour to discover and to make
\nreal to its self-knowledge. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThe seeking for God is also, subjectively, the seeking for our
\nhighest, truest, fullest, largest self. It is the seeking for a Reality
\nwhich the appearances of life conceal because they only partially
\nexpress it or because they express it from behind veils and figures,
\nby oppositions and contraries, often by what seem to be perversions and opposites of the Real. It is the seeking for something
\nwhose completeness comes only by a concrete and all-occupying
\nsense of the Infinite and Absolute; it can be established in its
\nintegrality only by finding a value of the infinite in all finite
\nthings and by the attempt\u2014necessary, inevitable, however impossible<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 161<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nor paradoxical it may seem to the normal reason\u2014to raise
\nall relativities to their absolutes and to reconcile their differences,
\noppositions and contraries by elevation and sublimation to some
\nhighest term in which all these are unified. Some perfect highest
\nterm there is by which all our imperfect lower terms can be justified and their discords harmonised if once we can induce them
\nto be its conscious expressions, to exist not for themselves but for
\nThat, as contributory values of that highest Truth, fractional
\nmeasures of that highest and largest common measure. A One
\nthere is in which all the entangled discords of this multiplicity
\nof separated, conflicting, intertwining, colliding ideas, forces,
\ntendencies, instincts, impulses, aspects, appearances which we
\ncall life, can find the unity of their diversity, the harmony of
\ntheir divergences, the justification of their claims, the correction
\nof their perversions and aberrations, the solution of their problems and disputes. Knowledge seeks for that in order that Life
\nmay know its own true meaning and transform itself into the
\nhighest and most harmonious possible expression of a divine
\nReality. All seeks for that, each power feels out for it in its own
\nway: the infrarational gropes for it blindly along the line of its
\ninstincts, needs, impulses; the rational lays for it its trap of logic
\nand order, follows out and gathers together its diversities, analyses them in order to synthetise; the suprarational gets behind
\nand above things and into their inmost parts, there to touch and
\nlay hands on the Reality itself in its core and essence and enlighten all its infinite details from that secret centre. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nThis truth comes most easily home to us in Religion and in
\nArt, in the cult of the spiritual and in the cult of the beautiful,
\nbecause there we get away most thoroughly from the unrestful
\npressure of the outward appearances of life, the urgent siege of
\nits necessities, the deafening clamour of its utilities. There we
\nare not compelled at every turn to make terms with some gross<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 162<\/font>
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n

 material claim, some vulgar but inevitable necessity of the hour
\nand the moment. We have leisure and breathing-time to seek the
\nReal behind the apparent: we are allowed to turn our eyes either
\naway from the temporary and transient or through the temporal
\nitself to the eternal; we can draw back from the limitations of the
\nimmediately practical and recreate our souls by the touch of the
\nideal and the universal. We begin to shake off our chains, we
\nget rid of life in it’s aspect of a prison-house with Necessity
\nfor our jailer and utility for our constant task-master; we are
\nadmitted to the liberties of the soul; we enter God’s infinite kingdom of beauty and delight or we lay hands on the keys of our
\nabsolute self-finding and open ourselves to the possession or the
\nadoration of the Eternal. There lies the immense value of Religion, the immense value of Art and Poetry to the human spirit; it lies in their immediate power for inner truth, for self-enlargement, for liberation. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nBut in other spheres of life, in the spheres of what by an
\nirony of our ignorance we call especially practical life,\u2014although,
\nif the Divine be our true object of search and realisation, our
\nnormal conduct in them and our current idea of them is the very
\nopposite of practical,\u2014we are less ready to recognise the universal
\ntruth. We take a long time to admit it even partially in theory,
\nwe are seldom ready at all to follow it in practice. And we find
\nthis difficulty because there especially, in all our practical life,
\nwe are content to be the slaves of an outward Necessity and
\nthink ourselves always excused when we admit as the law of our
\nthought, will and action the yoke of immediate and temporary
\nutilities. Yet even there we must arrive eventually at the highest
\ntruth. 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 contrary,
\nwe shall never find out their true meaning or resolve their harsh <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 163<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nand often agonising problems until we learn to see in them a
\nmeans towards the discovery and the individual and collective
\nexpression of our highest and, because our highest, therefore our
\ntruest and fullest self, our largest most imperative principle and
\npower of existence. All life is only a lavish and manifold opportunity given us to discover, realise, express the Divine. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIt is in our ethical being that this truest truth of practical
\nlife, its real and highest practicality becomes most readily apparent. It is true that the rational man has tried to reduce the ethical
\nlife 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
\nlaw of reason. He has never really succeeded and he never can
\nreally succeed; his appearances of success are mere pretences
\nof the intellect building elegant and empty constructions with
\nwords and ideas, mere conventions of logic and vamped-up synthesis, in sum pretentious failures which break down at the first
\nstrenuous touch of reality. Such was that extraordinary system
\nof utilitarian ethics discovered in the nineteenth century\u2014the
\ngreat century of science and reason and utility\u2014by one of its
\nmost positive and systematic minds and now deservedly discredited. Happily we need now only smile at its shallow pretentious
\nerrors, its substitution of a practical, outward and occasional test
\nfor the inner, subjective and absolute motive of ethics, its reduction of ethical action to an impossibly scientific and quite impracticable jugglery of moral mathematics, attractive enough to
\nthe reasoning and logical mind, quite false and alien to the whole
\ninstinct and intuition of the ethical being. Equally false and
\nimpracticable are other attempts of the reason to account for
\nand regulate its principle and phenomena\u2014the hedonistic theory
\nwhich refers all virtue to the pleasure and satisfaction of the
\nmind in good or the sociological which supposes ethics to be no
\nmore than a system of formulas, of conduct generated from the
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 164<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nsocial sense and a rule direction of the social impulses and would
\nregulate its action by that insufficient standard. The ethical being
\nescapes from all these formulas: it is a law to itself and finds its
\nprinciple in its own eternal nature which is not in its essential
\ncharacter a growth of evolving mind, even though it may seem
\nto be that in its earthly history; but a light from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nNot that all these errors have not each of them a truth behind their false constructions; for all errors of the human reason
\nare false 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
\nbalance of the greatest good of the greatest number, but simply
\nthe good of others and most widely the good of all is one ideal
\naim 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
\nalways sure what is the real good of all. But this does not help
\nto regulate our ethical practice, nor does it supply us with its
\ninner principle whether of being or of action, but only produces
\none of the many considerations by which we can feel our way
\nalong the road which is so difficult to travel. Good, not utility
\nmust be the principle and standard of good; otherwise we fall
\ninto the hands of that dangerous pretender expediency, whose
\nwhole method is alien to the ethical. Moreover, the standard of
\nutility, the judgment of utility, its spirit, its form, its application
\nmust vary with the individual nature, the habit of mind, the outlook on the world. Here there can be no reliable general law to
\nwhich all can subscribe, no set of large governing principles such
\nas it is sought to supply to our conduct by a true ethics. Nor can
\nethics at all or ever be a matter of calculation. There is only one
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 165<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nsafe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good,
\nhis instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good and
\nto govern by that his conduct. He may err, but he will be on his
\nright road in spite of all stumblings, because he will be faithful
\nto 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, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem
\nto our reason. But the law of nature of the ethical being is the
\npursuit of good; it can never be the pursuit of utility. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nNeither is its law the pursuit of pleasure high or base, nor
\nself-satisfaction of any kind, however subtle or even spiritual.
\nIt 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
\nspring 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
\nin virtue growing, in good accomplished there is a great pleasure
\nand that the seeking for it may well be always there as a subconscient motive to the pursuit of virtue. But for practical purposes
\nthis is a side aspect of the matter; it does not constitute pleasure
\ninto a test or standard of virtue. On the contrary, virtue comes
\nto the natural man by a struggle with his pleasure-seeking nature
\nand is often a deliberate embracing of pain, an edification of
\nstrength by suffering. We do not embrace that pain and struggle
\nfor the pleasure of the pain and the pleasure of the struggle; for
\nthat higher strenuous delight, though it is felt by the secret spirit
\nin us, is not usually or not at first conscious in the conscient
\nnormal part of our being which is the field of the struggle. The
\naction of 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
\nof an absolute standard, a law of the Divine. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIn 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 or<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 166<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nhis ethical evolution. For ethics only begins by the demand upon
\nhim of something other than his personal preference, vital pleasure or material self-interest; and this demand seems at first to
\nwork on him through the necessity of his relations with others,
\nby the exigencies of his social existence, but that this is not the
\ncore of the matter is shown by the fact that the ethical demand
\ndoes not always square with the social demand, nor the ethical standard always
\ncoincide with the social standard. On the contrary, the ethical man is often called upon to reject and do battle
\nwith the social demand, to break, to move away from, to reverse
\nthe social standard. His relations with others and his relations
\nwith himself are both of them the occasions of his ethical
\ngrowth; but that which determines his ethical being is his relations with God,
\nthe urge of the Divine upon him whether concealed in his nature or conscious in his higher self or inner
\ngenius. He obeys an inner ideal, not an outer standard; he answers to a divine law in his being, not to a social claim or a collective necessity. The ethical imperative comes not from around,
\nbut from within him and above him. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIt has been felt and said from of old that the laws of right,
\nthe laws of perfect conduct are the laws of the gods, eternal beyond, laws that man is conscious of and summoned to obey. The
\nage of reason has scouted this summary account of the matter
\nas a superstition or a poetical imagination which the nature and
\nhistory of the world contradict. But still there is a truth in this
\nancient superstition or imagination which the rational denial of
\nit misses and the rational confirmations of it, whether Kant’s
\ncategorical imperative or another, do not altogether restore. If man’s
\nconscience 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
\nin all their mutations which lies at the very roots of his own
\nnature and of world-nature. And if Nature in man and the world
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 167<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nis in its beginnings infra-ethical as well as infra-rational, as it is at
\nits summit supra-ethical as well as supra-rational, yet in that
\ninfra-ethical there is something which becomes in the human
\nplane of being the ethical, and that supra-ethical is itself a consummation of the ethical and cannot be reached by any who
\nhave not trod the long ethical road. Below hides that secret of
\ngood in all things which the human being approaches and tries
\nto deliver partially through ethical instinct and ethical idea; above is hidden the eternal good which exceeds our partial and
\nfragmentary ethical conceptions. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nOur ethical impulses and activities begin like all the rest in
\nthe infrarational and take their rise from the subconscient.
\nThey arise as an instinct of right, an instinct of obedience to an
\nunderstood law, an instinct of self-giving in labour, an instinct
\nof sacrifice and self-sacrifice, an instinct of love, of self-subordination and of solidarity with others. Man obeys the law at first
\nwithout any inquiry into the why and the wherefore; he does
\nnot seek for it a sanction in the reason. His first thought is that
\nit is a law created by higher powers than himself and his race
\nand he says with the ancient poet that he knows not whence
\nthese laws sprang, but only that they are and endure and cannot
\nwith impunity be violated. What the instincts and impulses
\nseek after, the reason labours to make us understand, so that the
\nwill may come to use the ethical impulses intelligently and turn
\nthe instincts into ethical ideas. It corrects man’s crude and often
\nerring misprisions of the ethical instinct, separates and purifies
\nhis confused associations, shows as best it can the relations of
\nhis often clashing moral ideals, tries to arbitrate and compromise
\nbetween their conflicting claims, arranges a system and many-sided rule of ethical action. And all this is well, a necessary stage
\nof our advance; but in the end these ethical ideas and<\/i> this intelligent ethical will which it has tried to train to its control, escape
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 168<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n

 from its hold and soar up beyond its province. Always, even
\nwhen enduring its rein and curb, they have that inborn tendency. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nFor the ethical being like the rest is a growth and a seeking
\ntowards the absolute, the divine, which can only be attained
\nsecurely in the suprarational. It seeks after an absolute purity,
\nan absolute right, an absolute truth, an absolute strength, an
\nabsolute love and self-giving, and it is most satisfied when it can
\nget them in absolute measure, without limit, curb or compromise,
\ndivinely, infinitely, in a sort of godhead and transfiguration of
\nthe ethical being. The reason is chiefly concerned with what it
\nbest understands, the apparent process, the machinery, the outward act, its result and effect, its circumstance, occasion and
\nmotive; by these it judges the morality of the action and the morality of the
\ndoer. But the developed ethical being knows instinctively that it is an inner something which it seeks and the
\noutward act is only a means of bringing out and manifesting
\nwithin ourselves by its psychological effects that inner absolute
\nand eternal entity. The value of our actions lies not so much
\nin their apparent nature and outward result as in their help towards the growth of the Divine within us. It is difficult, even
\nimpossible to justify upon outward grounds the absolute justice,
\nabsolute right, absolute purity, love or selflessness of an action
\nor course of action; for action is always relative, it is mixed and uncertain in
\nits results, perplexed in its occasions. But it is possible to relate the inner being to the eternal and absolute good,
\nto make our sense and will full of it so as to act out of its impulsion or its intuitions and inspirations. That is what the ethical
\nbeing labours towards and the higher ethical man increasingly
\nattains to in his inner efforts. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nIn fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and
\nevil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according <\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 169<\/font> <\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\nto the standards of the world,\u2014those are only crude appearances,
\nit is an attempt to grow into the divine nature. Its parts o\u00a3
\npurity are an aspiration towards the inalienable purity of God’s
\nbeing; its parts of truth and right are a seeking after conscious
\nunity with the law of the divine knowledge and will; its parts of
\nsympathy and charity are a movement towards the infinity and
\nuniversality of the divine love; its parts of strength and manhood
\nare an edification of the divine strength and power. That is the
\nheart of its meaning. Its high fulfilment comes when the being
\nof the man undergoes this transfiguration; then it is not his actions that standardise his nature but his nature that gives value
\nto his actions; then he is no longer laboriously virtuous, artificially moral, but naturally divine. Actively, too, he is fulfilled
\nand consummated when he is not led or moved either by the
\ninfrarational impulses or the rational intelligence and will, but inspired and
\npiloted by the divine knowledge and will made conscious in his nature. And that can only be done, first by communication of the truth of these things through the intuitive mind
\nas it purifies itself progressively from the invasion of egoism, self-interest, desire, passion and all kinds of self-will, finally through
\nthe suprarational light and power, no longer communicated but
\npresent and in possession of his being. Such was the supreme
\naim of the ancient sages who had the wisdom which rational
\nman and rational society have rejected because it was too high a
\ntruth for the comprehension of the reason and for the powers
\nof the normal limited human will too bold and immense, too
\ninfinite an effort. <\/font><\/p>\n

\nTherefore 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
\nalready an obscure seeking after the divine and absolute; it aims
\nat an absolute satisfaction, it finds its highest light and means in
\nsomething beyond the reason, it is fulfilled only when it finds
\nGod, when it creates in man some image of the divine Reality.<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 170<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\n Rising from its infrarational beginnings through its intermediate
\ndependence on the reason to a suprarational consummation, the
\nethical is like the aesthetic and the religious being of man a seeking after the Eternal.
\n<\/font><\/p>\n

\nPage – 171<\/font><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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