Ethics (the real thing)

It is the very nature of the soul or the psychic being to turn towards the divine Truth as the sunflower to the sun. (Sri Aurobindo, SY 153)

Ethics, it has been said, is a stage in evolution. Evolution starts out non-ethical, becomes infra-ethical in life, can be half-ethical or even anti-ethical in the intelligent animal called “man,” and will eventually be supra-ethical — it will have no need of ethics. To requote Sri Aurobindo:

The ethical impulse and attitude, so all-important to humanity, is a means by which it struggles out of the lower harmony and universality based upon inconscience and broken up by Life into individual discords towards a higher harmony and universality based upon conscient oneness with all existences. Arriving at that goal, this means will no longer be necessary or even possible, since the qualities and oppositions on which it depends will naturally dissolve and disappear in the final reconciliation. [LD 104]

Here Sri Aurobindo refers to ethics in the narrower sense of a mental standard of conduct, a moral rule, as he also does in the following passage:

an ethical rule merely puts a bit in the mouth of the wild horses of Nature and exercises over them a difficult and partial control, but it has no power to transform Nature so that she may move in a secure freedom fulfilling the intuitions that proceed from a divine self-knowledge. At best its method is to lay down limits, to coerce the devil, to put the wall of a relative and very doubtful safety around us. [SY 136]

But “ethics” can also be given a deeper meaning, as Sri Aurobindo does when he speaks of our “true ethical being” [HC 98] and characterizes utilitarian ethics as “false and alien to the whole instinct and intuition of the ethical being” [HC 149].

The ethical being ... is a law to itself and finds its principle in its own eternal nature which is not in its essential character a growth of evolving mind, even though it may seem to be that in its earthly history, but a light from the ideal, a reflection in man of the Divine....

There is only one safe rule for the ethical man, to stick to his principle of good, his instinct for good, his vision of good, his intuition of good and 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 faithful 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, dangerous is an alien law however speciously superior it may seem to our reason....

[The ethical man] 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, but from within him and above him.... If man’s conscience is a creation of his evolving nature, if his conceptions of ethical law are mutable and depend on his stage of evolution, yet at the root of them there is something constant in all 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 its beginnings infra-ethical as well as infrarational, as it is at its summit supra-ethical as well as suprarational, yet in that infra-ethical there is something which becomes in the human plane of being the ethical, and that supra-ethical is itself a consummation of 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 which the human being approaches and tries to deliver partially through ethical instinct and ethical idea; above is hidden the eternal Good which exceeds our partial and fragmentary ethical conceptions....

The reason is chiefly concerned with what it best understands, the apparent process, the machinery, the outward act, its result and effect, its circumstance, occasion and motive; by these it judges the morality of the action and the morality of the doer. But the developed ethical being knows instinctively that it is an inner something which it seeks.... [It is possible for our ethical being] to make our sense and will full of [the eternal and absolute good] so as to act out of its impulsion or its intuitions and inspirations. That is what the ethical being labours towards and the higher ethical man increasingly attains to in his inner efforts.

In fact ethics is not in its essence a calculation of good and evil in the action or a laboured effort to be blameless according to the standards of the world,—those are only crude appearances,—it is an attempt to grow into the divine nature.... That is the heart of its meaning. Its high fulfilment comes when the being of the man undergoes this transfiguration; then it is not his actions that standardise his nature but his nature that gives value to his actions; then he is no longer laboriously virtuous, artificially moral, but naturally divine. Actively, too, he is fulfilled and consummated when he is not led or moved either by the infrarational impulses or the rational intelligence and will, but inspired and piloted by the divine knowledge and will made conscious in his nature....

Such was the supreme aim of the ancient sages who had the wisdom which rational man and rational society have rejected because it was too high a truth for the comprehension of the reason and for the powers of the normal limited human will too bold and immense, too infinite an effort. [HC 149–54]

These passages are from “The Suprarational Good,” a chapter of The Human Cycle that follows “The Suprarational Beauty,” from which I have quoted here. In these two chapters Sri Aurobindo makes the point that Beauty and Good are aspects of what is ultimately real — Brahman or Sachchidananda or whatever you want to call it. They are aspects of the infinite quality or delight at the heart of Reality. If we hold ourselves responsible for them, thinking of ourselves as their creators, we give ourselves way too much credit.

In a chapter of The Life Divine, Sri Aurobindo raises the question: “what is it in the human being that originates and gives its power and place to the sense of good and evil?” It is neither the vital mind’s first valuation of things in sensational and individual terms — “all that is pleasant, helpful, beneficial to the life-ego is good, all that is unpleasant, malefic, injurious or destructive is evil” — nor its second valuation of things in utilitarian and social terms. Nor is it any ethical system that the thinking mind founds on reason or on an aesthetic, emotional or hedonistic basis.

[A]ll these standards are either too narrow and rigid or complex and confused, uncertain, subject to alteration by a mental or a vital change or evolution; yet it is felt that there is a deeper abiding truth and something within us that can have the intuition of that truth,—in other words, that the real sanction is inward, spiritual and psychic. The traditional account of this inner witness is conscience, a power of perception in us half mental, half intuitive; but this is something superficial, constructed, unreliable: there is certainly within us, though less easily active, more masked by surface elements, a deeper spiritual sense, the soul’s discernment, an inborn light within our nature. [LD 631–32]

This inborn light within our nature is not a product of Matter (the principle which in the lower hemisphere of existence corresponds to the principle of Sat in the higher), nor is it a creation of Life (the principle which in the lower hemisphere corresponds to the principle of Chit), nor does it belong to Mind (the principle which in the lower hemisphere corresponds to the principle of Vijnana or Supermind). It is what in the lower hemisphere corresponds to the principle of Ananda. It is a soul-personality, a psychic being, which insists on the distinction between good and evil “though in a larger sense than the mere moral difference” [LD 632]

[The original All-Delight, Ananda] is not present in the universal alone, but it is here secret in ourselves, as we discover when we go back from our outward consciousness into the Self within us; the psychic being in us ... extracts a divine meaning and use from our most poignant sufferings, difficulties, misfortunes. Nothing but this All-Delight could dare or bear to impose such experiences on itself or on us; nothing else could turn them thus to its own utility and our spiritual profit. [LD 420–21]

If this psychic being is not a product of matter, life, or mind, how does it relate to the world of matter, life, and mind? As mentioned previously, the drama of evolution begins not with one but with two multitudes: a multitude of formless particles and a multitude of disempowered selves or souls.

The multitude of formless particles is an apparent multitude. If Sat or Being — the substantial aspect of Sachchidananda — appears to be many, is because of the mind’s almost exclusive emphasis on what distinguishes and separates.

At its origin, as we have seen here, mind is a cosmic principle. It is “the final action of the Truth-consciousness in its apprehensive operation” [LD 183]. In the lower hemisphere, which encompasses matter, life, and mind, the mind attaches a grossly exaggerated reality to the multiplicity it serves to create. As we have seen here, it is the multitude of spatial relations that is real. What accounts for the apparent multiplicity of the relata — the parts and particles between which the relations obtain — is the mind’s unawareness of the reflexive nature of these relations — the fact that they are self-relations, the fact that they obtain between the One and the selfsame One, or the fact that the true number of “ultimate constituents” is one.

The multitude of disempowered selves or souls bears a similar relation to the One, albeit to the One qua ultimate subject rather than the One qua ultimate object. You may recall that evolution presupposes involution. As we have seen here and here, the first step towards involution is individuation: the original aperspectival, all-containing consciousness adopts a multitude of standpoints from which it experiences its content in perspective. Each individual that is thus brought into being is, at its core, a unique facet of the infinite quality/delight (Ananda) at the heart of Reality. In a perfect world, each of these individuals would have the power to express, realize, or manifest its unique essential nature, its svabhāva, and it would do so in harmony with the self-expression of every other individual. But at the very beginning of the drama of evolution, each is deprived of the power to manifest its svabhāva.

Between these two multitudes there thus yawns a gulf. The individual selves or souls lack the means to cast their essential natures into creative ideas, while the so-called ultimate constituents of matter lack the means to realize ideas — except for the laws of physics, which are instrumental in setting the stage for the adventure of evolution.

Evolution can thus be likened to the construction of a bridge — a construction which takes place from both sides. The first principle to emerge on the material side is life, which has the power to receive ideas and to realize them in matter. This is followed by the emergence of mind, which has the power to translate essential quality into expressive ideas. What happens on the other side is that the soul, the essential psychic entity, evolves a psychic personality, which is capable of exerting an increasingly effective influence on the external being. To cut a long and complex story short, the psychic being evolves through the experiences that the external being affords, while the external being grows through the increasing influence the psychic being is able to exert.

Another narrative shortcut is to regard the operations of life and mind sans psychic influence as deterministic. The spurious freedom that the external being believes to enjoy turns into genuine freedom to the extent that it becomes conscious of the psychic entity within and a means of self-expression for the latter. One can thus conceive of two dynamisms, the deterministic dynamism of nature and a “soul dynamism” by which the psychic being manifests its svabhāva. And one can then foresee a progressive integration of the two dynamisms: nature-force becoming increasingly susceptible to modification by “soul-power” until it is fully subsumed by the latter. One can even foresee a rather distant future in which not only the mental and vital parts of our complex make-up but even the physical body comes to be an integral part of the psychic being and to partake of its immortality.

In the remainder of this post, I offer a few details of that long and complex story, in Sri Aurobindo’s own words.

The psychic being can at first exercise only a concealed and partial and indirect action through the mind, the life and the body, since it is these parts of Nature that have to be developed as its instruments of self-expression, and it is long confined by their evolution. Missioned to lead man in the Ignorance towards the light of the Divine Consciousness, it takes the essence of all experience in the Ignorance to form a nucleus of soul-growth in the nature; the rest it turns into material for the future growth of the instruments which it has to use until they are ready to be a luminous instrumentation of the Divine.

It is this secret psychic entity which is the true original Conscience in us deeper than the constructed and conventional conscience of the moralist, for it is this which points always towards Truth and Right and Beauty, towards Love and Harmony and all that is a divine possibility in us, and persists till these things become the major need of our nature. It is the psychic personality in us that flowers as the saint, the sage, the seer; when it reaches its full strength, it turns the being towards the Knowledge of Self and the Divine, towards the supreme Truth, the supreme Good, the supreme Beauty, Love and Bliss, the divine heights and largenesses, and opens us to the touch of spiritual sympathy, universality, oneness.

On the contrary, where the psychic personality is weak, crude or ill-developed, the finer parts and movements in us are lacking or poor in character and power, even though the mind may be forceful and brilliant, the heart of vital emotions hard and strong and masterful, the life-force dominant and successful, the bodily existence rich and fortunate and an apparent lord and victor. It is then the outer desire-soul, the pseudo-psychic entity, that reigns and we mistake its misinterpretations of psychic suggestion and aspiration, its ideas and ideals, its desires and yearnings for true soul-stuff and wealth of spiritual experience. [LD 238–40]

At this points Sri Aurobindo added the following footnote:

The word “psychic” in our ordinary parlance is more often used in reference to this desire-soul than to the true psychic. It is used still more loosely of psychological and other phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal character which are really connected with the inner mind, inner vital, subtle physical being subliminal in us and are not at all direct operations of the psyche. Even such phenomena as materialisation and dematerialisation are included, though, if established, they evidently are not soul-action and would not shed any light upon the nature or existence of the psychic entity, but would rather be an abnormal action of an occult subtle physical energy intervening in the ordinary status of the gross body of things, reducing it to its own subtle condition and again reconstituting it in the terms of gross matter.

The Mother made this drawing to explain to a child the meaning of Yoga. Man is at the bottom, the Divine at the top. The wavy line is the path of the ordinary life, the straight line the path of Yoga.

The fundamental psychic entity in us has the delight of life and all experience as part of the progressive manifestation of the spirit, but the very principle of its delight of life is to gather out of all contacts and happenings their secret divine sense and essence, a divine use and purpose so that by experience our mind and life may grow out of the Inconscience towards a supreme consciousness, out of the divisions of the Ignorance towards an integralising consciousness and knowledge. It is there for that and it pursues from life to life its ever-increasing upward tendency and insistence; the growth of the soul is a growth out of darkness into light, out of falsehood into truth, out of suffering into its own supreme and universal Ananda. The soul’s perception of good and evil may not coincide with the mind’s artificial standards, but it has a deeper sense, a sure discrimination of what points to the higher Light and what points away from it. [LD 632–33]

When [the secret psychic entity] becomes dominant over the nature, when we are consciously the soul and when mind, life and body take their true place as its instruments, we are aware of a guide within that knows the truth, the good, the true delight and beauty of existence, controls heart and intellect by its luminous law and leads our life and being towards spiritual completeness. Even within the obscure workings of the Ignorance we have then a witness who discerns, a living light that illumines, a will that refuses to be misled and separates the mind’s truth from its error, the heart’s intimate response from its vibrations to a wrong call and wrong demand upon it, the life’s true ardour and plenitude of movement from vital passion and the turbid falsehoods of our vital nature and its dark self-seekings. This is the first step of self-realisation, to enthrone the soul, the divine psychic individual in the place of the ego. [LD 653–54]