The Battleground of Life
We must now again consider the situation from which the Gita arises before we proceed further. For this purpose, we have to follow in the large steps of the Teacher of the Gita. We have to observe his tracing of the triune path of man. This path is that of his will, heart and thought raising themselves to the Highest. It leads us into the being of that which is the supreme object of all action, love and knowledge. However, this time we have to do this in its largest bearings as a type of human life in general (and not just the particular and peculiar situation of Arjuna) and even of all world-existence. It is true that Arjuna is himself concerned only with his own situation and his inner struggle and the law of action which he must follow. However, as we have already seen, the particular question he raises, in the manner in which he raises it does really bring up many more questions.
These are the question of
· Human life and action
· What the world is, and
· Why it is so, and
· How possibly, it being what it is, life here in the world can be reconciled with life in the Spirit
Moreover, the Teacher insists that the issue of resolution of all this deep and difficult matters of life is the very foundation of his doctrine of ‘command to an action’. Having reached this stage of understanding, this resolution then must proceed from a new poise of being and by the light of a liberating knowledge.
We have now to see as exactly what is the difficulty for the man who has to do the two things simultaneously :
· Outwardly, he has to take the world as it is and act in it, and
· He has also to live the spiritual life from within.
We have to discern as to what is this aspect of existence which appeals his awakened mind and at the same time brings about the dejection and discouragement. This is highlighted by the title of the first chapter of the Gita which it significantly calls the Yoga of the dejection of Arjuna. It is the dejection and discouragement felt by the human being when he is forced to face the spectacle of the universe as it really is. This happens when the veil of the ethical illusion, the illusion of self-righteousness is torn from his eyes. This is the stage before a higher reconciliation with himself is effected. This situation is represented in the two aspects in the war of Kurukshetra.
These two aspects are :
· Outwardly, it is figured as the carnage and massacre of Kurukshetra, and
· Inwardly, spiritually, it is represented by the vision of the Lord of all things as Time arising to devour and destroy the creatures whom it has made.
We have to note that this is the vision of the Lord of all existence who is the universal Creator as well as the universal Destroyer. The ancient Scriptures have stated this in a rather ruthless image as “The sages and the heroes are his food and death is the spice of his banquet.” It is one and the same truth seen first indirectly and obscurely in the facts of life. Then it is seen directly and clearly in the soul’s vision of that which manifests itself in life. The outward aspect is that of world-existence and human existence which is full of struggle and slaughter. The inward aspect is that of the universal Being fulfilling himself in a vast creation and a vast destruction. In Kurukshetra, the battle field of massacre, Arjuna has two visions :
· Life a battle and a field of death, and
· God the Terrible
We have various theories of the struggle in the world and its result :
· War as Creator
Heraclitus has said that “War is the father of all things”. War is the king of all. Like most of the other aphorisms of the Greek thinker, it contains a profound truth. Everything in this world, if not the world itself, seems to be born from a clash of material and other forces.
· Self Destruction of World
Some go even further and conclude that through the struggle of forces, tendencies, principles, beings the world seems to progress. It ever creates new things and at the same time ever destroys the old things. One is not sure where the world thus marches to. But one thing is sure, The final result of all this is a self-destruction of the world.
· Vain Cycles : Some say that the final result is the unending series of vain cycles.
· Progressive Cycles
The most optimistic opinion is that it leads to the unending series of progressive cycles and not the vain cycles. Whatever trouble and apparent confusion may be there initially, it leads through them all towards a higher and higher approximation to some divine apocalypse.
There is divergence of opinions as reflected above. However, we can have two common threads running through all the above theories.
· There is no construction without destruction. There is no harmony except by a poise of contending forces won out of many actual and potential discords. And
· There is no continual existence of life except by a constant self-feeding and devouring of other life.
Three Commandments
Our very bodily life is a constant dying and being reborn. The body itself is a beleaguered city attacked by assailing forces and protected by defending forces, whose business is to devour each other. All our existence is of similar nature.
It seems that we have three commandment from the very beginning of the world :
· “Thou shalt not conquer except by battle with thy fellows, and thy surroundings;
· Thou shalt not even live except by battle and struggle and by absorbing into thyself other life.
· The first law of this world that I have made is creation and reservation by destruction.”
Though it seems ironical to put it this way, we can not deny the fact that it represents some aspects of the reality.
Blatant statement of Truth by Upanishads
Ancient thought accepted this starting point so far as it was observable by scrutiny of the universe. The old Upanishads saw it very clearly. They have phrased it with an uncompromising thoroughness without falling into the temptation to use any honeyed glosses or optimistic scuttlings of the truth. They said that “Hunger is Death. It is the creator and master of this world.” They figured vital existence in the image of the Horse of the sacrifice. They described Matter by a name which means ordinarily food. They said that we call it food because the creatures devour matter, and in turn Matter itself devours creatures. The Darwinians rediscovered this truth in the formula of the material world as “The eater eating is eaten”. They laid it down that the struggle for life is the law of evolutionary existence. Modern Science has only further emphasized the old truths that had already been expressed in much more forcible, wide and accurate formulas by the aphorisms of Heraclitus and the figures employed by the Upanishads.
Benefits of Nietzsche’s Theory
Nietzsche has insisted upon war as an aspect of life and the ideal man as a warrior. He has put forward the theory that the human being is the camel-man to begin with and the child-man hereafter, but he must be the lion-man in the middle if he is to attain his perfection. We may widely differ from many of the moral and practical conclusions he drew from these theories. However, we are forced to admit their undeniable justification. They recall us to a truth we like to hide out of sight. It is for our own good that we should be reminded of it.
The reasons are twofold :
· First, because it has a tonic effect for every strong soul. It saves us from the flabbiness and relaxation encouraged by a too much pleasing sentimentalism of philosophic, religious or ethical thought.. This sentimentalism loves to look upon Nature as love and life and beauty and good, but it turns away from her grim mask of death. It adores God as Shiva (the holy) but refuses to adore him as Rudra (the terrible).
· Secondly, unless we have the honesty and courage to look existence straight in the face, we shall never arrive at any effective solution of its discords and oppositions.
Opposite angles
We can view this from two opposite angles – both leading towards the same conclusion. These angles are :
· First, we must see what life and the world are in reality. Afterwards, with all the good intentions we can set about finding the right way to transform them into what they should be. The repellent aspect of existence holds in itself some secret of the final harmony. If we ignore it or belittle it, we then miss that secret. All our efforts at a solution will then fail. They will fail by nothing else but the fault of our own self-indulgent ignoring of the true elements of the problem.
· On the other hand, we may see the discords and struggles of life as an enemy who is to be beaten down, trampled on, excised and eliminated. Even if we hold this view, still we gain nothing by underrating its power and hold upon life. We achieve nothing by refusing to see how firmly it is rooted in the effective past and the actually operative principles of existence.
Morality of War
We should note here that war and destruction are not only universal principles of our life here in its purely material aspects. They are also the principles of our mental and moral existence. It is self evident that in the actual life of intellectual, social, political and moral man we can not make any real progress without a struggle. There is always a battle between what already exists and lives on the one hand and what seeks to exist and live on the other. There is also a battle between all that stands behind either of these two sides. As the men and things are in actuality, it is impossible to observe the two principles :
· To advance , to grow, to fulfill,
and still
· To observe the principle of harmlessness.
This principle of harmlessness is placed before us as the highest and best law of conduct.
Soul force and destruction
Some people advocate that we will use only soul-force and never destroy by war or even will not adopt defensive employment of physical violence ! Philosophically, this sound good. The trouble is that until the soul-force is effective the Asuric force in men and nations will trample down, break, slaughter, burn and pollute the world. We see it actually happening today. Moreover, with this philosophy of non-violence, the Asuric force will operate at its ease and unhindered. This will cause as much destruction of life by our abstinence as caused by others resorting to violence. It is no solace to say that we have set up an ideal which may some day and at any rate ought to lead up to better things. Even soul-force, when it is effective, destroys. Only those people who have effectively used the soul force with full awareness will know how much more terrible and destructive it is than the sword and the cannon. Only those, who do not limit their view to the front end of the act and its immediate effects, can see the ultimate reality.
They will know :
· how tremendous are its after-effects.
· how much is eventually destroyed
and with that much
· all the life that depended on it and fed upon it.
Evil can not perish without the destruction of much that lives by the evil. The fact that we are personally saved from the pain of the sensational act of violence does not reduce the severity of the destruction.
Soul force and the law of Karma
There is more to the use of soul force. Every time we use soul-force we raise a great force of Karma against our adversary. The after-movements of the force of Karma are beyond our power to control. Vasishtha uses soul-force against the military violence of Vishwamitra and armies of Huns and Shakas and Pallavas hurl themselves on the aggressor. The very quiescence and passivity of the spiritual man faced with the violence and aggression of the enemy awakens the tremendous forces of the world to a retributive action. Looking from a larger perspective, it may even be more merciful to put up a forceful resistance to the representatives of the evil than to allow them to trample on until they cause a worse destruction than we would ever think of inflicting. It is not enough that our own hands should remain clean and our souls unstained. It will not cause the law of strife and destruction to die out of the world. It is necessary that the root cause of the strife must first disappear out of humanity. The law will not be abrogated by mere immobility and inertia which is unwilling to use or which is incapable of using any kind of resistance to evil. Indeed, Tamas (inertia) causes much more injury than what the Rajasic principle of strife can cause. The Rajasic principle at least creates more than it destroys. Therefore, the Slayer of creatures remain unabolished by the individual’s abstention from strife and from its inevitable concomitant destruction in their more gross and physical form. It may at the most help his own moral being. This is as far as the individual’s action goes.
From the point of view of the world at large, the whole of human history bears witness to the inexorable vitality and persistent prevalence of this principle in the world.
Is there any alternative to strife ?
It is natural that we should attempt to palliate, to lay stress on other aspects. Strife and destruction are not all. There is the saving principle of association and mutual help as opposite to the force of dissociation and mutual strife. We have a power of love which is no less than the power of egoistic self-assertion. We have an impulse to sacrifice ourselves for others as opposite to the impulse to sacrifice others to ourselves. However good the above propositions may sound, we can not take them at the face value. When we see how these principles have actually worked, we shall not be tempted to gloss over or ignore the power of their opposites represented by the evil force.
We will see this one by one.
Association
We have talked about the association. But we must remember that the association has been worked not only for mutual help, but at the same time for defence and aggression. It has been used to strengthen as against all that attacks or resists in the struggle for life. Association itself has been a servant of war, egoism and the self-assertion of life against life.
Love
Love itself has been constantly a power of death. Especially it is true in the case of the love of good and the love of God as embraced by the human ego. It has been responsible for much strife, slaughter and destruction.
Self Sacrifice
Self sacrifice is great and noble. But at its highest it is an acknowledgement of the law of Life by death. It then becomes an offering on the altar of some Power that demands a victim in order that the work desired may be done. In the lower and the superior scale of animal life, we see the highest examples of self-sacrifice.
These instances are :
· The mother bird facing the animal prey in defence of its young
· The patriot dying for his country’s freedom
· The religious martyr, or
· The martyr of an idea
This is very much evident in what these animals bear witness in such circumstances.
Consequences are terrible
At the same time, if we consider the subsequent consequences, an easy optimism becomes even less possible. Take the example of the patriot dying in order that his country may be free. Now, let us observe the same country a few decades after the Lord of Karma has paid the price of the blood and the suffering that was given. You will see that the same country has become an oppressor itself. It has become an exploiter and conqueror of colonies and dependencies. It is devouring others so that it may aggressively live and succeed in life. The Christian martyrs perish in their thousands setting soul-force against empire-force so that Christ may conquer. Christianity prevail. Soul-force does triumph. Christianity does prevail. But not the Christ. The victorious religion becomes a militant and dominant Church. It is then more fanatically persecuting power than the creed and the empire which it replaced. The same religions organise themselves into powers of mutual strife. They battle fiercely against each other in order to live, to grow and to possess the world.
All these observations invariably lead us to show that there is some fundamental element of existence which makes this strife and struggle an inevitable fact of life. It may even be the initial element rooted in our existence from the very beginning of life on earth. We do not know how to conquer it. This may be because either it can not be conquered due to its very nature or it may be because we have not looked at it with a strong and impartial gaze. A gaze that will enable us to recognise it calmly and fairly and know what it is. We must have the courage and impartiality to look at the existence in the face, in the ‘eye to eye’ contact with it, if our sole aim is to arrive at a right solution, whatever that solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face. These two can not be separated. The responsibility for the laws of the world-existence can not be shifted away from Him who created them. It can not be shifted away from That which constituted it. Even in this endeavour also we are tempted to palliate and equivocate. We erect a God of Love and Mercy. We erect a God of Good, a God who is just, righteous and virtuous. This is done according to our own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness. All that is outside the scope of the definition of our God is then termed as not being He or not being His.
We have several explanations for this :
· We treat it as being made by some diabolical Power.
· We theorise that our God tolerated or suffered this diabolical Power for the purpose of working out its wicked will.
· We may say that the material of our existence which is not God is made out by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd.
· We may even surmise that it was the fault of some selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God. This looks as if in this animal world, it was man who had created the law of death and devouring.
· We may say that it is really the Nature who by a force of tremendous process creates and preserves. However, it is also the Nature who slays and destroys what she has created and preserved. She effects destruction in the same step and by the same inevitable action as she creates.
It is only a few religions which have had the courage say without any reserve that this enigmatic World-Power is one Deity, one Trinity. The Indian religion has this courage. It had the courage to lift up the image of the Force that acts in the world in both its aspects :
· The beneficent Durga,
and also
· Terrible Kali in her blood-stained dance of destruction
It says that “This too is the Mother; this also know to be God; this too, if thou hast the strength, adore”. It is significant that the Indian religion which had this unflinching honesty and tremendous courage, has succeeded in creating a profound and widespread spirituality such as no other can parallel. Truth is the foundation of real spirituality and courage is its soul. ‘Tasyai…. Satyam dyatamam’.
This does not mean that
· all this strife and destruction are the alpha and omega of existence,
· that harmony is not greater than war,
· love is not greater than hate,
· the manifest divine is not greater than death
It also does not mean that we must not move towards the replacement
· of physical force by soul-force,
· of war by peace,
· of strife by union,
· of devouring by love,
· of egoism by universality,
· of death by immortal life.
We have to realize and understand the other side of the final Truth.
That is God is not only :
· the destroyer, but the Friend of creatures,
· not only the cosmic Trinity, but the Transcendent,
and
· the terrible Kali is also the loving and beneficent Mother.
· The lord of Kurukshetra is the divine comrade and charioteer, the attracter of beings, incarnate Krishna.
Through all his explanations he may be attracting us to whatever goal or godhead and irrespective of wherever and whatever he is driving at the moment through all the strife and clash and confusion, one thing is absolutely certain. He is leading us eventually to some transcendence of all these aspects upon which we have been so firmly insisting. We have now to discover as to where, how, with what kind of transcendence and under what conditions this journey takes place. The first necessary condition for this to happen is to see the world as it is. We have to rightly observe and value his action as it reveals itself at the start and now. Once we fulfill these conditions, then the way and the goal will better reveal themselves. We must first acknowledge Kurukshetra. We must first fearlessly submit to the law of Life by Death before we can find our way to the Life Immortal. We must open our eyes, with a less appalled gaze than Arjuna’s, to the vision of our Lord of Time and Death. We must cease to deny, hate or recoil from the universal Destroyer. Then only will our understanding of the final Truth be clear and precise.
...... based on Chapter 5, Essays on the Gita by Sri Aurobindo
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