Author’s Note: The chapter titled, ‘The Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil’ in Sri Aurobindo’s The Life Divine (Book Two, Part I, Chapter XIV), is the main source of inspiration and material for this essay.

1. The fundamental problem

1.1. Introduction

Bliss is the inherent characteristic of every finite being and of every world process. The relative and the finite can rise above their relativity and finitude in proportion as they share this eternal bliss.

An obstacle which makes acceptance of this truth near impossible is prevalence of ignorance, evil, pain and suffering. Innocent persons in public parks, crowded trains or in twin towers are killed by suicide bombers for no apparent reason; mass killings, ethnic cleansing and air attacks on some other civil places are done to retaliate such sins of an individual or a small group of individuals; and intellectuals are (kept) busy justifying this as justice!

Residents are buried alive under the debris of their collapsed new building and shattered dreams within a fraction of a second. One crore rupees spent in an evening celebration is nothing for a few even if about one crore children are victims of starvation and farmers continue to commit suicide. Is there God really? And how can He allow such things to continue? Theory of Karma appears as too thin a cover to hide the spread of these things. It gives a chain of cause and effect, but then what was the first cause for?

Actually the problem is not in the theory of Karma, it is in the theory of extra cosmic God. It is in the false notion that God is someone away and aloof from all these things and is either helpless or crooked (or both!) to allow such injustice, cruelty and irrationality pervading our life. In either case He is not worthy of worship.

But this concept of mean, jealous, or remote-control God so prevalent in mythologies all over is not true: ‘… as the man evolves so the God (his concept of God) evolves’. In fact ignorance is in its nature a self-limiting knowledge oblivious of the integral self-awareness and confined to an exclusive concentration in a single field. More poignant question is problem of Evil. What are the significance, necessity and appearance of such a contrary phenomenon (cf. SABCL 18, pp. 596–7)? From epics to history, from folklore to classics, from news to TV serials and from cartoon films to science fiction, some things are common in all scripts: (a) struggle of good versus evil, (b) eventual victory of good over evil, (c) majority of recipients, irrespective of age and education, while consciously and in public revering good characters, are unconsciously, giving equal place for evil characters in their memories, whether it is Ravana or Shakuni, Captain Nemo (in Jules Verne’s Nautilus), Iago (in Othello), Black Spiderman (in Spiderman III movie) or Team Rocket (in Pokemon cartoon strip) ... the list is endless.

1.2. The nature of falsehood and evil

When we look at the problem of evil it may be helpful to start from what it cannot be:

1. Falsehood and evil cannot be by accident or chance or involuntary confusion and forgetfulness.

2. It cannot be an unexpected mishap for which Spirit was not prepared and is a

prisoner of it.

3. It cannot be inexplicable mystery of original and eternal of which All-Teacher is unable to give account to Himself and others.

4. There must be behind it a significance of All-Wisdom and power of All-Consciousness and It uses it for some indispensable function.

There are three issues about evil. What is: (a) its origin and place in cosmic work, (b) its relation to the Absolute and (c) its point of hold in the individual?

Does evil have an Absolute, or are both good and evil relative? Some say that like good has an absolute (normally termed as God, Allah, Buddha), falsehood and evil also should have an absolute (like Satan, Shaitan, Mara). Or good and evil (and knowledge and ignorance) must be existing only in relativity. They have no significance beyond. But both these views are not true. For if there is no absolute good, or truth, each one will be free to make one’s own interpretations and twist matters to suit one’s purpose. There has to be a basis of truth and righteousness (Rta) to cosmos, else it will crumble like chaos. Ignorance is incomplete knowledge, falsehood is lower truth.

Where knowledge is complete, ignorance cannot be there. Their roots are in black soil of inconscient and relativity is also a by-product of world movement (cf. SABCL 18, p. 598).

1.3. Limitation of our perception and expression

Truth is relative to us because our knowledge is surrounded by ignorance. We stop at guesses, inferences, intimations — our conclusions are partial and constructed expressions of that which is in direct contact with the reality, and they are images and figures through perception but are not embodiment of truth.

Our perception and expression are like that of six blind men touching different parts of the elephant and describing them. It is like a fishnet with 10 ´ 10-mm mesh leading to conclusion that there is no fish smaller than 10-mm size. Our instruments of knowledge set limit to our perception.

The ideals cherished for sometime, for example, sacrificing personal career for the sake of national cause, are denounced after sometime. The representations of things and happenings for us are opaque; they carry with them their shadow of nescience and error. For one, they deny other truths, and secondly that which they express doesn’t get its full value — most of the times only an end or an edge is projected. It is like a sheet seen as a line from one end, a rod seen as a circle. This is secondary formulation and so is unauthentic and derivative.

We must understand that human values of good and evil, like truth and error, are relative and uncertain. They change with time and place. Polygamy and child marriage are sacred in tribal areas even now, so is sacrificing animals. In a civilised society we see conflicts between values, such as joint family or nuclear family, independence of the younger generation or taking care of old parents, agrarian or industrial developmental model, same-sex friendships or mixed social groups, celibacy or indulgence, materialism or asceticism ... the list goes on. Which of these values is equivocally accepted? Or as another example, consider our perceptions. They are clearly partial, prejudiced, don’t take us too far, to say the least they are inconclusive. Whether allopathic or yoga or surgery, Swadeshi or American dream or hybrid, primary education for all or more IITs and IIMs, big dams or small hydel projects, centralised nuclear energy or decentralised bio energy, and so on. About which of the issues do we have some clear understanding? Our agriculture minister advises farmers to seek employment other than agriculture, finance minister is concerned about strengthening of rupee against dollar! Media intensifies the confusion. It is true mirror of society for it is as schizophrenic as the society. (This was observed by Sri Aurobindo about newspapers, but today it is even truer for the entire media.)

We must also understand that what we call as good results in evil and vice versa: refusal to accept Cripps commission recommendation was good for demanding Purna Swaraj, but it resulted in partition and violence that was unstoppable. Emergency was termed as necessary evil, Anushasana Parva, it resulted in terror let loose. Today Information Technology, Globalisation, SEZs and Disinvestment are largely perceived as modern gods, but their black shadow has already started emerging: Nandigram killings, closures in textile and other manufacturing industries, forced retirements and stopped recruitments, opposition to malls and corporate farming through Bandhs ... the list goes on. Can one ignore it as just dross, a by-product, a ‘necessary evil’ in the process? Can long-term gains for the state (or for few) be made as important as immediate annihilation of many right now? Mechanical processes are generally always filled with a combination of useful and useless, good and bad, job and chips, casting and risers, but human affairs cannot be justified in that way. Good society is an impossible thing like ‘hot ice’, said Vivekananda in Jnanayoga. Evil in society is like chronic rheumatism, if you cure ankle pain, headache starts. We can only shift the point of problem, pain or suffering, but we cannot eradicate it. Shifting place or changing name is not solving problem.

1.4. Shadow of light

All pain and suffering are due to insufficient conscious force in all surface being which makes it unable to deal with self and Nature. They will not exist, if in us there were an integral presence of luminous conscience and the Divine Force of integral being. Relation of truth and falsehood, good and evil is not that of mutual dependence but of contradiction like light and shadow.

Shadow depends on light. Light doesn’t depend on shadow. Once truth manifests, then only falsehood/evil becomes possible.For wherever affirmation is there negation is also conceived (cf. SABCL 18, p. 600) and because it is conceived so it is inevitable.

At what juncture of manifestation do the opposites enter? There are two possibilities: (1) either only after plunge in ignorance — proper only to material manifestation; or (2) at some stages of increasing involution of consciousness in separative mind and life — falsehood, error, evil are originally in mental and vital plane.

This is accepted for a long time in many traditions that there are planes beyond the material plane where these things exist and in the worlds beyond ours they are ruling. There are powers and forms of vital mind and life that seem to be the pre-physical foundation of the discordant defective forms.

The powers or beings on these planes are active to impose their adverse constructions on terrestrial creatures. They oppose increasing of light, progress of the soul towards a divine consciousness and divine existence. This is the reason in myths for the fight between powers of light and darkness: asuras and suras, dev and danav, the role of samandha, pishaccha, rakshasas; in Semitic religions also there are Satan and his hosts. This theory of traditional knowledge is perfectly rational and verifiable by inner experience — imposes itself if we admit supraphysical and don’t cage ourselves in the reality of only the physical beings.

2. What is the problem of evil?

2.1. The possessed

Physical invisible cosmic forces can act on physical inanimate objects. Forces like gravitation, magnetism, electricity move, alter, rotate, couple or decouple objects. So there is no reason why vital and mental invisible cosmic forces should not do the same for mind and life.

Science has no evidence of the second type and so is not largely ready to accept it. But there are evidences of people with split personalities. Dreams and psychoanalysis reveal a different substratum of personality which many times can be shocking.

Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hyde and Psycho are not just works of fiction. Dual personalities, people possessed by something and doing unusually good or evil things, especially the latter, which can shock and numb the people who know the person very closely, do exist. A person so possessed later admits that he or she was not in his or her senses; some power, a devil did it through him or her.

These forces surpass the measures of human relativity: they are superhuman, titanic and demoniac. If they possess a human being, he/she is pushed to the excess of good or evil, especially evil which shocks our ordinary human sensibility. How can one explain the gas chambers by Nazis in the Second World War, Or the recent killings of innocent children in Nithari in India, works of Chemical Ali in Iraq, mass production and distribution of banned poisonous drugs and their trials on the poor in third world countries to amass more wealth? This may lead someone to the point that evil indeed must be having an absolute. But still it is not the truth.

Immeasurable is not necessarily Absolute. If pain is immeasurable, it ends or it destroys the world or object of possession. Immensity is not able to substitute infinity (cf. SABCL 18, p. 605). In spite of all the miseries, pain and suffering, man is constantly searching for happiness; that means happiness is more true, more basic than unhappiness, good is more absolute than evil. We see, even in adverse climates with no water or sunlight, a branch of tree struggles to reach up, a flower smiles for no one. Even in the times of war and massacres, people get the drops of love and smiles. Hope is not lost even at the last breath.

On the good side of ‘the possessed’ many disciples have said that their spiritual guru did this work through their bodies. Unusually great episodes in the life of saints, martyrs, leaders, poets cannot be explained by human scales. There are examples like Swami Vivekananda to whom Sri Ramakrishna had said: Kali will get the work done even through your bones, how can you deny it? Many writers, orators, painters, scientists have admitted the power much beyond themselves which gave them that clue to the riddle, the revelation, the fire and the lightening which pulled the masses behind them for years together.

It is by stepping back from the physical surface into his inner being and subliminal consciousness that he [an individual] becomes directly aware of them [these beings and forces from other planes] and is able to know [them] directly and deal with their action upon him. He grows aware of [their] interventions, which seek to lead him in one direction or the another ... (SABCL 18, p. 604)

He can realise that he is not a conscious creature unexplainably produced in unconscious world of a seed of inconscient matter and moving about in an obscure self-ignorance, but an embodied soul through whose action, cosmic nature is seeking to fulfil itself.

2.2. Why not matter?

The first creation from Inconscient is Matter. In Matter evil or falsehood cannot exist, for there is no such active surface organisation of consciousness, no such relation in material forces or objects. The indwelling consciousness in them is mute, undifferentiated. It is only by contact with conscious beings that material objects exercise powers of influence, which can be good or evil, but the material good or evil depends on contacted being’s sense of harm or help (cf. SABCL 18, pp. 606–7).

Fire, poison, medicine — their good or evil ‘ness’ depends on the person, the way he contacts or consumes them. The same fire that cooks food, strengthens metal, releases pain and it can also burn down body, belongings and houses. It has no preferences or avoidance and follows its gunadharma or swabhava dharma automatically, impartially. The poison for one can be medicine for other, it depends on who is being treated and for what, the action of the matter is same in both the cases but effect can be different.

The world of pure matter is neutral and irresponsible. Animals don’t have moral sense of evil. The sensational values of good and evil are inherent in the form of pleasure and pain but the mental idea, moral response of mind to these values are creations of human beings. Have we heard of an evil dog, a false fire, cunning crow and responsible waterfall, etc.? Yes, they are heard and read, but only in the fiction created by human minds for entertaining themselves. In reality they are neither positive nor negative. Up until the advent of man in the nature the matter had been behaving and for the most part continues to behave exactly as per the nature and her laws, so there is no polarity, no conflict within them.

In man there is this conflict but at the higher level there is also a truth of detached reason, which can look at all that is thus admitted by nature as serviceable to her processes in life and matter.

But there is also this other middle truth of consciousness which awakens us to the values of good and evil and the application of their necessity and importance. This is one of the indispensable steps in the process of evolutionary nature.

2.3. The valuation process

This valuation process ascends as follows:

1. sensational and individual valuation in the beginning — all that is pleasant to me, helpful to life ego is good, painful is evil;

2. utilitarian and social — helpful for social life and collective ego is good, opposite is evil;

3. thinking mind in third stage tries to find intellectual basis — law, principle, karma, religious sanction, they say truth or righteousness itself is God;

4. but beyond such rational enforcement of ethical instinct there is a sense of something deeper, masked behind surface elements — it is the soul’s deeper spiritual sense, inborn light.

Soul’s journey is from darkness to light, from falsehood to truth, from suffering to universal Ananda. Soul’s perception of good and evil may not coincide with mind’s artificial standards, but it has deeper sense — what points to the light versus what points away from the light.

An inferior light is below good and evil. A superior light is beyond good and evil (cf. SABCL 18, p. 610).

Emergence takes place in a separated form of life, which has to affirm itself against principle of inanimate material inertia and constant pull of material inertia towards disintegration and relapse. This limited life form also has to affirm against other life forms or world as we know it and arrive at expression and propagation. Thus emerges constantly self-affirming vital and physical individual ego, which leads to similar collective ego.

This is nature’s creation on surface to conceal her real self.

It might be imagined that consciousness is only the physical inconscience mechanically recording facts of existence on brain cells with a reflex or response in the cells automatically reading the record and dictating the answer. Scientists are still working on brain structure, left and right sides and theory of numerous centres, each for one subject (they say they have found a centre for imagination, also a centre for spiritual experience, as per the research done at MIT). There are strong Artificial Intelligence advocates who are trying to replicate human mind through computer. But they also are opposed by equally or in fact much better scientists who emphatically say that there is something in human mind which cannot be replicated by even the most advanced computer software or hardware. Computer or, in general, any machine or a system is good, in fact excellent in doing routine things, algorithmic things. Mechanical theory can accommodate routine things but how to credibly account for ideation, imagination, speculation, the free play of intellect with its observed material? How one can ensure that the extremely intelligent robot will be ‘good natured’, will not think of some ‘evil designs’? Or will robot not be a pawn in the hands of an evil power? That brings us to the original question: What is evil and from where does it come in a thing? The science fiction has already played on this theme repetitively for that is the perpetual fear in the minds of even those in the field of machines. The opposition to the technology of cloning as there can be a clone of even a cruel dictator is also from the same point of view.

The argument of mind and consciousness coming out of physical structure, a brain or a machine is clearly insufficient. It is the other way in fact.

The evolution of consciousness and knowledge cannot be accounted for unless there is already a concealed consciousness in things with its inherent and native powers emerging little by little. (SABCL 18, p. 612)

2.4. Two sources of knowledge

1.   First source: a secret conscious force sends up to the surface minimum of intuition necessary for it to maintain its existence and go through operations indispensable to life and survival. This intuition is not possessed but possesses animal being and moves it. Surface result of this intuition is automatic instinct.

But intuition is unerring, instinct can err either when the infinite consciousness interferes or when circumstances change.

2.  Second source is surface contact with outside world — source of conscious sensation and sense perception and then of intelligence. The emergence of a surface consciousness by force of life contacts is due to the fact that in both subject and object there is conscious force already existent in a subliminal latency (cf. SABCL 18, p. 613).

Subject to object direct knowledge is not possible, because: (i) there is a veto of inconscience (cf. SABCL 18, p. 614); (ii) intention for evolution develops slowly through imperfect and growing surface awareness. Therefore, in absence of direct awareness it develops imperfect organs and instincts for indirect knowing.

2.5. Inevitable error

In animals, surface consciousness can obstruct intuition but because its capacity is less, it interferes less with the automatic mechanical and instinctive action of nature.

(A similar point is discussed in Section 2.2, Why not matter’.) The emergence of mind in life can bring immense increase in range and capacity of the evolving consciousness force but it also brings immense increase in range and capacity of error.

For evolving mind trails constantly error as its shadow, a shadow that grows with the growing body of consciousness and knowledge. (SABCL 18, p. 615)

… Inconscience developing into Ignorance and Ignorance forming itself into a mixed, modified and partial knowledge before it can be ready for transformation into a higher Truth-Consciousness and Truth-Knowledge. Our imperfect mental intelligence is a necessary stage of transition before this higher transformation can be made possible. (SABCL 18, p. 616)

Error in new contact and error in deformation of intuitive response: is the double source of error (cf. SABCL 18, p. 620).

Things known are to be related, unknown are to be observed, discovered, they need to fit to past knowledge, and so dovetail their shape to suit the whole picture getting constructed inside. Different possibilities emerge in this process, some are to be shut, some explored, so error is inevitable in this process.

As per Sankhya philosophy; there are three types of cognition, hence three types of persons:

Tamas: obscure in reception, unwilling to enlarge.

Rajas: defensive about own ideas, aggressive in intellectual battle.

Sattwa: eager for knowledge, open to new ideas.

The Sankhya philosophy of three gunas is elaborated by Gita in different chapters differentiating clearly as what is work, what is food, what is sacrifice for each of the Sattwic, Rajasic, Tamasic persons. One is supposed to have mix of all three. He must recognise it and slowly try to convert Rajas and Tamas into Sattwa part.

But Sattwa also is limited in light, it also has ego and is unable to enlarge beyond it. This limitation of mind-consciousness by personality is necessary as a stage of evolution as it has certain self-expression: it is for the moment its law/dharma — this often is the source of error.

What is true in the field of cognition is equally true in the field of will and action. Vital ego wants space, expansion, possession of world, and it needs things for his ego and for collective ego with whom it associates. It may try to do it by the method it thinks to be right: by violence, ruse, falsehood, aggression, crushing others — all types of evils, not only in secular but also in religious affairs and in ideas.

Thus the real ideal is not Sattwa but triguõàtãta: beyond all the three gunas: Nimittamàtra§ bhava Savyasàcin (CWSA 19, p. 386).

But all along a secret Delight is developed. It is developed in good, evil, truth, falsehood, pleasure and pain, defeat and gain, sacred and sin; delight is there in life, it is there in death.

The Gita tells us that in the material world, one who is unaffected by whatever good or evil he may obtain, neither praising it nor despising it, is firmly fixed in perfect knowledge.

The Divine Power and Presence within you will free you from sin and evil and lift you far above human standards of virtue. For you will live and act in the absolute and spontaneous right and purity of the spiritual being and the immaculate force of the divine nature. The Divine and not you will enact his own will and works through you, not for your lower personal pleasure and desire, but for the world-purpose and for your divine good and the manifest or secret good of all. Inundated with light, you will see the form of the Godhead in the world and in the works of Time, know his purpose and hear his command. Your nature will receive as an instrument his will only whatever it may be and do it without question, because there will come with each initiation of your acts from above and within you an imperative knowledge and an illumined assent to the divine wisdom and its significance. The battle will be his, his the victory, his the empire. (CWSA 19, p. 593)

About the author: Narendra Joshi is a student in the SACAR-IGNOU PhD Programme in
Sri Aurobindo Studies.