The Yoga of Sri Aurobindo - Part 7

BAD THOUGHT-FORMATION

A bad thought is a bad act. You may not know it, but an evil thought is truly an evil act. If you think ill of a man and wish him ill, you are responsible for the mishaps that may befall him to the same degree as when you act ill towards him. Unfortunately, an evil thought is not a recognised crime and nobody intervenes when you think ill. Not only so, there are a good many people who consider it a play to excite wicked thoughts in others. They do so (innocently, they think,) sometimes through sheer stupidity, more often through vanity, through an air of self-importance for having said something interesting.

When you have a bad thought, you make an evil formation and you carry it about you or throw it out. It happens sometimes that when you pass by a man, you suddenly feel unwell, you may not connect the two and you may know nothing of the matter, but in fact the man may have been entertaining an evil thought and it has pounced upon you.

When you find out the cause, then what you have to do is to chase it away, as if it were a fly. The flies are sometimes very troublesome, the more you drive them away the more they come and take it as an amusing game. But if you are serious and have the will, you succeed in driving them out. In the same manner when an evil formation

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seeks to possess or touch you, push it away immediately, push it away again and again till it disappears.

Why should there be a bad will at all, you ask?

You go into the very origin of things. Why is there inconscience, ignorance and obscurity? You ask for the why and wherefore of the universe. Why is creation like this and not otherwise? Every one has explained in his own way. The philosophers have done so, the scientists have done so on different lines. But, none has found the way out. You ask why there is bad will, but the truly interesting and important thing is to find a means whereby there would be no bad will. What is the use of asking why there is pain and suffering and misery, unless it is to find out the remedy? If you look for the why, you may find as many explanations as you like, each may be useful in a way, but none leads you anywhere, except into a blind alley.

There are many things in the world you do not approve of. Some people who, as they put it, wish to have the knowledge, want to find out why it is so. It is a line of knowledge. But I say it is much more important to find out how to make things otherwise than they are at present. That is exactly the problem Buddha set before himself. He sat under a tree and continued till he found the solution. The solution, however, is not very satisfactory: "You say, the world is bad, let us then do away with the world"; but to whose profit, as Sri Aurobindo

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asks very pertinently? The world will no longer be bad, since it will exist no more. The world will have to be rolled back into its origin, the original pure existence or non-existence. Then man will be, in Sri Aurobindo's words, the all-powerful master of something that does not exist, an emperor without an empire, a king without a kingdom. It is a solution. But there are others, which are better. We consider ours to he the best. There are some who say, like the Buddha, evil comes from ignorance, remove the ignorance and evil will disappear. Others say that evil comes from division, from separation; if the universe were not separated from its origin, there would be no evil. Others again declare that it is an evil will that is the cause of all, of separation and ignorance. Then the question is, from where does this bad will come? If it were at the origin of things, it must have been in the origin itself. And then some question the bad will itself,—there is no such thing, essentially, fundamentally, it is pure illusion.

Do animals have a bad will?

I do not think so. Things spoken of in relation to animals as monstrous are not really due to a bad will. Let us take for example the insect world. Of all animals it is this species which seems to have most the attribute of wickedness, something akin to a bad will. It may, however, be simply that we are applying our own mode of consciousness to theirs, we impute bad will to an

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action which is not really of the kind. For example, there are insects whose larva can live only upon a living being; they have to feed upon a living creature, they do not get nourishment from dead flesh. So the parent insect before laying the eggs that are to become larvae first prepares the ground: it finds another insect or a small animal, stings into a nerve centre and paralyses it; then safely lays eggs in that paralysed body, which not being dead feeds the larvae when they come out of the eggs. All this looks very much machiavellian. But nothing is reasoned out here, it is pure instinct. Would you call it bad will? it is simply the will to propagate. You can say perhaps that these insects are moved by a spirit of the species which is conscious and has a conscious will and that this will is an evil will. These beings that create or form the various species of the insect world—many working in a much more monstrous way than the example I have given—must then truly be frightful, inspired by a perverse and diabolic imagination. Quite possible. For it is said that the origin of the insect world is in the vital; the builders of that world belong to the vital and not to the material plane of consciousness; in other words, they not only symbolise, but they represent and live the evil will. They are fully conscious of their evil will and they exercise that will deliberately and with a set purpose. Man's bad will is often only a reflection, an imitation of the bad will of vital beings which is a will clearly hostile to the created world, whose express intention it is to make things as painful, as difficult, as ugly,

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as monstrous as possible. It is these beings, some say, that have created the insects. Even then, the insects cannot be described as representing the evil will, since they do not do mischief purposely, they are moved by an unconscious will in them. The bad will is really that will which does evil for the sake of doing evil, which seeks to destroy for the sake of destroying, that takes pleasure in doing wrong. In the animal I do not think there is this kind of evil will, especially in the higher species. What is there is the instinct of self-preservation, obscure and violent reactions, but not the kind of evil that human will shows in the perverse human mental. I believe it is the human mind under the direct influence of vital beings that begins to work in the perverse way. Titans, Asuras are the beings of ill-will, they belong totally to the vital world and when they manifest themselves in this world of ours, they mean mischief, they do evil for the sake of doing evil, they destroy for the sake of destroying, they have the delight of negation.

People speak of the wickedness of cats, when the cats, for example, play with the mice before eating them. I have observed the matter and I know what it is. It is not at all as you think. The cats do what they do, not through wickedness or wanton cruelty. The mother cat hunts for the sake of her young ones. She catches a mouse; if she gave it immediately as it is to the babies, they would not be able to eat, it would be hard and tough flesh. So she plays with it, to us she seems to do so; she plays,

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that is to say, throws it up, rolls it, catches it again, gives it a few blows, tosses it once more, all that simply to soften the flesh, to prepare it beforehand, so that the little ones can put their teeth into it and eat easily. It is not certainly playing with the intention of only playing, for the pleasure of it. There is as much ill-will behind it as there is behind man's killing in the slaughter-house. The animal hunts and prepares its food, its prey, in the best way it can. It has no oven, no fireplace, no cooking; it must have some way of its own to make its food soft and edible.

It is said also that the first expression of love in living beings is the desire to eat him whom one loves. To love means to embrace, to absorb, to devour. This seems to prove the fact that when the tiger catches its victim or the snake his, the victim in either case, although alarmed in the beginning, do not at all suffer, but lets himself go in a sort of delight of being devoured. I shall narrate to you a true story, the experience of a person from whom I heard it. A man was passing through a bush in the company of friends. The friends were a little ahead, he was behind. Suddenly he was caught by a tiger, a man-eater. The companions turned back to know what had become of their absent friend. They followed the marks and ran up just in time to prevent the tiger from swallowing their friend. When he had recovered a little he was told what a frightful experience he must have gone through. "Not at all", he declared to the astonishment of everybody, "just imagine, I did not know what

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had happened, but as I was being dragged along by the tiger, I felt a great love for him and I had a great desire that he should eat me!" Well, it is a true fact and I do not exaggerate. Once upon a time I saw with my own eyes something very similar. In the zoological gardens of Paris, a huge python was kept in a cage. It was the hour of feeding the animals and I happened to be present. The cage was opened and a young white rabbit was put in. It was a pretty little animal. As soon as it saw the serpent, it ran to the other corner of the cage and sat doubled up all trembling. The serpent had not moved at all, had simply turned round its head. It seemed as if it was half asleep, quietly it put out its neck and head and began to look at the rabbit. It was horrible, the picture. The serpent only looked at the rabbit without moving. Now I saw another picture. The rabbit that was a mass of fright, ceased trembling; it had shrunk itself, it became normal. Then it lifted its head, opened wide its eyes and gazed at the serpent; it began to move slowly, very slowly, forward and when it had come sufficiently near, the neck of the serpent shot out and the rabbit was in its mouth. Then came the task of preparing the food. The serpent rolled, twisted, broke the limbs of its prey, munched it into something like a soft mass that might more easily go down the gullet. Where is the ill will, the wickedness in all this? When a man does anything like it, he does not do it spontaneously, through his natural instinct, but driven by his mind and mental perversions, a thing different from the healthy instinct

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that he has no more. But man wanted to act freely and independently!

What is instinct exactly? It is Nature's consciousness. Nature is conscious of her action; it is not an individual consciousness. It is a global or collective consciousness. There is also a consciousness of the species. Each species has its consciousness which is called sometimes the spirit of the species, that is to say, a conscious being presiding over a particular species. Nature is conscious in the sense that she knows what she wants, she knows her whither and her how, her end and the way to go towards it. To man much of Nature seems incoherent, because his consciousness is narrow and he has not an over-all vision. When you look at the small details, the little fragments, you do not understand; you do not find any link, sequence, sense. But Nature has a conscious will, she is a conscious being. Perhaps the word "being" is too human. When we speak of Nature's being, we naturally think of the human being, only a little bigger, or perhaps much bigger but working more or less in the same way. But it is not so. Instead of the word "being", I would prefer the word "entity". The conscious entity that is Nature has a conscious will and it does things much more deliberately and purposively than man, and it has formidable forces at its disposal. Man speaks of blind and violent Nature. But it is man who is blind and violent, not Nature. You say an earthquake is a terrible affair. Thousands of houses crash into dust, millions of people are killed, whole cities

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devastated, entire portions of earth are swallowed up etc. etc. Yes, from the human point of view Nature seems monstrous. But what has she done after all? When you get a knock on your body somewhere, there appears a blue patch. Are you worried about it? Your earthquake is nothing more than a reshuffling of a cell in your body. You destroy thousands of cells every moment of your life. You are monstrous? That is the relative proportion. And consider, we are speaking of earth alone and earthly events. But what is this earth itself in the bosom of the universe? A point, a zero. You are walking on the ground and are not looking down. You place one step forward and then another and you trample thousands of innocent ants under your feet. If you were an ant you would have cried out, what a cruel and stupid force! Imagine other forces stalking about much bigger than yourself and under their casual steps millions of creatures like you are crushed, continents are pressed down and mountains kicked up. They do not even notice such catastrophic happenings! The only difference between man and ant is that man knows what happens to him and the ant does not. But even there are you sure?

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