Page 19 - NAMAH-Oct-2022

Namah In the Face of Error and Evil

Self-blame is another kind of egoism where invoking Agni, the Divine Will in man that
we refuse the needed change and feel too ever pushes us forward, burning down the
satisfied with blaming ourselves as if by doing impurities and releasing the hidden truth
so we have done our duty. If blaming others and building within us a state of perpetual
is the sign of a dead conscience, blaming felicity rather than the suffering that comes
oneself is the sign of a troubled and disturbed through error and ignorance.
conscience that cannot comprehend the truth
of things. Instead of these movements we “O god Agni, knowing all things that are
must move beyond conscience, which is the manifested, lead us by the good path to the
voice of the mind or a norm and construct to felicity; remove from us the devious attraction
the still small voice of the soul where alone of sin. To thee completest speech of submission
we can hope to find the authentic truth. Not we would dispose (3).”
that it is always easy to follow this voice
because the soul does not follow the logic of
the human reason or the conventions of the
human social norms. It follows the lead of the
Divine Will within it and trusts the Divine
with regard to the consequences. Man’s
ascension will lead him to this new social
order where he subordinates both mental
reason and the vital impulse to the guiding
light of intuition in which alone he shall find
his new sociology and principle of action. The
sooner we find it the better it is for us. The
more we delay this discovery the longer we References
shall always swing between right and wrong
and be prone to error and subject to ‘sin’. Of 1. Sri Aurobindo. Birth Centenary Library, Volume
course, by sin we do not mean the religious 28. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram Trust;
idea of these things but the original Vedantic 1970, pp. 336-37.
concept that sin is nothing else but that action
which deviates us from the straight path to 2. Sri Aurobindo. The Complete Works of Sri Aurobindo,
the Light and the Right and tricks or lures Volume 19. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Ashram
us to follow the crooked deceptive lanes that Trust; 1997, pp. 171-72.
s
slope down towards darkness and fall. The Isa
s
Upanisad summarises it in one of the prayers 3. Sri Aurobindo. Complete Works, Volume 17; 2003, p. 10.

Dr. Alok Pandey, an editor of NAMAH and a member of SAIIIHR, is a doctor practising at the
Sri Aurobindo Ashram.

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