If Falsehood, Error, Wrong, Evil are an “ugly contretemps” accepted by the bold and adventurous Spirit, then there has to be a significance in their appearance. Not only that; they seem to be natural and as if indispensable in the working of the individual as well as of the universe. It is thus that through death life progresses towards its higher and superconscient possibilities—until the higher and superconscient power herself starts operating in it directly. When we live in this dark and veiling ignorance, we miss the greater purpose these agents, these negatives play.

Explaining the Yoga of Beauty, Romain Rolland quotes a passage ascribed to Socrates. It is about the ascension of Beauty from the low vitalistic to the sublime and the impersonal: “…one must pass from the love of a beautiful form to the love of all beautiful forms or to physical beauty in general; then from love of beautiful bodies to the love of beautiful souls, beautiful actions, and beautiful thoughts. In this ascension of the spirit through moral beauty, a marvellous beauty will suddenly appear to him, eternal, exempt from all generation, from all corruption, absolutely beautiful: not consisting in either in a beautiful face, nor in any body nor any thought nor in any science; not residing anywhere but in itself, whether in heaven or on earth, but existing eternally in itself and for itself in its absolute and perfect unity.”

What holds for Beauty also holds for Truth and Good and Joy and Right and Strength. Yet the problem stays unattended behind, the “ugly contretemps” remain back in the cosmos and in the individual. The soul has returned to itself but the world is yet gripped by the fierce wrestling antagonists. This is an experience peculiar not only to the seekers of deep Samadhi in the ancient Indian traditions, but also to Christian and Sufi mystics. The point is, the glory of the Vedantic Passive Brahman sheds off all that is worldly and limited and small and uncouth and ugly, that the Divine Gloom, the Night of God gives freedom, but a freedom in the Self alone, in the quiescent Self. Here Self’s vast spiritual silence occupies space: (Savitri, p. 310)

Only the Inconceivable is left,

Only the Nameless without space and time:

Abolished is the burdening need of life:

Thought falls from us, we cease from joy and grief;

The ego is dead; we are free from being and care,

We have done with birth and death and work and fate.

But in this vast spiritual silence it is too early for the soul to rejoice. A leap into the “divine abyss” has been taken, but the self’s mission and self’s power have not come into the full operative dynamics of the creation. This is something which is missed even by the great Viae Romanae, the royal paths of the ancient practices of spirituality, oriental or occidental.

Here again we may check Romain Rolland’s quote about “the beautiful explanation of Evil in the system of the Areopagite”: (taken from The Life of Vivekananda)

Evil is neither being, for then it would not be absolutely evil, nor non-being, for this transcendental appellation can only belong to that contained in the sovereign good in a sovereign fashion.

Evil is neither fixity, nor identity, it is varied, indefinite, as if floating in subjects which do not possess immutability in themselves… Evil, as evil, is not a reality, it is not a being… Evil as evil is nowhere…

Everything exists only of and through the Good, which is the Supereminent Unity.

Evil is certainly not a reality in the absolute sense, yet the fact of evil is undeniable. If we go along the line of Plotinus then, somewhere in the termination of the divine hypostases it is the self-limitation of Good that becomes Evil. But in this deepening flight from the larger unknown to the lesser unknown there is no remedy for this self-limiting Good’s Evil to become again the limitless Good’s Good. The experience of the creatively infinite Inconscience, giving rise to the “ugly contretemps”, is missing in all these formulations. But the more we read the Life Divine’s chapter on the Origin and Remedy of Falsehood, Error, Wrong and Evil, the more luminous do they become in the full dynamic play of a wonderful possibility of divine manifestation upon earth.

RY Deshpande