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Philosophy of Sri Aurobindo
had been the intention, life would have been otherwise arranged in the cosmic ordinance of things. All the secret of the circumstances of rebirth enters around the one capital need of the soul, the need of growth, the need of experience, that governs the line of its evolution and all the rest is accessory."11
Here we have the clue to the higher Law of Karma, which is concerned with ethical value. Right action done for its own sake is truly ethical and enables the soul in its evolution. But the action done from any fear or from the point of view of any material gain may be practical but is not least ethical. We can well understand that moral good produces good and moral evil creates evil. The habit of love increases our power of love, which purifies our heart and opens it to the universal good. On the contrary, hatred corrupts a man and fills him with poison.
Here, one inay raise a question: What then is the relation between good and evil or what is the necessary connection between good and evil? Though love is joy itself, sometimes love suffers. Hatred is itself troubled and self-affecting, but sometimes, it delights. Love is born of universal de light and triumph, while the hatred, troubled as it is in its nature, leads to suffering. So, Right, the Rța of Vedic rishis, is the highest law of the highest truth.
The Law of Karma is not only the determinant of future life. If it is just that the virtuous man should be rewarded with success and happiness and the wicked man punished with downfall and pain at some time, in some life, either on earth or in heaven or in hell, it is also just that the strong man should have the reward of his cultivated strength. The intellectual man should have the prize of his cultivated skill, the will that labours in whatever field the fruit of its effort and its works. “But it does not work rightly, you say, not morally and not according to the ethical law. But, what is right working in this connection of will and action and consequence? I may be religious and honest, but if I have the swift flame of intellect, the understanding, the brain...the truth is there are several orders of energy and their separate characteristic working must be seen, before their relations can be rightly discovered in the harmonies of Nature. A complex web is what we have to unravel.