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Essays on the Gita -Sri Aurobindo
First Series : Chapter 4
The Core of the Teaching
Duty is a relative term and depends upon our relation to others.
It is a father’s duty, as a father, to nurture and educate his
children; a lawyer’s to do his best for his client even if he knows
him to be guilty and his defence to be a lie; a soldier’s to fight
and shoot to order even if he kill his own kin and countrymen;
a judge’s to send the guilty to prison and hang the murderer.
And so long as these positions are accepted, the duty remains
clear, a practical matter of course even when it is not a point
of honour or affection, and overrides the absolute religious or
moral law. But what if the inner view is changed, if the lawyer
is awakened to the absolute sinfulness of falsehood, the judge
becomes convinced that capital punishment is a crime against
humanity, the man called upon to the battlefield feels, like the
conscientious objector of today or as a Tolstoy would feel, that
in no circumstances is it permissible to take human life any more
than to eat human flesh? It is obvious that here the moral law
which is above all relative duties must prevail; and that law
depends on no social relation or conception of duty but on the
awakened inner perception of man, the moral being.
There are in the world, in fact, two different laws of conduct
each valid on its own plane, the rule principally dependent on
external status and the rule independent of status and entirely
dependent on the thought and conscience. The Gita does not
teach us to subordinate the higher plane to the lower, it does
not ask the awakened moral consciousness to slay itself on the
altar of duty as a sacrifice and victim to the law of the social
status. It calls us higher and not lower; from the conflict of
the two planes it bids us ascend to a supreme poise above the
mainly practical, above the purely ethical, to the Brahmic consciousness.
It replaces the conception of social duty by a divine
obligation.
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