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Re: Social Orders of Life
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To: alt-hindu@uunet.uu.net
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Subject: Re: Social Orders of Life
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From: hal_computer@earthlink.net (Debashish Banerji)
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Date: 8 Jan 1995 10:10:41 GMT
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From news@earthlink.net Sun Jan 8 05: 04:11 1995
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Newsgroups: alt.hindu
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Organization: HAL Computer Systems
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References: <3ei7gn$jj4@ucunix.san.uc.edu>
In article <3ei7gn$jj4@ucunix.san.uc.edu>, ptbast@wpi.edu (Pete Bastien) says:
>
>Please note that this is a serious attempt at a start of
>a discussion, although I suppose if I were to start a troll
>such a disclaimer would be useful.
>
>>From what I understand, or perhaps misunderstand, there has
>traditionally been four social orders or castes. Is this
>considered to be the case in all regions, or countries? If
>so, why? If not, what social order has replaced the
>traditional division? There is certainly a social division in
>nearly all, if not all, countries of the world.
>
>More importantly the division in the social order has had an
>effect on the religion of the people. Some western traditions
>deny that this is so and so have made attempts to minimize
>the effects. Is this also the case in the eastern traditions?
>Or more precisely, is the social division mirrored by a
>religious (possibly spiritual) division?
>
I quote from Sri Aurobindo (The Synthsis of Yoga, Chapter XV under the
Yoga of Self Perfection - Soul-Force and the Fourfold Personality, page
714, Centenary edition, Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press):
"The Godhead, the spirit manifested in Nature appears in a sea of infinite
quality, Ananta-guna. But the executive or mechanical Prakriti is of the
threefold guna, Sattwa, Rajas, Tamas, and the Ananta-guna, the spiritual
play of infinite quality, modifies itself in this mechanical nature into
the type of these three gunas. And in the soul-force in man this Godhead
in Nature represents itself as a fourfold effective power, caturvyuha,
a Power for knowledge, a Power for strength, a Power for mutuality and
active and productive relation and interchange, a Power for works and
labour and service, and its presence casts all human life into a nexus
and inner and outer operation of these four things. The ancient thought
of India, conscious of this fourfold type of active human personality and
nature, built out of it the four types of the Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya
and Sudra, each with its spiritual turn, ethical ideal, suitable
upbringing, fixed function in society and place in the evolutionary
scale of the spirit. As always tends to be the case when we too much
externalize and mechanize the more subtle truths of our nature, this
became a hard and fast system inconsistent with the freedom and
variability and complexity of the finer developing spirit in man.
Nevertheless the truth behind it exists and is one of some considerable
importance in the perfection of our power of nature; but we have to take
it in its inner aspects, first, personality, character, temperament,
soul-type, then the soul-force which lies behind them and wears these
forms, and lastly the play of the free spiritual Shakti in which they
find their culmination and unity beyond all modes. For the crude
external idea that a man is born as a Brahmana, Kshatriya, Vaishya or
Sudra and that alone, is not a psychological truth of our being. The
psychological fact is that there are these four active powers and
tendencies of the Spirit and its executive Shakti within us and the
predominance of one or the other in the more well-formed part of our
personality gives us our main tendencies, dominant qualities and
capacities, effective turn in action and life. But they are more or
less present in all men, here manifest, there latent, here developed,
there subdued and depressed or subordinate, and in the perfect man will
be raised up to a fullness and harmony which in the spiritual freedom
will burst out into the free play of the infinite quality of the spirit
in the inner and outer life and in the self-enjoying creative play of
the Purusha with his and the world's Nature-Power."
