Self-deception can take the form of a judgmental attitude regarding the thoughts, feelings or actions of others. Particularly if an individual has worked to try to eliminate certain things within himself, he has a very close relationship to those things, he can feel the vibration and a lot of effort has gone into finding ways to partially or entirely neutralize them in his life. He may have succeeded for the most part in doing so, yet can still recognise and understand these vibratory patterns when they arise in others around him. Both the negative and the positive sides of that vibration remain linked at all times. The manner in which he responds to these vibrations may show true mastery, or evidence one of the forms of self-deception. It is clear from his ability to see and react to the vibrations that they still have a hold on him at some level of his being. He is not “above” them and free. In fact, the ability to respond to the vibration may show that he is still indulging that movement at some level or in some part of the being.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the issue of avoiding judging others, as one would be judged on the same standard. He specifically addresses the hypocrisy of attacking someone on the basis of a small particle in his eye when the person expressing anger or rage has a large obstruction in his own eye! This is the “righteous wrath” that Sri Aurobindo describes:
Sri Aurobindo states in his Thoughts and Aphorisms: ”When I hear of a righteous wrath, I wonder at man’s capacity for self-deception.”
The Mother writes: ”…actually there are two ways of deceiving oneself, which are very different. For example, you may very well be shocked by certain things, not for personal reasons, but precisely in your goodwill and eagerness to serve the Divine, when you see people behaving badly, being selfish, unfaithful and treacherous. There is a stage where you have overcome these things and no longer allow them to manifest in yourself, but to the extent that you are linked to the ordinary consciousness, the ordinary point of view, the ordinary life, the ordinary way of thinking, they are still possible, they exist latently because they are the reverse of the qualities that you are striving to attain. And this opposition still exists — until you rise above it and no longer have either the quality or the defect. So long as you have the virtue, its opposite is always latent in you; it is only when you are above both the virtue and the defect that it disappears.”
“So this kind of indignation that you feel comes from the fact that you are not altogether above it; you are at the stage where you thoroughly disapprove and could not do it yourself. Up to that point there is nothing to say, unless you give a violent outer expression to your indignation. If anger intervenes, it is because there is a complete contradiction between the feeling you want to have and how you react to others. Because anger is a deformation of the vital power, an obscure and wholly unregenerated vital, a vital that is still subject to all the ordinary actions and reactions. When this vital power is used by an ignorant and egoistic individual will and this will meets with opposition from other individual wills around it, this power, under the pressure of opposition, changes into anger and tries to obtain by violence what cannot be achieved solely by the pressure of the force itself.”
“Besides, anger, like every other kind of violence, is always a sign of weakness, impotence and incapacity.”
“And here self-deception comes solely from the approval given to it or the flattering epithet attached to it — because anger can only be something blind, ignorant and asuric, that is to say, contrary to the light.”
“But this is still the best case.”
Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, Our Many Selves: Practical Yogic Psychology, Chapter 6, Some Answers and Explanations, pp. 201-203
Santosh has been studying Sri Aurobindo's writings since 1971 and has a daily blog at http://sriaurobindostudies.wordpress.com and podcast at https://anchor.fm/santosh-krinsky He is author of 19 books and is editor-in-chief at Lotus Press. He is president of Institute for Wholistic Education, a non-profit focused on integrating spirituality into daily life.
More information about Sri Aurobindo can be found at http://www.sri-aurobindo.com
The US editions and links to e-book editions of Sri Aurobindo’s writings can be found at http://www.lotuspress.com
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