Skip to main content

Beyond right and wrong

 


“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” The great 13th-century Persian poet Rumi sang that. Rumi was an enlightened person and like all enlightened people he knew that the line between right and wrong is rather too blurred. Right and wrong, truth and falsehood, are not absolutes except in science and mathematics.

Sonya, the heroine of Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, is a prostitute. Prostitution is absolutely wrong, a cardinal sin, in most religions and moral systems. Sonya stands on the side of the condemned in ordinary morality. But not for Dostoevsky. Sonya emerges as one of the noblest characters in the novel. She was driven to prostitution by utter poverty. She had to look after her ailing sister and her children. Sonya had no choice but sell her body.

Ordinary morality and religion would condemn Sonya. But Rumi would have met her on that field beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.

Life’s truths and rights cannot be absolute. There is no God who would dare to dish out absolute truths and rights in the world of human beings. Human truths are limited. Human rights are circumscribed. By circumstances, by motives, by ironies.

One person’s fetish may be another’s food. One person’s god may be another’s demon.

Your truth may be your neighbour’s biggest irony.

Why do you insist on imposing your truths, your likes, your views on your neighbour?

This discussion is absurd, I know. We live in a post-truth world where truths and facts don’t matter at all, forget about absolutes and relatives. The heartbeats of slogans override the sobriety of truths and rights here. It is not about wrongdoing and rightdoing anymore; it’s about fabrication of truths and rights. The prophets of post-truth are alchemists. And alchemy was always fake.

Alchemy may go about sporting a long, white beard which pretends to be something what it is definitely not. Alchemy relies on false propaganda. Massive advertisements. Communicative abundance. Diarrhoea of words. Photoshops. Photo ops. Costumes. Fancy dress which is taken as real by a bunch of bhakts.

A field beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing alone won’t do anymore. We are not in 13th century. We are in post-truth 21st century.

What is needed now is a field beyond absolute truths and post-truth. What is needed is real democracy. Real democracy teaches us that no man or woman is good enough to claim they possess the truth and to rule over fellow beings.

PS. This post has been provoked by the latest Indispire theme: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” ― Rumi #internationalpeaceday

 

 

Comments

  1. Excellent information shared by this post. StaffMerge present the best Video Interview Platform for making hiring easier and time saving process for Employers.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I remember Sonya from class and I believe that she will meet Rumi at the field beyond truths and the contrary. The world names the truths and wrongs according to their will and you've explained it pretty well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Rights and wrongs are relative to one's upbringing, religion, culture, education, psychological makeup...

      Delete
  3. What is needed now is a field beyond absolute truths and post-truth. I am pondering over it. I am also pondering over - no man or woman is good enough to claim they possess the truth and to rule over fellow beings. Yes, we are not in 13th century (which was perhaps better than this post-truth 21st century). Your thoughts appear to be in the context of today's India. However they apply to the world as a whole.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, they apply to the whole world. Trump, Putin, Jinping...all need to understand these lessons. Biden seems to be a bit better...

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Second Crucifixion

  ‘The Second Crucifixion’ is the title of the last chapter of Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins’s magnum opus Freedom at Midnight . The sub-heading is: ‘New Delhi, 30 January 1948’. Seventy-three years ago, on that day, a great soul was shot dead by a man who was driven by the darkness of hatred. Gandhi has just completed his usual prayer session. He had recited a prayer from the Gita:                         For certain is death for the born                         and certain is birth for the dead;                         Therefore over the inevitable                         Thou shalt not grieve . At that time Narayan Apte and Vishnu Karkare were moving to Retiring Room Number 6 at the Old Delhi railway station. They walked like thieves not wishing to be noticed by anyone. The early morning’s winter fog of Delhi gave them the required wrap. They found Nathuram Godse already awake in the retiring room. The three of them sat together and finalised the plot against Gand

The Final Farewell

Book Review “ Death ends life, not a relationship ,” as Mitch Albom put it. That is why, we have so many rituals associated with death. Minakshi Dewan’s book, The Final Farewell [HarperCollins, 2023], is a well-researched book about those rituals. The book starts with an elaborate description of the Sikh rituals associated with death and cremation, before moving on to Islam, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and finally Hinduism. After that, it’s all about the various traditions and related details of Hindu final rites. A few chapters are dedicated to the problems of widows in India, gender discrimination in the last rites, and the problem of unclaimed dead bodies. There is a chapter titled ‘Grieving Widows in Hindi Cinema’ too. Death and its rituals form an unusual theme for a book. Frankly, I don’t find the topic stimulating in any way. Obviously, I didn’t buy this book. It came to me as quite many other books do – for reasons of their own. I read the book finally, having shelv

Cats and Love

No less a psychologist than Freud said that the “time spent with cats is never wasted.” I find time to spend with cats precisely for that reason. They are not easy to love, particularly if they are the country variety which are not quite tameable, and mine are those. What makes my love affair with my cats special is precisely their unwillingness to befriend me. They’d rather be in their own company. “In ancient time, cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this,” Terry Pratchett says. My cats haven’t, I’m sure. Pratchett knew what he was speaking about because he loved cats which appear frequently in his works. Pratchett’s cats love independence, very unlike dogs. Dogs come when you call them; cats take a message and get back to you as and when they please. I don’t have dogs. But my brother’s dogs visit us – Maggie and me – every evening. We give them something to eat and they love that. They spend time with us after eating. My cats just go away without even a look af

Vultures and Religion

When vultures become extinct, why should a religion face a threat? “When the vultures died off, they stopped eating the bodies of Zoroastrians…” I was amused as I went on reading the book The Final Farewell by Minakshi Dewan. The book is about how the dead are dealt with by people of different religious persuasions. Dead people are quite useless, unless you love euphemism. Or, as they say, dead people tell no tales. In the end, we are all just stories made by people like the religious woman who wrote the epitaph for her atheist husband: “Here lies an atheist, all dressed up and no place to go.” Zoroastrianism is a religion which converts death into a sordid tale by throwing the corpses of its believers to vultures. Death makes one impure, according to that religion. Well, I always thought, and still do, that life makes one impure. I have the support of Lord Buddha on that. Life is dukkha , said the Enlightened. That is, suffering, dissatisfaction and unease. Death is liberation