According to Krishna the entire creation falls under two categories: the ‘Divinely Good’ (Daivic) and the ‘Diabolically Fallen’ (Asuric). But in fact, there is yet another group, the ‘Incorrigibly Indifferent’ (Rakshasic) about whom the Lord is serenely silent. This silence regarding them is perhaps more eloquent than all his eloquence regarding the other two groups! Religions and the techniques of self-development are addressed only to the former two groups and not to the Rakshasic type of men. They have not yet sufficiently grown in their evolution; they are still in the hands of the moulding Nature and they have yet to be properly baked in the furnace-of-life and its scorching experiences. As they grow up sufficiently, they come under the category of the “Diabolically Fallen,” and religion can come forward to lift them to the status of the “Divinely Good.” From then onwards it can show them the way to experience and realise the Absolute Goodness which is the Eternal Reality.
If all about the Asura type was given in a broad sketch earlier, (XVI-4) the details are being filled in elaborately in the following stanzas.
In almost all religious text-books of the world, the positive qualities of goodness and righteousness are glorified. But they rarely paint, exhaustively, the negative tendencies in a devilish personality. Some critics of Hinduism are jubilant in discovering this tendency in our scriptural texts as a great weakness in our prophets and seers. This criticism against Hinduism was levelled mainly by the critics of the nineteenth century. They are very silent nowadays because of the results of the twentieth century psychological researches and the success of some of the psychiatric methods. To become poignantly aware of the negative tendencies in one’s own personality-structure, and to become consciously disgusted with those vulgar urges, are the ways of easily eradicating such wrong tendencies from one’s inner nature. Be aware of a weakness; it readily disappears from our character — says the modern psychiatrist.
The bad is not merely an opposite of the good. It can never be that the good has certain urges and the bad has another type of urges. Human urges are always typical, and both the good and the bad are expressions of man’s heart. Bad is only “GOOD MISCONSTRUED.” Therefore, in the enumeration of the qualities of the bad, we do not have to meet with a sapless list of the opposites of the previous enumeration which pointed the good. As we discover the contents of the bad mind, we shall discover that they are all the very same as those of the good, but mis-applied under a wrong enthusiasm created as a result of some false evaluations. Virtue, poisoned with ignorance is evil; evil, treated and cured of its poison, when it regains its health, becomes virtue.
THUS THE VERY FIRST STANZA WHICH PAINTS THE ASURIC TYPE OPENS, AS IT WERE, WITH AN APOLOGY FOR THE ‘DIABOLICALLY FALLEN,’ ALONG WITH A POWERFUL SUGGESTION ELICITING OUR MOST TENDER KINDNESS TOWARDS THEM:
