P. S. V. Aiyer (from Sai Sudha-June 1972) - CONFORMITY AND CREATIVITY

[JR]

—A Traveller on Earth

Greed is the basis of acceptance and obedience. All obedience is born out of fear and desire for self-glorification. When greed takes the form of ambition, it becomes respectable and virtuous. All virtue is the moral drapery for greed and envy. Acceptance of authority and obedience to orders mean conformity to a given procedure and pattern in order to achieve some pre-conceived object. In it, there is promise for pleasure and plenty. All means for pleasure become important because greed for pleasure and more pleasure perpetuates the means. Auspiciousness does not lie in any day or occasion but in self-glorification. There is no sacred day or sacred place, our senses and valuation of things make for sanctity or sacrilege. This valuation is ever-changing and clinging to pre­determined valuation brings in sorrow and misery. Conformity is ever to the past and to the predetermined. The sense of emptiness like hunger breeds greed and any gratification of greed enhances the possibility of intensive furtherance of both.

It was called a very auspicious day and people who would otherwise indulge in excesses of food were observing fast, some acute and some moderate, some starving and some changing one variety of food for the other. It was a day of prayers and of recita­tion of ancient rhythmic poetry describing the greatness of some deity and the utter dependence on it of the human life. People assembled at holy places and held religious gatherings, sacrifices in which auspicious and so-called meritorious food was burnt and turned to ashes accompanied by hymns to the All-High, while dogs and orphans watched by, loitering here end there with hungry look; and  searching a nook for whom really charity was   necessary

All calculated action is never meritorious. All traditional valua­tion of action is conformity to the greed of keeping the social order, which is inequality, chaos and disorder, a slave to the needs of the vested interests.

Why do you say "yes" to so many influences on your mind? Why should we obey tradition? Why do we—you and me, accept the way of behaviour, the words, the languages, the phrases, the relationships and their commitments of duty and devotion, why, do we honour things which we do not understand? Why do we adopt methods everywhere in life—may they be in the calculation of figures or in the manners of eating food?

We want security and smooth-going life. Do we not want to be assured that after doing certain action, certain benefits would come about? Can we not see the inherent principle of reward and punishment dangled before our conceptual faculty to drive us to accept mc-des of behaviour, patterns of relationship and manners of social life?

When one accepts tradition because he sees it to be convenient and connives at the falsehood of accepted norms, he ceases to be a creative individual, a real human being. He only happens to be a spare part of the social machinery, and can never break the bond­ages he has created and built up around himself.

The network of tradition is self-sustaining. Any further addition to the steps in the method or system of action or thought only strengthens the hold and grip of the fear, the greed to achieve success, happiness, pleasures and plenty through it, and therefore a creative individual has nothing whatsoever to do with this social set-up, this convenient approach to  relationship,  the family bondage the bondage of duty towards parents, the brotherliness within the nasty self-enclosing communal feeling, the stagnant stinking store­house of traditional pride and prosperity, and he can never rely on his reactions born out of need to be well-known amongst the pegs around him. He can never act from the background of social status, prejudices and privileges. He can never think or feel from the environmental influences.

Conformity to the social morality and political or economic pattern is the way of the mediocre, the way of yes-men, the misery of masses, who create a projection of their yearnings and call him their leader. A projection of a mediocre mind can never create a wise and farseeing leader and therefore creative individual is never the leader of the masses. He has nothing to do with them on the level of relationship in any form. He is completely individual and therefore cannot take part in any happenings around him, either auspicious or obnoxious, either traditionally sanctioned or revolu­tionary and reactive.

Conformity is death and the domination of the matter, the thought-matter and the feeling-matter and the body-matter. Con­formity o f the individual to the masses is therefore the total destruc­tion of creativity and divinity. All social structures are limited by desires on mass-scale and a sub-conscious fear of the new streaks of light. Society is ever baffled by the new and the creative; Any system when crystallised becomes a haphazard approximation to the flow of life and therefore always falls short of the extraordinary swiftness, the ever-freshness of the creative spirit.