There was a time when obedience, purity and chastity were prized virtues and monasteries the world over drew to themselves men and women who were prepared to renounce the worldly life in favour of one where rigid discipline was required to be self-imposed. Each of these three virtues required for its flowering the inculcating of a genuine humility. Sacrifice was of course there and austerity, as also that particular type of charity which strength allied to humbleness can alone provide.

Why is it that the world of today has fallen off from discipline and has like the madman and the drunkard sought its felicity in the depths of depraved desires? The answer may, to some extent, be found in the inversion of ethic values which too great a familiarity with modern science has generated. Matter and material things now engross and even obsess the minds of people and have made inroads into their deeper nature, thus atrophying their higher instincts. In consequence, life has now degenerated into a race for acquiring ease through the agency of those physical possessions as have caught the personal fancy of the people. Rivalry is a natural outcome, and co-operation has become an expediency and a last resort for confronting a stronger rival. Even such an institution as the orthodox church has had to bow to the current epidemic of permissiveness on such ideals as obedience and celibacy. What has gone wrong with humanity or rather with those who have the power to mould its thinking?

The cause for the malaise which has gripped large masses of people is a shirking and even a deliberate violation of duties. Duties to oneself; to family, wife and household; duties to race and kin, to friend and foe; duties to kingdoms below the human as to those above it, are getting obliterated from the minds of men. It is the task of each student of the philosophy to enumerate to himself what those duties are and to give them the widest circulation possible. The Voice of the Silence and the Bhagavad-Gita give these in precise terms for the layman, the chela and the Guru.

When one comes to assess the relationship of oneself to duties, one begins to understand that obedience to the behests of duty is something impersonal. Principles are involved; personalities are incidental. To the average person caught in the treadmill of life, duties are ofttimes irksome, unpleasant and diametrically opposed to what seems the most desirable. The mother has certain duties to discharge towards her child, duties which are bound to limit her outings and social activities. The father owes it to his children to implant in them the love of truth, honesty and tolerance. It demands of him drastic curtailment of club and sports activities; it demands patience, sacrifice and an abounding love. There is no substitute for the love and care of parents. Yet, parents themselves show today a singular slackness in obedience to elementary duties. They set an example of evasiveness, of selfish indulgence and a shocking disregard for truth and discipline. When they see these same traits being displayed by their children on the campus, they are horrified and want committees to probe and tell them what they already know—that disobedience to duty which they themselves portray gets reflected as an ugly image projected by their own children.

This straying away from discipline, this departure from paths of rectitude is nowhere more noticeable than in the teacher-pupil relationship. The ancient ideal of the Guru now no longer attracts the teaching profession. Not the evoking of human values but the mass production of money-spinning robots is the order of the day. There is no incentive nor even liking to forge a close intellectual and soul rapport which alone can give to education its human and even supra-human values. The modern teacher judges his own merit by the number of pupils whom he trains to jump successfully through intellectual hoops. All care, all energy is turned towards that end. It is thus that the teacher fails to obey the duties of his calling. He no longer educes and therefore fails to educate. The noble arts are weighed against material values and found to be wanting. Intellect is sharpened at the expense of intuition, material advancement remains the only goal. The building of character, the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty is considered of no great significance. Herein is to be perceived the shifting of allegiance from the true to the untrue; the unwillingness to obey and follow the sterner discipline and the yielding to the seducion of the pleasanter and the less difficult path.

The remedy, it would seem, lies in arousing the desire to break away from paths of indiscipline and the generation of a firm resolve to obey those rules which must necessarily be governing a congregation of souls. It is always right to give unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, but it is an abomination to render unto Caesar the things which are God's.

It will be readily conceded that obedience to certain rules is essential to preserve the health of the body. The gourmet who insists on satisfying his appetites and has therefore to rely on medicines to mitigate the ill effects of his indulgence is a cheat, a renegade who thinks that human ingenuity can bypass the nemesis which follows upon a breakage of Nature's laws. The health of body and mind is preserved by the observance of those obligations and duties as are ordained by their nature and characteristics. It is when man fails to obey a law which is essential to his well-being that illness and disease supervene.

In actual practice, obedience to laws has two broad aspects. The one is concerned with the discharge by oneself of one's own duties. The other is obedience to the laws of Brotherhood, one corollary of which demands that none shall thwart another from carrying out his appointed tasks. In fact, if we pursue the matter to any appreciable depth, we shall find that obedience to the higher laws demands that we seek the good of another even at the sacrifice of our own. And it is futile to say that exceptions can be made to suit the exigencies of society, nation or family. Once a truth is accepted on principle, all action must conform to it unreservedly. The injunction to "help Nature and work on with her" when translated into daily action must mean strict obedience to laws, as rigidly and smoothly to be obeyed as is seen portrayed in the movement of the tides, the marshalling of planets and the whirl in the atoms and the elements.

When we pass from the physical to the inner worlds, obedience becomes imperative since the person who enters there has yet to get experience of the conditions that obtain in the new and unaccustomed realms. The laws that govern water are different from those which govern ice or steam, though it is the same water that undergoes the transformation. So, too, with man. As he steps into the higher worlds, he has to learn to breathe its atmosphere and develop new sinews to work in them. It is when he is new to the changed conditions, when like the new-born child he has to learn to use his eyes and adjust them to correct perspectives, that he has to place his faith in his teachers and implicitly obey their behests. The child who studies the alphabet obeys the sequence of letters. He cannot say that he prefers 'F', for instance, to be placed next to and to immediately follow 'B'. Is the earthly person used to having his own way and relying on the keenness of his intellect, prepared to change his mode of life, give up his prejudices, erase the memories of the half-baked knowledge of science and submit his mind to imbibe the new learning? Is he, for instance, prepared to take in the knowledge without the urge to compare it with the bits of knowledge he has hitherto picked up? Can he be a servant? Can he react in gratitude, or are his instincts so dulled that only ingratitude can emerge? These considerations are vital to the person before he can dare venture on the paths that lead to the inner realms of light. It is here that obedience becomes imperative. The one who refuses to bow is not yet fit for the higher training and he must be left to the kind mercies of Nature to teach him that obedience is the key that opens the doors to the higher world of light.

Obedience implies the carrying out of orders or instructions which are unpleasant to the person. It may require him to subjugate his inclinations to another's behests and to carry out that which may be abhorrent to his sensibilities. What is it that engenders such obedience that it springs to instant action lending itself as a tool in the hands of its master? It will be seen that when servility creeps into obedience it makes it beggarly, for it may too often be the result of a fear of consequences that may follow upon disobedience. Such obedience is given to the tyrant and to an imaginary God who can consign one to purgatory or hell. Remove the fear and with it you will remove obedience. Obedience can also be a thing of barter and may be given in the hope of having a return in pleasure, or in gains and favours and the promises of a future heaven. It is not such obedience that is the mead of a truly religious life. The other type, the enduring variety, is not the cringing obedience of the slave nor the commercial type that expects a compensating return.

In the spiritual life, obedience carries more vital overtones, because it invariably springs from a full and grateful heart. Such obedience is humble and is kind. It survives all ordeals, is not easily disturbed. Injustice and calumny have no barbs in their armory to stay its course. When gratitude generates obedience, it no longer appears as an irksome imposition. It comes natural—a serene unimpeded flow as spontaneous as that of large rivers sweeping majestically towards the sea. True obedience reflects the stately movements of the heavens, the kiss of the tide as it recedes from the shore and the orderly sequence of the days and nights of Brahma and of men. The stooping of the larger to the weaker heart reflects an obedience to the laws of compassion which enjoin protection and a loving care of those less endowed. It precedes acts of beneficence and brings with it the strength to suffer all meekly and to render for offence nothing but grace and good.

Deal with crime in its formative period, and with criminals not as debtors who must pay for misdeeds or as a group of men and women to be segregated and rendered impotent in mind and body, but as stupid sons or daughters, brothers or sisters, who need guidance and strict supervision in normal, wholesome environment.

—L. E. Lawes