She added that if they had any self-mastery, their actions would have been different. She said the more ignorant one is, the more one does these things.
I somehow disagreed with this simple reductionist ignorance-did-it-all explanation that seems to absolve these grown-up men from claiming moral responsibility. I explained to her that firstly, they ‘chose’ to remain ignorant because they ‘chose’ not to become masters of their nature. So it is all a conscious choice. I further added that when one willfully chooses darkness over light in thoughts and actions, he crosses over to Falsehood. These men, I asserted, committed these misdeeds with FULL awareness of their actions and it is their sheer addiction to lower sensory pleasures that led them to do this without fear and full impunity. They may have been ignorant of the full consequences of their actions (a rare faculty only the wise possess), but not their actions per se. A nuanced difference you see.
[Follow-up Question:]
At the end of it, she was convinced that ignorance as the cause, while I explained it all as wilful falsehood.
My question to you is: What do you think led to the moral abyss – simple unconscious ignorance on their part or brazen conscious falsehood?
This is difficult to say or make a blanket statement for one and all involved. Conscious Falsehood or conscious evil is rare. Much of it is due to unconsciousness and Ignorance. In fact, if you believe in one of the theories going around strongly, Epstein was simply a Mossad agent who was doing his job, a patriotic job, whose main goal was to catch hold of the weaknesses of certain high-ups. These people chose to do what they did because the instinct to gratify the senses was more important to them, at that moment for sure, than whatever job they were engaged in. That in itself does not make someone evil. Take two examples. John F Kennedy was surely an instrument whom the Mother was using to bring the US and India closer, a necessity for the New World Order. But JFK was shot by forces of falsehood (as confirmed by The Mother). However, if you look into the weaknesses of the flesh, then JFK would score high on that scale. Wine and women were very much his weakness. Or to take the other two clear-cut examples, that of Winston Churchill and Napoleon, both of whom had strong weaknesses of the flesh but were certainly divine instruments. Similarly, Sri Aurobindo remarked about Nehru that he is Sattwic by nature, though he was an agnostic and his affairs are rather well known. On the other hand, Gandhi and Hitler were not womanisers for sure, nor chasing money, yet they were asuras, even an instrument of Falsehood!
In other words, it is very difficult to pass strong judgments on people because they have certain weaknesses of character, or to declare them great just because they display rigid control. Morality is human and so is immorality. Falsehood is not a human thing but a dark and dangerous force opposing the Divine that uses human instruments to stifle the Divine Plan. It cannot be deduced from a man’s weak moral character that he is an instrument of conscious evil, nor can it be deduced from a rigidly moral man that he is a saintly person.
In simple terms, Falsehood is that which stands in the way of, consciously opposes and derails the Divine Plan and the Divine Purpose in creation. Sex, weakness and lust and greed indicate a weak-willed person who, depending upon the balance of his nature, may be used as an instrument of Evil and Falsehood, especially if he is in the field of politics. Falsehood is most active there since it generally uses world leaders to influence the destiny of mankind and create chaos. Maybe some of the names in the Epstein files are of that kind. I know only a little bit of it, as it appeared on TV. But it may not be right to generalise a person as Falsehood just because he has his name associated with the sex scandal. All that we can say is that the man involved was immoral, had a weakness for women, which becomes worse with easy money and power at hand. He was surely damaging himself. But it is difficult to say whether such a person was an instrument of Falsehood, a thing far worse and more serious. Weakness of human nature is one thing, something quite universal given the imperfect human nature, and falsehood quite another.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
