But this Titan, hewing, shaping, planting things though in ignorance and darkness, seems also to be much more participating and fueling the evolution. Why this rigid distinction then?
Also, this ‘heavier and less grateful portion of the burden’ – is it much like Ravana was helpful to Rama in bringing down the Sattwic rule upon earth and Duryodana to Krishna in guiding us to find Him and act freely in the world? In this way, was there any help done then by Hitler, Stalin, Gandhi etc as well in this yuga?
Would you please shed more light on this and help my understanding?
`In Nature, since it started from division and egoism, the Titan had to come first; he is here in us as the elder god, the first ruler of man’s heaven and earth. Then arrives the God and delivers and harmonises. Thus the old legend tells us that the Deva and the Asura laboured together to churn the ocean of life for the supreme draught of immortality, but, once it had been won, Vishnu kept it for the God and defrauded the fiercer and more violent worker. And this seems unjust; for the Asura has the heavier and less grateful portion of the burden. He begins and leads; he goes his way hewing, shaping, planting: the God follows, amends, concludes, reaps. He prepares fiercely and with anguish against a thousand obstacles the force that we shall use: the other enjoys the victory and the delight. And therefore to the great God Shiva the stained and stormy Titan is very dear,—Shiva who took for himself the fierce, dark and bitter poison first churned up from the sea of life and left to others the nectar. But the choice that Shiva made with knowledge and from love, the Titans made from darkness and passion,—desirous really of something very different and deceived by their stormy egoism. Therefore, the award of Vishnu stands, to the God shall fall the crown and the immortality and not, unless he divinise himself, to the proud and strenuous Asura.`
Sri Aurobindo, The Supramental Manifestation and Other Writings – The Superman
https://motherandsriaurobindo.in/Sri-Aurobindo/books/sabcl/the-supramental-manifestation
In the original Vedic sense the Asura represented Force (the left hand of God) while the Devas represented Knowledge or Wisdom (the right hand of God). Now just as Knowledge without Force is ineffective for work or manifestation, so too Force without Wisdom is dangerous. Shiva, Rudra, Kali are all worshipped by the Asuras because they manifest Force. Vishnu, Krishna, Gauri, Saraswati are all worshipped by the deva type as they represent Wisdom and Knowledge. This was the original distinction. Both came from the same One Reality and both have their own place in creation as instruments of the Divine.
The problem is when, like modern religions and sects we forget the other aspects of the One Supreme Being. Harihar (joining of Vishnu and Shiva) becomes two separate sects of Vaishnavas and Shaiviites. Later this division and separation goes to the extreme due to which the Asuras (Force without Wisdom) falls into the Inconscient as described by the Mother in the story of creation which, seen closely is a detailed version of the story of the great fall described in the Rigveda as the Brahmajaya (Bride of Brahman) who goes far away from the Brahman and hides in the Inconscient.
Force comes first to stir hard matter as it yields itself. Wisdom is there but it stays behind. It is so with everything. The hard ground is tilled first and then it is ready to nourish the seeds. The law of suffering comes first due to the hard resistance, the law of love and harmony comes later.
The Asuras have their own role. But then why do the Puranas show them sometimes (not always though) in a poor light? Because man in his evolutionary journey must graduate to the Asura type to the Deva. Man himself is an Asura by birth. He becomes a god by conversion. There are number of stories of conversion of the Asura into a Deva type. Prahlad, a daitya by birth, is one of the greatest devotees of the Lord. There are also stories of fall of a Deva into an Asuric life, the poorvadevaha of the Vedas. To convert them is one of the work undertaken by Sri Aurobindo. So the distinction was never so rigid as we made it later on.
However we must not confuse the Asura with hostile forces. These are indeed extremely dangerous and full of deception. For practical purposes however we must consciously reject the Asuric tendencies in us and inculcate the daivi elements as described in the Gita. Let me close with these passages from Chapter 16 of the Gita, which is the simplest and most practical account of the matter.
‘The Deva nature is distinguished by an acme of the sattwic B.G.16.1 | B.G.16.2 | B.G.16.3 habits and qualities; self-control, sacrifice, the religious habit, cleanness and purity, candour and straightforwardness, truth, calm and self-denial, compassion to all beings, modesty, gentleness, forgivingness, patience, steadfastness, a deep sweet and serious freedom from all restlessness, levity and inconstancy are B.G.16.4 its native attributes. The Asuric qualities, wrath, greed, cunning, treachery, wilful doing of injury to others, pride and arrogance and excessive self-esteem have no place in its composition. But its gentleness and self-denial and self-control are free too from all weakness: it has energy and soul force, strong resolution, the fearlessness of the soul that lives in the right and according to the truth as well as its harmlessness, tejaḥ, abhayam, dhṛtiḥ, ahiṁsā, satyam. The whole being, the whole temperament is integrally pure; there is a seeking for knowledge and a calm and fixed abiding in knowledge. This is the wealth, the plenitude of the man born into the Deva nature.
The Asuric nature has too its wealth, its plenitude of force, B.G.16.6 | B.G.16.7 | B.G.16.8 | B.G.16.9 | B.G.16.10 | B.G.16.11 | B.G.16.12 | B.G.16.13 | B.G.16.14 | B.G.16.15 | B.G.16.16 | B.G.16.17 | B.G.16.18 | B.G.16.19 | B.G.16.20 but it is of a very different, a powerful and evil kind. Asuric men have no true knowledge of the way of action or the way of abstention, the fulfilling or the holding in of the nature. Truth is not in them, nor clean doing, nor faithful observance. They see naturally in the world nothing but a huge play of the satisfaction of self; theirs is a world with Desire for its cause and seed and governing force and law, a world of Chance, a world devoid of just relation and linked Karma, a world without God, not true, not founded in Truth. Whatever better intellectual or higher religious dogma they may possess, this alone is the true creed of their mind and will in action; they follow always the cult of Desire and Ego. On that way of seeing life they lean in reality and by its falsehood they ruin their souls and their reason. The Asuric man becomes the centre or instrument of a fierce, Titanic, violent action, a power of destruction in the world, a fount of injury and evil. Arrogant, full of self-esteem and the drunkenness of their pride, these misguided souls delude themselves, persist in false and obstinate aims and pursue the fixed impure resolution of their longings. They imagine that desire and enjoyment are all the aim of life and in their inordinate and insatiable pursuit of it they are the prey of a devouring, a measurelessly unceasing care and thought and endeavour and anxiety till the moment of their death. Bound by a hundred bonds, devoured by wrath and lust, unweariedly occupied in amassing unjust gains which may serve their enjoyment and the satisfaction of their craving, always they think, “Today I have gained this object of desire, tomorrow I shall have that other; today I have so much wealth, more I will get tomorrow. I have killed this my enemy, the rest too I will kill. I am a lord and king of men, I am perfect, accomplished, strong, happy, fortunate, a privileged enjoyer of the world; I am wealthy, I am of high birth; who is there like unto me? I will sacrifice, I will give, I will enjoy.” Thus occupied by many egoistic ideas, deluded, doing works, but doing them wrongly, acting mightily, but for themselves, for desire, for enjoyment, not for God in themselves and God in man, they fall into the unclean hell of their own evil. They sacrifice and give, but from a self-regarding ostentation, from vanity and with a stiff and foolish pride. In the egoism of their strength and power, in the violence of their wrath and arrogance they hate, despise and belittle the God hidden in themselves and the God in man. And because they have this proud hatred and contempt of good and of God, because they are cruel and evil, the Divine casts them down continually B.G.16.20 into more and more Asuric births. Not seeking him, they find him not, and at last, losing the way to him altogether, sink down into the lowest status of soul-nature, adhamāṁ gatim.
This graphic description, even giving its entire value to the distinction it implies, must not be pressed to carry more in it than B.G.16.6 it means. When it is said that there are two creations of beings in this material world, Deva and Asura,4 it is not meant that human souls are so created by God from the beginning each with its own inevitable career in Nature, nor is it meant that there is a rigid spiritual predestination and those rejected from the beginning by the Divine are blinded by him so that they may be thrust down to eternal perdition and the impurity of Hell. All souls are eternal portions of the Divine, the Asura as well as the Deva, all can come to salvation: even the greatest sinner can turn to the Divine. But the evolution of the soul in Nature is an adventure of which Swabhava and the Karma governed by the swabhava are ever the chief powers; and if an excess in the manifestation of the swabhava, the self-becoming of the soul, a disorder in its play turns the law of being to the perverse side, if the rajasic qualities are given the upper hand, cultured to the diminution of sattwa, then the trend of Karma and its results necessarily culminate not in the sattwic height which is capable of the movement of liberation, but in the highest exaggeration of the perversities of the lower nature. The man, if he does not stop short and abandon his way of error, has eventually the Asura full-born in him, and once he has taken that enormous turn away from the Light and Truth, he can no more reverse the fatal speed of his course because of the very immensity of the misused divine power in him until he has plumbed the depths to which it falls, found bottom and seen where the way has led him, the power exhausted and misspent, himself down in the lowest state of the soul nature, which is Hell. Only when he understands and turns to the Light, does that other truth of the Gita come in, that even the greatest sinner, the most impure and violent evil-doer is saved the moment he turns to adore and follow after the Godhead within him. Then, simply by that turn, he gets very soon into the sattwic way which leads to perfection and freedom.
The Asuric Prakriti is the rajasic at its height; it leads to the slavery of the soul in Nature, to desire, wrath and greed, the three B.G.16.21 powers of the rajasic ego, and these are the threefold doors of Hell, the Hell into which the natural being falls when it indulges the impurity and evil and error of its lower or perverted instincts. These three are again the doors of a great darkness, they fold B.G.16.22 back into Tamas, the characteristic power of the original Ignorance; for the unbridled force of the rajasic nature, when exhausted, falls back into the weakness, collapse, darkness, incapacity of the worst tamasic soul-status. To escape from this downfall one must get rid of these three evil forces and turn to the light of the sattwic quality, live by the right, in the true relations, according to the Truth and the Law; then one follows one’s own higher good and arrives at the highest soul-status. To follow the law of desire is not the true rule of our nature; there is a higher and juster standard of its works. But where is it embodied or how is it to be found? In the first place, the human race has always been seeking for this just and high Law and whatever it has discovered is embodied in its Shastra, its rule of science and knowledge, rule of ethics, rule of religion, rule of best social living, rule of one’s right relations with man and God and Nature. Shastra does not mean a mass of customs, some good, some bad, unintelligently followed by the customary routine mind of the tamasic man. Shastra is the knowledge and teaching laid down by intuition, experience and wisdom, the science and art and ethic of life, the best standards available to the race. The half-awakened man who leaves the observance B.G.16.23 of its rule to follow the guidance of his instincts and desires, can get pleasure but not happiness; for the inner happiness can only come by right living. He cannot move to perfection, cannot acquire the highest spiritual status. The law of instinct and desire seems to come first in the animal world, but the manhood of man grows by pursuit of truth and religion and knowledge and a right life. The Shastra, the recognised Right that he has set up B.G.16.24 to govern his lower members by his reason and intelligent will, must therefore first be observed and made the authority for conduct and works and for what should or should not be done, till the instinctive desire nature is schooled and abated and put down by the habit of self-control and man is ready first for a freer intelligent self-guidance and then for the highest supreme law and supreme liberty of the spiritual nature.’
Most human beings however do not fall into a clear category. They are a terrible mix of both with some kind of a preponderance of one or the other. While we must not hate or despise anyone man must evolve the Deva in him. Further still, to be complete, we must cultivate the Intelligence and Wisdom of the gods and the strength and perseverance and labour of the Asura as revealedtous in the Durga strotra.
‘Mother Durga! Giver of force and love and knowledge, terrible art thou in thy own self of might, Mother beautiful and fierce. In the battle of life, in India’s battle, we are warriors commissioned by thee; Mother, give to our heart and mind a titan’s strength, a titan’s energy, to our soul and intelligence a god’s character and knowledge.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
