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What is Right Action ?

Prof. P. Krishna

(Talk delivered at the International Theosophical Convention in Chennai, India in Dec. 2006)

IN our life all of us have from time to time to take tough decisions, and we are often faced
with the question, what is the right thing to do? Perhaps more so for a Theosophist, because
we claim to be world citizens, not confined to the narrow morality of a particular culture or
a particular religion. I would like to examine the whole question of how to decide what is
right action, and what is involved in taking that decision. If one looks around the world,
one finds that the concept of what is right and wrong varies from culture to culture, religion
to religion, and often country to country. In the Brahmanical culture of India it is
considered unethical to eat meat, or partake of alcohol or other stimulating drugs; but it is
quite normal for others in India, and certainly in the West, to do this. Sexual indulgence
outside marriage is considered in many countries to be a private matter between
consenting adults. In other countries one can be executed for it, as it is considered a sin on
par with murder. Widow marriage is looked down upon among Hindus, but quite accepted
in Islam and Christianity. So, depending on the particular culture in which we have been
brought up and the values that we imbibe from that culture, our sense of what is right and
wrong varies. This has been so for centuries. But it is a problem now, because the world has
shrunk, we have globalization, large numbers of people go to work abroad, either for
commerce or education, and live and mix with people of other cultures. Those who have
had this experience will remember that the first time they came into contact with another
culture, they received several shocks, and it took the mind some time to question and
understand what was happening. These different moral values have themselves divided
humanity, because one cannot very well say that what is immoral here is moral elsewhere.
For Theosophists the question assumes a still greater significance, because we consider that
we all belong to one human family. So how should we define right action, or is there no
universal guideline? It is often said that one must follow one’s inner voice, the voice of
one’s own conscience, but conscience also varies from person to person. Someone who has
been brought up as a vegetarian is horrified at the thought of having eaten meat or touched
it, feels guilty if it has crossed his lips, but another who has grown up eating meat does not
feel so at all. So our conscience is also conditioned by the particular culture and religion in
which one grows up, and the responses of different human beings are therefore varied.

In the business and political worlds they talk of right action as that which succeeds in
achieving its objective. That which fails is considered wrong action, which means that the
end justifies the means. Is that true? I ask myself whether it was right for the Buddha to
leave his family, wife and child, and go into the forest in order to meditate and discover
the cause of sorrow for humanity, or was he abdicating his social and family responsibilities
in doing so? Was his action justified because he became enlightened and gave a profound
message to the world? After all, when he left he did not know whether he would become
enlightened or not, whether he would find what he was in quest of. So how can the result
justify the correctness of an earlier action? Mr Bush justifies the deaths of ‘innocent’
bystanders in Afghanistan and Iraq as ‘collateral damage’. That is, it was not his intention
to kill them but to create a democracy, and incidentally a lot of innocent people died in the
process. So, reason is a double-edged weapon; you can argue either way. Indeed, in every
court case there is a lawyer on each side of the issue. Is right action that which can be
justified through clever arguments? Shakespeare wrote: ‘Nothing is either good or bad, but
thinking makes it so.’ Very true, but our thinking is also based on our values and
conditioning, and the atmosphere in which we grow up; so different people think
differently. Even if you consider expert philosophers, like Bertrand Russell or Will Durant,
you will find that their opinions differ on what is right and wrong. So whose thinking
should one accept and on what basis?

People who have lived in different cultures Often say that the practical thing to do is to
assume that what ninety percent of the people around you are doing is right. So if we wish
to catch a bus in Delhi and people do not stand in a queue there, it is all right to push others
to get onto the bus; but it is not all right in Bombay, where everybody stands in a line and
respects the queue. In India, if in a family everybody is vegetarian, that is the right thing to
do; but when going to the West, it is all right to eat meat, because that is what most people
there do. We also have the saying: ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do.’ This is one of the
guidelines that is often promoted.

Is right action something to be voted on and decided by the majority? Would the
performance of sati by a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband become right if a
million people approve of it, or would it still be wrong? If we look at our own life, we find
that when we are at a loss to discern what is right and what is wrong through our own
intelligence, we turn back to tradition and imitate what our parents or other elders in the

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family did in a similar situation. This means, if our parents thought ‘to spare the rod is to
spoil the child,’ then when 291 May 2007 our child is being mischievous we tend to imitate
them and beat our child because we were beaten in our childhood. That may mean we are
perpetrating a wrong action from one generation to the next. Surely that is not very
intelligent. Much wrong is thus perpetrated, justified by all kinds of clever arguments,
historical and otherwise. Discrimination based on caste, race or gender has gone on in
society for thousands of years in this manner. We can call it ‘our culture, our tradition’ but
does that make it right? Or is discrimination evil at all times irrespective of where and
when and how long it has been practised?

Are there universal considerations or moral values based on which we can take a decision
for ourselves when faced with such a dilemma? Is there a secular, rational, scientific
solution to this problem? If you ask a secular person, he will talk about enlightened
self-interest. We know that we are all interconnected, that we are not living in isolation,
therefore the rightness or wrongness of an action should be decided on the basis of the
effect it has in the long run on the whole, and not just the effect on oneself. That sounds
quite rational. It is often said that honesty is the best policy. That means honesty is not a
moral virtue, it is the best policy because that is what succeeds in the long run, even in
business. So again one is thinking in terms of success, not in terms of morality. Based on
this principle one can create a scientific formula for deciding whether an action is right or
wrong. Consider how the action affects all who are connected to it. Include yourself as one
of the persons. Let +dH denote the happiness / pleasure / joy which it gives to one
individual in one unit of time. If it causes unhappiness / displeasure / discomfort, treat it
as negative (-dH). Now sum it up for all individuals, for all time, as a series. In science they
call it integration. If the result is positive, it is right action; if negative it is wrong action!
This concept makes sense, but how to do the mental integration logically? There is no
mathematical formula to sum up this series, and different people will give varying
importance to different considerations. The egotistic person will say the first term
(involving him, his wife, children or neighbours) is the most important; and all the others
which relate to other citizens or the environment can be disregarded. That is precisely what
it means to be an egotist. Someone else who is attached to his family and feels a lot for
them will include his wife and children, but exclude other people. So logic fails because the
different terms in the series are given different values depending on the state of the
individual consciousness and largeness of heart! Thus the dilemma is not resolved by
becoming secular or freeing oneself from tradition.

This brings us to the spiritual definition of right and wrong action. This definition is not
based on considerations of success or failure. It is not based on the results of that action. It
is based on the state of consciousness from which that action springs. If the consciousness
from which it emanates is egotistic, narrow minded and disorderly, it is a wrong action,
even if it produces so-called desirable or good results. If it emanates from a consciousness
which is loving, compassionate, non-violent, generous, and so on, then it is right action
even if it fails. Such a consciousness is orderly, it has virtue. So the Buddha’s action in
leaving his wife and child and going into the forest would be right if he did it out of love
and compassion for humanity; and the same action would be wrong if he did it for
egotistical reasons, because he wanted to get away from his responsibilities. The quality of
the mind taking that decision determines whether it is a right or wrong decision. That is
why virtue needs to be defined not in terms of outer actions, but in terms of the inner state
or motive from which that action springs. If, as Theosophists, we accept that definition of
virtue, then the most important thing for us to do is to come upon an orderly consciousness,
because it has the wisdom and intelligence to realize what is right action. When you come
upon that state of virtue, of enlightened being, then, do what you will, it will always be
right.

Because there is no self-interest in that consciousness, there is no partiality for the ‘me’ and
the ‘mine’. Krishnamurti expressed it in another way; he said: ‘Come upon love and do
what you will.’ Then one does not have to think and calculate and so on. But we must
understand what he means by ‘love’. To him, ‘Love is where the self is not.’ He is not
talking about romance or attachment or sentiment as love. Only when self-interest is not
the motivation, is there love. That is the definition of true love, the love that Jesus and the
Buddha talked about. Today that word is bandied around with So many superficial
meanings that we must be careful to discover its root meaning, which comes from the
sages. The Buddha pointed out 2,500 years ago, three great truths about human
consciousness. The first was just an observed fact: that sorrow exists. There is a lot of
psychological suffering in the human consciousness. That is a fact. The second truth was
that suffering has a cause which is igorance. Ignorance, not as lack of knowledge but in the
form of illusion. Many illusions are present in the mind. An illusion is something we
assume to be true when it is not so, or something to which we have given tremendous
importance when it is really not important in life. To understand that and free the mind of
the false is wisdom. There is very little wisdom in a mind that is full of illusion.

The third great truth the Buddha pointed out was that the cause of sorrow can be
eliminated. The cause of disorder lies in illusion; therefore it can be eliminated. We cannot
eliminate a fact, we can only eliminate illusion, because when we discover what is true,

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that which is false disappears. By way of illustration, if we imagine that there is a ghost
hiding in every tree, when we go out at night we feel afraid of the ghost; but the whole
thing is imaginary, illusory. If we learn that there are actually no ghosts, that it is just
something which our imagination has conjured up because from childhood we may have
been told about ghosts, then the fear will disappear. Fear or sorrow is created by our own
thinking or imagination, and if we discover that it is false, it ends. Therefore illusion can be
ended through the quest for truth. When illusion ends, the corresponding disorder in
consciousness ends. All division between human beings is also born of illusion, so it can
end, and that is wisdom. Theosophy is the quest for wisdom, which is synonymous with
the quest for truth and the ending of illusion. That in turn is the same as the ending of
disorder in consciousness. If disorder ends, there is order. We do not have to cultivate
order. There is tremendous order in Nature. It is the manifestation of that order in the
external world which scientists are studying. In our own body too there is tremendous
order. A thousand things are happening right now in our bodies in an orderly way, and all
we do is eat some food and do some exercise. It is Nature’s order or intelligence which is
operating. That is what keeps this machinery going — not our intelligence. That
intelligence, that cosmic order, must operate also in our consciousness, for it already exists.
But we have superimposed our own ‘intelligence’, which is conditioned and has particular
value systems we have not questioned it. From this arises division, hatred, discrimination
and violence.

This creates the ego as the separate self, making us feel that it is valuable to act out of
self-interest. But that is an illusion. It is not really in our self-interest to act out of
self-interest! For example, if one is corrupt and takes a bribe, it appears that one profits from
it. If profit is the main consideration, this appears to be right action. If it is right action for
one, then it must be right action for everybody. Surely, this cannot be denied. But if when
we go to admit our child in a school or take him to the hospital for treatment the school
administrator or doctor is corrupt, we all suffer, because we are all dependent on each
other. The ego may seek some immediate benefit, but that is an illusion. It is not really a
benefit, because, in the long run, if we continue to be egotistic, we all lose, and violence is
the result; we all suffer because we are not isolated entities.

Theosophy goes much further. It says that human beings as well as animals, plants, rivers,
the entire universe is one whole, since everything is connected with everything else. That is
what we saw in the film by Al Gore entitled ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, where he says that all
the earth and its environment is like one huge living organism which has survived for
billions of years with a certain balance arising from Nature’s intelligence; but human
‘intelligence’ is now breaking down that balance, and that is not really intelligent. That is
another great illusion of humanity. A true Theosophist must deeply investigate what is true
and what is false, and come upon self-knowledge; then that wisdom, that awakened
intelligence, will tell us, at all times, what is the right thing to do.

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