Deputising For God

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

This lecture was given at Shanti Sadan on 9th February 1966.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

Deputising For God

 

Many great works of drama or literature are an allegory of life. Goethe's Faust

is a good case in point, and the perennial fascination of Greek drama, or of

such plays as Ibsen's Peer Gynt derives from the fact that they express in

symbolic form insights which we can recognise as true for our own lives.

 

Shakespeare's plays may appear much more naturalistic than the examples I have

mentioned but, nonetheless, there is often a meaning which we can find beneath

the surface meaning. It is perhaps a characteristic of poets that they

themselves are not always aware of the meaning of what they have written and it

may be so with Shakespeare (we cannot tell). We can't ask him, and he has left

nothing but his plays for us to question, but in those plays he portrays every

variety of human being and human behaviour and he portrays them with such

understanding and such deep insight that we cannot but learn from him.

 

One of the lesser known plays of Shakespeare - Measure for Measure - is set in

the Dukedom of Vienna. As the play opens the Duke is deliberately leaving his

Dukedom for a time and he has appointed one Angelo as his deputy, to rule in his

stead, conferring on him all the powers of life and death exercised by the Duke

himself. But though he tells his subjects he is going abroad, he doesn't really

leave the kingdom at all. He remains to watch events and see what happens,

disguising himself from his people and taking on the habit of a friar. Clearly

he has not gone because he had to; he has gone because he wants to put something

to the test. He says as much in one of his first speeches, where he speaks of

the way in which Nature expects man to make use of the gifts he has and try them

out in practice in his life, a speech which reminds one of the New Testament

parable of the talents:

 

Heaven doth with us as we with torches do,

Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues

Did not go forth of us, 'twere all alike

As if we had them not. Spirits are not finely

touch'd

But to fine issues, nor Nature never lends

The smallest scruple of her excellence

But, like a thrifty goddess, she determines

Herself the glory of a creditor,

Both thanks and use. (I. i. 32-40)

 

Such is the beginning of the plot, the details of which need not concern us

here. But later in the play, when the harsh enforcement of the law by the

puritanical deputy has led another character, Claudio, into prison and condemned

to death, Claudio is visited by the Duke disguised as a monk.

 

Now the behaviour of this Duke has puzzled, and will continue to puzzle,

generations of audiences. He is clearly conceived and presented as a wise and

good character, seeing deeply into the hearts of his subjects and knowing their

weaknesses. Yet he temporarily abdicates the control of his Dukedom and hands it

over to his deputy, a man outwardly more virtuous than the Duke himself, or so

it seems at the beginning. Certainly this deputy is stern and puritanical and,

in his own eyes, means to stand up for the good as he sees it, no matter what it

costs either himself or others.

 

The results of this policy are not as the deputy expects - an immediate

improvement in the weal of the State and a stamping out of all vice and evil -

but quite the reverse. He himself is corrupted by power. He is not the first (as

Cordelia says in another play) who with the best will has incurred the worst.

 

But why does a wise Duke allow this to happen? It is clear that he knows his

deputy; it is clear that he knows what is taking place and why. But he

apparently lets it happen. One is reminded of that perennial question, for ever

being asked of anyone who tries to advocate any of the great spiritual

teachings. 'Look at the world', it is said, 'and all the evil it contains, the

useless violence, the suffering and the misery. How can you say that God is

all-powerful and loving and that He is good, if He allows all this to happen!'

 

Perhaps Shakespeare has given the answer to this question once and for all in

the character of the Duke. He too is all-powerful, he too allows it to happen.

But he does not turn his back on the Dukedom; he remains there in the monk's

disguise, watching the turn of events, and continually ameliorating the worst

consequences of his subjects' mistakes and folly. And he ameliorates them

equally for the pseudo-saint Angelo and the sinner Claudio! He is not inactive,

but he influences things only from behind the scenes, so to speak, leaving his

subjects freedom to act and freedom to discover the consequences of those

actions.

 

And this surely is one of the main points that arises from the play. If the Duke

remained in power and excercised his authority, all would no doubt go well

enough, but no one would be any nearer an understanding of themselves and their

hopes and fears than they were at the beginning. Only by having a degree of

freedom of choice, the freedom to try out their desires and test them in the

fire of experience, do the characters learn anything about themselves.

 

It is an old spiritual doctrine that the angels are vastly superior spiritually

to man, and yet they are at the same time man's inferiors. The angels are much

more perfect servants of God, according to the old doctrine; they always

recognise His authority and they live to glorify Him. But they do not have man's

power of free choice, freedom to accept or reject, to adore and acquiesce in the

divine plan like Ganymede or to rebel against it like Prometheus. And since they

can know only the heights and not the depths, they are what they are; they

cannot grow and they cannot achieve the highest good in life - to realise their

own higher identity with the Lord, through suffering, through experience and

through widening knowledge.

 

Angelo, in the play, in spite of his name, is no angel. He is very much a man,

and as such he is capable of being a god or a devil, and this is precisely what

Shakespeare shows us happening in the play. At the beginning, Angelo, the

deputy, is in his own eyes a very good and virtuous man, very well-meaning; he

is perhaps the prototype of the Pharisee in the New Testament who thanks God

that he is not as other men are. It is only when he has 'carte blanche', so to

speak, to try and impose his ideas on his fellow men in society, that he learns

the difference between love of power masquerading as virtue, and real virtue. As

Confucius says: 'Your goody-goody people are the thieves of virtue.' They steal

the name of 'virtuous' for something spurious. But Angelo learns the truth

during the play and if he ends it a disillusioned man, he ends it also a better

man than he began it. He has learnt to know more about himself and about the

nature of his own mind.

 

Similarly, the spiritual teachers tell us, each and every man is given a measure

of free-will by the spiritual Power behind the universe, because he is here in

order to learn and to gain a deeper insight into his own nature. The world is no

continuing city. It is a school, as our Teacher used so often to remind us,

through which each and every individual has to pass and from which he has

eventually to graduate. This is the spiritual evolution of the individual. There

are many stages, but man must move ever onwards towards full self-knowledge. As

Jesus said: 'Life is a bridge, pass over it, but do not build houses on it.'

 

Like the Duke in the play, the spiritual powers come, so to speak, in disguise

to man, to guide him and to advise him, manifesting themselves through the great

saints and the spiritual teachers of all traditions; they have not abdicated

control of the world and left it anarchic, exposed to the forces of evil, but

like wise parents they know that no spiritual child, any more than a physical

child, will learn and grow unless it is allowed the possibility of making its

own mistakes and even suffering a little from them.

 

So it is that the Duke in the middle of the play comes to the imprisoned

Claudio. Claudio's past action or karmas had led him to the condemned cell. This

is the strict and just enforcement of the law (whether one thinks it a good law

or not). Now the Duke will later intervene to prevent that law being carried

out, but he says nothing of this to Claudio; instead he makes one of

Shakespeare's most powerful and beautiful speeches to get him to accept his

condemnation and to resign himself to death. One has heard people saying: 'What

extraordinary and improbable behaviour Shakespeare portrays in the Duke! Why

doesn't he tell Claudio who he is and release him there and then, or at least

show him that he is going to save him and put his mind at rest?' But apart from

spoiling the structure of the play, it is also surely to miss the whole point

and the whole subtlety and profundity of what Shakespeare is doing. Until man

has learnt to accept his circumstances, whatever they are, he has not learnt

wisdom and he cannot really learn from those circumstances.

 

If we approach the spiritual teachers we find that the spiritual attitude is

one, we might say, of ruthless opportunism. There is no happening in life which

cannot be turned by us to our own advantage if we are willing to accept it and

to learn from it. Better is one's own duty even done badly (says the Gita) than

the duty of another done excellently. And yet we spend most of our life

hankering after the things we have not got. As the Duke tells Claudio: 'Happy

thou art not; for what thou has not, still thou strivest to get, and what thou

hast, forget'st.' We all spend most of our life striving to get what we have not

got and forgetting the advantages that we enjoy. But what have we really?

 

'Where our treasure is there will our heart be also.' But our heart is only

where we think our treasure to be and the problem is finding out where it really

is. According to the yogis our real treasure is within, within our own being. In

the Upanishad it speaks of the inner being of man as containing a hidden hoard

of gold over which he passes daily, unaware that it exists. And it is to find

this treasure within his own being that Yoga is taught and undertaken. Man is as

yet only half awake and he has to be awakened through experience.

 

'What's yet in this, that bears the name of life?' asks the Duke. 'Thou hast nor

youth nor age, but, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep, dreaming on both.' The

yogis tell us the same thing. We are bemused by the dreams of what we imagine

things to be, until, like the characters in the play, we are gradually awakened

to reality by experience.

 

Each and every individual is, in a very real sense, the delegated deputy of God,

just as Angelo is the delegated deputy of the Duke. Man is given an element of

free-will within certain bounds and he makes of it what he will. The trouble is

that he is inclined to forget his own limitations and, not only to assume the

mantle of full authority, but to dismiss the supreme authority as a useless and

outdated myth into the bargain! Like Angelo, he fondly imagines that the golden

era has now arrived and that he will make a much better job of running the world

than has been the case hitherto. It is only when he is unlucky enough to be

given the unimpeded chance to try doing it that he and everyone else learns just

how wrong one can be. After all, this is no new sentiment. Many dictators in

history from Alexander to Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin, have all

imagined they were benefactors of the world, and some started off with the very

best of intentions to be so. But as they had not conquered themselves, they very

soon turned into a personification of the power and pleasure urges of their own

lower minds.

 

Most of us, of course, do not get an unimpeded chance to try running the world,

but we all have a part of it in which we can exercise our own free-will,

modifying, and to some extent creating, the conditions which will exist there.

Moreover, each and everyone of us has one particular sphere where the exercise

of our will is paramount and our wisdom or our folly has absolutely free play.

That place, personal to each one of us, is the contents of our own mind. What we

make there is largely a matter of our own choice, and if we don't find it to our

own liking now, it is salutary to remember that it is the result of a myriad of

such choices in the past. It is the region which makes each and everyone of us

an investor - an investor of time, energy and will-power, in which we all enjoy

or suffer the consequences of those investments, and learn whether they have

been wise or foolish ones.

 

Not everyone starts life from the same position, or with the same advantages.

This, surely, is the point of the parable of the talents. But all equally can

make something great and admirable out of what they have.

 

The conclusion is that man needs to escape from 'the after-dinner sleep' which

often becomes a nightmare prison of narrow individualistic passions and

emotions. The old religious teachings which most of mankind is now busy

rejecting had many hundreds of ways in which they helped him to do this. One of

the most powerful of these ways was to go on reminding him that he was not an

independent being, answerable to no-one and free to exercise his will to his own

advantage in any way that he thought he would like to do, that he was not free,

whether by cunning, strength or persuasion, to impose his will on the rest of

the world, but that he was an image of God and answerable to God. To the Jews

and Christians, all men were the children of God, and each individual alike was

equally worthy of respect and had equal rights. Equally, each individual was an

object of love and mercy in the eyes of God. In the Gita, the Lord say: 'O

Arjuna, I abide deep in the heart of all beings.' So we find in all the

religions this idea that man, each individual man, is both a deputy, in some

sense, for God and also a temple of God, answerable to God and also worthy of

respect as one of God's creatures.

 

The teachings of Yoga go further than this. They say that man's higher Self is

already divine, and this deputy 'I', the ego, is, through delusion, through the

dream of ignorance, turning against its own higher nature if it flouts the

higher law. This authority is not something imposed from outside, a law or

statute laid down for the universe by a transcendent God; it is something much

more immediate than that, much more scientific if you like. The law is the law

of man's own being and in flouting that law he is fragmenting and violating his

own real nature, the nature of his own personality. What Shakespeare shows in

Macbeth, for instance, is the breakdown and the disillusionment of the

personalities of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth when they have embarked on the road of

ruthless and unmitigated individualism.

 

The idea that we should get advantages just for ourselves, so as to excel all

others, is a negation of the spiritual law, but it is not unknown even in the

aspirants to the spiritual path. It is a negation of man's higher nature. Even

in the spiritual field, this spirit of individualism has to be given up. In the

Chinese teaching of Chuang Tzu there is a story told of a dialogue between the

Teacher and the pupil. The pupil asks the Teacher: 'Can one get Tao, can one get

illumination, so as to have it for one's own?' And the Teacher replied: 'Your

very body is not your own. How should Tao be your own?' 'If my body is not my

own,' said the pupil, 'pray whose is it?' The Teacher answered: 'It is the

delegated image of God. Your life is not your own. It is the delegated harmony

of God. Your individuality is not your own. It is the delegated adaptability of

God...You move, but you do not know how. You taste, but you do not know the

cause. These are the operations of God's laws. How then should you get Tao so as

to have it for your own?'

 

There is a profound truth expressed here and it is worth meditating on the

meaning. The great modern yogi, Swami Rama Tirtha, in one of his lectures

describes a prince who went to a Teacher of Yoga and said: 'You are claiming to

bring people to God-vision! Show me God!' The Teacher said to the prince: 'Well,

I will show you God if you wish it, but first you must show me your credentials.

Who are you? As you know, before being ushered into the presence even of a

worldly king, etiquette demands that one must produce one's credentials. You

won't get in to see any king unless you can show who you are.' The prince

replied: 'I am prince so-and-so and I come from such-and-such a place.' But he

said: 'That's no good at all. This can't be you. One can very easily change a

name. One can very easily move house. How can you say that this is you, that

this name and this address describe the essential you? These are as easily

changed as the clothes that one wears!' The prince answered thoughtfully: 'What

you say may be true. Then I am the body, I am this body.' It is a common view;

man when he is unreflecting thinks he is no more than a particular physical body

and, in doing so, he condemns himself to live furthering the interests of that

body. What an extraordinary idea it is really! Even Shakespeare points it out!

As the Duke says to Claudio: 'Thou art not thyself, for thou exist'st on many

thousand grains that issue out of dust.' He is saying here that, insofar as you

are the body, you are not yourself at all; you are simply all the matter, all

the particles of matter, which have collected into this body, which have been

eaten as food, which have turned into this body and which are now there. How can

you call this your self?

 

The idea that this 'I' is no more than the transformed food we have eaten is

indeed difficult to accept. For what could possibly give continuity to this 'I'

- and still more, what gives it the light of awareness? There is no light of

awareness in the food we eat, there is no consciousness in the food we eat, nor

in the matter which is lost from the body. The stuff of the body which we are

taking to be the essential 'I' when we call the body our self is constantly

being taken in and lost and changes many many times during the life of an

individual. And the Teacher in Swami Rama Tirtha's account, having pointed out

some of these things to the prince, goes on to say: 'Besides, why do you take

responsibility for this body, when you are no more responsible for what goes on

in this body than you are for the operation of the laws of nature? Food is

digested in the body, blood is circulated, a million cells are dividing and

moving, millions of phagocytes are ingesting bacteria in it. Are you personally

responsible for all this? And, if you are, if you do take the view you are

responsible, are you not equally responsible for the operations of all living

matter elsewhere? Why only this bit? Why is it this particular body that you

feel to be your 'I'?

 

The prince sees that this is not a satisfactory answer and he asks: 'What about

the mind? Am I not essentially this mind of mine?' But the mind is more

mercurial and changing even than the body. As Shakespeare's Duke tells Claudio:

'Thou are not certain, for thy complexion shifts to strange effects after the

moon.' And the lunatic antics of our mind are too well-known to us to need

underlining. The mind is more changeable perhaps than anything else of ourselves

that we know.

 

But there seems to be something in the mind, an abiding sense of 'I', which does

not change with the changing states of the mind. Is not this the core of our

personality? The yogis tell us that intrinsically, in its real nature, it is,

and it is the divine element in man, his real Self. But when it identifies

itself with this deputy, when it abdicates like the Duke in favour of the

deputy, the ego, the empirical ego, then this deputy is only an image, only

something standing in the place of the spiritual Self and as such it is subject

to exactly the same delusions of grandeur that afflicted Angelo in Measure for

Measure.

 

The ego's salvation is, firstly, to realise that it only rules as a deputy, it

is answerable to higher spiritual authority, and then through knowledge or

wisdom to abdicate in favour of the real Self, the real authority, to bring back

the ruler who has never really been away. As Dr. Shastri writes in Wisdom from

the East: 'Bondage is caused by ignorance, and is not real. The fetters and

limitations now imposed on us by the " I " are sheer illusion. Nothing but

knowledge can remove them.' He enlarges on this topic all through the fourth

chapter of the book. Let us end with the prayer that he gives there:

 

O Lord omniscient and omnipresent, reveal thy

inner being to me so that my little I, which now

considers itself separate from thee, may discover

that its supposed separate identity was an illusion

and that thou art real.

 

Freedom through Self-Realisation

A.M. Halliday

A Shanti Sadan Publication - London

ISBN 0-85424-040-3

Pgs. 126-136